Exploring Australian Politics, History, and Culture: An Engaging Discourse with Dan Eden

What do the Australian political landscape and the struggle for social justice look like under the microscope? Join us on a journey that traverses the fascinating contours of Australian politics, history, and culture, guided by our esteemed guest, Farron. A thorough exploration awaits, from the complexities of maintaining ethnic identity in Australia to the rise of evangelicalism and the impact of American culture on Australian politics.

In the course of our engaging and enlightening discourse with Farron, we pull back the curtain on Australia's unique political economy and the intricate tapestry of class dynamics influenced by settler colonialism and racial nuances. We probe the depths of Australia's position as a core periphery in the global capitalist system and the tug-of-war between aligning with the US or China. We also bring to light the state of leftist traditions and social movements in Australia, from the inspiring indigenous struggles against racism and colonialism to the ongoing debate surrounding the Uluru statement from the heart.

As we channel our exploration to its finale, Farron generously shares a selection of recommended readings and resources to further enrich your understanding of the pulsating world of Australian politics and culture. Among these are books such as "New Britannia" and "White Possessive," and the engaging podcast, "Crimes of Class." Don't miss out on this profound and enlightening discourse that presents an in-depth understanding of the socio-political dynamics of Australia. Your perspective on Australian politics, history, and culture will never be the same again.

Dave Eden is a Brisbane-based communist writer and podcaster who authors the blogs With Sober Senses and The Word From Struggle Street. He costs the anti-capitalist podcast Living The Dream  with Jon Piccini.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:35

Hello and welcome to Farm Vlog, and today I'm with Dave Eden and we're going to start off by discussing the conditions and political economy of Australia. But before that we're going to start off with something in the national civic space of the Australian consciousness and then we're going to talk about that. So I'm going to hand it over to you, dave.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Thanks, thanks, van Hi everyone. My name is Dave Eden. I'd like to start today by giving an acknowledgement of country. I am speaking from, brisbane, or Miangin, which is the lands of the Yagura and Turbile peoples, and I'd like to pay my respects to elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been sasseted.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Okay, and I am going to do something that I normally make fun of. I am speaking from youth country on youth ancestral and territorial lands and Paiute ancestral territorial lands. We don't add anything additional to our land acknowledgements because in some cases some of the peoples aren't even around anymore, although the youth and the.

Speaker 1: 2:42

Paiutes are both still excellent tribes and I was going to ask you we were talking with this a little bit off air. The land acknowledgement, or acknowledgement of country in your case, and they're very similar in their format. Just listening to it is in the United States. It started in an activist spaces. It has seemingly gotten stuck in academic spaces, like you will see and like if you go to your average state or non-conservatively private school you'll see like some acknowledgement even often on the bottom of an email, but it has not carried over to civic culture outside of very educated, very elite spaces at all and indigenous peoples here actually tend to be themselves very split on the acknowledgements because they may be like well, you know it's, I guess it's nice, but what does that do about anything?

Speaker 1: 3:49

and? But it hasn't interestingly become like the touch point for reactionaries here, because, frankly, they just don't get that much exposed unless they're on academic campuses. Okay, cool, cool, yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:02

So what's going on Australia? Yeah, so it is definitely part of the Australian. What Australian public culture at the moment? So obviously Australia it is the term that most kind of radicals would use is they describe it as a settler colony? I think there's a really important argument about the interrelationship of capitalism and colonialism. That has very different political implications and amongst friends and comrades sometimes you really kind of dig into that. But a key part of that has been, obviously since colonisation there has been resistance by indigenous peoples in Australia and I would say over the last 20 years when Australian society has been largely very stable, it has been indigenous people who continue to be left out of what we might call the social deal in Australia and also have been struggling across multiple fronts about that, and in very complicated ways. That has had a profound kind of transformation in public culture and forms of expression, if not really transforming the miserable conditions and conditions of oppression for a lot of indigenous people. And so one marker of that is that the acknowledgement of country, which is different from a welcome to country. So a welcome to country would be performed by indigenous people in their country to welcome other people to that country, and there's a separate politics around that too, and the acknowledgement of country has been fairly generalised. So every meeting that I have at work and I work at a university would start with an acknowledgement of country when a plain land. So if you catch a plane from from Sydney to Canberra when the plain lands, and an acknowledgement of country will be played when the plain lands in the foot. There's two football semi-finals on tonight rugby league and Australian rules, afl, and both of those will start with an acknowledgement of country. That's hegemonic right.

Speaker 2: 6:04

There is a section of reactionaries that have seen that as a touchstone to push against. So the one of them, core, like the Australian right is, you know, a real toilet of grifters. So they're always fighting for like different space. But probably the dominant non-Nazi faction is a party called One Nation and they have opposed this for a considerable amount of time. The larger conservative bloc, the, the Liberal National Coalition. They'll try to be more sophisticated. So the previous Liberal Prime Minister tried to add on to go what we're going to do is we're going to do an acknowledgement of country and then we're going to thank the troops, like added on to that as well.

Speaker 2: 6:46

But recently there's a reactionary football commentator who's calling for people to boo the acknowledgement of country and it also it's like football has been very important in the public debate about racism in Australia as well. Like Indigenous people do have a proportionately incredibly well in, you know, in Australian rules in particular and public debates around racism as it's expressed on the football field, and that's also become more complicated. As you know, we've had different waves of non-white migration and they've been respected in support. Sport has been one of the ways that racism has been debated in Australia and you know a number of Indigenous people have gone from being making their name as football players to becoming social and political actors. So this is being debated out in really kind of complicated ways and it's happening in the context of a referendum that's going on in Australia over a a an Indigenous voice to parliament being enshrined in in the in the constitution.

Speaker 2: 7:58

Now, at the same time, there are radical Indigenous voices that do critique the acknowledgement as being purely performative as well.

Speaker 2: 8:09

You know, if you look at any of the statistics and they're captured, you know they're regularly by the closing the gap reports like life expectancy for Indigenous people, health indicators for Indigenous people, the rates of incarceration for Indigenous people, horrific, right. I think like it's not hyperbole to say that when you dig into like juvenile imprison imprisonment you you're often looking at, over 90% of the people that are being incarcerated are Indigenous people. Right, and we're, I think Indigenous people are three to four percent of the population overall. I'd have to go back and and check those stats. So structurally, race in Australia is still totally fucked right and you know that's also built into a mode of accumulating, a form of capitalism in Australia that's still largely reliant on digging shit out of the ground, you know, particularly in areas where there are still Indigenous, large Indigenous populations making land right claims. This is very, very fused and it's a very intense debate. But the acknowledgement the country has been a kind of social victory at at some, at some level, even if that critique happens, does that make sense for?

Speaker 1: 9:15

no, absolutely. I'm actually just trying to. What I'm parsing out when I'm listening to this is, on one hand, I you know, I'm sure that this is a trans-Indigenous movement in various places across the the the world, particularly the settler colonial world. At the same and I'll define what I mean by that we often focus on on the United States. You know, my stance is every state, in every established state in the Americas, with the exception of, maybe, bolivia and your goye is effectively a settler, colonial government, and everyone's at different parts and different ways to how they deal with it.

Speaker 1: 10:02

In US life, indigenous people make up depending on whether or not you include it in native Hawaiians between less than 1% or 2% of the population and unfortunately, they are strongly overshadowed by other racial dynamics in the country, both in terms of the Latin population, both in immigration. Okay, and through. You know the fact that a good portion of our country used to be Mexico itself, instead of the.

Speaker 2: 10:36

Yeah, okay, okay, so this is like let's make a jump right and okay. So if you want to talk about Australia and Australian society and capitalism in Australia and I'm cribbing a lot of the work of an Australian writer called Angela Metropolis, who people should go out and and really check right but the foundation of capitalism in Australia has always relied on a particular politics of race that has had kind of two layers to it. First of all has been the exclusion and oppression of Indigenous people and that starts. And then the second has been the regulation of the migrant population. And you know the white Australia policy exists. You know was up to the early 70s. We formally have a white, you know a white Australia policy and it's been crucial because the what we call Australian social democracy, labourism, was a long-term supporter of these racial politics in particular. You know the strategy was the way that you maintain wages is that you limit migration and you, you, for a long period of time, you fix that as white migration. So there were these two lines. You know, the exclusion of the exclusion of oppression of Indigenous people and attempted genocide let's be serious about and at the same time a kind of regulation of who gets in to a labour force that's protected by migration.

