Are Australian MPs more or less radical than their voters? Some comparisons from the Australian Election and Australian Candidate Studies for 2007 (I have combined ‘agree’ and ‘strongly agree’):
Candidates
Voters
Candidates
Voters
Support income and wealth redistribution
Support income and wealth redistribution
Support legalisation of same-sex marriage
Support legalisation of same-sex marriage
Liberal-National
15.6%
32.8%
16.9%
31.4%
Labor
67.6%
64.6%
66.7%
49.7%
Greens
80.9%
69.4%
90.4%
76.8%
Socially the Coalition are more conservative than their voters but economically [...]
To look over the landscape of socialism is to be persuaded that again and again that Marx was the socialist thinker who had something enduring to say, non-Marxist socialism is fated to merge into liberalism, and if we were looking to political guidance Leonard Hobhouse probably more offers more than the Webbs.
Some recent reading has shed light on how we evaluate Labor’s most productive decade that of the 1940s. Almost finished Boris Schedvin’s Shaping Science and Industry a study of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the predecessor of the CSIRO.
Some valuable words from Brad de Long:
If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will have [...]
Students at Deakin in interested in wars, Australia and the Two World Wars is a popular subject, they are fascinated by Nazis as well so The Holocaust is a popular subject. Would students would be interested in the history of communism? There are the recent books by Archie Brown and Robert Service and also the [...]
Lenin famously penned 600 odd words on the ALP, Rick Kuhn writes here on the fate of this article. Labour History in 2011 will publish a special issue on the state of labour history in Australia. I have submitted a proposal to be the author of the article on labour and politics. Below are my [...]
The death on Sunday of Jyoti Basu, Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) leader and Chief Minister of West Bengal 1977-2000 marks the end of an era in the history of the left within the old British Empire and its former colonies. Basu as a student in London in the 1930s was inspired by the [...]
Thinking of of writing a book on the modest topic of the past and future of socialist politics. Much Australian left commentary sees the history of socialism as irrelevant, in particular the Communist movement is either an embarrassment or else the product of malign individuals.
Working on the relation between government and business in the United States. As part of this reread Alfred Chandler’s exceptional Strategy and Structure and The Visible Hand. One interesting point is that although the 1930s are a time when theories of ‘monopoly capitalism’ gain major following and Gramsci develops the concept of ‘Fordism’, it is [...]
Primaries are back in the news in Australia following media reports of their use by the British conservatives to endorse a candidate. Primaries seem to attract sympathy from the left judging by Larvatus Pradeo. I doubt however that the current uninspiring quality of Labor MPs would be much improved by primaries, although some of the [...]
