mind reader

Dear friends,

In an almost bourgeois fugue state today I felt rising rage at the para-privatisation of the postal service in this country. Yeah, oddly specific trigger for today’s writing, ey. This, in particular, after being scorned dozens of times for deliveries by “express post” that almost feel like spite come 3-4 business days later than their estimate with an accompanying gaslighting green sign saying “Updated”. Ugh. Okay, but let’s think about the motivations of the company behind all this, because as we know, Australia Post is technically a government body, but with absolutely none of the benefits of nationalisation – just like almost all our other services which have been sold to the lowest bidder to extract maximum profit for shareholders and screw consumers everywhere.

Australia Post operates, fairly uniquely, as a corporate entity. However, unlike privatised utilities, such as water and electricity, which are run for a profit subject to “government regulators” (a genius invention that allows the government to take credit for any semblance of good work done by corpo operators, while ensuring that billionaires accumulate more skimmed wealth back from consumers forced into monopoly “markets”), it remains a corporate entity of the government. The government is the only shareholder. So the profits extracted by the postal service flow to highly paid leadership and government pockets, with no reciprocal investment from government back into the postal service. Simply put, the postal service in this country is a business owned by and beholden to the government, who wants it run like a business. The worst of both worlds. Anyway, enough whinging, let’s analyse it.

The corporatisation of public entities in Australia, which, obviously, is exemplified by Australia Post, represents another form of twisted neoliberal transformation – one that maintains a facade of “public ownership” while implementing private sector logic and extractive practices. This hybrid model, where government enterprises are restructured to operate as corporations while remaining technically state-owned, serves as a transitional phase in the broader project of privatisation. The transformation of Australia Post from a public service focused on universal mail delivery to a “government business enterprise” obsessed with profit metrics and market share epitomises this process. Under this model, essential public services are forced to operate according to market principles, leading to branch closures in “unprofitable” (read: poorer) areas, workforce casualisation, and the prioritisation of (late) parcel delivery (where competition enables price gouging) over basic mail services. This corporatisation sees the gradual absorption of public institutions into capitalist logic without the political resistance that outright privatisation might generate. Sneaky, and effective.

The Australia Post case is particularly interesting, to me right now as I wait for a package, as it demonstrates how corporatisation functions as a mechanism for transferring wealth from workers and communities to capital while maintaining the illusion of public ownership. CEO salaries skyrocket while front-line postal workers face increasing precarity and intensified exploitation. Regional communities lose services deemed “inefficient” while executive bonuses (remember that watch?) are justified through metrics that privilege profit over public good. The corporate structure enables the worst aspects of private sector management - obsession with metrics, worker surveillance, and continuous cost-cutting – while the government connection provides convenient cover for exploitative practices. Harvey called this process “accumulation by dispossession”, operating through institutional transformation rather than outright privatisation, the slow bleeding of public value into private hands through the imposition of corporate logic on public services.

The broader implications of this corporatisation trend reveal how neoliberal ideology has thoroughly infected Australian governance – as though we didn’t know this already. Even nominally public institutions are now expected to operate as if they were private businesses, with “commercial returns” taking precedence over social benefit (hmm, this feels awfully familiar in the context of universities). This creates a twisted form of exploitation where public assets, built through generations of collective investment and labour, are transformed into extractive enterprises that operate against the interests of the very communities they’re meant to serve. The ALP’s embrace of this model demonstrates their complete capitulation to neoliberal logic – maintaining technical public ownership while gutting the actual public service mission of these institutions. The result is a form of privatisation-by-stealth that could actually be more damaging than outright privatisation, as it corrupts the very notion of public service while providing political cover for continued exploitation.