Speaker 2: 12:08

And there's a key Australian text called New Britannia by an Australian communist author, humphrey McQueen, which is, if people are going to read a book on Australia, I'd really recommend New Britannia. And Humphrey McQueen is like a fascinating guy, is really great dude as well, we can talk about him more as well. And New Britannia really spells out how important this commitment to white Australia and to British empire was to the development of labourism in Australia. And that's been very important because there was previously a kind of popular myth that would like to cast Australia as a like a nation of convicts and therefore of larrykins and rebels right, kind of oppressed by the evil British. But really when you get into it it's something else and even today you will see that the dominant strategy of labourism so it's the Labour Party and the trade unions is a mixture of arbitration. So rather than kind of class fight, you get together with the state, the boss and the union and you try to set wage conditions within a level that still allows accumulation and a limit of who can enter the labour force. But at the same time there's another tension because obviously capital, on the other hand, wants a growing migrant and wants a growing labour force.

Speaker 2: 13:30

Right, and often what Australia has benefited from since the end of the Second World War is that we get adult migrants, so someone else does the training of them. They come here and they grow our labour force, and then the people who have come here have then engaged in a series of struggles against racism here. So multiculturalism in Australia is both a history of state policy but also a multiculturalism from below at the same time. And you then you get very complicated regulatory forms around, a form of guest labour as well, where people can come here with different visas at different times, they don't have citizen rights, they're locked in working in agricultural sections and things like that. So that complicated dynamic of race, of a social deal offered to people on race, but capital's desire for an expanding labour force mixed with the struggle against racism of people, here is the history of Australia, and that only makes sense because of Australia's particular role in the world system of capitalism. Yeah, which is to leap ahead yeah, well, it's.

Speaker 1: 14:39

To me, australia is unlike the United States. It's a core periphery at the same time like we have like what? Like the United States as a whole is a core country. Um uh, although we have internal peripheries which I think is often missed in the analysis of the United.

Speaker 1: 14:55

States very strong ones, and I'm sure, in fact I know Australia does too. But Australia is I don't know anyone who would exclude Australia from the core but you're not. You're not also not a power country in the core. So it's, yeah, very like. You know, even when we talk about, like modern monetary theory dynamics, we always throw out Australia as one of the examples, because for some reason they don't seem to notice, with the exception of Japan, everybody they mention is part of the former British imperial system.

Speaker 2: 15:25

Yeah, um, but so yes, so a very interesting, um, a very interesting Australian political economist, bruce McFarlane, died recently and he's a. He's a really interesting dude, like, uh, he was a Maoist but also kind of kicked around with the post Canesians, um, you know, got in biffs with the cops. Really interesting guy. I stumbled across an essay of his, uh, a couple of years ago in a book from the 70s called Australian capitalism towards a socialist critique, and know that he lays out in very broad brushstrokes the kind of unique conditions of Australia, and one is that because it is a safe.

Speaker 2: 16:03

It is since its colonisation it has been a safe space for capital.

Speaker 2: 16:07

Right, it's been a safe space for the British Empire, then for American Imperial power.

Speaker 2: 16:12

There is always been capital that has flowed into Australia and also as a resource exporting country it's actually been exporting resources that have had quite high returns and you know we've always had, except for a few exceptions, like a positive terms of trade. And his kind of argument is that because this capital flowing in and because you know these, these like, like, particularly the mining boom in this century, things like the mining boom or the previous wool exports, there's always been this buffer to Australian capitalism. That's meant class struggle has never been particularly intense. There's been enough capital coming in that the bosses haven't had to force extra profits out of the wages here, out of workers here, to push accumulation further. And the racial politics that I just talked about there sit within that place in the world system. If Australia is a corporate and that's not really my language, right, like, however you want to like describe, you know I, you know I'm still one of the you know fun of the five remaining Negrians in Australia in some ways, right.

Speaker 1: 17:16

Maybe one of the five remaining Negrians on the planet.

Speaker 2: 17:19

Yeah, totally Right. Well, I don't know about that, but certainly there's a. There's a. My very close comrades, we all kind of started reading Negrie together in Woollongong 20 years ago and like we've got a particular reading and critique right. But certainly, however you typify the world order, the Australian state the ruling class and the political class has always been a loyal participant, an active participant in the main main maintenance of the world order.

Speaker 2: 17:52

Some debate about where it should be, where we should orientate towards, like you know, against British law, like right now, there would probably be a debate between those who think we should ally to the US and be drawn into a horrific war with China and those that think that's insane, particularly because capital accumulation, like capital accumulation in Australia right now is entirely tied to Chinese stimulus, right, like the reason that we've only had a small recession and that was during the COVID period over the last 30 years, so with the 2008 crisis didn't really impact Australia as much as it did anywhere else.

Speaker 2: 18:29

Like formally, I think, apart from just a period in COVID maybe 2020, maybe 2021, there's been no recession in Australia for about three decades and that is largely because we're tied into accumulation in China and the stimulus in China.

Speaker 2: 18:42

We dig shit out of the ground that goes over there so. But Australia has always been a kind of loyal participant in the maintenance of that world system and with prominent attempts to attempt to struggle against that as well. You've got to remember too that there's there's plenty of US troops here as well and increasingly like we're spending a vast amount of money buying some subs, nuclear subs and stationing cruise missiles and all this kind of shit that's going on at the moment, and the peace movement is beginning to kind of ramp up again, particularly as opposed in the Orcas Treaty and Australia's increasing movement, and so we're just dropping all over the place here. But yes, race relate to a particular form of accumulation which fits within a particular role in the world system here, which produces a particular kind of politics that I think is very different from just the models in the UK or the US or Europe when we want to talk about class and struggle, social democracy, unions and the left in Australia.

Speaker 1: 19:47

And this is something that I've been trying to wrap my head around for a long time because, because in many ways the US and Australia are the superficially seem similar as post, as post British colonial holdings who have relative independence, for different reasons and through different mechanisms, but and also in relation to indigenous peoples and and the the British pattern of handling settler colonials, and which tend to be more eliminationist than, say, you know, new Spain or whatever. Yet it has seemed to me that like, okay, there's been mechanisms in both places that suppressed class, class intensity, but they're very different in how they are, very different.

Speaker 2: 20:39

So keep so. If I'm not sure, if you do yourself, I reckon I'm sure you've got lots of books to read.

Speaker 2: 20:45

Do yourself a favor and read this novel called power without glory by Frank Harvey Frank Hardy Sorry, so it's a. It's a novel about the Labour Party, written by a communist author that was banned for a period of time. Right and at, the story behind it is great, but like that's a really great book to give you an understanding about how the class dynamic in Australia was managed. So, given those conditions that I've previously described, the model I guess the deal that was offered to Australia was a deal to the class in Australia, was a deal that was built around white Australia on one side and arbitration on the other side. So this was an idea rather than kind of like open class fights, that capital and the state and unions would get together and the harvest harvest.

Speaker 2: 21:33

The decision is the classic one, some years ago it's 1912 or something like that where they say, ok, what is a family wage? And we set that that wage right and we go OK, if you work this job in this industry, this is what you get paid, and that provided an overall framework. So this model still happened. You know, movement still went on, there were still brutal battles, but it happened within that framework that was able to kind of contain conditions overall up until I guess the set, the crisis of the 70s, when a new model was developed, and that new model that was developed, say we call it neoliberalism in Australia was also implemented through Labor Party in the trade union.

Speaker 2: 22:15

So there's a book that all your listeners should run out and get, by Liz Humphries, called how Labor Built Neoliberalism, and so basically the, when the Labor government comes to power late 70s, early 80s, they do a thing called the Accord, where the trade unions, businesses and the Labor government sit down together and implement what we understand neoliberalism to be right. It's not thatcher fighting the miners, it's not. I think it was a pilot. There was a pilot's battle under Reagan right in the US. It's incorporation. So if you're going to do paint that broad brushstroke, what is unique about Australia is is that level of capitalism here having the ability to allow us national level management of the class dynamic, broken down in periods during the crisis or elements of struggle.

