mind reader

Dear friends,

I’ve been “experiencing” liberal American post-election analysis on every form of media I visit. I’m sure you’re in the same boat as politically engaged people – but things have really reached frustration point today. So, without naming names, msnbc, I want to explore how “liberal politics”, or really what should be labeled soft-right after this Trump-slide, maintains hegemonic control through a variety of interlinked mechanisms that ultimately serve capital while preventing genuine social transformation. You know – the usual. Specifically today I’m interested in “sanewashing” and virtue signaling, because that’s the thrust of post-electoral fervor in the US – and I can feel it in my bones coming to Australia next (after all we’re just little USA, right? More on that soon).

It’s worth beginning with how liberals internally justify their political positioning. Their inaction, justification of government and corporate decisions, and general malaise unless something is a personal threat to them (even then, a stretch for action to occur). The bourgeois “left” engages in endless self-congratulatory rhetoric about being “reasonable” and “moderate”. Through this they position themselves as the “adult in the room” (in all things, really – yuck) while actively enabling fascism through constant concessions to capital. This manifesto of mediocrity serves to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse while portraying any genuine challenge to capitalism as dangerously extreme. Thanks, liberals (and to be clear to the Australians in the room I mean ALP supporters, not “Liberal Party” supporters who are Trumpian). The grip of the liberal mindset becomes a self-reinforcing loop: “we must be reasonable because we are moderate, and we are moderate because we are reasonable”. This circular logic conveniently ignores how their “reasonable” politic continues to enable exploitation and expropriation. Nice gymnastics.

Illustration required! The phenomenon of “sanewashing” exemplifies this mental HIIT workout perfectly. Liberals dismiss Trump supporters and other right-wing voters as simply “crazy” or “weird” rather than engaging with the material conditions and deliberate manipulation that drives working people toward reactionary politics. This is particularly important – the start and end of issues in US and Australian politics alike is that there are no parties supporting fair working conditions, socialised care, or ecological preservation – no parties beside the Australian Greens anyway. And even that is a concession to the change desperately needed in both countries to save our planet from climate destruction. “Those people are just nuts”, the liberals declare, while continuing to support the very economic system that creates the desperation and alienation fuelling fascism’s rise. This narrative conveniently absolves liberals of any responsibility to build genuine solidarity or challenge fundamental injustices, they can rest easy on their privileged boomeresque retirement fund. It also reinforces the false binary between two flavours of capitalism – one openly fascist, one with a pride flag – a dichotomy of the ages as the “political spectrum” tells you you can have your opinion, as long as it is ontologically capitalist.

From a sociological perspective, this othering process serves multiple hegemonic functions. It allows liberals to maintain their self-image as the “reasonable” ones while actively participating in systems of exploitation – hot. It fragments working class solidarity by creating artificial divisions between the “normal” and “crazy” segments of society. Most perniciously, it prevents meaningful analysis of how capitalism itself produces the social conditions that drive people toward extreme positions. The people who should be conducting the analysis, hell, they should be rallying on the streets, instead its “woe is me, some crazy people won the power” and “Kamala only lost because she was marginalised by the media” – not an ounce of introspection in the whole liberal core. The obsession with individual “sanity” versus “insanity” literally masks the systemic nature of our crisis – if you reduce all our problems to one faulty leader (Dutton, Badenoch, Luxon, Trump) then “capitalism is ok, it’s just the leaders who are wrong” while their more palatable leader (Albo, Starmer, Hipkins, Biden) institutes the same policy with a rainbow flag draped over it – do you feel sufficiently “washed” yet?

The normalising of “sanity” as defined by acquiescence to capitalist relations represents another victory for ruling class ideology. And with liberals it is always ruling class ideology – not anything born of organic intellectualism – because they seek only to become the next oppressor (landlord, CEO, investor), not defeat systems of oppression. Those who accept endless war, environmental destruction, and grinding poverty as “normal” get to claim the mantle of “reason”, while those who suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of profit, planetary destruction, and genocide are dismissed as extremists. Again, cool work liberals. The deep irrationality of a system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet gets naturalised as “just the way things are” and this pervasive hegemony informs all of what is “allowed” on the political spectrum – policing the possibility of change.

