“Against Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms — of speech, of worship, from fear, from want — neoliberals posed the four freedoms of capital, goods, services, and labor.”

‘As a woman is above a worm,
So is a man above a woman…
As a woman is above a worm,
So is a worm above a Christian’

This doggrel summarises the victorious Nazi hierarchy described in a 1937 novel by feminist writer Katharine Burdekin: Swastika Night. It is set over 700 years in the future, and would now count as an alternative history. It is an equal parts fascinating and frustrating story about fascist ideology pushed to its logical conclusion. Burdekin focuses on aspects of Nazism that don’t get much attention in popular portrayals: its attitude to and treatment…

How many lessons do you need in economics? Listening to the impenetrable jargon of commentators in the media, you might think you need a lifetime’s worth of them. Similarly the reams of statistics used in academic articles demonstrate why economists often call it a ‘science’, (with critics adding the modifier ‘dismal’).

However there is an alternative tradition of popularising economics which insists that its core propositions are very simple, indeed ‘common sense’. Condensing economics into single idea from which all others flow is an approach exemplified by Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 bestseller Economics in One Lesson. In his new book, John…

‘The prisoner constructs his identity against the concept of freedom. His imagination is always preoccupied with the world beyond the fences and in his mind he forms a picture of a world where people are free’.

Behrouz Boochani’s work, ‘No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison’ is very explicit in naming his experience as that of being a prisoner. The euphemisms of Australian policy — ‘regional processing’, ‘detention centres’, ‘detainees’ — are rejected. Boochani’s experience of Manus is prisoner like because it is, in fact, a prison. …

The power of the ‘walkthrough’ has a mythic status among union officials because the opportunity they present is so rare. As a organiser for the Federal Public Service union, one of the most valued activities I could undertake was the ‘walkthrough’. This was, literally, walking through a workplace, going from worker to worker, and having conversations. You asked if they were a union member, and if they weren’t — you asked them to join.

During the Howard government, walking through federal public sector agencies became almost impossible — the restrictions on the ‘right of entry’ for union organisers were so…

The hidden injuries of class

‘On a clear day you can see the class struggle from here’ is a line from Mike Leigh’s film Career Girls, and one of the clearest places you can see it in Australia is at a Centrelink office.

When I applied for unemployment benefits in 2004, Centrelink required me to attend an all day seminar for detailed instruction — with lectures and videos — about mutual obligation. One video dramatised the experience of a young man who got a few hours of paid work during his fortnight. His failure to declare it to his Centrelink…

I commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution by reading the latest biography of the man who ended it, and arguably saved the world from the threat (for the time) of nuclear war: Mikhail Gorbachev.

William Taubman makes a brief nod to my favourite Cold War theory — that it was actually ended by Nancy Reagan’s Astrologer! The story goes that President Ronald, under the sway of his advisors who were an earlier generation of neoconservatives, was inclined to see glasnost and perestroika as more Soviet propaganda. However first lady Nancy, who listened ‘religiously’ to her astrologer Joan…