Speaker 2: 23:10

You know, obviously, the waves of struggles in the 60s and 70s, but overall that has been the framework and you know, those of us that want to go beyond it have been compelled to go to challenge the racial basis and the arbitration basis, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 23:26

No, it makes sense. I mean what? What makes Australia than interesting actually, is that your path to neoliberalism is actually more similar to, say, norway or our Sweden's path, but the caveat that there's this settler, colonial racial dynamics, which also in some ways certainly looks like the US, are a lot of the other post British holdings.

Speaker 2: 23:54

So there's two things immediately, van, they're super interesting about that. So the Communist Party supported the accord process and one of the reasons they supported the accord process was they thought they were getting like a Swedish plan out of it. You know that the that neoliberalism would provide an increased social wage and certainly the labors, and of the Hawking Keating government in the 70s was a progressive understanding of neoliberalism that re relaunched capital accumulation would be the thing that would solve the racial dynamics and gender oppression in Australia. Paul Keating, who, like, was the driver of this, he was the treasure under hawk, then the Prime Minister. If you ever watch his red fern address when he goes and talks to a group of indigenous people, like the level of critique he makes about several settler colonialism in the early 90s, you wouldn't. You a politician couldn't make that. Now it was that radical right like into. You know he's like we took your land, we took your children, we murdered you. We've got to fix this.

Speaker 2: 24:59

And his version of land rights was certainly critiqued. I was in the IS at the time when he was doing this was certainly critiqued, but it was a progressive version of neoliberalism, you know if that makes sense. The other thing that is interesting if we talk about reactionaries in Australia because broadly the period of the end of the Social Democratic Labor as compromise fits in broadly with the end of white Australia and Australia becoming functionally incredibly multicultural place. It means that this often get in reactionary discourse, the critique of neoliberalism becomes a racist one, if that makes sense. We used to have an honest social democratic deal and then we allowed Asian migration and it all ended. You know so that like there is that kind of association out there of a kind of like a reactionary critique of neoliberalism that he calls for a re-anstanciation of white Australia.

Speaker 1: 26:03

So and this is an interesting thing to think about when you talk about this from the kind of understanding our two countries through contrast. We are just getting the kind of reactionary that you have had for a long time. The reactionary critique of neoliberalism is coming to the US very late.

Speaker 2: 26:25

But what we're getting from you is the anti-trans politics.

Speaker 1: 26:29

Yes, yes and we're so, thank you, and we're medicalization theories.

Speaker 2: 26:34

It's wild, Right, it's real and I think also as well. It's like the political class in Australia are fucked, Right, they're just incompetent. And so you know the kind of the political class that of the 80s and 90s were very competent people that came out of trade unions, you know, came out of you know the liberal party machine as well, but the current layer of politicians are just awful and so they are very. The reactionaries certainly are looking to American culture, wars and kind of strategically experimenting with them here as well. So there is certainly, you know, the reactionaries here are trying to like after the victory of the same sex marriage plebiscite a couple of years ago and you know the things.

Speaker 2: 27:23

Obviously they're still bigotry against queer people in Australia, but what was largely seen as a social victory, a lot of the reactionaries are starting to pick that up. And one of the few terms that I've I think the only I don't know if listeners would be probably listeners aren't probably familiar with my podcast or my blog, but I invented a term a couple of years ago called the cosmic right, which is probably my one contribution to intellectual and like the cosmic right in Australia. So like hippy fascists, they've really picked up the anti trans stuff here as well. So we've got that from.

Speaker 1: 27:58

That's what we've taken from from the it's one of America's greatest exports, on both the left and the right actually, is weird interpretations of cultural war battles, which is which is often yeah for sure. For example, there has been an Americanization of the European last way of speaking about a lot of these, these issues, which is actually kind of baffled me, because we're we're more decoupled in a lot of ways than we've ever been.

Speaker 1: 28:25

So the Russia, the Russian Kremlin and when I deal with you know, when I talk to Australians, it seems like there's been some of that with the left yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:37

Yeah, so, totally. So. So on a multiple different levels, like historically, like we got post structuralism through American literature departments.

Speaker 1: 28:50

So you got a different version of France, you got so so yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:53

So it means, like you know, it was only in the last 10 or 15 years that it kind of realized that. Oh, actually, you know, altazar and Faco were all sitting down talking together Because in the 80s here you were either an Altazarian or you were into Faco and there was just like a cut between them, right, and some people went over. So, like you know, the big English Altazarian Hindus ended his life in Australia, who obviously became a Fakaltian great guy as well, like lovely dude became a Fakaltian before the end of his life. But we got that kind of theory not directly from the French but via, and that created a lot of kind of confusion over a long period of time. When I was young we got a lot of kind of European traditions, I guess via the US as well. You know like I have a vast amount of media and semi-o text books on my shelves.

Speaker 2: 29:51

You know, for example, crime Think was pretty big in the scene that you know I was part of, and then I guess also in terms of anti-racist stuff.

Speaker 2: 30:00

You know the Black Lives Matters movement has been important here and taken up and re articulated in different ways, but not all of those kind of critiques have come through either. You know the way that after the wave of revolts that you know, people around like Shimon and people like that have made kind of critiques. Those critiques necessarily haven't come here. So you have these weird moments where I went to this incredibly great rally right where it was a Black Lives Matter rally in Australia. This one was taken up really driven by like young Sudanese migrants, right, who like in the racial hierarchy in Australia, get it like they used to kind of just have a moment because I think this is kind of crucial right, like so when my there was a period of time where you could migrate to Australia at the period of the Second World War, get a very shit job at the bottom of the labor hierarchy but still earn enough to accumulate property Right.

Speaker 2: 31:06

So, my grand, my grandparents on my mother's side, were refugees after the Holocaust. Right, you know, worked as a butcher, my mom becomes a teacher. They've been able to have houses and a middle class life that probably extends up into the 70s and the 80s, with maybe Vietnamese migration. So there's a large wave of Vietnamese migration after the end of the and so I live in a Vietnamese suburb and those people that came over in the late 70s, early 80s have been able to do the same. But if you kind of migrate now, the house prices are so large and the wages are so low, that kind of step of integration doesn't really exist anymore, right? So it's like like, pretty much, if your family didn't make it here during Fordism or you didn't come with money, so you're not a migrant, you know, not a professional migrant. The idea of you could do labor at the bottom of the labor hierarchy and move yourself up, that road has closed.

Speaker 2: 32:05

So that, combined with the kind of racial dynamics in Australia, there is a particular kind of like condition against, kind of the newer migrants from Africa face a lot of racism, right, and it's often, you know, police violence and these kind of things there's lots of, like, you know, african youth crime gangs, panics in the media and that kind of stuff. So these youth had kind of taken up Black Lives Matter to kind of express this and had this rally. But they it was really fascinating as great good on them but there was also obvious kind of disconnects here. So they take some of that language. You know that kind of like hands up, don't shoot, kind of language from the US. But in Australia the cops very rarely kill you by shooting, that they beat you to death. You know, like it's like the cops here do shoot people but the cop murders of largely indigenous people in watch houses, whatever. They've run people over, they beat people to death and then they don't give them, they beat them and they don't give them medical attention and then they die, right.

Speaker 2: 33:08

And it's also these kids were kind of like talking about the US slavery experience, where you would kind of think that what they weren't parallel meeting is that they were from countries that were kind of colonized by the English, have come to a country that's colonized by the US. There's another point of connection and there was lots of good dynamics going on between, like the like it observers, an old man, between, like you know, young Sudanese kids and indigenous indigenous activists as well. We get that stuff from America, but there's often it takes a moment to digest it If that makes sense, or one of the things we get and tell me. You tell me when I'm just ranting here, like gentrification is an entirely inappropriate term to apply to Australia, but a lot of people look to the US, take the concept gentrification and apply that and it just doesn't make sense. So anyway, I've been ranting.

Speaker 1: 33:58

I actually find it interesting because, for example, in indigenous communities, we can't talk about gentrification. It's not, it's not equitable to our indigenous communities either. It's really applicable to like traditional black neighborhoods that are actually themselves a product of deliberate developmental policy in the mid 20s. But but those patterns are very different and I think one of the things that that makes one of them. I've gone back and forth from why I think the US racial dynamic is is exported to so many places other than our obvious media, had Jim and clearly have an English speaking world, so I'm just going to accept that and take it as a given. But also, we have so many different kinds of racial hierarchies and oppressions here that there's generally something for you to glom on, to like there's. There are multiple and often opposed racial dynamics in the US that can speak to different, different, different dynamics in different places but often not particularly well what I don't think, for example, to kind of like talk about this when you talk about African migrants.