Particularly galling is how this discourse completely ignores the role of education. (Here we go Aidan’s back on the high horse). Not in the liberal sense of “if only they understood facts and logic” but in the Gramscian sense of developing critical consciousness – consciousness born of their class origin that enables a shared understanding of the failings, expolitation, and fundamentally cancerous nature of capital – rather than vanguarding and justifying it endlessly for “sanity” against both the socialist left and the alt-right. Instead of building systems of popular education that help people understand their material conditions and collective interests, liberals fixate on sneering at the “uneducated masses” while offering no alternative vision. They posture about how the “poors and illiterates” can’t truly understand their big brain political system, and yet when they do vote they somehow choose “insanity” rather than their candidate. Their conception of education remains trapped within capitalist logic, naturally – training “better workers” (read: complicity in capitalism’s exploitation) rather than developing revolutionary consciousness.

The political spectrum, here, serves as yet another tool in this same hegemonic arsenal. By positioning “moderate” pro-capital positions as the reasonable centre, with socialism relegated to the “extreme” fringe alongside fascism (no, not in horseshoe theory’s twisted worldview – if those liberal kids could read they’d be very upset), this framework naturalises exploitation while pathologising resistance. It is no accident that the “centre” always seems to align perfectly with the interests of capital – and over time creeps ever further rightward as capital’s crises and metastaticisation destroy our ecology, demand more socially gruelling positions, and continues painting anything that challenges these interests as dangerous extremism – anything. This false equivalence between left and right “extremes” serves to maintain capitalist hegemony by preventing genuine alternatives from gaining traction. Again, harming progressive causes and trapping the broadest discourse within a narrative controlled by binary and “sanity”.

The manufactured spectrum, with perhaps its most damaging feature, enables the alt-right to position itself as merely the “opposite” of some imagined radical left, thereby normalising its fascistic tendencies through false equivalence. “Well, if there are communists on the far left, we must be the reasonable counterbalance on the right”, goes their twisted logic. But this framing fundamentally misunderstands (deliberately, of course) the dimensional nature of political thought. The spectrum isn’t a simple line from left to right, it’s not even a two-dimensional political compass. The reality is that while fascists and liberals argue about various flavors of capitalism, genuine socialist and communist thought operates on a different axis (because their values are concerned with freedom from oppression, not “how would you like your oppression today?”). Fundamentally, it is an axis that questions the very premises of capital that both “ends” of the mainstream spectrum take for granted. It’s like watching two people argue about the best way to arrange deck chairs on the Titanic while refusing to acknowledge the iceberg – or better yet, refusing to acknowledge that boats could be steered differently altogether. The right’s success in positioning itself as just another “pole” on a reasonable spectrum serves to further entrench capital’s hegemony by making any genuine alternative appear literally unthinkable. Through this sleight of hand, they can paint socialists as “just as extreme” as fascists, while the real extremism – the endless extraction, exploitation, and expropriation required by capitalism itself – gets completely naturalised as the water we all swim in. The bourgeois media’s obsession with “both sides” reporting only reinforces this dynamic, creating an artificial equivalence between those who want to accelerate capitalism’s death drive and those who dare to imagine we might organise society differently.

Meanwhile liberals engage in endless virtue signalling about inclusion and diversity while actively participating in systems of exploitation and expropriation. They need to “look” reasonable, after all, as the moderate centre in all this. They’ll put “Black Lives Matter” in their social media bios while opposing any policy that might actually challenge racial capitalism. Similarly with decolonial efforts – full support for Indigenous movements unless they challenge capitalism – but knock-off art piece looks nice on their wall right? They’ll celebrate pride while supporting politicians who maintain the carceral state. I could go on but I’m feeling physically ill at the thought of liberal performativity, capture, and misappropriation of genuine causes into identity based squabbles [1]. The performance of progressive values without material commitment to transformation only serves to recuperate radical movements into channels safe for capital – and serves to both disempower the genuine movement and fuel capitalist “washing” – i.e., greenwashing, queerwashing, and so on.

