Australia

‘The best antidote to ideology is detail,’ writes Paul Mason. And the detail that’s missing this Armistice Day is that working people, when they take power into their own hands, can end whatever catastrophe is imposed on them.

What's the relationship between labour struggles against capitalism and Indigenous struggles against colonialism? How has Marxist and communist theory traditionally tried to understand this relationship? This episode of Living the Dream from The Word With Struggle Street examines these questions by looking at the Communist Party of Australia in the 1920s and 30s and its relationship, or lack there of, with Indigenous struggles.

The smashed avo has become symbolic of a standard of living: the bundle of commodities that form the historically necessary level for the reproduction of a large swathe of the working class in the last 10 or 20 years, and which increasingly seems untenable in the future. Moralising about the spending choices of the young is thus part of a disciplinary manoeuvre aimed at increasing the acceptance for a lower standard of living: whether that lowering of standards of living happens through the apparently neutral processes of the capitalist mode of production, or from direct attacks from capitalists.

Eleanor Robertson on the need for a communist, as opposed to liberal or reformist, approach to fighting oppression. This post first appeared on Medium.