Speaker 1: 35:16

African migrants have not had that much success picking up the language of Black Lives Matter here, because their material conditions, while they are socially excluded and definitely receive anti black racism, their material conditions are actually so dramatically different in a lot of ways, yeah, and then say the descendants of slaves, that it's. It is actually attention in the discourse about whether or not it is appropriate for them to pick up the language, and I don't see like when I think about Australia, that there's no history there that would that would lead to that kind of dynamic.

Speaker 2: 35:57

We have a very brutal when it talks to migrant immigration, a very brutal discourse built around can they be assimilated? If that?

Speaker 1: 36:06

makes sense and you?

Speaker 2: 36:07

see it repeated since the 50s and it's like these Italians, can they be? Can they be assimilated? These Greeks, can they be assimilated? Then it's like you know, these Croatians and Yugoslavians, then Vietnamese, then Asians, then Arabs, then Muslims, then black. It's the same discourse out of like, constantly deployed in the form of policing, particularly on young men and youth and their behavior in public. Heavily like the racist paranoia is in Australia, heavily sexualized, heavily focused on racist violence, whipped up all the time. Crime like I've seen multiple crime, gang paranoias with different ethnic group in mind in life and that's just a mainstay of the reactionary basis in Australian, in Australian politics. But at the same time there's been long struggles against anti racism and you know like.

Speaker 2: 37:02

My kids go to the local public school. There's like 200. So public school in Australia is a state school, right, so like go to the local state school, the primary school there. There's about 220 kids there. There are kids, there are 40 languages spoken at kids homes, right, so like that that's. And I live in the electorate that elected in the early 90s. Pauline Hansen, who was the, is the most prominent reactionary politician, right, if that makes sense, and it's actually somewhere here.

Speaker 1: 37:40

But weirdly what I think this is often missed by our own discourse because it's not like the discourse we export doesn't reflect this. But if you look at like racial diversity is not actually a good predictor in the United States about in a, even in a congressional district, about where the politics is going to go, except for with one group and that's and that's and that's the black community, that that's like the only one where it's the strongest predictor of whether or not you're democratic or not, and I think right now that's led to racial discourse dominating our kind of mainstream politics.

Speaker 1: 38:23

but it's actually moving away from that, because people and Asian immigrants are no longer voting democratic in the same numbers they used to.

Speaker 2: 38:43

And so it's not like the state right and the state provision of support. There has not been the need to maintain ethnic identity based fraternal societies to reproduce life like there has been in the US, absolutely, and so it's not very common, you know. Like you see, like my sister lives in Santa Monica and she's always, like you know, she always having her mind blown by people saying like who are you? And they're like I'm Finnish because their family came from Finland, like you know.

Speaker 1: 39:15

Four generations ago.

Speaker 2: 39:17

There's an element of that like. So you know, if, if you like, say there's there's lots of ethnic clubs, but they play let that often by the third generation. They find themselves very hard to reproduce themselves. So, like the Spanish club which is like Sydney, had to close down because by the third generation kids aren't calling themselves Spanish anymore. Like the Polish club in my neighborhood is mainly kept to like it exists for like one wave or two of migration, but you haven't been historically dependent on these to reproduce life because the state provides welfare Right, even though it's not as good as it used to be. So the maintenance of a kind of multiculturalism that's really based on going on I'm not white, I'm. This isn't as strong in Australia as you see in the United States.

Speaker 1: 40:05

And that's a way to be frank.

Speaker 2: 40:07

Pardon.

Speaker 1: 40:08

It's also where you're more secular.

Speaker 2: 40:10

The Australia. Yeah, unbelievably, unbelievably so. So like evangelical churches are seen as an American in position, so like there's a common like expression in Australia where you say only in America, right like that, that's only in America, or the liberal or center left will critique something as being American. So I heard that and laughed actually, to be frank.

Speaker 2: 40:34

So so like, if there's an attempt to like, say, like, say healthcare is the primary one, right, so like we have Medicare, so there's an element of state sponsored. No, it's good and it's bad, doesn't cover everything, let's not romanticize it so, but every attempt is better than what we have entirely like.

Speaker 2: 40:54

Like. So, for example, you know, like I would never think if my kids are sick in the middle of the night that it's gonna cost me anything taking them to emergency right. I never have. You know, it's so full on when you've got a sick child right, the level of stress, particularly when they're under five, and to think that I can't do this because of the cost. A lot of non-essential services cost a lot If you have chronic illnesses, dental, all this stuff either not covered. It's not perfect but it certainly does something.

Speaker 2: 41:29

But every time someone suggests and like right-wing cranks are always like oh, actually, you know, we need to cut Medicare or whatever. Like it's critiqued as that is American. We don't want that because it's American. Evangelical preachers are critiqued as being American, even though Hillsong is an Australian product. It comes from two suburbs over from where I grew up. You know there are those kind of developments here. But yeah, certainly things are critiqued. Evangelicalism is critiqued and far more secular. It's been quite new for the reactionary forces who identify as being Christian right, like that's a relatively new thing to see that politicians on the right are like oh yeah, I'm a practicing Christian, like in the past it was just, I'm a cynical lawyer, you know, and I probably go to church because I think it's good for social order, but you know I've got multiple girlfriends on the side. Would have been the old reactionary politician.

Speaker 1: 42:23

I mean, that's a fascinating change in our cultures in some way, because it's like your reactionaries are a lot more like us and our reactionaries are, even though they would never state it this way. They're a lot more like European reactionaries these days, like everybody's shifting. And because evangelicalism here under the age if you're under the age of 35, it has almost no cultural import.

Speaker 2: 42:54

Interesting.

Speaker 1: 42:55

But it has an extreme cultural import if you're over the age of 35. And so, for example, like amongst debates here, you'll hear like Gloria Steinem come on and go on like the Guardian, the BBC or whatever, and she will talk about like the right and we talked in the Christian right in America and we talked to like 19 year olds here. Like what is she talking about?

Speaker 2: 43:22

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1: 43:23

And like so there's just giant gap in the frameworks. But we've been exporting our religious reactionaries forever and it is interesting, so I thought about how much American nonsense goes to Australia. But another funny thing that I've noticed is like reactionaries who don't succeed in Canada come to us. Yeah, very strange, like pipeline between the English speaking countries.

Speaker 2: 43:53

Yeah, and like there's a grifter economy in Australia too as well. You know you can be a bullshit reactionary grifter from North America and come here, but should we flip, rather than just talk about the reactionaries to talk about the struggle.

Speaker 1: 44:06

Are you interested in You're like, where is the struggle and where is your left?

Speaker 2: 44:10

Yeah, it's very interesting. Like, obviously I'm old, so my I'm in my mid 40s and I don't hang out with a whole bunch of 18 year olds, so I have a particular limited view. I think what's really there is obviously struggles going on, lots and lots of struggles. The most prominent struggles for the most last 20 years have, I feel, have been the struggles have been indigenous struggles against racism and the settler climate deal. These takes a number of different shapes. Some of it is cultural, so protesting things like the invasion day. So Australia Day is a holiday that celebrates colonialism, so contesting things like that opposition to it, often under an invasion day idea. Cultural politics there's a whole range of indigenous artists and fights are very site specific fights around land rights and site specific fights against police violence as well. That they have been the large struggles. Now, beyond that, right Again, what you have to keep in mind is that the material conditions of the majority of Australian Australian population are quite complex, that the neoliberal period here and there's some really stuff I'm super fascinated by.

