Jeff Sparrow

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of cycling groups in Europe were founded on socialist principles. I had some notion, before reading Jeff Sparrow’s Provocations, of the link between cycling and that era’s feminist politics – the independent, bloomer-clad woman on her bicycle, which Sparrow also sketches – but not of Italy’s Ciclisti Rossi (Red Cyclists) or England’s Clarion Cycling Club. The latter’s anthem celebrated its members’ two-wheeled role in advancing class struggle.

There is a debate as long-running as climate change itself: can capitalism, with its demand for endless growth, be sustained on a planet with finite bounds and limited resources? Freemarketeers say yes. For them, the issue is not capitalism per se but an economic model that does not factor in the true cost of emissions. As a result, we the people and the planet are subsidising industries that pollute for free. The counterargument is based on simple intuition: How on earth can capitalism, the unstoppable force be contained inside the inelastic object? This has never received a convincing reply.

Whatever benefits it has brought, aggressive globalisation has also dislocated industries, wrecked communities, and fostered social alienation. Large numbers of working-class, blue-collar, and rural voters (these categories overlap) feel abandoned, anxious, and economically insecure, even when they have ...

Few would suggest that global capitalism is in rude, unqualified, health. Greece has just voted on whether to stay in the Euro, global markets continue their rollercoaster trajectory, and millions of workers in advanced Western economies remain jobless. With much of the rich world halfway into a lost decade, capitalism is suffering another of the periodic and devastating crises that seem an ineradicable aspect of its nature.

In 1963, ASIO opened a file on a disreputable fellow named Laurie Oakes, who was then living with Alex Mitchell, another Daily Mirror reporter. The two men came to the spooks’ attention when Mitchell suggested hiding unionist Pat Mackie from the police ...

From Menzies to Gillard, from the Cold War to Pacific solutions, the history of Overland magazine offers a leftist version of post-World War II Australian political, cultural and literary life. This issue of Overland is its two hundredth. As Jeff Sparrow, the current Editor, points out, survival is an achievement: ‘The “little magazine” is a peculiar animal. The life cycle of the species generally follows a predictable pattern: birth (usually marked by the ritual issuing of manifestos) and rapid growth, followed by financial crisis, paralysis and death, a cycle that typically unfolds within the span of six months or so.’ Sparrow, one of Australia’s more penetrating commentators, might have granted himself more space to discuss the future of Overland, and, more broadly, to reflect on challenges facing activists who challenge the assumption that capitalism can save – is saving – the world.

The key theme of Overland 198 is upheaval. The contributors explore a range of dramatic changes that have occurred in Australian politics and global culture in recent years. Mungo McCallum contends that asylum seekers have been used as political footballs by both Labor and the Liberals. Raewyn Connell investigates how the left has been affected by what she terms the ‘neoliberal agenda’. Michael Brull responds to a recent debate between ‘dissident Jews’ Dennis Altman and Ned Curthoys. James Ley describes the work of up-and-coming Australian novelists, and there is short fiction by Miriam Sved, Phillip Tang and Tim Richards.

On 4 October 1918, one month before he was killed, Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother describing the ‘mop-up’ operations in which his division was engaged. ‘It passed the limits of my Abhorrence. I lost all my earthly faculties and fought like an angel.’ Owen assured his beloved mother that his nerves were ‘in perfect order’. This letter, written by the poet who gave us ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the metaphor of a generation sacrificed like cattle on the battlefield, is a terrible indictment of war and its effect on the human psyche.