Politics

That the unit of the individual is too small to enact political transformation is the simple wager that Jodi Dean uses to open Comrade. It is a work of political theory that is well-timed, as neoliberal states have failed their citizens en masse and ideas such as solidarity and mutual aid have threatened to go mainstream in the West.

Journalists like John Martinkus have risked their lives by reporting from West Papua. What they bring to readers are, to borrow Susan Sontag’s words, ‘full frontal views of the dead and dying’. For me, at the centre of The Road is the litany of a witness burdened by the gravity of knowing and seeing the dead in full frontal view. But the book shows that while writing has its virtue, it is not nearly enough. Sontag suggests that we should not take the ‘we’ for granted when ‘the subject is looking at other people’s pain,’ but what is clear is that the ‘they,’ the Papuans who are the living dead, dying under Indonesian persecution, also see and demand a response, an action. John Martinkus’s The Road: Uprising in West Papua magnifies their stories so that we not only see but act.

Jeff Sparrow’s book was written and published within nine months of the shootings, and so provides a contemporaneous picture of the extreme right in 2019 in a world where things are rapidly changing. The immediacy of the book means that it is a journalistic investigation of why the shootings occurred – but is also a call to arms for anti-racists and anti-fascists in the face of the threat of right-wing violence, both in Australia and overseas. With the revival of the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe and right-wing concern about ‘antifa’, Sparrow’s book, alongside works like Mark Bray’s Antifa, is a useful guide to the problems that anti-fascists and anti-racists are up against, as well as how they are to be confronted.

Australia has an obsession with and an expertise in creative accounting. Governments have for years declared that we’re too small a nation to contribute significantly to climate change, while crowing about our status as the world’s number one coal exporter. (Being both the world’s smallest continent and the world’s largest island might have given us the world’s largest chip on the shoulder.) We send our coal overseas and claim that we’re no longer responsible for what happens to it. The logic is flawed, but it’s also embedded in us. We’ve ended up at a point where nation states make agreements about emissions targets and behaviours as though the atmosphere can read our maps.

At its best, the feminist manifesto is not only a weapon against patriarchy but a weapon against the worst aspects of feminist politics – it refutes liberal tendencies of moderation and incremental, slow, ‘wait and be patient’ modes of reform. It is a rebuttal to institutional practices of silencing women’s voices, and it refuses to ignore anger. It rips down the principles that underlie institutional politeness, women’s complicity in their own oppression, and authorial passivity.

On 9 June 2019, a million people poured into the streets of Hong Kong, kicking off a protest movement that would last seven months, see pitched battles between citizens and police on tear-gassed streets, and shake the territory to its economic foundations. Bruce Lee’s ‘be water’ defined its fluid and agile tactics. But tear gas smoke, flaming Molotov cocktails, chants of ‘If we burn, you burn with us’ and the politically incendiary slogan ‘Reclaim Hong Kong, Revolution of our time!’ showed fire to be the movement’s true element.

‘Fruitful misunderstandings’ strikes me as a good way to think about the blogosphere — and, actually, as a good way of describing what interesting criticism does, in so far as you never really ‘understand’ a work you’re responding to in any transparent, straightforward sense.

Only a few short decades ago, we may have only felt their stealth and thought of them as understudies to real villainry. With bodies littering roads around the world and no end in sight, their presence is unavoidable, the existential questions they pose real. It has been a blockbuster season in Australia.

For me, the easiest way to demonstrate the uniqueness of the blog medium is to think about why the k-punk book instantly and overwhelmingly prompts that question of its migration across media, a question which would not even arise for an anthology of newspaper or journal articles.

These two books are the work of a critic out of temper with the times. They contain some unfashionable opinions argued with undisguised rancour; and for that reason, there’s a conviction to be formed and tested on almost every page.