Anarcho-syndicalist Piper Tompkins is visiting (so-called) Australia and talking world-systems theory:
Anarchism and World Systems Analysis
‘Piper Tompkins is a trans anarcho-syndicalist who writes and makes videos about politics, philosophy, and social science. Piper will be presenting on the anarchist movement and the social science of world-systems analysis. The presentation will explore the historical development of capitalism and anarchism as well as some of the fundamental ideas of world-systems analysis.’
Also dropping by Down Under is a member of the SAC, to discuss class struggle in Sweden:
Class Struggle in Sweden
‘Considered the ‘successful’ example of social democracy, class conflict in Sweden is often overlooked. Join Cim-Héloïse from the executive committee of the Central Organisation of Swedish Workers (SAC) to discuss the history and practice of anarchism, syndicalism, and class struggle in Sweden and the lessons for unionists and revolutionaries in Australia today.’
Next week’s episode of Yeah Nah Pasaran! will be our 200th. We’ll be doing some kinda AMA so if you have any questions you’d like answered, feel free to ask. All previous episodes are available for listening on the 3CR website or by way of your favourite (Apple, Spotify etc.) podcasting platform.
This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! on 3CR we talk to Dr Claudia Leeb. Claudia is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University and works at the intersection of early Frankfurt school critical theory, feminist political theory, and psychoanalytic theory to address questions of power and socio-political change in contemporary societies. Claudia is also the author of the forthcoming title Contesting the Far Right: A Psychoanalytic and Feminist Critical Theory Approach (Columbia University Press, 2024):
Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift.
We spoke to Claudia about the book and how critical theory and psychoanalytic approaches to the far right can help illuminate our responses, Austria and identitarianism, Trump and the AltRight.
4.30pm, Thursday, March 14, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
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This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! on 3CR we talk to Dr Audrey Truschke [Bluesky, X/Twitter]. Audrey is a Professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University whose work has brought her to the attention of Hindu nationalists. We spoke to her about her work on South Asian history, encounters with Hindutva and the importance of defending academic freedom.
4.30pm, Thursday, March 7, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.
Last month, Brimbank council announced that the lease on Tim Lutze’s Legacy Boxing Gym in Sunshine West had expired and would not be renewed. Used for several years by the National Socialist Network (NSN) as a training centre and sometime headquarters, the group now seeks a new home.
Speaking of the NSN, after parading through Sydney in late January, the NSN lvl boss, Tom Sewell, was treated to a rather odd profile in The Daily Telegraph in early February. Hence: ‘As more is uncovered about the leader of Australia’s neo-Nazi movement, it can be revealed Thomas Sewell was once in business with Asian men.’ TLDR: in 2016, Sewell, James Buckle and two Asian men established a company known as Compass One Pty Ltd. The company formally ceased operations on March 15, 2019: a rather infamous date (especially for Kiwis like Sewell). Of the 2019 massacre (Christchurch terrorist posted publicly about plans before attack, Mark Daadler, newsroom, February 20, 2024): ‘A small team of researchers at the University of Auckland has found years of posts from the terrorist behind the March 15, 2019 attack on two Christchurch mosques, disproving the notion that he had not been active on extremist forums’.
The Daily Telegraph article also notes that in 2022 the Balwyn Gauleiter established a roofing and plumbing business. This news is sure to delight the plumbers’ union (PPTEU), whose successful campaign to overturn a proposed ban on duck hunting — one spearheaded by their comrades in the ETU — also generated support by Sewell’s erstwhile comrade Mr Buckle.
H e a v y metal
A few weeks ago (February 10), a heavy metal gig at the Leadbeater in Richmond was cancelled. Featuring Grave Upheaval, Cemetery Urn, Munitions, Petrol and Cult of the Night, the show also starred a band called Haste, formerly known as Gurn, one closely associated with NS/BM label and distro Australibus Tenebris. The cancellation triggered the usual response from upset consumers but — on a brighter, shinier, happier note — I understand that there’s Over 666 metal gigs happening in Naarm/Melbourne in any given year, so fingers crossed those frowns will, eventually, be turned upside-down.
Or not.
Coincidentally, triple j’s ‘Hack’ has published a piece on the Dark side of metal (April McLennan, February 28, 2024). It refers to a number of bands, including Ignis Gehenna, Spear of Longinus and (quasi-metal) Black Magick SS. Weirdly, while reference is made to a failed attempt by the NSN to disrupt an anti-fascist benefit gig in September last year, no positive connection is made between this incident and elsewhere in the article when reference is made to the same mob of Hitler Yoof marching through Sydney (and through Ballarat in December last year).
All The McFeels
In the United States, ‘Jazzhands McFeels’, host of the ‘Fash the Nation’ podcast on the ‘The Right Stuff’ (TRS) neo-Nazi propaganda network, was recently revealed as being a 41-year-old ex-Republican rich kid called Robert Warren Gasiewicz of Stuart, Florida. You may remember TRS from such luminaries as Mike Peinovich (‘Mike Enoch’) or its abortive political project, the ‘National Justice Party’ (NJP). The implosion of the NJP — a batshit outfit well-regarded by the bRanes trust at David Hiscox’s recently-revived neo-Nazi blog XYZ — is examined by the hosts of another podcast, ‘I Don’t Speak German’, who’ve returned to the virtual airwaves with an episode dedicated to the NJP’s collapse: ‘We’re back. It’s cool. What isn’t cool is the National Justice Party. Because it doesn’t exist any more. And it wasn’t cool when it did. It was shit. And that’s why … well, listen to the episode.’ See also : This Podcaster Dug Into the World of Neo-Nazis. Now They’ve Put a Target on Him., Nick R. Martin, The Daily Beast, October 20, 2019.