And readers out there from the philosophical tradition may be troubled by my espousals today, but let’s be clear – contemporary liberal politics has devolved far from the aspirational heights of philosophical liberalism. While classical liberal philosophy, emerging from enlightenment thinking, at least attempted to grapple with fundamental questions of human freedom, rights, and the relationship between individual and society, today’s liberal politics has abandoned even these intellectual ambitions – verging on libertarianism. Philosophers like Locke, Mill, and even Rawls – raced, gendered and classed as their conclusions largely were – engaged seriously with questions of justice, liberty, and the social contract. Their theoretical frameworks, which integrated into the bourgeois interests of their time, maintained some commitment to universal principles and rational inquiry. By contrast, contemporary liberal politics circle jerks itself to pure pragmatism in servitude to capital. The profound questions about human nature, freedom, and justice that animated classical liberal thought have been replaced by shallow technocratic discussions of “what works” where “works” is defined entirely in terms of maintaining capitalist social relations (slavery of the 99%). This degeneration of liberalism from a philosophical project (however flawed) to pure ideology maintenance exemplifies the broader crisis of bourgeois thought under late capitalism.

All of these varied techniques the “washing”, othering, normalisation of capitalist “reason”, and the shallow performance of progress – are the modern day tools of hegemonic enforcement – these are the ways that capitalism is protected, steered, and remains in a state of growth and subsumption forever – liberal engines perpetually powering and justifying capitalist heat death. These techniques, and the broad approach of liberals to contemporary politics fragments solidarity, mystifies power relations, and channels dissent into dead ends. Most dangerously, it prevents us from building the kind of intersectional movement for justice that could actually challenge capital’s death grip on our future [2]. The liberal framework offers no tools for addressing the deep interconnections between various forms of oppression because it cannot question the capitalist system that produces and requires those oppressions.

Through Chomsky’s lens of manufactured consent, we can see how the liberal worship of capitalism – dressed up in the language of pragmatism and progress – represents the ultimate betrayal of human potential. The media apparatus, educational institutions, and cultural frameworks that reproduce liberal hegemony don’t just maintain capitalism – they actively work to prevent us from imagining alternatives – they inform our epistemology and shape our ontology [3]. When liberals valourise “moderate” politics while demonising genuine resistance, when they perform inclusion while defending exploitation, when they preach “civility” while enabling fascism, they aren’t just expressing personal political preferences – they are carrying out essential ideological work for capital. This betrayal cuts deepest at the intersections of oppression, where the violence of capitalism compounds with racism, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and other systems of domination. Liberal hegemony works overtime to obscure these connections, to prevent us from seeing how capitalism requires these interlocking systems of oppression to function [4]. The result is a profound distortion of human nature itself – our inherent capacities for solidarity, creativity, and collective flourishing constantly twisted into competitive individualism and performative politics. Breaking free from this hegemonic web requires more than just critiquing liberal politics – it demands building new forms of consciousness and organisation that can unite the multiply oppressed in struggle against capital and all its mutually reinforcing systems of domination. Only through this kind of radical, intersectional solidarity can we begin to imagine and create the kind of world our human nature actually calls for – and the start point, as always, is education.

In solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://mndrdr.org/2024/identity-politics-and-the-crisis-of-working-class-solidarity

[2] Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T., & Fraser, N. (2019). Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. Verso.

[3] Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.

[4] Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Dear friends,

We live in a time of intensifying identity-based conflict, where every social and political issue becomes refracted through the lens of personal identity and group affiliation. Look no further than headlines shared here on mind reader every day. The deployment of identity politics – both by the ostensible “left” and the increasingly mask-off right – has become a primary mechanism through which hegemonic power maintains its grip on civil society while forestalling any genuine movement toward working class solidarity (let alone anti-capitalist movements). I think it is worth us spending additional time examining this phenomenon and its implications for building an intersectional movement capable of challenging capitalism’s death grip on our collective future. Because our future is collective, identities be damned.

