The State Election, the Media and the Will of the People.
go to full story…

In the first week in January the DSP held a four-day summer school in a college at Sydney University. The venue was not widely advertised and I turned up with a certain amount of trepidation in light of the recent unpleasant incident on the Green Left discussion list when an unreconstructed Stalinist accused me of being an agent provocateur, and there was no adequate response from the people running the Green Left list.
go to full story…

In the broad sweep of the interests of the working class and the left half of Australian society, the macro-politics of the election results of the Labor Party and the Greens are of more importance than the micro-politics of the small socialist groups and their reactions to the elections.

My experience as a leader of the Vietnam antiwar protests in the 1960s in Sydney provides a bit of insight into the events in Melbourne at the G20 protests.

Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment was a funny movie, but 100 Morgans running around is a political pain in the neck.

From The Guardian: "The death of Peter Fryer aged 79, comes 50 years to the week since his honest reporting of Hungary’s 1956 revolution for the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) split the Communist party of Great Britain, and changed his own life. A loyal CP member since 1945, and a Worker journalist for nine years, he immediately wrote a short, passionate book Hungarian Tragedy in defence of the revolution – and was expelled from the party."
go to full story…

Alan Ramsey in today’s Sydney Morning Herald rounds up the parliamentary debate on the Howard government’s new citizenship laws. It hasn’t had much attention in the media.
go to full story…

It’s a dismal commentary on the rather impoverished political culture of the far left that the 50^th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and of Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin, have received almost no historical commemoration by leftists in Australia and, judging by Marxmail, not much in the US.
go to full story…

...and his loyal backstop, His Eminence George Pell. 

The previous Catholic pope, who died a year or so ago, was at some pains to
soften the cultural clash between the Catholic church and Muslims and
Jews, and tried to thread his way between the conflicting interests of
Muslim countries, the state of Israel and the Catholic church.
go to full story…