Mein Place
Tomorrow, local cooker Darren Bergwerf will discover whether or not his brave stance in favour of truth and freedom will see him finally assume his rightful place in the Victorian parliament … or be usurped by the dastardly Victorian Socialists.
Today, liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. As Arun Kundnani demonstrates, white liberals can heroically confront their own whiteness all they want, yet these structures remain.
This deeply researched and swift-moving narrative history tells the story of the two antiracisms and their fates. As neoliberalism reordered the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, the case became clear: fighting racism means striking at its capitalist roots.
4.30pm, Thursday, February 29, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.
This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! on 3CR we talk to Rae Jereza. Rae is a non-binary, Filipino-American anthropologist working in North America whose research is at the intersection of race, digital technologies, and digital labor in the U.S.. (They also can has two cool cats: Boopy and Christmas Boy.) We spoke to Rae about digital labour on the content farms of Meta, race, guns in the U.S., and more.
4.30pm, Thursday, February 22, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.
In October and then again in November I gave brief consideration on the response of Australian unions to the war on Gaza. Months later, with the death toll (overwhelmingly civilian), officially having reached 29,000 (with the fate of many thousands of others unaccounted for but presumably also killed and buried under rubble), tens of thousands of others wounded, the Occupied Territory and its institutions — schools, hospitals, residences, places of worship and so on — pulverised, little has changed, nor is there any reasonable expectation that it will.
That said …
On Thursday in Melbourne, members of the Australian Services Union (organised via ASU 4 Palestine) have declared that they’ll be staging a walkout in order to pressure employers in the services and community sector to join them in calling for a ceasefire. The walkout takes place almost twelve months after hundreds of members of the Electrical Trades Union in Victoria walked off the job in order to protest a proposed ban on duck hunting. This walk-off formed part of a wider campaign, supported by the so-called BIG (Building Industrial Gorup) of unions: the AMWU, CFMMEU, ETU and PPTEU. The million-dollar public relations campaign was effective: the state government ignored the recommendations of the inquiry to institute a ban, and electricians, plumbers and others can continue to enjoy shooting ducks this year.
4.30pm, Thursday, February 15, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.
4.30pm, Thursday, February 8, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.
[Update (January 31, 2024) : Cameron Brodie-Hall, the leader of the Adelaide cell of the NSN, has plead not guilty to a charge of possessing extremist material: ‘A book outlining how to spark a Nazi revolution in Australia with bombings and the murder of ‘soft targets’ was found in the home of an alleged neo Nazi leader, a court has heard.’]
I wasn’t gonna bother but then I thought, what the Hell, may as well.
• Despite The Australian‘s (frankly idiotik) avowal to the contrary: Yes, Virginia, nazis exist. Both in Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere.
• Just as fascist groupings first emerged in Australia in the 1920s, Nazi associations quickly followed in the 1930s. Following the end of the Second World War, and the collapse of Italian Fascism, German Nazism and other European fascist regimes and movements, local expressions were — unsurprisingly — rather subdued, and didn’t really start cracking again until the 1960s. That said, the Australian state, as part of a wider program by the victorious Anglo-American franchise, also rolled out the welcome mat for some select Nazi criminals along with other fascist migrants/refugees. Of particular note in this regard is the Ustasha, which continues to attract some degree of support from within the Croatian-Australian community and whose leader, Ante Pavelic, is still accorded a place of honour in a number of community centres. See also : Fascists in Exile: Post-War Displaced Persons in Australia, Jayne Persian (Routledge, 2024).
• Formal neo-Nazi associations such as Tom Sewell’s National Socialist Network (AKA European Australian Movement) are relatively rare. Thus, while Antipodean Resistance, Aryan Nations, Blood & Honour/Southern Cross Hammerskins, Creativity, Squadron 88 and other groupuscules have been in existence over a period of several decades, none have drawn the same degree of ‘mainstream’ attention as the NSN/EAM. See : A Brief Guide To The Australian Far Right (September 2021 Edition).
• The NSN/EAM did not fall from the sky. Rather, the grouping around Sewell evolved out of previous articulations of racist and fascist organising. Hence, prior to Sewell’s decision to Go Full Nazi — a tactical decision which his former kamerad Blair Cottrell eschewed, preferring his political perspective stayed in the closet – he organised with The Lads Society, which in turn emerged from the collapse of the United Patriots Front; itself the (rather self-)conscious ‘vanguard’ of Reclaim Australia. To put it simply, the NSN is the product of years of far-right and neo-Nazi organising and mobilisation: a culmination rather than, as it’s often framed, a ‘sudden’ explosion (and one helped along its way by sometimes quite favourable treatment by those who may now want to distance themselves from this specific projection). A useful account of important elements in this process is provided in The Rise of the Fascist Cadre: Shifts in Far-Right Organising in Australia, Jordan McSwiney, C-REX – Center for Research on Extremism, May 18, 2021.
• I could go on (and one day I hope to), but finally, it’s simply not possible to understand the antics of the boy from Balwyn and his flunkeys without first situating them in the recent history of far-right organising and the wider political context in which they find themselves and to which they respond. This also requires that particular attention is paid to the relationship of these ‘extreme’ political expressions and the altogether ‘mainstream’ obsessions of media and politics over borders and immigration, race and nation, xenophobia and Islamophobia. This necessarily includes examining, on the one hand, the parliamentary cretinism of PHONy (It’s OK to be White!), the anti-Indigenous racism associated with the failed ‘Voice’ campaign and the murderous brutality of the Australian border regime and, on the other hand, the deeper wells of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy and colonial-settlerism from which it draws and which form its foundations.
In essence: ‘Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.’ ~ Max Horkheimer
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
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