Alastair Greig
& Dick Nichols
The first issue of Seeing Red, the "forum of social, political and cultural dissent" launched by the Socialist Alliance, will be rolling off the presses in the next couple of weeks.
While the members of the editorial board are all members of the Socialist Alliance, Seeing Red aims to engage the broader left and anti-capitalist movement in a discussion of contemporary local and global issues. It strives to do this in a language all the different parts of the Australian left and radical movement can understand.
To help organise this effort each issue will feature a specific theme — grouping articles, interviews, short comment pieces and graphic material around it. The "neoliberal agenda" is the chosen theme for the first issue.
In the first issue of Seeing Red, Ian Watson — co-author of Fragmented Futures, the acclaimed book on developments in working life in Australia — examines the rhetoric behind Mark Latham's Labor. Watson summarises Lathamism: "Buried within Latham's twenty-first century program is a nineteenth-century distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. Third Way advocates have seized on this distinction in their attack on welfare 'dependency'. In this light, the ladder of opportunity is revealed as even more dangerous than a simple celebration of individualism. The 'rungs' become the sticks for beating the victims towards more so-called 'welfare reform'."
The Australia Institute's Richard Dennis tackles the issue of Howard's policy of "middle class welfare". His conclusion is bound to provoke debate: "Middle-class welfare is symptomatic of a range of important problems that exist in Australia. First, it reveals how our national objectives have been steadily shifted from improving essential services and helping those most in need to bribing the well-to-do in order to achieve electoral support. Secondly, it is evidence that as a society we accept the view that more consumption is never enough. When nearly half of the richest households in Australia believe they can't afford to buy everything they need we have a sociological problem, not an economic problem."
Editorial board member Humphrey McQueen tackles the issue of what approach to health the left should adopt beyond defending Medicare, asking what are the essential ingredients of a "wellness policy" that takes health totally out of the realm of profit-making?
McQueen cites the work of West Australian epidemiologist and 2003 Australian of the Year, Fiona Stanley. Seeing Red reprints her August 2003 address to the National Press Club, in which Stanley provides a powerful analysis of why increasing social wealth is not accompanied by increasing health.
As part of its effort to provide useful background on the hot and complex issues of contemporary politics and life, Seeing Red will regularly feature interviews with figures prominent in the struggles and analytical efforts of the left.
Internationally acclaimed Pakistani-born British writer Tariq Ali, author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon, starts this series with an interview in which he argues strongly that the US occupation of Iraq is untenable.
His analysis is reinforced in a feature piece by the Socialist Alliance's anti-war working group convener, Pip Hinman. For Hinman, the peace movement has not "failed". Quite the reverse — if it continues to mobilise in support of the demand "Troops out", the movement will play a vital role in deepening Washington's crisis in Iraq.
Hinman's analysis of Howard's crimes against Iraq is matched by Judy McVey's diagnosis of his crimes against Australia's women.
Seeing Red also starts its life with regular columns on Indigenous issues (Kim Bullimore dissecting Germaine Greer's romanticisation of Aboriginal culture); science (Pat Brewer tackling the latest outbreak of biological determinism); labour history (Ashley Lavelle on Clarrie O'Shea's 1969 jailing) and the Howard government's industrial relations agenda (Sue Bolton assessing Howard's difficulties in forcing through his anti-union plans).
The magazine also aims to build up the sort of lively cultural and review section that has often been missing in the left media. The first issue goes beyond books and novels to deal with poetry, the visual arts, performance, language and — surely a first for a left magazine — the video game Escape from Woomera.
Beginning with the second issue, a regular letters section will be introduced.
The price of the magazine has been kept down to $5, extraordinary value for a large format 48-page journalwith full-colour cover. And a subscription for four issues will cost you only $16.
[Alastair Greig and Dick Nichols are members of the Seeing Red editorial board.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.