the Banner Bright

Aditya Chakrabortty: “Corbynism began with promises of democracy, but ended up as bunkerised as all other Labour leaderships. What started as anti-austerity movement is now a melange of ideas, most of which look and sound utterly absurd on a doorstep on a rainy morning. … In the era of taking back control, Corbyn offered yet more direction from Westminster… In the 2017 election I wrote that a party that grew out of social institutions needed to turn itself into a social institution in precisely those areas it historically took for granted. That remains the key task: providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords, haggling with the utilities to provide cheaper and better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and consulting constituents on what issues Labour should be battling on. None of this is as easy as getting the woman with the great backstory to run No 11, or some GCSE marketing talk about finding new ‘narratives’. It’s hard graft, and it won’t make good copy. But Labour has no God-given right to expect votes, let alone to govern. It needs to renew its contract with its base. The big question is whether it wants to.”

Tom Blackburn: “In a way, the impending Labour leadership contest might be useful if only for the purposes of clarification: what does the Labour right want, and what is its vision for the future of the country?” (If the UK is anything like Australia, the answer is coal and racism.) “Already the partisans of Blue Labour are doing the rounds, insisting as ever that the post-industrial working class can only be reached through social revanchism and misanthropy with a red rosette apologetically attached. But there is no future in any form of Labour politics which fails to address the working class in its full diversity, and the post-industrial working class would be failed by such a prospectus as much as anyone. Furthermore, many of Britain’s most precariously employed workers are young, BAME or both, and it would be a dereliction of duty to treat them as a second-class concern (at best). Of course Labour needs to find ways of rebuilding in its former heartlands, but to abandon those groups which had found real grounds for optimism in Corbynism, after so many years of being ignored by politicians and demonised in the press, would be a grotesque betrayal as well as self-defeating.“

Grace Blakely: “For decades, all over the world, a single question has constrained the ambition of socialists: ‘How are you going to pay for it?’ … The only convincing way to answer that question is that most of us can’t afford the things we need to survive because we’re paid less than we deserve for the work we do — because the rich monopolise the returns from our hard work.  … The only way to build support for radical economic and political transformation is to change the terms of the debate. We don’t advocate public investment because it will boost profits that will trickle down to everyone else; we advocate ending austerity because it will reduce inequality, boost workers’ power and facilitate decarbonisation. We don’t advocate taxing the rich because it’s better for growth; we advocate taxing the rich because working people are the ones who create the wealth, and that wealth should be returned to them. These arguments are not only more compelling, they also lead naturally to arguments for much deeper political and economic transformation. At root, the answer to ‘but how are you going to pay for it?’ is not economic, it’s political.”

Kate Galloway: “Two Aboriginal men are currently being held in immigration detention under threat of deportation because they are not Australian citizens. … There is no question that the men are not citizens: the question centres on whether they are aliens. The suggestion in the men’s submission is that they are non-alien, non-citizens. If the court accepts this argument, there will be a new category of person recognised by law and this case will represent a significant shift in the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the state. There are many ways to read this matter — especially for lawyers who love to delve into the depths of legal doctrine. But there is a simple and incontrovertible truth that is difficult to avoid. So long as we recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as First Nations; so long as we understand that First Nations’ claims to land subsist despite the advent of English sovereignty; so long as the basis for land claims rest upon connection — physical, spiritual, kin-based — the notion of an Aboriginal person as ‘alien’ is untenable.” (I have very little faith that our High Court will do the right thing.)

Nathan J Robinson: “[A]s an exercise in imagining a better world, utopianism is not just useful but crucial, because what we have to do is have some real sense of what we’re aiming for. … I asked my friends and people who follow Current Affairs on social media, ‘What would you have in your utopia?’ And people were talking about quite simple things that weren’t that far away from things we have now but have been made to seem kind of impossible. It was things like, ‘I want to be able to go to the doctor and not get a bill[.]’ …  I use the examples of getting rid of borders and prison abolition. Getting rid of borders seems crazy utopian until you realize that for most of human history, there weren’t any borders. It’s the same with prison abolition. You can think, ‘Well, there are countries around the world today that really have very, very few people in prison — is it that crazy to think that someday we can reduce that population to almost nothing, if not nothing?’ I don’t think so. Your utopia becomes something much more feasible when you start having these dreams and start thinking about what it would take to achieve them.”