So, obviously, I decided to have a look at the strategic priorities and KPIs of Australia Post which, naturally, show us how corporatisation transforms public services into engines of capitalist accumulation under the guise of “modernisation” and “efficiency” – literally, using these words. The focus on “winning in eCommerce” and “market leading digital experiences” reveals how thoroughly market logic has colonised what was once a public service mission [1]. From these priorities, Marx might have suggested, we see the subordination of use value (delivering mail to all Australians) to exchange value (maximising profitable [i.e., not to consumers, but B2B] parcel delivery services). The language used in their strategic framework – with its emphasis on “customer-centric” decisions rather than public service [2] – shows again how discourses of neoliberal capitalist ideology have thoroughly gripped once public institutions [3].

While the government “transparency portal” hosts the reports, the name must be ironic because, the absence of genuine public service metrics from their Enterprise Scorecard and the complete inaccessibility of internal success metrics show an opaque postal corporation, not a public good. From what we can see, there are KPIs focused entirely on commercial performance and market competition – a framework that would be indistinguishable from any private logistics company. With reports obscene executive compensation packages (again, luxury watches, anyone?), including multi-million dollar payouts even during periods of loss, reveal how corporatisation enables private sector wealth extraction while maintaining the facade of public ownership.

The Post26 Strategy [4], with its technocratic emphasis on “digital transformation” and “customer experience”, serves as ideological cover for the continued dismantling of universal service obligations. As mentioned, when they discuss “reimagining the Post Office network”, what they really mean is closing “unprofitable” branches in working class and regional communities while investing in premium services for wealthy urban areas. This strategic direction demonstrates passive revolution, toward neoliberalism, the gradual transformation of public institutions through the implementation of market logic and corporate governance structures. The result is a publicly-owned institution that actively works against public interests while generating private profits through executive compensation and contractor arrangements – precisely the outcome intended by neoliberal restructuring. And I, for one, find that incredibly sad.

The subterfuge of “almost privatisation” here is sick, particularly after decades of privatisation in the country. Under successive Labor and Liberal governments, Australia has witnessed the systematic dismantling of public services through privatisation: the continued expansion of capital into previously uncommodified spheres of social life. From telecommunications (Telstra) to energy infrastructure to healthcare, this transformation represents both a transfer of ownership and a fundamental shift in how these essential services are conceptualised – from public goods to sources of private profit extraction. Could it get any more gross? Yeah. The privatisation playbook follows a familiar pattern: first, public services are deliberately underfunded and undermined, creating artificial crises that justify private sector intervention. Then, public assets built through generations of collective labour are sold off at bargain prices to private interests. This process has been particularly aggressive in Australia, where neoliberal ideology’s grip on both major parties has resulted in bipartisan support for privatisation despite clear evidence of negative outcomes for workers and service users.

The ideological justification for this “privatisation”, in all its forms, relies on manufactured consent, the carefully cultivated belief that private sector “efficiency” naturally leads to better services and lower costs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet this mythology serves to mask the fundamental contradiction at the heart of privatised essential services, and the Australian public falls for it every single time. The incompatibility between the profit motive and the social necessity of these services is rendered invisible. When basic human needs like healthcare, energy, and transportation are subjected to market logic, the result is inevitably the prioritisation of shareholder returns over public good. The ALP’s role in this process is, as always, insidious using its historical connection to the labour movement to provide progressive cover for fundamentally regressive policies that transfer wealth and power from workers to capital. But let’s not get started on the Labor party right now.

The deliberate degradation of public services in Australia shows progressive neoliberalism (borrowing from Fraser), the coupling of regressive economic policies with a superficial veneer of social progress. This deterioration has hit marginalised communities with particular force, creating compounded exploitation at the intersections of class, race, disability and gender. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, for instance, face both the withdrawal of culturally appropriate services and the imposition of privatised alternatives that fail to meet community needs. The disabled community confronts an NDIS increasingly shaped by market logic rather than care requirements. These kinds of targeted impact reveals how the degradation of public services functions as a mechanism for reinforcing existing social hierarchies while creating new forms of dispossession. And damn its pernicious.

