🧵 6/6 The series asks: what could the Green Institute actually build, and is left populism the right framework for building it? Follow me or subscribe to my Substack to keep up to date.

🧵 5/6 This is piece one of four. It examines what left populism actually is, what analytical choices it makes, and why those choices produce predictable failure modes regardless of the sincerity of the commitments behind them.

🧵 4/6 Left populism has a track record internationally. It is not an encouraging one. The subsequent pieces in this series examine that evidence in detail.

🧵 3/6 That foundational choice has real consequences. It shapes which claims get made, which coalitions get built, and, most importantly, which commitments get dropped when the political going gets hard.

🧵 2/6 Left populism isn’t just a communications style. It’s a specific analytical framework with a specific foundational choice, organising from anger at the establishment rather than from a prior commitment to challenging the entanglement of racial, gender, and economic oppression.

Left populism: What is it and what are its limits? What the Green Institute could be - Part I of IV

🧵 1/6 The appointment of Max Chandler-Mather as Executive Director of the Green Institute marks a significant strategic shift toward left populism as the organising framework for the Australian Greens. This is the first of four pieces examining what that means.
open.substack.com/pub/revitali...

a bald man is smiling and saying " you fell victim to one of the classic blunders ! " ALT: a bald man is smiling and saying " you fell victim to one of the classic blunders ! "

Trump and his advisors really should have taken Vizzini's advice, "never get involved in a land war in Asia"

🧵 6/6 The explanation being defended here isn't mine, it runs from Lenin through Gramsci to Du Bois, Roediger and Allen. But if it's wrong, the left needs an account that better explains why some sections of the working class back One Nation, not one that provides comfort by dismissing the reality.

🧵 5/6 The left's inability to honestly account for One Nation's working class base isn't a communication problem. It's a theoretical one. A framework that treats workers as either deceived or irrational can't develop the political practice the terrain requires.

🧵 4/6 The economist frame, asking whether the differential is large enough to produce political accommodation, misses the point entirely. What matters is not the size of the gap but the meanings workers give to their relative position. That's where Du Bois's psychological wage, does the work.

🧵 3/6 A central objection: higher wages in the imperial core just reflect higher productivity, not any redistribution of imperial surplus. But this misreads how the benefit is transmitted, through price mechanisms and overall profit rates, not only through direct wage transfers.

🧵 2/6 The most common objection: well-paid workers can be militant, so how can higher wages explain political accommodation? It's a real observation, but it conflates industrial militancy with revolutionary politics. They're not the same thing.

Working class support for One Nation: In defence of the explanation The labour aristocracy thesis has generated sustained criticism from Marxists and non-Marxists alike.

🧵 1/6 Working class support for One Nation: In defence of the explanation. My follow-up to Tuesday's piece, this time taking on the serious objections to the framework. open.substack.com/pub/revitali...

🧵 5/5 The second piece responds directly to theoretical objections against the framework. Follow and/or subscribe to catch it when it drops.

🧵 4/5 The psychological wage isn't just a diagnostic concept. It points toward specific political work: reattributing the source of working-class gains from racial solidarity to collective struggle. The ACTU's recent One Nation voting record video is a real-world example, with a telling limit.

🧵 3/5 This piece argues that Lenin's labour aristocracy thesis, Theodore Allen's invention of whiteness, and Roediger's psychological wage, taken together, produce a more adequate account than significant sections of the far-left currently offer.

🧵 2/5 The left's standard answer, false consciousness, ruling class ideology, Murdoch, struggles to explain why sections of the working class went there. And you can't win people back from a politics you won't honestly account for.

Working class support for One Nation: Towards an honest explanation The rapid surge in support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has forced a question the Australian left has consistently avoided answering honestly: why do sections of the working class support a politic...

🧵 1/5 When Guardian polling shows 58% of Australians considering a One Nation vote, the claim that its base is "primarily petty bourgeois" fails on basic arithmetic. Workers are the majority of the population. They have to be in that number. open.substack.com/pub/revitali...

The question of "is "X" a war crime", can be an arcane matter, it can also be very straight forward. This apears to be the latter. There aren't any circumstances where killing captured, unarmed, non-combatants, which is murder, isn't a war crime.

🧵 8/8 And it requires that protest, the most system-affirming form of political expression available is not merely tolerated. Demonstrating that the system is capable of responding to their concerns. A society that suppresses that expression has not achieved cohesion. It has demanded compliance.

🧵 7/8 Genuine social cohesion requires material conditions: real equality of opportunity, freedom from discrimination, access to housing, healthcare and education. That the political attachments of Diaspora communities be treated with the same respect as those of the Anglo-Australian mainstream.

🧵 6/8 Mainstream criminological research confirms that coercive laws cannot build social cohesion, they can only reduce some threats to it, and risk undermining the very goals they aim to achieve when they clamp down on democratic participation.

🧵 5/8 The Queensland slogan bans and the Starmer government's Palestine Action proscription both demonstrate that suppression makes things worse. The High Court found the Palestine Action ban disproportionate, confirming within the system's own legal framework what critics had argued.

🧵 4/8 The system has explicitly recognised protest as a right: in the Values Statement, the High Court's implied freedom of political communication, and the ICCPR. Protests don't cause breakdowns in social cohesion, they are symptoms of pressures on it.

🧵 3/8 The selective application tells the real story. Palestinian protesters expressing values enshrined in Australia's own Values Statement are treated as threats. One Nation voters who explicitly reject those values have their belonging never questioned.

🧵 2/8 Social cohesion has a real meaning. It's about trust, belonging, and the material conditions that make people feel genuinely part of a society. The discourse fails not just because it's weaponised, but because it undermines the very conditions it claims to protect.

How to undermine social cohesion: A guide from Australia's political elites Social cohesion has become one of the most contested terms in Australian political discourse.

🧵 1/8 Since the Bondi Attack, PM Albanese invoked "social cohesion" 35 times by March 13. A new piece on what the discourse is actually doing, and what genuine social cohesion would require. open.substack.com/pub/revitali...

Alliance deference, not Trumpism: Understanding Labor's Iran position and how to change it Trump’s decision, encouraged by Netanyahu and Republican hawks, to attack Iran has triggered both an economic crisis and a sharp intensification of the pressures on historic US alliances, including th...

🧵8/8 The full piece on Labor's structural position, why the AUKUS logic has collapsed, what Australia could actually be doing, and why the current moment is genuinely different from previous anti-war formations inside Labor. open.substack.com/pub/revitali...

🧵7/8 The politics needed here is patient, non-sectarian coalition building. Working with ALP members where they are, not demanding they repudiate their party before you'll talk to them. Denunciation performs opposition. It doesn't build the pressure that can actually shift things.

🧵6/8 Iran's closure of Hormuz isn't just a bargaining chip, it's rational. The US withdrew from the JCPOA. Iran was attacked during negotiations. On the day before Operation Epic Fury, Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling and full IAEA verification. The US attacked anyway.