Politics

There’s been a lot written already about the work of the late English writer, blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017. Last year, a substantial anthology of Mark’s blog writing — together with interviews, reviews, and an unfinished manuscript fragment — was published as k-punk (Repeater Books), which was also the name of his highly influential blog.

Our dependence on the environment is the ultimate proof that there is such a thing as the common good.

‘Writers and metaphors might not lead us directly to a change in policy. But that is not to say that writing cannot do things in the world. It can shift our frame of reference, for one.’

The Colonial Fantasy could have been a book that shaped how future settler publics saw their predecessors – it’s what I hoped for when I opened it – but that ambition falls flat. And as she asks her peers to pull out of governing us, is Maddison not doing her own supplanting? She rehashes Kevin Gilbert’s Because a White Man’ll Never Do It – a book with almost the very same thesis, and a book that’s older than my parents.

It has become more unusual in recent years for presidential candidates not to have written books, usually in the form of memoirs, policy works, or some combination of both.

Yet labour’s role in the establishment of neoliberalism in Australia marked both the union movement and the ALP, leaving both of them shells of their former selves.

How exceptional can a region that produces so much of the energy that powers contemporary capitalism be?

The one thing Morrison seems to have grasped is that politics is not essentially about what goes on in the corridors of Parliament House.

For the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff, the meteoric rise of the tech industry brings with it worrying developments that should worry us – the general public – a lot more than they do, and the fact that most people are blas√© about them is itself a matter of concern. The purpose of her book Surveillance Capitalism is to awaken the reader to a sense of ‘astonishment and outrage’ at Big Tech’s power grab and its effects on society.

If we take institutional arrangements for granted, do we notice when they cease to work? Here I mean arrangement such as regular elections, democratic legislatures, independent law courts and a free press, which together form the bedrock of democratic politics. All can continue to function as they ought, while failing to deliver what they should. A hollowed-out version of democracy risks lulling us into a false sense of security about its institutions. Democracy could fail while remaining intact.