There are polls but don’t dismiss Marxist critical theory
There are polls. Fundraising email from Labor national secretary George Wright, Monday morning:
Today’s Newspoll is out and has Labor at 50/50 with the Liberals. We’re neck-and-neck … Can you contribute $5 to help elect a Shorten Labor government this election year?
And there are polls. Canberra bureau chief Phillip Hudson digs deeper into the same survey, The Australian, yesterday:
Voters rank Malcolm Turnbull as vastly more capable than Bill Shorten of handling the economy, tax reform and asylum-seekers, according to the latest Newspoll.
So what does Labor say about the Newspoll now? Chris Bowen, doorstop, yesterday:
I don’t comment on the details of polls but … there has been various polls out this week and I think that when you look at them in their totality they show that this will be a real contest.
Criticising Marxism is anti-Semitic. Jason Wilson, The Guardian Australia, Monday:
On Saturday, The Australian published a column by the ABC’s political editor, Chris Uhlmann. In it, Uhlmann repeated a disturbing theory about the origins of 20th-century social change … As the US hate-watch group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, puts it, this “theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of ‘Marxism’ that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system” … When they first reported on it, the SPLC called it “the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right”, but worried about “signs that this bizarre theory is catching on in the mainstream” … The SPLC worried about this happening, because it may lend respectability to a narrative that “in its most virulent form, (it is) an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers”.
Not that I’m calling anyone names. Wilson continues:
There’s no suggestion being made here that Uhlmann himself is anti-Semitic.
But:
In the context of this history, his metaphors … are exceptionally poorly chosen. He should have been more careful.
And what really appears to wind Wilson up? Any view that may contradict Marxist critical theoreticians even he admits are obscure:
Any critique of American values they made — for example in the work of Theodore Adorno — was on the basis of a lament for the decline of traditional European high culture in the face of postwar commercial culture … The decline of traditional values is a result of the relentlessly transformative nature of capitalism itself, not the work of a small group of emigre Marxists who are little read now even among academics.
Tragic news for pedlars of identity politics cliches. Tom Arup, Fairfax Media, yesterday:
It appears the adage that climate change sceptics are typically conservative white men is only partly true.
Brexit banter. House of Commons, Monday:
Jeremy Corbyn: Last week I was in Brussels meeting with heads of state. One of them said …
Tory MP Chris Pincher: Who are you?