Speaker 2: 45:38

So in what we call the high, in what I would call the high neoliberal period, the share of income between shifted in capital's favor, but more people in per in every Australian household started working. Working hours went up, wages did continue to increase in a very unequal form till about 2013. There was a massive expansion in credit and the prices of commodities dropped because we started importing some more stuff in China. So the shift of income in capital's favor was actually experienced as a material increase in wealth for the majority of people, and not through class struggle, largely Not through collective struggle, but through the mixture of the labor shortage, the mining boom and access to credit. So the mining boom in the first half of this century in the first part of this century meant you could like quit your job as a cleaner, become a FIFO worker, so a fly-in, fly-out worker, go drive trucks in mining construction and make 160 grand a year, right, which caused an upward pressure on wages. And there's very interesting things If you want to get super marxie and nerdy about it, like the official economist started talking about the two-speed economy, but I think effectively it meant that there wasn't. The tendencies towards averaging the rate of profit for capital accumulation were kind of broken in Australia Because the kind of super profits you could make in mining weren't met elsewhere. So that creates weird patterns of deformity. So you have this period of like, so that's up until about 2013.

Speaker 2: 47:19

Where it's played out, I mean, there hasn't been like, there hasn't been a great deal of fight. There's been specific fights about wages often have broken out either in the heavily unionized, high-paid sector so, say, you know, on the wharves there's always been an attempt to break the wharves or on the low end, so workers in chicken plants, no, those kind of things. Where it's broadly felt, though, is around the question of housing, so the housing market. In Australia, house prices are so ridiculously high and rents are so high. There's a very particular generational split, so if you own a house, one of your main forms of wealth is the rising value of that house right, which also you know that's two thirds of Australian households live in a house that they own. A third of those own it outright, a third are paying a mortgage For renters. They're increasingly locked out of that housing market, and rents grow at this astronomical rate, and so it is actually been around like.

Speaker 2: 48:24

What I'm talking with, comrades, is for a whole generation of young people. The wage is not the point of antagonism, it is rent. If that makes sense, rent is the period of point of antagonism that I always express this how do you fight over rent? Right? What happens, so I'd say, for like kind of like communists and anarchist comrades? They're doing this hard work of trying to form renters unions, fighting site-specific battles. But also, where I live in Brisbane, a group of comrades, more influenced by, like, I guess, the Bernie and Corbyn wave, have basically taken over the greens here and pushed them to the left and have had electoral success, unbelievable electoral success that has like even blew the minds of the national greens here, largely mobilizing the generational experience of rent. Now this has often been linked to a broader politics about the city and about space. That also connects to a politics of a critique about colonialization and the exclusion of indigenous people.

Speaker 2: 49:38

Now, if that's happened now, my long view would have been like there was a kind of wave of struggles in the 90s, that kind of built up that went through the defense of social democracy, environmental struggles, cultural struggles, the ultra globalization movement, then the anti-war movement, and when that was defeated that went led to a long period of defeat and a long period of demoralization. That actually happened coincided with the mining boom. So people felt this kind of defeat on the political level and retreated privately. And I think now, after that 20 year lull, as the kind of deal begins to fragment because wages really haven't developed, haven't moved since 2013,. Debt is particularly high, there's extreme cost of living pressures and focused on rent, we're beginning to see a kind of rearticulation struggle also as well. There are those ongoing indigenous struggles and the environmental movement has moved and changed and whatever and is in different spaces. So I guess broadly that's how it looks. Conservative governments keep on attempting to change industrial relations and keep on failing at different levels. So that would broadly where it be.

Speaker 2: 50:57

What is the condition of comrades? I think like there was far less people in left groups than there were 20 or 30 years ago and the left groups that exist are much smaller. I think people are far more in informal spaces, small collectives and milieus, though there has been I'm quite friendly with people with. I've got comrades in a group called the Revolutionary Communist Organization and there are attempts to kind of reform these. But the organized left is probably smaller than it has been in the past. But there's also in the South Brisbane Greens, more people experimenting with kind of left social democracy and if people are interested in going well, what are their politics? They have a website and a podcast called Flood and you can hear them just articulate that and kind of describe that and they would have a critical approach to their engagement.

Speaker 2: 51:54

Does that make sense, Farham?

Speaker 1: 51:55

You're trying to get yeah, yeah, it's interesting how like the growth of the social, although that's in decline here right now.

Speaker 2: 52:03

Yeah, well, but also as well, like we never had out, really had our movement of squares here.

Speaker 1: 52:07

Right.

Speaker 2: 52:08

Like Occupy happened, but it was a very small, minor Torian phenomena. There wasn't that 2008 crisis that led to explosion Right. We really haven't had that and in terms of what's going on, and even in terms of our industrial fights like the last big industrial fight that had like a national significance was the 1998 MUA Warf dispute where so the Maritime Union of Australia. So unionization is very low in Australia, very low in the private sector, and the areas where it does exist are often say particularly In inner city building sites or on the wharves. You have a small amount of people, heavily unionized, large influence of the Communist Party that's there and very high wages and in an export based economy, the fact that you have a small group of highly unionized workers that dominate the wharves is a major fucking problem for capital. Capital have always wanted to smash the unions on the wharves and in 1998 under the Howard Liberal government, they tried to do that. They went in with guys in balaclavas in the middle of the night and kicked all the workers off and brought in an entire scab workforce trained in the Gulf with cooperation from the military to replace that workforce and they were defeated.

Speaker 2: 53:40

That was one of those fights where everyone was involved. You went to that picket line and it was incredible. It was an amazing experience. This was happening at the same time that in the Northern Territory in Australia there was an attempt to stop mining in a place called Jabaluka, to stop uranium mining. There was also maintaining this long blockade and picket working with the indigenous people in the area. They were big national fights.

Speaker 2: 54:10

When I was at Union 1998, people were jumping on buses to travel thousands of kilometers to go beyond that Jabaluka blockade and everyone else who wasn't doing that was heading up to the MUA picket lines. It's been a long time since there's been a fight with that national level. When I talk to comrades I say what do we need to do? What doesn't happen in Australia is the circulation of struggles. You have lots of struggles in little pockets but the experience don't circulate through to develop some level of a national fight. If that makes sense, if comrades can do that, if we just need a really good YouTube station, we do that, or if that's determined by the material conditions I think is another point of conversation.

Speaker 1: 55:00

The whole dialectic here between economic determinism, aka material conditions, and political determinism, aka consciousness raising, is always I'm very heavy these days on that.

Speaker 2: 55:19

Consciousness activity can only do a small amount of things and it's unclear what it can do. I'm very much like work out. Can you do something that is useful? Why do you think it would be useful? I'm not like build the party and we'll solve the conditions. You've got to work within the conditions of the time. I think that's actually what being a materialist means. If communism is possible, it exists in some version, in the material conditions, in the present, in the struggles that are going on Lots of small ones you need to investigate, theorise, circulate and participate and work out what's useful.

Speaker 2: 55:58

Often the other thing you get is that high demoralisation cycle. It goes. Why can't we get things started up? It's because people are fucked up. People are fucked. There we go. Nothing is possible. Actually understanding these conditions, I think, is important and where the point of tension is and where the investigations that need to be done. There's lots of comrades that are experimenting over time with doing workers inquiries and things like that. I'm working with some comrades at the moment doing some investigation into renewable energy and there's some interesting kind of Obviously, that's a huge thing for Australia. Australia is a company that digs shit out of the ground and sends it overseas. A lot of our power is still produced by coal-fired power plates. Can capital have a transition to renewable energy? That is still good for capital. That's a big debate in Australia. This might blow your mind, but the Business Council of Australia, the ACTU, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and an environmental group maybe the WWF, not the wrestling the World Wildlife Federation get together and build strategy documents about how Australian capitalism can do a renewable transition.

Speaker 2: 57:10

So we're doing some investigation into that and we're doing some workers inquiries, but I certainly think you've got to look at what's going on rather than just hype activists. But sorry, I'm ranting and getting off track.

Speaker 1: 57:20

No, no, I was about to say between these two polls I tend to be kind of, I am not always a lininess, but I am on this question, and that is that a revolutionary situation has some subjective and mostly objective For sure.

Speaker 2: 57:41

It matters what you do, but you don't really know what to do or what it will do.

Speaker 1: 57:45

Exactly and you don't pick your context, and I have seen this. I talk about it as like the true horseshoe theory or whatever your economic determinism can be, like Inevitable list are defeatist, and sometimes they're the same people and then and these political politics first, or political determinist people are blah, blah, blah consciousness. Blah, blah consciousness. And then they fail and flip over to the other.