Identity politics, in its current manifestation, represents both a genuine expression of marginalised groups’ experiences and grievances under capitalism and a tool cynically wielded by power to fragment class consciousness. What began as important movements highlighting specific forms of oppression – from feminist critiques of patriarchy to queer resistance against heteronormativity to racial justice struggles against white supremacy – has been co-opted and transformed by hegemonic forces into battles over representation and recognition that leave fundamental power relations untouched. Capitalism marches on, and indeed, intensifies, subsumes and co-opts in the wake of these divisive rhetorics. The right deploys reactionary identity politics centred on nationalism, whiteness, and “traditional values” (read: rape, plunder, pillage) to redirect working class anger toward marginalised groups, while liberal identity politics often reduces systemic critique to demands for more diverse faces in positions of power. Both varieties serve to obscure the material basis of oppression in capitalist relations. Don’t @ me.

The emotional power of identity as a mobilising force is incredibly significant in our current political context. The assumptions, roles, and realities of communities are important and they colour how we see the world. Our sense of self, our experiences of marginalisation or privilege, and our community affiliations shape our social epistemology – which is equally shaped by a capitalist ontology. The right understands this viscerally – their appeals to white grievance, xenophobia, and moral panic over gender and sexuality tap into deep wells of fear and anger among their base. The “mainstream media” amplifies these cultural conflicts, with Australia’s Murdoch-dominated landscape taking particular glee in stoking hatred toward LGBTQI+ folks through endless inflammatory coverage. One need only look at how trans people have been demonised and scapegoated, basic human dignity turned into fodder for manufactured outrage designed to drive engagement and distract from capital’s continued pillaging of our planet. Oh, and to sell Murdoch’s rags.

The Australian media’s complicity in amplifying identity-based division represents a textbook example of manufactured consent in action. By framing every issue through a culture war lens – whether it’s gender-neutral bathrooms, Indigenous Voice, or immigration – the corporate media ensures that genuine class analysis and critique of capitalism remains off the table. To them, that’s all this is – a way of keeping “the proles in their jobs, asking no questions, and hating each other” – you can’t make this shit up. The endless cycle of inflammatory coverage creates a feedback loop where legitimate grievances get twisted into weapons for attacking other marginalised groups rather than challenging the very system that creates the marginalisation in the first place. Headlines about “woke ideology” and “gender ideology” serve as convenient distractions while – in our case, both major political parties continue implementing anti-worker policies – and revelling in the hate they have manufactured to grab more power at the next election.

This devolution into identity-based warfare has devastating consequences for building working class solidarity. Not to mention on the mental and physical health of “minorities” and marginalised peoples across the gamut of the political spectrum (even when they vote for the leopards which eat their own faces). When workers are convinced that their real enemies are immigrants, trans people, or “cultural Marxists” (guilty) rather than the capitalist class stealing the surplus value of their labour, the prospects for unified resistance plummet. And that’s what we’ve seen deployed time and again over the last thirty years, particularly as the Labor party undermines any affective worker movement through it’s monopoly over (bourgeoise) “unions”. The right’s concomitant deployment of reactionary identity politics serves to actively prevent the development of class consciousness, while liberal identity politics often reduces intersectional analysis to performative representation that leaves capitalism’s core operations intact. Both varieties in their pernicious creep into identity battles only strengthen rather than challenge hegemonic power – thereby simply reinforcing the damaging power imbalances that created the issues in the first place.

