This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr on April 4, 1968.
The murder of one of the great Black leaders of the time by white racists with the complicity of the US government, most likely the FBI, stunned all African Americans in the country.
Game of Mates tells the story of two Australian men, the working-class Bruce and the capitalist James 鈥 two imaginary but emblematic men with very different lives.
Written by economists Cameron Murray and Paul Fritjers, these two archetypal characters are used to tell the story of economic theft across Australia.
The Australian billionaire Dick Smith has been on the stump again warning of the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots.
鈥淚f we're not careful, if you end up with really wealthy people and lots of poor people, in the end the poor people will rebel,鈥 he said late last year.
聽鈥淵ou look at what happened in Russia in 1917 where they ended up with the tsar and the tsar's friends who are all equivalent billionaires.
聽鈥淭he pitchforks came out and we had revolution.鈥
When renowned came to Australia in 2011 he observed that for most people it is 鈥渆asier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism鈥.聽
Unfortunately, imagining the end of the world is getting easier. There are almost daily reports of the accumulating effects of climate change, to choose just one source of potential apocalypse.
One hundred years ago this month, workers, peasants and soldiers in Russia overthrew the corrupt government that had led the country into a disastrous war and established the Soviet Socialist Republic.聽
It seemed that, for once, the people had won. Socialism had gone from theoretical possibility to practical reality.
By Naomi Klein
Haymarket Books, 2017
A new book by Naomi Klein, one of the leading left journalists in North America and author of such important treatises as聽No Logo,听The Shock Doctrine 补苍诲听This Changes Everything, is not something you wants to miss 鈥 especially when it is on the 2016 US election and the rise of Donald Trump.
We're all familiar with the old maxim: 鈥渢he rich get richer while the poor get poorer鈥. It is said as often with resignation as it is as a call to action.
Left unquantified it remains abstract but it is much easier to get worked up when the sheer scale of material inequality is in front of your face. Hence the growing outcry surrounding Oxfam's recent annual reports on global inequality that clearly demonstrate the concentration of world resources in the hands of the 0.1%.
There have been destructive attacks on the homeless in the past year in Melbourne, but the vitriolic hate campaign and physical attacks on the street, and on squatters, has reached a deadly level: murder.聽
Just before midnight on March 1, a cowardly arson attack set off a blazing fire at Kinnear鈥檚 rope factory in Footscray, which took 40 minutes for the fire brigade to control. Three squatters were tragically killed: Tanya Burmeister and her 15- year-old daughter Zoe were among the dead.
The seeds of the current crisis of confidence in the capitalist parties in Australia go back to the 1980s when the Bob Hawke Labor government implemented its version of Margaret Thatcher鈥檚 neoliberal economic policies. The Hawke government also managed to achieve what previous Coalition governments had failed to do 鈥 seriously weaken the union movement.
While these reforms did not immediately create right-wing populism, once the reforms started to really bite by the late 1990s, it began to develop around Pauline Hanson.
The Occupy movement, which started as a protest against Wall Street, but ballooned across the US and internationally in 2011, adopted the slogan 鈥淲e are the 99%鈥 to symbolise the struggle for a better world against the greed of 鈥渢he 1%鈥. Some people at the time thought it was an exaggeration to talk about the 1% versus the 99%, but according to Oxfam, since 2015, that richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet combined.
The existence of drug markets 鈥 and the struggles around them 鈥 raise a number of important sociopolitical and structural issues for analysis.
The expansion of markets for psychoactive substances was a strategic initiative by European companies in the development of capitalism, slavery and imperialism. Initially there were no illicit markets but the licit industries included the critical sugar (and rum) industry in Haiti, Jamaica, Colombia and other countries and the tobacco industry in the US South.
Dickensian children in factories and coal mines; Karl Marx debunks Capitalism; revolutions and war grip Europe; and inequality casts a gloomy smog over Europe. Ships depart with slaves, convicts and political dissidents bound for the New Worlds, of which Australia is one.
It is the 19th century, the century of capital 鈥 a time that will dialectically reverberate shockwaves towards the greatest revolutions, the greatest economic collapse and the greatest bombs.