Speaker 2: 58:21

And it's also like what do you find useful? There's probably a lot of things that are useful, right, if I look at I try to do. I've got a full-time job, I've got kids, I've got a partner, so I've got limited time. What is useful for me to do? It's not necessary for me to be at every rally who cares if I'm there or not? But I'm really involved in my local community group over very boring local community issues, and part of that is because it's like for there to be politics, people have to meet. Right, what is useful in the outer suburbs is creating space.

Speaker 2: 58:52

I try to do theoretical work because I think that matters. You know, having an idea, having a good understanding of the conditions in your in may help, like I don't think theories everything you know. Often when you do theoretical work, people like you just think reading a book will determine everything. No, I don't think reading a book will determine everything, but I think having a trying to have a decent understanding of the conditions that you operate in matter Right. And also, I think, if you believe, and I believe that the future relies in people taking control of their conditions and collectively and consciously transforming them, understanding their conditions is part of that Right, like, if you don't believe people are willing to seriously think about what's going on in their world, then you don't believe they can transform that world. And you know we talked about evangelicals. You know, every week in Australia there are hundreds of thousands of people who are sitting in homes going page by page through the Bible, right, talking about it very seriously. People want to hear ideas, people want to understand the world, and I think that's kind of useful.

Speaker 2: 59:59

And I think also kind of useful for people in my generation is being a bit of like a librarian of knowledge. You know, like I was very much. You know I'm still deeply influenced by what 20 years ago we called autonomous Marxism, but now we probably call post-workarism or whatever. But we weren't very good at reproducing our understandings in Australia. Like a lot of those kind of theoretical debates of the ultra-globalization movement and the ultra-globalization movement itself are not known by young comrades, and so I think what's also useful is trying to talk about these kind of historical experiences. And then previous, I've got very good friends from Wollongong who are involved in a thing called Wollongong Outer Workers or WOW, which is in the early 80s that did all this amazing unemployed activism. So, though, like that kind of historical work is also really crucial too. So just finding out what is useful in those moments.

Speaker 2: 1:00:50

As for, you know, the organisational question, I really think that'll, you know, hit. The material conditions determine the appropriate form of. You know, there's a lot of influence in young comrades who go, oh, what the fuck did Kowtzki do? Like, okay, whatever. But I don't think you can import the organisational models of the past to the present, particularly because one of the things that I hope I've communicated to you is the specificity of class and capital in Australia. The Australian conditions have to be thought directly, and we can't just import models from the past or America or Europe. They have to be thought in their unique, particular conditions here, and that's in the inner city, but particularly when you get out to the hinterland.

Speaker 1: 1:01:34

So I don't know how I got to that rant, but there you go. Well, no, I mean this is it's hard to get Americans to take about their actual material conditions, and our material conditions are dominant, and probably nobody in the entire planet.

Speaker 2: 1:01:47

Totally. So I think, yeah, what is actually happening here, what does it actually look like, what is really going on? And also to understand that. You know and this is the influence of people like Holloway and Bonefeld on me is that there is struggle there. Like, I'm certainly influenced by the idea that everywhere you go, people are pushing or struggling, often in very small ways, but being able to see that and recognize that language and be open to that is crucial. So I think that's often a challenge here.

Speaker 1: 1:02:23

I guess she gives me, to give the specifics a little bit A lot of the, if the American left has any passing knowledge of the Australian left at all, which is a big if not just because American parochialism, but of the like British, the post British settler colonies. You guys are literally the furthest away from us and also your conditions rhyme but don't really, like you know, far into an American, so like including even your seasons. So it's something that if we've had encountered it, it's actually been through, like the IS traditions in Australia. Are you, you know your version of?

Speaker 1: 1:03:13

salt which is not our version of salt, which is also confusing.

Speaker 2: 1:03:16

But yeah, you want to look. I was in the ISO in the nineties, you know. So you know that is a that and it's probably the yeah it is. If there is a left group here, it is. It is still prominent. It's socialist alternative and, which is a particular inheritor of the Cliffite trajectory in Australia, gone through very strange mutations, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:03:44

I went to one of their first national conferences in the late 90s. So it originally split on a kind of anti-activist not anti-activist like in an anti-hype moment, because when French nuclear testing happened there was lots of anti-nuclear testing rallies in Australia and the IS recruited really quickly, which you know, like we were recruiting three times our membership at a rally right. So there was this idea that oh my God, the revolution's about to break out. And then the people who formed Socialist Alternative were like no, that's insane, this is just paper members, that's gotta go nowhere. And so they started in that trajectory but then have gone this particular kind of, I would say, heavily sectarian. You know, cell newspapers. Cell newspapers wrote hyper-activist direction and they are the kind of the prominent tradition In terms of, if you're looking for an organized expression, the group that was the biggest when I was a kid, which was the Democratic Socialist Party, which was kind of from a more orthodox position, has shrunk to a rump within a group called Socialist Alliance.

Speaker 2: 1:04:58

And that Socialist Alliance process was very much influenced by what happened in Scotland in the early 2000s but also was a reaction to the ultra-globalization movement. Like, during the ultra-globalization movement there was an explosion of interest in ultra-left and anarchist ideas and the traditional Socialists were kind of outflanked to the left. So Socialist Alliance kind of arose out of that.

Speaker 1: 1:05:22

Yeah, that again there's this mirror world tradition that we can talk about here. But you know, the IS tradition basically saved Trotsky as a men America until the CWT tradition came and also kind of added to its.

Speaker 2: 1:05:40

Yeah, that's the militant tendency right.

Speaker 1: 1:05:42

Yeah, that's the militant tendency.

Speaker 2: 1:05:44

Yeah, so they have only ever Like there's this really strange regionalism in Australia. Right, they've only ever prominently existed in Melbourne and they've gone through a number of splits, but they have a very prominent activist called Stephen Jolly who is a local counsellor there, I think. But yeah, so that kind of militant tradition has been very Melbourne-based, but that regionalism is not something you know. So in the late 60s you had Maoists in Melbourne, trotskyists in Sydney and anarchists in Brisbane. Like you get these Because the distances are so huge. You do get these particular kind of Less. Now things are more homogenised, but you have these kind of it's not a national phenomenon, it's a very much a city-based phenomenon.

Speaker 1: 1:06:33

So yeah, I guess the.

Speaker 2: 1:06:35

CP as well.

Speaker 1: 1:06:37

Yeah, that's I mean we have. We do have regional dominance of these carrying groups. Basically, the IS was the biggest, so it was never terribly big.

Speaker 2: 1:06:55

Can you just wait for a moment Van no problem?

Speaker 1: 1:06:59

No problem. So the IS tradition kind of During the ultaglobalisation movement saved Trotskyism in the United States. Our Trotskyist movements pretty much died in the 80s.

Speaker 2: 1:07:14

Yeah, so.

Speaker 1: 1:07:15

It's. Those movements have died here in the last five years. I mean our IS tradition dissolved. They all entered the democratic Socialist of America. They've kind of lost any Trotskyist.

Speaker 2: 1:07:27

Yeah, that's interesting, of course. I guess during so during the ultaglobalisation movement, probably the people that were the level of, like the real thinkers in the IS here were kind of one over either to maybe Particularly through. This is something we haven't talked about actually. It's actually crucial. The racial hierarchies in Australia have relied on the hyper-oppression of refugees that have tried to get here through ways that aren't formally legitimate. So since, like I think since the late 90s, if you turn up on a boat, like on a boat on Australian shores, you get thrown in a camp right, and so there is now this network of camps that the Australian state have, largely off-shore Now I've forgotten the exact history Throughout the South Pacific, where and also do turnbacks at sea, where people you know get the Australian Navy stops you and turns you back right. But there were these refugee camps, these endless detention centres that were built throughout Australia and refugee movements, like the movements tried to smash them, you know, to go. People went into the desert, pulled down the fences and people escaped and some of those people lived free for like 20 years and a lot of people that were in the IS were kind of one over to, I guess, kind of a gambon's politics. You know particularly about the camp and went in various different directions. So, like the encounter of like two things. To go back, the small point, the IS tradition encountered the ultra-globalisation and the struggle against borders and lost a whole bunch of people. There were still Some people stayed within that tradition. There were some. You know some people in a group called Solidarity, which is the only legitimate kind of you know another part of the IS tradition here and they do really hard work. You know like that day-in, day-out grind work around refugee struggles that are still in there.

