Have you ever worried that the current education system teaches children and young people to be cogs in the machine, rather than challenge it?
Fortunately, the second annual School of Rebellion is set to take place as part of this year’s Marxism Conference in Melbourne during the Easter long weekend. Over three days, children of conference attendees will be able to experience what education can and should be like.
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In the strange furore surrounding right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt demanding an apology from the ABC over a guest on Q&A suggesting he was racist, it is Bolt's long-time readers and fans for whom I feel the most.
Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it.
I thought that I, too, was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in Caracas this month: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the right-wing protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city.
I, too, had been taken in by media imagery.
Socialist Alternative has denied allegations by the Jewish Students’ Society at the Australian National University (ANU) that members of the socialist group abused them with anti-Semitic slurs.
The Tenants' Union of New South Wales, the state's peak organisation for tenants, has condemned the proposed sell-off of 293 public housing properties at Millers Point and The Rocks, announced by the Barry O'Farrell government on March 19.
The area is the historic heartland of the city of Sydney, and was previously saved from the developers' bulldozers by residents' action and Green Bans imposed by the NSW Builders Labourers Federation in the 1970s.
The arrival of a new M.I.A. album is always a thing to behold. Music critics are sure to be polarised, as are the usually ham-fisted attempts to better categorise her work to make it less controversial than it is. Snide remarks about her latest, Matangi, however, have been relatively muted in the months since its release.
The March in March protests across Australia over March 15-17 were a resounding success – not just because of their size, focus and breadth.
Just as significant is the fact that March in March tore apart the idea – seeded by the cynical rhetoric of John Howard's spin doctors in the wake of the invasion of Iraq – that protests don't work.
This protest worked precisely because it brought between 80,000 and 110,000 people out of their homes and into the streets in a disparate yet united way against the Tony Abbott government's attacks.
To get elected, wait until the existing government makes itself unelectable. Say as little as you can about your real policies. Smile, and present a small target.
Those were the perspectives of South Australia’s Liberal opposition in the run-up to the state elections on March 15. The key Liberal slogan, outside polling places throughout the state, was “A Fresh Start”. A start to what, specifically? Voters weren’t supposed to ask.
A former welfare worker at the Nauru refugee detention camp says the July 19 riot that razed most of the Topside compound was an “inevitable outcome” of a “cruel and degrading policy”, in a new book released last week.
The Undesirables by Mark Isaacs follows several big whistleblower revelations that have come from Nauru since the camp was re-established by then-PM Julia Gillard in August 2012.
The Liberal Party swept to victory in the Tasmanian elections on March 15, winning 14 seats of the 25 seat parliament. The Labor Party, which had governed for the past three years in coalition with the Greens, received a swing against of 9.5%. It won only six seats.
The Greens were also heavily punished, losing two seats in an 8% swing against them. Party leaders Nick McKim and Cassy O’Connor managed to keep their seats. Kim Booth looks likely to be re-elected as well.
Witnesses to the violence in the Manus Island detention centre spoke at a forum on March 17 organised by the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) in Sydney. The forum was organised after the death of Reza Berati, who died on February 17 after being beaten by Papua New Guinea police and G4S staff during widespread violence that also injured 60 asylum seekers.
The forum heard from the brother of a refugee detained on Manus Island, Samar; translator and former refugee Azita Bokan; and RAC spokesperson Ian Rintoul.
As David Harvey reminds us, capital never solves its crisis tendencies, it merely moves them around. Since the turn to neoliberalism in the 1980s there has certainly been a lot of movement.
Throughout the 1980s there were big recessions in all of the rich countries. Across Africa, Latin America and Western Asia at that time there was a depression, although it was not called this because of a self-imposed taboo on the word by mainstream economic commentators since 1929.
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