However, within this bleak landscape of corporatisation and privatisation, spaces for resistance and transformation continue to emerge. Honestly, all the time, opportunities for resistance and assertion of new ways of working abound. The contradictions that make Australia Post’s “hybrid” model so exploitative also create opportunities for worker and community organising. When postal workers face intensified exploitation, when communities lose vital services, when the gap between executive compensation and front-line working conditions becomes too grotesque to ignore, the potential for collective action grows. The union movement, despite decades of neoliberal attacks, retains significant strength in the postal sector – and the public’s growing frustration (okay, maybe just “my growing frustration”) with deteriorating services creates natural allies for workers’ struggles.

More broadly, the failure of privatisation and corporatisation to deliver on their promises of
“efficiency” and “improved services” has created cracks in the neoliberal consensus. So much so that their CEOs are being exterminated. Each time an “express” parcel arrives days late (lol, sorry I can’t help but whinge), each time a rural community loses its post office, each time workers face intensified surveillance and exploitation, the mythology of market superiority becomes harder to maintain. These contradictions provide openings for advancing alternative visions. Ones that reconnect public services with their original mission of serving human needs rather than generating profit. The future of truly public services depends on our ability to imagine and fight for alternatives to both outright privatisation and the cynical half-measure of corporatisation.

In solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/documents/statement-of-corporate-intent-2023-24-to-2026-27.pdf

[2] https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/documents/2023-australia-post-annual-report.pdf

[3] https://www.transparency.gov.au/publications/communications-and-the-arts/australian-postal-corporation/australian-postal-corporation-annual-report-2023-24/overview/our-strategic-priorities

[4] https://stest.npe.ourpost.com.au/about-us/our-business-and-purpose/post26-strategy I mean, really, for how long can a company lean on “COVID impacts” as an excuse for poor domestic shipping strategies?

Dear friends,

I have been thinking about the how the corporate class, the bootlickers, the “upper middle class” and others utterly slavish to the capitalist simultaneously dehumanise themselves and others. A phenomenal piece of mental trickery: contortion, gaslighting and betrayal. Those who fancy themselves stable and wealthy (an ever treacherous position to claim), and often profess it so by engaging in “high culture” activities (themselves equal parts immoral and despicable) which range incredibly broadly from horse racing, to stock market investing, or apparently lately cryptocurrency market gambling. This, to me, is a fundamentally interesting group of “people”. Let’s think on it.

In the imperial core — conceptually a useful imaginary space for us to consider in theorisation about “wealth” and culture — there are opportunities for multi-generational “middle classes” to establish themselves. However, there are no “middle classes” only capitalists and workers. So a false segregation has emerged similar to other divisions around identity. Except, differently to identity politics, the middle class often intentionally serves the capitalist class in their promotion of capital’s ideals. Indeed, we’ve seen recently post the CEO-killing (which Rupert Murdoch is very very unhappy about — lol) the clamouring of the middle class to attempt to protect and vanguard capital and its mistakes. And, almost as though it were natural, shift blame for the problems in society onto a perceived “lower class” (working class, but probably blue-collar and underemployed people).

So, within imperial core countries (majority white, western, largely european, and the “white” diaspora) there is a growing fat middle class that asserts to be different from those “lowly workers”. Beside the obvious snobbery, as mentioned, this is a false division. There is perhaps 1:10,000,000 chance that a member of the so called middle class could ever accumulate enough wealth that they be considered a capitalist. Particularly as the capitalist class currently hold so much wealth that they control more moneys than all the worlds governments combined. And often with a great deal more liquidity. The top 1% hold an absolutely unconscionable and utterly unrecognisable volume of capital such that their entire social organisation, purpose for being, and very existence is different to the 99%.

We might actually, to better understand this, consider that even if we combined all the wealth of people living on Kaurna Country (Adelaide, Australia) that this wealth would be less than Jeff Bezos pays himself in an hour. A. Single. Hour. Combine the wealth of Australia for ten financial years of extreme productivity and you might come close to the wealth of the empire that is Amazon, but it would be very close. Millionaires cosplaying that their wealth makes them a capitalist are a huge part of the problem of reinforcing this exploitative system. Even though they are still subject to a great many of the terrible conditions that the rest of us experience every day. Importantly, anyone whose accumulation overs $1m is highly unlikely to hold solidarity with the rest of the working class, but millionaires are no longer wealthy, and they experience class struggle (albeit at a deeply atrophied rate to the rest of us). But I promised some cultural exploration, we know we are being exploited and that these people have a very active role in it, so let’s get exploring what this does, culturally, to this group of people.

