Articles by: Boris Frankel

It is precisely at a time when the socialist Left is extremely weak in developed capitalist countries that utopian thinking flourishes to fill the gap created by the absence of strong mass movements. This is particularly true of the United Kingdom and the United States, where a sense of hopelessness about radical change (as opposed to social democratic change) has produced unusual or spectacular flights of fancy. When major thinkers such as Fredric Jameson contemplate…

Tony Abbott's twenty-first-century Australia could be an updated incarnation of the film 'Pleasantville'. Instead of 1950s America, Abbottville is a sanitised, stable suburban and rural world based upon existing forms and levels of consumption and production. It is free of climate-change concerns, 'boat people', political dissidents and unassimilated Indigenous Australians. Yet, unlike Pleasantville, Abbottville can't always be pleasant. Sacrifices must be made by society, especially by workers and welfare recipients if the loyal business defenders…

It is possible that Marcia Langton's 2012 Boyer Lectures will rank as a particularly shameful episode in the ABC's history. For five weeks, audiences were subjected to the kind of vitriol and empirically unfounded claims against the Left and environmentalists usually confined to Andrew Bolt's columns or Alan Jones' broadcasts. Where was the so-called balance that ABC management invokes usually to placate the Right, but never the Left?

Stuart Cunningham's defence of cultural policy analysis (see 'Cultural Criticism and Policy', Arena Magazine Oct./Nov. 1993) is yet another example of the continuing tension dividing the ranks of Australian cultural theorists. More importantly, it highlights the crucial role of cultural policy in the redefinition of national identity - the need for culture not only to legitimate, but to provide the very cognitive, moral and social interactions necessary for the restructuring of local and global political…

Earlier this year, former ALP President Barry Jones told Phillip Adams on ABC Late Night Live, that he felt like wearing a burqa in public to avoid strangers constantly stopping him to air their complaints about the ALP. Jones is typical of former 'true believers' who are now scathing in their criticisms of the ALP.

Booing Laurie Brereton at the recent ACTU congress may have been heart-warming, but ultimately it was merely an exercise in nostalgia. For right through the 1980s, the Accord process had effectively laid the basis for a deregulated labour market. All that is at stake now is how the ACTU can minimize the damage to workers' rights - not whether it can take a decentralized enterprise bargaining system off the agenda. From the moment that the…

In 1955 I joined the army of paperboys who sold newspapers on the suburban streets across Melbourne. Instead of shouting 'get your Herald' I was told by the other boys to shout 'Eenya Herald' or something like 'Eenya, Eenyer Herald'. 'What does it mean?' I asked the other boys. But they didn't know and said that they were merely repeating what an earlier generation of boys had shouted. While I was busy selling newspapers, Herbert…

The sight of key Accordist, Bill Kelty, joining with leading capitalist, Lindsay Fox, in what was little more than an exercise in charity work said it all. In appealing to the selfinterest, if not Christian spirit, of capitalists by begging them to take on workers at governmentsubsidized costs (up to $10,000 per job), Kelty's months of full-time 'charity work confirmed the bankruptcy of the market-dominated perspective which has dominated the ALP and ACTU since the…