There are two primary streams of feminism that have evolved throughout history at the same time as communist women’s liberation streams evolved alongside the development of the Soviet Union.

Engels of course was arguably one of the first contributors on a Marxist approach to gender in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” in which a central theme of arguments essentially proposed the idea that women oppression began with the initial surplus of agriculture. This has since has seen been challenged in regards to the now recognized structure of pre-cultivation societies as being significantly more rigid in gender roles and not necessarily matrilineal as previously thought. …

While California, Brazil and Bolivia have spent the past Northern Hemispheric summer burning and we all await more chaos created by more frequent natural disasters, an environmental emergency of a different nature has gone under the radar for some time. In fact, to even raise it as something that requires alarm or a sense of emergency seems to often be dismissed as conspiracy in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. …

Since the trade war with China began, the public response in Australia has been not just divided but incredibly confused. In fact, there has been no clear plan around China put forward for Australia by even our political class who seem just as at a crossroads as most of the public. Pew Research recently found that while Australians trust Germany and a slew of other European countries before they trust China, in fact more than 50% of Australians trust China before they trust the US. The US under Donald Trump seems to be losing international confidence and it can hardly be chalked up purely to the reality that Trump is an erratic figure or his problematic comments but likely also because Australian’s stand to loose much more from an all-out trade war with China than the US does. Of course, the layman concerns in Australia around China “buying up the country” remain. However, the debates seem split between those who make almost entirely moralistic arguments on the question (that any desire for protectionism is innately racist) or that China is somehow necessarily on some ghoulish plight to dominate the country both economically and culturally using arguments that most often equate to simply yelling ‘Yellow Peril’ into the void. So, is Australia really “bought?” And if so, by whom? Well, the first factor to acknowledge is that overall the USA is Australia’s primary investor and outstrips China on this question significantly where total Chinese total investment equated to about $87.2 …

Climate change is undoubtedly an existential threat. Something which threatens to bring about global suffering, food scarcity, and a torment of natural disasters too great to manage. And yet, we must resist an insular, navel-gazing approach to these threats which is increasingly something that exudes among even the purported collectivist-left in the form of nihilism, misanthropy and ‘sustainable populationism’(a nice term for Malthusian eugenics). We’ve all in our darkest hour felt the need to capitulate to this view worldview. Having seen first-hand the full-force of the Australian bushfires last year, I can certainly relate. …

The fluidity with which we now understand gender and sex has widened immensely, with great benefits for renewed freedom of expression. But are we losing an overall understanding of the material base for the reproduction of gendered poverty?

While we discuss autonomous yet sometimes quite vague demands for the liberation of women like our right to not be referred to or thought of as genitalia by the Trumps of the globe, a trend of ignoring class relations evolves.

So, what is the social reproduction of gendered poverty? Does it have any relevancy now? And is there an ultimate higher truth or objective way to understand women’s oppression that perhaps extends beyond the (what I will term) bell hook-sian intersection of individual lived experience. …

In Marxist-Leninist spheres of thought, there is often a back and forth of ideas (or just all-out debate) between those who tend to align themselves with Third Worldism or assiduously with the concept of a ‘labour aristocracy’ to make the case that there is no real proletariat to be spoken of in the West and those who believe there is a distinction between principled anti imperialism and in effect claiming that Western workers cannot be organized.

The history of imperialism committed by colonial nations like the USA, Australia and Canada is clear and these nations are clearly made up of large swathes of super exploited labour in the form of indigenous and Black people. …

Many reports around the Coronavirus demonstrate a ramp-up of Western Sinophobia on grand display but in many countries like the US & Australia it is arguably just the bubbles of a much deeper surface. What lays beneath the Pacific sea level here is the ongoing push against the Communist Party of China that not only diminutively speaks over the voices of Chinese people in general but also crudely identifies Sinophobia with white people in the West thinking or saying things that might be mean. A whole swathe of the left in fact have chosen to make this their battle where on one side of the fence they paint China and Chinese people as victims of their system (for the ultra left that being a neoliberalism worse than the West) and just so very coincidentally upholding the same line trotted out by right wing favourites like the Daily Mail, the Australian or Fox News, while in the other decrying those who perpetuate these exact same stereotypes about Chinese people who live on Western shores. …

Trans politics manages to dominate the mainstream media despite the fact that trans people in fact make up quite a small percentage of the population. Now, of course trans politics despite that becomes the target upon which the rolling culture wars series tends to rest. Need a nuanced debate on the economy? Great! Let’s throw trans people into the firing line of discussion over the most trivial aspects of trans politics possible.

But this is the reason why many people become consumed by the politics of something like gender neutral bathrooms and never look at the broader material base that something like trans politics actually exists within. The West is relatively new to the idea that gender may be encompassed by fluidity in comparison to other societies and consequently this issue is being discussed with the same amount of tact as a child pointing out that someone’s Dad is fat. …