Guilt.

Just bucketloads of guilt. Deeply internalised, highly processed, and almost intangible. But there is palpable guilt, fear and a sense of anxiety that runs so deep amongst class traitors that they will be: recognised as imposers and thrown to the lower class “wolves”, seen for what they are as enabling deep and unhinged violence against the working class, or ousted as incompatible with those they admire — the capitalists — because their godheads reject them. Interestingly, to me, the last of these is not unlikely. Actual capitalists, the strategists behind the human and planetary torment that is our existence, are psychopaths in the clinical sense. They have no recognition of the value of humans, have very little connection with humanity, and feel, experience and engage with the world in a way utterly different to the rest of us. Compassion is not in the dictionary. And the middle classes see this is as the ultimate “sacrifice” to the altar of capital and seek to emulate the violent despotism of their masters upon anyone around them, including their so-called friends.

Grim assessment? Yes, but there’s no other way of thinking of this. Class ascendancy is a sociopolitical process that is tied to inequitable and deeply unethical behaviour. We can characterise two major features of ascendancy that enable the process of stripping the humanity from the ascendant: first, an economic accumulation which, at minimum, undermines and exploits the skilled labour of coal-face workers; second, a social process of utterly re conceptualising humanity as a workforce to be enslaved. This has deep implications for socialisation, culture, and participation in “high society” not least of which is Gatsbyesque political circus and backstabbing.

The capitalist class exists in what we might term a “parallel society”, one which operates with fundamentally different temporal, spatial, and social coordinates than the world inhabited by workers. Their leisure practices aren’t merely more expensive versions of working-class recreation, but rather constitute an entirely distinct mode of being-in-the-world that systematically reproduces their class position. Consider how their relationship to time itself differs fundamentally from wage labourers — they experience neither the tyranny of the clock nor the anxious relationship to future security that characterises working class existence. Their leisure isn’t carved out from work time but rather represents their primary mode of existence, with “work” (in the form of capital management) seamlessly integrated into social activities.

This manifests in spaces of exclusive socialisation — private clubs, invitation-only events, closed “philanthropic” circles — where the real work of class reproduction occurs through what C. Wright Mills termed the power elite network. Here, marriages are arranged (let’s not even get into how deeply sexist and misogynistic these people are), business deals are conceived, and perhaps most importantly, the psychological and cultural foundations of ruling class consciousness are maintained through constant reinforcement of shared values and perspectives. Their children are socialised from birth, at a distance, into this parallel world through private schools, exclusive summer camps, and carefully curated social circles that ensure they never meaningfully encounter or understand the lived reality of the working class. This creates what we might term an epistemic bubble that renders the violence of capitalism natural to its beneficiaries such that it “always was”, allowing them to conceptualise their position as natural and deserved rather than the product of systemic exploitation. The result is a form of class consciousness that is simultaneously highly developed in terms of protecting class interests and profoundly unconscious of its own conditions of possibility and exploitation.

The interplay between ruling class consciousness and middle-class aspiration creates a self-reinforcing system of social reproduction that extends far beyond mere economic relations into the very fabric of cultural and psychological existence. There is a deeply broken nature to this relation, not only naturalising violence, extraction, inequity, inhumanity, and exploitation, but making those suffering most feel worst about their own suffering. Understanding this through hegemony gives some hope. The system perpetuates itself not primarily through direct coercion but through the active participation of its subjects in their own domination — particularly the middle classes who, despite their material position as workers, function as the most zealous defenders of capitalist social relations, perhaps more than the capitalists themselves. Their desperate performance of ruling class values, combined with their anxious policing of class boundaries, serves to maintain an epistemological fortress of capital (it hurt me not to write solitude), where the violence of exploitation is rendered simultaneously invisible and natural.