Katharine Murphy: “Dear prime minister. The country is not parched but desiccated, and it is burning like a tinderbox, and people are frightened. They are frightened about today and the terrible business of defending property and saving lives, and they are frightened about whether this is what spring and summer in Australia now looks like as droughts lengthen and deepen, and the fire season extends and intensifies because of climate change — which is what scientists have been trying to tell us all these years, so many times, in so many different ways, experts maligned and mangled in a culture war, pleading to be understood. … Ultimately, we get the politics we deserve. The obfuscation, the false comfort, the changing of the subject, the head-patting, will keep happening as long as we let it. … The only way things will change is if we choose, as a country, to do something else. To take responsibility. To demand something better. Because, ultimately, this, the future, is on us.”

Tom Greenwell: “Australia’s hybrid system of government-funded schools, with its independent, Catholic and public sectors, sorts children into different schools on the basis of their social background, dramatically exacerbating variations in social geography. In 2011, 32 per cent of children at public schools came from the most disadvantaged quarter of Australian families. By 2018, that figure had grown to 36 per cent, more than double the proportion at Catholic schools (17 per cent) and independent schools (14 per cent). … [O]ur hybrid system, in which some schools receive public funding but are permitted to charge fees at whatever rate the market will bear, drives the segregation of Australian school students. … Far from being sector-blind or a cost-saver, government funding to non-government schools has grown to the extent that many receive more public funding than comparable government schools. … While massive taxpayer support is provided to non-government schools, they continue to be able to enrol, expel and charge fees as they please — and our schools have become more and more characterised by either privilege or poverty.”

Astra Taylor: “I have long argued that democracy has never truly existed. Instead of being something we once had and only recently lost, I see democracy as a horizon people must continually struggle towards. It is an ideal that must be deepened and expanded. … What makes democracy so elusive is its inherently contradictory nature. Working towards a more democratic society will involve balancing a range of opposing values: freedom and equality, conflict and consensus, the local and the global, the present and the future. Democracy also requires weighing spontaneity and structure. Open revolt and rule-making, insurrection and statecraft — both sides are necessary in order for progress to be achieved. Democracy is messy. Time and again, rebellions, wildcat strikes, debtors’ revolts and urban uprisings have bent the will of recalcitrant authorities. But history also shows that there are no shortcuts: sudden outpourings of discontent have to be expanded, managed and advanced by the hard, slow work of organising for change. We should celebrate the contagious energy of mass demonstrations and street confrontations, while also channelling their fervour into focused, strategic efforts that have a chance of being longer-lived. … May this generation not look back and say it didn’t try.”

Lizzie O’Shea draws on Frantz Fanon’s work on race and identity to reconceptualise digital privacy as a form of self-determination: “A key part of the problem is that privacy as a right has been defined too narrowly, framed as the right to be left alone and little more. Part of our job, then, is to open up the more radical possibilities of this concept, to show that privacy is about the capacity to explore our personal faculties without judgment, to experiment in community-building on our own terms. The right to privacy is the right to exist in a world in which data generated about you cannot be used as an indelible record of your identity. Privacy is not just a technical approach to information management delegated to individual responsibility. … A more expansive way to think about privacy, then, is to see it as a right to digital self-determination. It is about self-governance, the right to determine our own destiny and be free to write a history of our own sense of self. Self-determination has a long history in legal and philosophical thinking, but it gained new meaning in the latter half of the twentieth century during the explosion of postcolonial struggles, including in the struggle for Algerian independence that Fanon was involved in. There are good reasons to see the struggle for digital self-determination as a successor of these movements.”

Osmond Chiu: Community wealth building aims to develop a framework to develop workable solutions that tries to keep money in local communities. Instead of spending significantly more, it relies on being smarter with how money is spent, taking advantage of the benefits of local industries, which support local multiple businesses through their supply chains and employ workers that will spend back into the local economy. It sees the economy as circular and rejects the extractive model of economic development which sees money taken out of local communities, and encourages a race to the bottom on taxes, wages and conditions. … While it is not a silver bullet to the challenges of regional economic development, community wealth building might be one way to start pushing back against economic decision-making that is based on the narrow criteria of financial cost. Instead, this approach can help re-embed the community into discussions about the kind of economy, and society, that we want.” Chiu highlights the success of Preston, in the north of England, to illustrate how community wealth-building can strengthen a community and improve people’s daily lives.