Speaker 2: 1:09:24

But that is an important thing to think about about Australia too. Is this the kind of politics that you're seeing, say the Conservatives take up in the UK around undocumented migration is a politics that the Australian state pioneered and the human cost of that in terms of people dying at sea is horrific, right, or people that have spent decades imprisoned in camps is horrific. And the social, the post-social democratic left just completely shat the bed on this that their unwillingness to substantially resist this, to go along with this hegemony, like the impact on people's lives, outrageous. But the other side of that, the struggle of people in camps and their supporters outside, is actually heroic. Some of it probably will never be written about because it involved breaking the law. You know, like people Busted people out of camps and took them around Australia and gave them lives for like decades. That's probably, you know, should be told, but it might take a long time before that's been told.

Speaker 2: 1:10:37

That's an important thing we should think about and the effect of that movement, the struggle over undocumented migration and against that oppression, was really important and really exhausting for a lot of people as well, because the human cost of it was so high and you know there's still that kind of it's still really fucked. You know, like and it's yeah, it was important. I actually can't remember where it's up to at the moment what, where our camps are and what was shut down under the new Labour government and what wasn't, but it's been a decade-long struggle and you know that was important for the left as well and also going back as well. What was important too, was the development of organisations like that were non-white organisations of people who had been in detention, organisations like Cross Border and Rise I think they're called. My memory's getting bad, so there was a debate around race and whiteness within the movement itself.

Speaker 1: 1:11:41

You know this brings me to a kind of interesting point about the other influence of the Australian left figures in the United States. The only prominent Australian who's had not even that much influence but some significant influence in the US left is kind of a defector from the anti-politics crowd and that's Ted Teza. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, cool.

Speaker 2: 1:12:05

Yeah, no, I've known Ted.

Speaker 1: 1:12:07

Look.

Speaker 2: 1:12:07

I really like Ted. Ted and I were in the IS together when I was a teenager, so I really like Ted. I consider him as a friend, I think the anti-polit. So I mentioned Liz Humphries before. Yes, the former partner, I believe.

Speaker 1: 1:12:26

So former partner, and they pioneered that anti-politic stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:12:30

That anti-politic stuff I think is still very useful. You know, the great thing about the anti-politics is that the South Brisbane greens that I mentioned before are very influenced by that anti-politics argument. So, you know, I think Ted's ideas should be taken seriously. So, yeah, I like he's a good guy. Yeah, I disagree with him a lot, like obviously he took a very different position on COVID and lockdowns and the like than I did at the time. I just kind of went along, you know, with Like basically when COVID happened, I went I don't understand how to manage a global pandemic, so I just took an entirely agnostic position. I didn't do that thing saying we should do this or we shouldn't do that. I think there are really important critiques to Like a large section of the left in Australia became a pro-lockdown left, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 1:13:32

I think this also met with a kind of Australian version of Trump derangement syndrome, where every you know the populace are crazy reactionaries. Progress is the state doing things right, like in Queensland. Our lockdowns weren't particularly harsh. We mainly shut off the borders, you know, and while numbers were low you had a large amount of personal autonomy, but obviously I'm a white collar worker who could work from home, like the kind of class divisions of lockdown and what that meant. And then particularly in Sydney, where that kind of multicultural racial picture I talked about before is really geographically coded in Sydney, where the Western suburbs are seen as the migrant, the poorer working class and migrant suburbs. In Sydney, like the level of policing that lockdown meant there was horrific right.

Speaker 2: 1:14:25

So, like now, I think more of us who kind of went, who kind of abstained or kind of went along, are probably saying like okay, tads arguments, like the critique of lockdown. I'm willing to consider it more and I also think we should use this time to think more about what a class response to crisis and pandemics are. You know we're about to have another again, a really fucked bushfire season right Like climate apocalypse is playing out in Australia through a cycle of floods and bushfires. Trying to work out what a response to this is, I think is really kind of crucial and also, you know, like, on the other hand, also reflecting on what we also see in the response to these crises are often a kind of you know, to use the term that comrades like Nick Southall from Wollongong News like disaster communism. We also see a disaster communism emerge from these disasters that we should try to maintain. So yeah, anyway, you're saying TADS got some influence. I think yeah, his work is worth reading.

Speaker 1: 1:15:31

Yeah, well, I think he's. I am, I guess, similar to you. I'm ambivalent about his work to some degree. I think some things he said has actually been kind of shown out about the power of the biosecurity state, but he also has Not quite as gone as far as like a gombon, but there's a certain yeah, okay, so. Yeah, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:16:00

So John and I now podcasted an interview with TADS a couple of years ago on anti-politics and I guess my the problem that I probably have with the take on anti-politics is probably the same critique that made me kind of leave really capital U, capital L, ultra-leftism.

Speaker 2: 1:16:21

You know where. You often kind of get this idea that most of what we consider activity is just bullshit and recuperated and empty. However, there is going to be this genuine moment of real activity right. So the standard ultra-left kind of way as a played out in Australia, particularly when I was in a group called the Treason Collective, was everything is over there as recuperation. We want real communist activity right. And then at some point I realized that's not how people live their lives right. People are enmeshed not only in the material conditions but the political and ideological conditions and they're struggling and they're trying to work them out and people's ideas are contradictory, like I kind of think that most people that I kind of talk to are a mixture of, like social democrats and the unabomber, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 1:17:09

You know, Like in the terms of like, yeah, definitely definitely they want to be like okay, can we win this reform? I also think we should destroy civilization. You know like it's like, and in that kind of world you've got to kind of work out how you relate to people. I would say the same with kind of like the anti-politics critique. It's like I do agree. This is whole. You know, I do agree with the level that politics has no kind of formal Like. The link between the political class and social struggles that go on is broken.

Speaker 2: 1:17:43

But I do still think you can work out attempts of useful activity. That often involves some kind of engagement with people that are still in those political spaces and see what happens. Obviously, what you want to do in a genuine way is develop an articulation of something that goes beyond it. You know like I can't Like you know I remember turning up you know we used to turn up when I was an ultra-leftist turn up at these like social democratic rallies with these very dense leaflets about why this is shit and recuperation and like obviously found no audience. You know Like I feel kind of the same. You know it's like I think there's. You can take those kind of critiques of recuperation or of anti-politics, but it still leaves a wider space for trying to work out what you should struggle about. I'm just kidding, I should probably go do some child-rearing in a moment too as well, even though I'm finding this fascinating.

Speaker 2: 1:18:31

Yeah, I hope you found this kind of useful.

Speaker 1: 1:18:34

I feel we could talk about forever and dig into a oh, absolutely, and maybe you know I'll probably, in about six months or so, be reaching back out if there's anything specific coming out of Australia.

Speaker 2: 1:18:45

I've been trying to the thing that yeah, the thing we're sorry to interrupt, the thing that we haven't talked about, is that there is a referendum coming up in a couple of weeks about a constitutional amendment to For an Indigenous voice to parliament.

Speaker 1: 1:19:00

Yeah, let's talk. Let's end on that. So what's going on there?

Speaker 2: 1:19:05

All right, that's a big question.

Speaker 2: 1:19:07

Okay that's a really big question. So there has been a particular wing. This is how I would. This is my narrative of it, right, mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 1:19:21

I think there has been a particular wing of the Indigenous movement that has basically had a look at Australian society and gone. We don't feel that there's Like what is the best that we can get out of a society that seems relatively different and relatively stable and we are a numerical minority with limited social power but suffer these extreme forms of oppression. So key thinkers from that tradition would be people like Noel Pearson, who's a particularly conservative thinker. Marsha Langton would be another one, and people should check out Noel Pearson's Boyer lectures where you'll get a really in-depth presentation, right. So there's that kind of tradition.

Speaker 2: 1:20:10

There's been and they've been looking at what has been possible, and one particular instantiation of this was the Uluru statement from the heart, where a number of Indigenous people and organisations and groups got together and put towards a statement with three principles. So they are treaty, truth-telling and I'm going to get the terms wrong but effectively a voice in Parliament. Not all Indigenous people have sided with this. There is a different, radical, intellectual Indigenous tradition represented by people like Irene Watson or Eileen Morton Robinson, which Eileen Morton Robinson's book the White Possessive people should go out and read that. That basically again.