This process of class reproduction operates through a tripartite of alienation: first, the fundamental alienation from labour that Marx identified; second, the alienation from class consciousness that results from the middle class’s false identification with capital; and third, the profound alienation from human solidarity that characterises the ruling class’s parallel society. Each level of this alienation reinforces the others, creating a totalising system where the very possibility of alternative social relations becomes utterly unthinkable. Hello, capitalist realism. The ruling class’s complete detachment from working class reality, maintained through their distinct temporal and spatial existence, isn’t a symptom of wealth inequality but rather a fundamentally necessary condition for the continuation of capitalist exploitation. One that the middle class desperately tries to emulate even as it ensures their own continued subordination.

The path forward requires more than recognition of these mechanisms - it demands a fundamental rupture in the reproduction of class relations at both material and ideological levels. See, I’m doing the hope thing from the last post. This rupture must begin with the recognition that the middle class’s position as capital’s loyal foot soldiers is fundamentally untenable, both materially and psychologically. Their guilt, their anxiety, their desperate performance of ruling class values — these are not individual psychological phenomena but rather structural features of a system that requires their active participation in their own exploitation. Only through the development of what Gramsci termed organic intellectual leadership, combined with practical solidarity across the working class (broadly defined), can we begin to imagine and construct alternative forms of social organisation that don’t require the systematic dehumanisation. The challenge, then, is not only to critique these mechanisms but to actively construct new forms of consciousness and solidarity that can break the cycle of class reproduction and create possibilities for genuine human emancipation.

The answer is quite literally compassion.

In solidarity,

Aidan.

Dear friends,

I have been thinking about optimism and despair. Actually, I’ve been reading on optimism over despair [1] and thinking about an analytical pattern that might help us mobilise this kind of thought in the way we discuss contemporaneous issues on mind reader. So, yes, this post is a meta post about being meta, what else have you come to expect from me? I’m going to talk in abstract about both the reason for optimism, and for despair, and how we might mobilise these against the way they are mobilised by the capitalist class. Because what’s better than human emotion, passion, feeling and process against something so fundamentally inhuman, nonhuman, non-human as capitalism. Let’s get into it...

Chomsky uses a pattern of explanatory critique that comprises his own unique theoretical positioning. I suspect, to label him as a “Marxist theorist” is to do him disservice given the expansive cannon of his texts over the decades. But, and gee can you tell I’m a fan, there is a tangible pattern to a great deal of his writing that offers not just critique, explication, and contextualisation of thinking, theorising, politics and more, but also a movement. This movement, I think, is what is often missing from other contemporary Marxist theory. In my own work, I reflect, that following Gramscian notions of praxis — rather than, say, theorisation for theorisations sake — I have been able to portray a sense of change or at least the desire for change. This, I have been told, demonstrates immeasurable optimism in the face of challenges. Cool. I’m in this meta and ... I guess I like it?

Chomsky, particularly in his recent books combining letters and correspondence on contemporary politics, shows a pattern of writing and thinking. It looks something like this:

1. Offer a clear-eyed analysis of serious problems. This includes contemporary and sometimes even reactionary (in the Marxist sense) political moments, anything from the climate crisis to nuclear threats and recently robust explanation of democratic decay.

2. Contextualise through examination of historical parallels where collective action achieved meaningful change despite seemingly insurmountable odds. This, in particular, is useful for understanding modes “out of” our current crises (or reactions, and so on).

3. Offer identification of current opportunities and levers for change. Weaving the topic of concern, into a historical mesh that explains both how a given phenomena may be understood through an anti-capitalist lens, while offering possibility and momentum. But more specifically, directing people to protestation that holds precedent.

