Left Politics

Van Rudd for Lalor (Vic)

Van Thanh Rudd was born in Nambour, Queensland and is currently working as a visual artist in Melbourne's west. His involvement in the arts over the last 15 years included his early obsession with landscape painting around Nambour and Brisbane. Once moving to Melbourne in 1995, he studied figure drawing in various community venues around Melbourne. Since moving from Brisbane, Van has also played as a drummer, bass guitarist and keyboardist in various Melbourne pop/rock bands (Cheezlekane, Seconds, Stalis Vetch and Granma). The bands played in many Melbourne venues including the Punters Club and the Corner Hotel. He tried very hard to balance music (gigging a lot) and visual art until about 2007, when he decided that visual art could last him into old age. Van has exhibited his art regularly since 1995. He had his first solo show at the Northcote Library (RampArt) in 1997. He was briefly curator of RampArt in 1997 — the space was co-run by the Northcote Library and Darebin Artists Action Group (DAAG).

By Allen Myers

It’s easy enough to see that there are many things in this world that need changing. Figuring out how to change them is a bit more complicated.

By Allen Myers

“Socialism sounds like a great idea, but it’s not really feasible. At least in the developed countries, workers are too brainwashed by the system, and the ruling class is just too powerful to be overthrown.” That is not a precise quotation from any specific person, but socialists frequently encounter arguments to this effect. It is a widespread view in developed capitalist countries like Australia. How accurate is it?

By Allen Myers

Australia has been much luckier than most countries in the current international recession. While unemployment has certainly increased, it has not risen as much as in most of the world and, at 5.4%, it is still lower than it was throughout the 1990s. Partly this is because some unemployment is disguised as underemployment (people not being able to work as many paid hours as they would like), or because the official statistics don’t count people who have given up looking for work. Mainly, however, it reflects the particularly fortunate position of Australian capitalism, which has raked in huge fortunes over the past two decades by selling vast quantities of raw materials to countries in Asia, particularly China.

[This is an abridged version of Cuban President Raul Castro’s speech to the closing session of the Ninth Congress of Cuba’s Union of Young Communists (UJC) held in Havana, Cuba, April 3-4. The complete text can be read at Agencia Cubana de Noticias].

By Allen Myers

“Why can’t the left get together? Why are there so many different socialist groups?” Sometimes these questions are just an attempt to belittle the socialist left by right-wingers (who nevertheless think it perfectly normal that there should be many pro-capitalist parties). But it is also a serious question from unaffiliated leftists.

By Kerry Vernon

In a March 19 article on the website of the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group, the largest Australian organisation claiming to be Marxist, titled “Why men don’t benefit from women’s oppression”, SAlt member Kate Jeffreys repeats a gross distortion of the Marxist analysis of the oppression of women under capitalism. In arguing, correctly, that it is the capitalist class that is the cause and chief beneficiary of women’s oppression, Jeffreys also claims working-class men do not benefit in any way from capitalism’s sexist oppression of working-class women, despite the fact that working-class men have higher wages than working-class women, are more unionised and have more valued skills. They also don’t do anywhere near their fair share of unpaid housework and hardly ever suffer sexual harassment and assault.

By Allen Myers

An Australian Associated Press report a few months ago unintentionally pointed out one of the absurdities of modern capitalism. This is that a good part of the so-called wealth of capitalist societies doesn’t really exist. According to the report (as printed in the October 1 Sydney Morning Herald), the outbreak of the international economic crisis in 2008 caused personal wealth (excluding housing and self-owned businesses) in Australia to drop by 27%. It quoted the multinational Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as saying that Australian personal wealth fell by more than $600 billion from the year before. And — shed a tear for them — 32,790 households stopped being millionaires (leaving only 49,452).

By Doug Lorimer

The first issue of the Socialist Alliance’s Green Left Weekly for this year, dated January 20, carried an article headlined “New period of left unity and struggle launched”. The article quoted SA member Dave Kerin as saying that the seventh national conference of the SA, held January 2-5, with some 220 participants, signified that “the Socialist Alliance becoming a true alliance of a very broad cross-section of views that are of the historic left”.

By Marce Cameron

Since becoming Cuba’s acting president in August 2007, Raul Castro has called for a nationwide debate on the future of Cuba’s socialist revolution. This debate has been taking place in workplaces, neighbourhoods, Cuban Communist Party (PCC) base committees and informally in bars, cafes and on the streets. Increasingly, a free and frank debate is also taking place in the island’s pro-revolution media, in particular the two daily papers Granma and Juventud Rebelde.