Speaker 1: 1:20:58

Oh, that's a great book. Just a second, I just read it. Like this year, it's a great book.

Speaker 2: 1:21:03

Yeah, I'm very critical of it. Like you know, if you listen to my podcast, one of our last episodes is we engage with it, right, like, and they also think not a lot can come out of settler colonialism, but take a very different perspective and they would be very Chilsey. Wattago would be another thinker along these lines. But anyway, so the people that were part of this voice and if people are interested to get I'm cribbing off notes by Megan Davis, her quarterly essay, right, and so what came out of this was a statement from the heart calling for these three forms of transformation. That has been taken up by the Australian Labour Party and, I would say, large progressive capital. Right, but it's also been largely emptied of its content at the same time as it's been taken up. So you have these two dynamics, kind of the Indigenous struggle. The Labour Party and capital have taken up this referendum and an element of the left moving towards it. So we will go to the polls October 14th to vote whether that should be a voice to parliament and the details enshrined in the Constitution. And one reason they wanted enshrined in the Constitution is there have been various different Indigenous bodies in the past, like ATSIC that carried out representation, had budgets, all these kinds of things, and then Conservative governments would elect and abolish them. So there's an idea that if it's in the Constitution, right, then that can't be changed. Now there's two levels of critique. There's the kind of radical, indigenous critique which has two elements to it, that says Treaty First, that this is a mistake, we need Treaty First. Or there is a more radical position that says no further engagement or being interpolated by the state. There is also a reactionary bloc. So I think that the Labour government expected the Liberals so that's the Liberal National Coalition would also go along with the referendum, and it's very hard in Australian history for referendums to get up without bipartisan support. But the Liberal National so the right have taken a no position right, largely, I think, influenced by kind of Trumpian cultural strategy, and this has galvanised a racist bloc. So the no vote. So that's the kind of terrain.

Speaker 2: 1:23:34

I am going to vote yes and I'm trying to get a little bit more involved in the yes campaign. I feel that there are two radical positions. There is yes plus or abstention, if that makes sense, because I think that what will probably happen is and it looks like at the moment the no vote will win and I feel that, despite the very interesting validity of the Indigenous radical critique, it will be read as a demoralising event and emboldened reaction. But I don't think what is going to happen is that the voice will be voted down and then treaty will be on the agenda next year. I think what will happen it'll be voted down and be like that's fucking it. The same way that when the Republican referendum lost in the late 90s and that was wild. If you picked up in Australia in the early 90s, if you picked up the Saturday paper every morning, it was like we're going to become a republic and it would be full of what the flag is going to be redesigned as. And that was that hawk-keeting, progressive, neoliberal republicanism. When the Republican referendum was defeated, that has just completely disappeared. Like even though lots of people in the Labour Party would still consider themselves republics. Like the national discourse, just completely. When you talk to people about what the early 90s were compared to now, it blows people's minds. I feel the no victory will probably defeat. So the onus will really be on what you know. Those people are arguing for a radical no position to go. Ok, what happens now?

Speaker 2: 1:25:14

I still hope that we can have a yes victory and that, even though I think the voice in its current form will be incredibly limited, I hope it'll do maybe three things One, open up a new front for struggle. Secondly, bring comrades together. And this is where my thinking has changed over the last 10 years, largely influenced by the social democratic experience is that, even though I don't think, I don't think the state can deliver, I think the experience of winning, I don't think defeat radicalises anymore. I think the experience of winning can radicalise. I don't think it has to. I think things are very open and fragmented and whatever, but that is what's going on.

Speaker 2: 1:25:56

But, like, what we're really seeing is like the no campaign has just allowed this sewer of reaction to kind of spew out and like any like what you know where we started this conversation by talking about how there'd been this cultural hegemony of the like, the acknowledgement of country, we're partly only seeing that being questioned right now because the no campaign feels so emboldened to push back against all of this Right. So now, indigenous activists, thinkers and comrades are all over this spectrum. You know there are indigenous people in the reactionary no campaign, a small amount of particular influential indigenous conservative politician. There are indigenous people in the progressive. No, there are indigenous people in the progressive. Yes, you know, for the white left, this, of course, is very confusing because our traditional practice has been to go well, you know, we're white people, or maybe not white, but not indigenous, and we will follow where indigenous comrades are going. But what this is showing is that there is a plurality of indigenous politics. So it's a very interesting kind of moment for me. It's been quite depressing to see what I went. I thought it was just going to be a yes vote that was going to happen, but the way the reactionaries have emboldened this, even though I think the yes vote will be very small.

Speaker 2: 1:27:27

Now, the next thing to dig into, which is probably the hardest thing to think about and joining two other points of conversation together, is during COVID lockdown, we had our anti-lockdown movement here, what we'd call cosmic right. An element of what I would say is the of the indigenous movement has kind of been one over a small amount, has been one over to kind of a cosmic right position. So you have these kind you know you have and it's often over this language of sovereignty, so the sovereign citizen language and some indigenous sovereign, and that is something that is not talked about a lot and is even hard to look at. Right and one of the things that makes it even more complicated, it would be often the non-university educated sections of indigenous activists. So more working class and plebeian are building these alliances, and it is the same way that we lost the hippies, who are now tied up to the cosmic right, which I actually think is a bad thing. You know, the left used to pull hippies along with them, but they're now increasingly won by the cosmic right. There's been these kind of, so there'll be a no protest, I think, this weekend in Brisbane, a no rally that has some key indigenous voices who have this kind of fusion of indigenous politics and cosmic right politics. That's a really interesting and confusing situation right that people are operating in and I guess, unlike 20 or 30 years ago and this goes to Tad and Liz's anti-politics thesis this is not played out by debates amongst organizations. This is played out as debates by individuals on social media. So what really is the social power that they represent? So that, yeah, that's that's where we're at.

Speaker 2: 1:29:16

October 14 is the referendum I will, you know, like, with a little bit of talk about things that are useful. I'm hopefully we'll finish some writing on this. I'm very gingerly trying to get written beforehand explaining my position, feeling, you know, trying to get it right, but I feel behind this is an evolution in my dear about actually how social transformations happen. And also, very interesting, my local group. So in the suburb I live in there's a yes group and just trying to meet up with them to be like who are these heads? They're probably all Labour Party trade union people, but I should at least know them right. Like who are these heads? Where are they at? And when no wins, where do we go from there?

Speaker 1: 1:29:59

That is a great point on what we should be following here in states. How can people find your work, Dave?

Speaker 2: 1:30:08

Yeah, okay, so I have two blogs. One is called the Word from Struggle Street and the other is called With Soda Senses, and I've also got a podcast which on that blog called Living the Dream, we put out shows, sometimes we put out heaps, sometimes we put out like one a year. The last one that's up is actually on the White Possessive. We did a series on race in Australia and we looked at three books. So we looked at the New Britannia by Hunt for Him a Queen, gus and Harzers. Oh, what is Gus and Harzers book called? That's really bad. Sorry, I have a bright bright five there.

Speaker 2: 1:30:50

And Eileen Morton Robinson is the White Possessive, which are three kind of evolutions of thinking of race. Here I've got an interview I recorded at the end of last year with a Burmese comrade who lives in Brisbane. That will be very interesting because he's really critical of what we understand as identity politics as well, and John and I are talking about recording again soon. We also want to get Liz Humphries back on the show to talk about labourism and what it's like to have a labour government. So that's where we're there and you'll find lots of points off to other things in Australia.

Speaker 2: 1:31:23

My references are probably kind of dated, but I think if people can pick up the New Britannia or that's a really good book to read, or the White Possessive, that also even though I disagree with it a lot is a really important Indigenous work that people should read. And from a novel read, Power Without Glory by Frank Hardy. That's also super crucial. I would also recommend a podcast of friends of mine called Crimes of Class and these are friends of mine from Wollongong where they talk through their experiences as communists over decades, also in criminalised and working class lives, and that's really worth checking out. But there's lots of amazing stuff. There's a lot of things that should go. Now I'm on Twitter, it's still because I'm old at with sober senses and people just hit me up. I'm happy to talk.

Speaker 1: 1:32:15

All right, Well, thank you Thanks.

Speaker 2: 1:32:16

Farron, I hope you found that useful.

Speaker 1: 1:32:18

I did.