The cost of this fragmentation falls hardest on those facing multiple, intersecting forms of marginalisation. When movements for social transformation devolve into competing claims of oppression rather than building genuine solidarity, it is invariably the most vulnerable who suffer – Indigenous workers, disabled folks, queer and trans people of colour, and so on. Their specific experiences of exploitation and exclusion demand an intersectional analysis that holds both the particularity of identity-based oppression and the universality of class struggle. We cannot build effective resistance by either ignoring difference or reducing everything to identity – we need an educative praxis that fosters deep understanding across lines of difference while maintaining focus on our shared enemy –capitalism. And this doesn’t mean “reasoning with the right” who are hellbent on running the globe into climate-based destruction just for shits and giggles (masochistic and religious nut jobs alike).

Where might we go from here? The path forward requires developing forms of solidarity that can honour both our differences and our fundamental commonality as members of the working class facing extinction under capitalism’s death drive. This means creating spaces for genuine dialogue and political education that help people understand how their specific experiences of marginalisation connect to systems of oppression. Only the 1% has “got it made” in this system, and just because someone has a veneer of privilege, does not make them an exploiter – though idly leveraging that privilege for personal benefit is deeply problematic. The panacea isn’t more identity-based battling, or divisive rubbish, but rather building movements that centre the leadership of the most impacted while fostering collective understanding of how capitalism relies on and reproduces multiple, intersecting hierarchies. And, in case I haven’t been clear enough, most importantly, it means maintaining laser focus on the real enemy – not each other, but the capitalist class and their political enablers pushing us toward fascism and ecological collapse.

The tools for this work already exist in our theoretical traditions – from intersectional feminism to social reproduction theory to Gramsci’s insights about building counter-hegemony. What we need now is the collective will to deploy them in service of genuine solidarity rather than allowing our identities to be weaponised for capital’s benefit. The ruling class wants us fighting each other over pronouns, level of personal exploitation and disadvantage, and “others that look like you made this system” all while the capitalists steal the future from us, our planet and our children. If you choose the path of lateral violence over identity battles you choose capitalism, the system that oppresses you. An alternate path, one of radical education, deep solidarity, and unified resistance against the death cult of colonial capitalism is a panacea for resistance that allows our strengths to shine – not dividing us on our (perceived) identities, labels applied by others to keep us busy.

In closing, friends, none of us are free until all of us are free. The revolution must be intersectional or it will be bullshit. Platitudes, or action? I think action.

In solidarity,

Aidan

Dear friends,

I’ve heard a few (bad) hot takes on US politics lately and this has really got my hackles up about fascism. We need a common literacy to understand that low-grade sociopathy, manipulative bullshit, and lateral violence are the same things played out in our social worlds, work lives, and in politics. The political class is not smart, they are not strategic, and they are most certainly manipulating you. So let’s build some literacy around narratives that let (small l) liberals off the hook as fascism builds complicity. We need a theorist, and as you know, we’re big into Gramsci in these parts, we’ll start there.

Gramsci gave a poignant analysis of fascism’s rise in Italy. He did something no other historical materialist scholar had done to that point – provided a devastatingly accurate framework for understanding his political moment – and the value of this has not diminished, despite new technologies and manipulation. Writing from one of Mussolini’s prisons, Gramsci identified how fascism emerges not as a sudden rupture but through a gradual process of cultural and political transformation. Later, this came to be known as manufactured consent. The bourgeoisie, facing crisis and unable to maintain control through consent alone, increasingly turn to coercion while maintaining a facade of democratic legitimacy. This process involves what Gramsci called “transformismo”. This heralds systematic absorption and neutralisation of potential opposition forces, particularly among the educated classes who might otherwise provide leadership to counter-hegemonic movements. The “educated liberals” are convinced that fascism isn’t so bad – it’s not coming for them… yet.

We have seen, particularly over the past few months, this same process playing out with frightening similarity. The ruling class, facing multiple crises of legitimacy – from climate collapse to grotesque inequality – increasingly abandons even the pretence of democratic governance, maintaining just enough electoral theatre to claim legitimacy. The absorption of supposedly “progressive” parties into this project, with Labor in Australia and Democrats in the US serving as willing accomplices in the march toward fascism, perfectly exemplifies Gramsci’s concept of transformismo. These parties, while occasionally offering a veneer of mild social reforms (never enacted “oh after you elect us again we’ll take climate action”), serve only to legitimise the rightward ratcheting of acceptable political discourse while preventing the emergence of genuine alternatives.

