Living the Dream

On this show Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) talk about what is going on in Queensland under the ALP.  We look at the attempt to fund social reproduction and stimulate capital accumulation in the conditions of the end of the mining boom - all whilst trying to manufacture social peace.

Special attention is given to the Advance Queensland initiative. 

Today Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) will be talking about two recent articles by Jon that trace the changes in key concepts in the languages of activism and the Left (for lack of better terms) and the reasons for and the potential costs of these changes.

 

The articles discussed are: Human Rights and the Left and Damned Whores and God’s Police, liberation and the power of activist language: A guest post by Jon Piccini

After months of silence Living the Dream podcasts are back.

Here we look at the prominence of conspiracy theories, what it is about contemporary capitalism that gives rise to them and what this means for anti-capitalist politics.

Music from Chumbawamba, Total Control, Voight-Kampff, Belgrado, Grey Places and Downtown Boys

In this episode of Living the Dream we look at the recent Qld election and try to grapple with what it all means, what the new ALP government is planning to do, what the challenges facing capital accumulation are and where the lines of antagonism may be.

Music from The Saints and Tina Harris

Articles referred include:

Don't Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts Of Lessons For The Left

 

Economic and Fiscal Challenges: Interim Results of Medium Term Modelling

From the Subprime to the Sovereign Crisis. Why Keynesianism does not work?

Statement on Monetary Policy February 2015

In part four of our three part series on the Qld election we talk about what can we expect after the votes have been counted and what does this mean for emancipatory politics, where can we draw our hope and power from and what do we mean by ‘we’ anyway?

Music by Razar

Here in part 3 of our #livingthedream election special Rob reflects on the experience of Qld Uncut and the lessons that can be learnt for social struggles for dignity and emancipation whoever wins the upcoming election.

First track from http://rokumusic.com

In part two of Stranger Choices we look at the concepts of anti-politics and depoliticisation and how they might help us understand the elections in Queensland. We examine the role law and order plays, the populism of the Palmer United Party and the contradictions, the promise and the problems of a very exceptional Greens candidate Jonathan Sri.

The articles discussed in this podcast are

Anti-politics: Elephant in the room

Policing Newman’s Crisis: Law And Order, Hegemony And The State

Here is part one of a three part ( hopefully) series about the Queensland election. In this episode Dave and Jon talk about elections and their role in capitalism, the limitation of Left understandings of the Newman government, the link between the global crisis and debt and privatisation in Queensland and more! And we did all of this on our lunchbreak in a noisy café!  Sound quality gets better in the 2^nd half….

This is part 1 of an attempt to examine the nature and history of "really existing socialism" and the impact this has on attempting to imagine and enact emancipatory politics today. Here I deal with how the very real violence of the party-states is used to ideologically mask the violence of the liberal order.  

No Shelter! A Collective Against Gendered Violence

We talk with Rascal a participant in No Shelter! A Collective Against Gendered Violence about the struggle against the closure of services for survivors of domestic violence, the transformations in the provision of welfare, the role that gender and the home play in contemporary capitalism and more!

Rascal has written about these issues here as part of the new blog Full Prole Science