4. Finally, subtle emphasis on how despair serves power by making resistance seem futile. This is where, I think, we all need a reminder. When we allow in-fighting, degradation of comradery, and separation from our causes (qua collapse into arbitrary battles instead of fighting the ruling class) we are giving into the despair which sees individualism rise, narcissistic solutions to big problems, and failures of solidarity from all parties involved.

This pattern, expanded loosely here, intriguingly follows form with some of the mind reader posts shared, but not all. And I think, when we stray from this trajectory, we do each other a disservice. My last post, admittedly not my best, showed a way to respond to reactionary politics — engagement with discourse, personalisation of opinion, sharing of commentary, and so on. But it didn’t follow the trajectory of this pattern. Something I’m looking to do a better job of moving forward — without binding myself to a formula that puts everyone to sleep. If we re-frame the pattern explored above as a movement:

Despair -> (Analysis -> Ideation ->) Optimism

We can see collectivised analysis — work in the ballpark of this project (said humbly) — as advancing hope. I don’t know about you, but I find engaging with news, mainstream journalism, incredibly difficult. Particularly on days where I feel down about things. And partly this is my own filter, bringing such disdain for the cancer that is our onto-economic system, tarnishing news celebrating billionaires’ newfound oligopoly. And partly it’s the nature of hegemonic media offering no relief from the ontic primacy of capitalism. It’s one of those “once you see it” moments — once you know how to identify how anti-human capitalism is, you see the values, attitudes and approach everywhere. It’s gross. Not to mention racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and so much more — and liberal notions of “inclusion” do not quell the rage for the bullshit that is this way of life... But the answer isn’t (only) rage, just as it cannot be despair. Rather it’s salient, theoretical analysis, closed by calls for action that are actualised, contextualised, or meaningful. Instead, I want to offer hope or at least optimistic naivete.

Some days, of course, you just feel done. And that’s okay too, we all need a bitch, cry, or meditation every now and then, but I hope we can collectively, readers, writers, thinkers, activists, change makers and those unable to “unsee” capitalism’s exploitation find the collective space to move towards an optimistic future. Because otherwise we’re advancing values that both support capitalism’s exploitation, and we’re feeding our own death and destruction.

That’s not optimism, though. Let me take my own medicine so that we may be hopeful about the future.

We are in a time where forces of evil — literal fascists — vie for power in a system designed for the destruction of 99% of humans, and 100% of the environment for the benefit of less than 1%. The optimism, though, is in the numbers. Time and again, workers of all varieties have come together to transform this system for the better. To resist the attacks, undermining, and lateral violence of a system that knows no bounds. Even when we have shit day after shit day, the environment suffers catastrophic losses, human rights take a backslide, or our own personal circumstances seem helpless we still collectively hold a spirit of recovery, change, revitalisation, and energy. We have a fundamentally human value of hope. A human value of optimism.

We have the power to change our trajectory. And this is demonstrable in analyses by countless thinkers. Shown in the wins of activists, unionists, and independent radicals the world over. And time and again we (humans) have shown that we can come together. And we can change the world. We do this in myriad ways. Not just activism. Not just theory. Not just governance. Not just solidarity. Not one mode — because there is no such thing as one size fits all. We all change the world in small ways, and through our collective thought, care, and values we can reassert something fundamentally different that moves us to optimistic spaces.

Here’s feeling. We must continue to assert that change is possible. We collectivise optimism. We need to find ways to unite. Because it is every. single. one. of. us. in the 99% against the Musks, Trumps, Zuccs, Cooks, and so on. Let’s do better, be better, and rise above attacking each other. “The workers united will never be defeated”. Not as an excuse to ignore the intersectional needs of our friends, neighbours, and comrades — actually, quite the opposite. Learn about intersectional causes. Find allyship. Move forward in respectful and reciprocal ways. And above all, stay hopeful, optimistic, and moving towards a brighter future, because at the moment that’s really all we’ve got — anything is better than this deeply troubling and very real global return to fascism.

With love, optimism, and respect,

Aidan

[1] Chomsky, N., & Polychroniou, C. (2017). Optimism over despair: On capitalism, empire and social change. Penguin Books.