Understanding the “ratchet effect”, which I’ve mentioned in passing, is a useful tool for our toolbelt. It describes simply the mechanism by which ostensibly opposed political parties work in concert to continually move politics rightward. In the US, the Republicans push extreme positions while Democrats offer token resistance, or a more palatable version of the same policy, before eventually just adopting slightly moderated versions of the same policies anyway. In Australia, we see this dynamic between the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor, while in the UK it manifests between Tories and Labour. The pattern is depressingly consistent: right-wing parties introduce increasingly extreme measures, “opposition” parties offer performative resistance while ultimately accepting the new normal, and the cycle repeats with the goalposts shifted further right. In just the last week we’ve seen the Australian senate introduce legislation to ban abortion, and the only party working to counter this is the Greens – here, as an example, we can see how right-wing extremism is fostered, and because Labor offer the (small l) liberals a sense of security, the issue is brushed aside as “not your problem”.

This ratchet operates differently across these countries due to their distinct electoral systems, but the end result is incredibly similar. In Australia, compulsory voting and ranked choice theoretically should provide more opportunity for genuine progressive alternatives to emerge. However, the combination of media monopoly and the major parties’ shared commitment to capital ensures that even these more democratic mechanisms ultimately serve the rightward march. Indeed, lies deliberately perpetuated by the ALP make the populace believe that they waste their vote by voting for the Greens in this country – patently untrue. The US’s first-past-the-post system makes this process even more pronounced, while the UK sits somewhere between these extremes.

The differences between these countries’ voting systems, though, show us how formal democratic mechanisms are rendered meaningless within a hegemonic system. Regardless of how the political system is organised, the vanguarding of capital takes priority – if the citizens are rowdy then the Labor party holds the solutions, if the citizens are placid then the Liberals come in to intensify production and exploitation – it is that simple. Australia’s compulsory voting and ranked choice system, while superior on paper, operates within the same constraining framework of media manipulation and manufactured consent. In this way while it is possible for grassroots action and collective education to transform our political environment – axe student debt, improve welfare initiatives, fix working conditions – the power of divisive and hateful hegemonic narratives empowers the LNP to target women’s rights, rather than for the discourse to be about reforms that make life better for the 99% (while inconveniencing capitalists who control the narrative). The US’s nakedly anti-democratic electoral college and first-past-the-post voting makes the system’s failures more obvious – and, apparently, paralysing in the context of a handful of actual voters, in spite of the Democrats being obviously the only choice this election just gone – but the end result differs little beyond speed. In all cases, the formal mechanisms of democracy serve primarily to legitimise (fascist) decisions already made by capital. Those decisions, as discussed, always harm the 99%.

The role of traditional media in this process is important – fundamentally. Murdoch’s near-monopoly in Australia represents perhaps the most extreme version, but the pattern holds across all these countries. Corporate media serves to normalise increasingly extreme right-wing positions while demonising even mild social democratic reforms as dangerous radicalism. The genius of this system lies in how it maintains the appearance of debate while systematically narrowing the range of acceptable discourse – codifying the ratcheting to the right through the continued repetition of talking points which make these reforms seem like a true part of the “conversation”. We shouldn’t even be talking about the right of women to healthcare – this should be an ipso iure protection fundamental to any “civilised” nation. Alas, Murdoch (and Dutton, Albo) and their ilk manufacture these damaging narratives to ensure their own power – and cement capitalism as ontic reality (like good servants to their billionaire masters).

The media’s role in protecting fascist governments while they strip away civil liberties follows a consistent pattern: first, downplay the significance of each individual regression of rights; second, present these changes as necessary responses to manufactured crises [1]; and finally, demonise any opposition as threatening some nebulous concept of “security” or “stability” – playing to workers fears about job losses, “migrants” and other manufactured concerns that only play to the “economy”. This process operates with particular efficiency in Australia, where media concentration makes coordinated messaging easier to maintain. Moreover, with social media regulations in this country, the sharing of news, political opinion, and thought has become so tightly controlled that the traditional media has secured its place as the “only source of truth”.

