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…
Four articles by John Hinkson and a reply by Boris Frankel, from Arena issues spanning 1982 - 1992: 'Beyond Imagination? Responding to Nuclear War', 'Post-Lyotard: A Critique of the Information Society', 'Misreading the Deeper Current: The Limits of Economic Rationality', 'A Postmodern Market Society?' (Frankel), and 'Ships in the Night: A Reply to Boris Frankel'
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?
