Writing on the World Around Us.
On 18 May, Australians will cast their votes in an election that has workers’ rights at centre-stage. In what has been declared by the social-democratic opposition Labor Party as a “referendum on wages”, the proposed policies on workplace relations have not been more divergent in over a decade. Continue reading “Australian unions seek to “balance the power of the powerful” in historic election”
Faced with a construction boom in the 1970’s, front-line neighbourhoods and unionised construction workers in Sydney formed a radical coalition to protect their communities. Continue reading “Sydney’s Green Bans: the worker boycotts that saved the city”
Stagnant wages, precarious employment, insufficient pensions, and gender inequality, these are the daily realities which belie Spain’s much-touted economic recovery, and these are the problems against which trade unions rallied in yesterday’s International Workers’ Day demonstrations. Continue reading “Galicia Mobilises for Wages, Pensions, and Rights on May Day (News Report)”
In this still dawning twenty-first century, the sense of historical transformation is palpable. North, south, east and west the world convulses with conflict and change. Continue reading “There is a Crack in Everything… – Reviewing David Harvey’s “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism””
In Galicia, the conservative regional government has embarked upon a healthcare reform path which critics – organised around the platform SOS Sanidade Publica – condemn as a strategy for “turning healthcare into just another commodity“. Continue reading “News Report – Galicia Cries SOS for Public Health”
Everybody knows, wrote the old maestro Cohen, “everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody knows the fight was fixed: the poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes, everybody knows.” But though we know it, though we feel it and see it, we might not know the how or the why. Robert Reich wrote Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few for this very purpose, to show us how it is and ask us, pointing his finger out of the book towards our nearby faces, “now whadaya gonna do ‘bout it?” Continue reading “The Fixed Fight: Reviewing Robert Reich’s “Saving Capitalism””
In this twenty first century, capitalism – enabled by the fibre-optic revolution, accelerated by political regression, expanded by global markets – has penetrated our daily lives to extraordinary depths, transforming social practises wherever it goes. It has implanted itself even into language, supplanting what was once conceptual language for what now may be denominated corporate language. Continue reading “From Conceptual to Corporate Language (ft. The Ego-lobilisation Index)”
The Venus of Willendorf. Shoes. Omar Khayyam. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Sewage. The feats and fames of humankind are many and diverse – but we remain, as ever, animals; and as animals we forever behave. Continue reading “A Fowl Society: On Human Behaviour in Chickens (and Vice-Versa)”
It is July 1936, Spain, and a long-planned military conspiracy aims to dislodge from power a democratically elected government. Aircraft fly in mercenaries from abroad, troops are mobilised across the country, and a war begins. Continue reading “Exploring La Sauceda, Spain: A Town Wiped off the Map by Fascism”