Social media, here, also has an important role to play – as an accelerant to hate. Not so much has it created new problems as supercharged existing ones. The algorithmic amplification of extreme content, combined with the erosion of shared reality through filter bubbles, creates perfect conditions for fascist radicalisation. We see it with young white men, vilified minorities and so many communities – hateful and vitriolic “truth tellers” like Andrew Tate emerge as celebrity to assure young men it is okay to rape – after all, the Republicans are enacting Project 2025. In addition, foreign state actors, while real, serve as convenient scapegoats for a system that is fundamentally designed to fragment and confuse working class consciousness. Yes, foreign states like Russian harness AI to drive division in international elections for their own political benefit. Of course, it would be naive to think the US wasn’t doing the same – imperialism flows from all these nations. But AI bots on Twitter are just the latest in ensuring the hegemony – and profit-driven engagement algorithms make this work possible, thanks Zucc.

The proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories through social media represents the “logical” endpoint of a system designed to maximise engagement at any cost. At least to neoliberals with no concept of ethics, morals, or human decency. When combined with already poor media literacy – which in this country is only getting worse with phones banned in schools, and incoming legislation to prevent anyone under 17 from accessing social media in any format. Concomitant with the systematic degradation of critical thinking skills in education. Here the Australian Government, largely controlled by the Labor party, have been responsible for breeding conditions which are the perfect milieu for fascist ideas to proliferate rapidly while genuine analysis cannot find purchase. Thanks, again, Albo.

So what could be done? Let’s look to those who fought fascism before. Returning to Gramsci’s concept of counter-hegemony is vital, but requires some tweaking for our current moment. The traditional focus on building alternative institutions and cultural formations must now contend with algorithmic suppression and the accelerated pace of digital media. Literally not only must we fight for new ways of working, but fight even harder to have those ways heard and recognised. I propose, here, some key principles for construction of a counter-hegemony:

1. Build genuine class consciousness that transcends the artificial divisions promoted through identity politics while acknowledging the real intersectional impacts of oppression. Teach your neighbours.

2. Develop alternative media platforms and networks that can operate outside the constraining logic of engagement metrics and algorithmic amplification. Look no further than the Fediverse.

3. Reassert the role of analytical thinking, media literacy, and engagement with transformative social science in Education, particularly among young people who have grown up in the social media ecosystem. Don’t deny them access to social platforms, teach them proper engagement.

4. Maintain focus on the material basis of exploitation while building solidarity across artificial divisions. The binary division of the 99% and 1% is a powerful narrative. Your suffering is because of Elon Musk is a simple narrative to reinforce.

Traditional media, particularly in Australia, makes this kind of thinking and, importantly, action challenging – not impossible. The very contradictions that drive the system toward fascism also create opportunities for counter-hegemonic organisation. The key is developing ways to bypass traditional media gatekeepers while building genuine class consciousness and solidarity. The pathway forward requires simultaneously working within existing systems – even if only for the purposes of subsistence forced on us by this exploitative system – while building alternative structures and consciousness. This doesn’t mean accepting the logic of electoralism or falling for reformist traps – something we must all be mindful of, but rather using every available tool to build working class power while maintaining clear analysis of the system’s fundamental antagonisms.

As crisis continues to deepen – whether through climate collapse, economic instability, attacking fundamental human rights or the system’s own internal contradictions – opportunities for genuine transformation continue to emerge. Every. Single. Day. The question is whether we’ll have built the consciousness and organisational capacity to utilise them when they do. This requires patient, if occasionally depressing, work now to build understanding and solidarity while maintaining revolutionary horizon beyond the false choices offered by capitalist “democracy”.

In solidarity,

Aidan

[1] Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planetand What We Can Do About It. Verso Books.