Living the Dream

Living the Dream is back! Jon and Dave are trying to work out what’s going on with the Crisafulli/ Janetzki Queensland state government. Why is it criminalising simply speaking up against the genocide in GAZA? Why is it criminalising children? What’s its plan for capitalism in Queensland? Why has it launched a commission against the CFMEU? How is it balancing the culture war hunger of its aging ba...

In this episode, recorded in October 2024, Jon and Dave chat with friend of the show and all-around good egg Elizabeth Humphrys about the Labour Movement’s (both the ALP and Trade Unions) actions to put the CFMEU under administration. Just what is going on?   You can read more of Liz’s prolific output here .   Listeners may be interested in this building industry rank and file newsletter Hard Hat

In this episode Dave chats with Nick Southall about his new book Disaster Communism and Anarchy in the Streets   You can buy a copy of Nick’s book from the publisher Kembla Books   Nick’s blog is Revolts Now . Here you can find a collection of his work: including that on the Wollongong Out of Workers Union, his PhD thesis, reflections on his life in the Communist Party of Australia, his experience...

Well it’s been a while, but Living the Dream is back!   Jon and Dave welcome in 2024 by discussing how in 2023 the Albanese Hegemony disintegrated. We discuss what the Laborist project looked like coming out of the 2022 election, and how over 2023 between the costs of living crisis and the failure of the Voice referendum the wheels fell off and more importantly why we should or should not care.  ...

Hi All Long time no listen! Dave has launched a game on Kickstarter and is using Living The Dream to shameless promote it! Go here and pledge Share the link with your friendshttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/babyboomer/baby-boomer-have-it-all-relaunch  

  In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) and Jon (@jonpiccini) discuss The White Possessive by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia and is Professor of Indigenous Research at the University of Queensland. Moreton-Robinson’s work provides a root-and-branch critique o...

Recorded just before Xmas in this episode Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) talk about 2021. Unsurprisingly we talk a lot about the global pandemic and the attempts to manage it. We discuss the continual rise of an insurgent Right that seems to have become the pole for much of social rebellion at the same time large sections of the Left have further invested in fantasies of the state,...

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with two anarchist comrades Tommy (@correnterosso) and Charlie about Tommy’s recent article Anarchy and Its Allies: The United Front and the Groupings of Tendency and the related rise in anarcho-communist organisations in Australia.  We chat about how anarchism is developing andthe current appeal of Platformism and Especifismo . Topics of discussion in...

In this episode Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) continue their discussion about race, whiteness and Australia. This time they are reading Ghassan Hage’s classic of 90s Theory  White Nation . We talk through his ideas about Whiteness, White Nationalism and fantasy, his critique of tolerance and multiculturalism and try to work out what these ideas give us and also what they miss. How...

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) and Jon (@JonPiccini) discuss Humphrey McQueen's A New Britannia. This is the first of three books we are reading as part of a series on race and capitalism in Australia, We try to come to grips with his argument and its explanation for racism arising from the specifics of class formation in Australia, how it challenged established Leftwing thought and its i...

This is part 1 of our new reading series on race in Australia and the struggle against it. Over the next 3 or so months Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) will be reading A New Britannia by Humphrey McQueen, White Nation by Ghassan Hage and The White Possessive by Aileen Moreton-Robinson.  In this episode we set out why we are doing this, our thinking at this point in time and briefly d...

In this episode Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) have a chat with Anthony O’Donnell (@AnthonyODonne13), a Senior Lecturer from La Trobe and author of ‘Inventing Unemployment: Regulating Joblessness in Twentieth-Century Australia’. Anthony shows us how the category of Full Employment was invented and why, and undermines the claim that the low levels of post-War unemployment were due to...

In this episode of Living The Dream Dave (@withsobersenses) talks with Anna Sturman (@anna_sturman) author of ‘Climate Emergency’, COVID-19 and the Australian capitalist state . Anna draws on the work of Nicos Poulantzas to present an understanding of the state, a diagnosis of the contemporary conjuncture of Australian capitalism and suggest ways that we can struggle for dignity and lives worth li...

In this episode of Living The Dream Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Godfrey Moase (@gemoase) a director of the United Workers Union.   The UWU, a recent a fusion of the National Union of Workers and United Voice, has been receiving a lot of attention due to the industrial actions of its members, its claims to be revitalising internal democracy and its Workers’ Plan To Survive Covid-19 Crisis :...

In this episode of Living The Dream Dave @withsobersenses talks about the questions that COVID-19 is forcing us to confront – and then goes on to do an analysis of a report from  Macquarie Wealth Management stating conventional capitalism is dying and finishes by looking at the latest developments in the provision of stimulus from the RBA and the Federal Government. After recording this episode I...

In this episode Dave @withsobersenses takes a moment to think about how and why COVID-19 is impacting the capitalist mode of production, what are the drivers of the looming recession and depression and why various Keynesian arguments get it wrong.   You should read Social Contagion   Music by Assück

In this episode, Jon (@JonPiccini) has a long delayed conversation with Shan Windscript (@ShanWindy), Phd student at University of Melbourne and organiser, who has played key roles in the fight for casual workers in the tertiary sector and the rights of international students. We talk about how the Coronavirus has served to weaponise long standing fears about China in Australia, how supporting mov...

In this episode of Living The Dream Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) catch up with Tash Heenan (@tashellenheenan) and Jeremy Poxon (@JeremyPoxon) to discuss the Green New Deal. Jon, Tash and Jeremy are partisans of the Green New Deal, seeing it as a way of addressing immediate concerns and opening pathways to more radical transformations whilst Dave remains something of a half-reforme...

Now that the hot-takes have gone cold and are stale as bricks @JonPiccini and @withsobersenses  take out their artisanal slow-cooker take on the recent Australian Federal election. Why did we get it so wrong? Why did #changetherules suck? What will a Morrison Coalition government look like and what does it mean for our strategy? CW: This show contains a discussion of misogyny and domestic violence...

In this episode Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) try to work out if we have anything useful to say about an election that is all hype but actually a snoozefest. What does it tell us about the state of Australian society, what can anticapitalists draw from it? Are we about the #Changetherules or will Clive Palmer be leading us into a Kangaroo Reich? What happens the morning after? We a...

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Keir Milburn ( @KeirMilburn  ). Keir is from Leeds and has been an anti-state communist for a respectable amount of time (and an all round good egg). Previously a member of Class War and the Leeds May Day Group/ The Free Association he is now part of Plan C . Recently he has been trying to think through how anti-capitalists can related to the rise...

In this episode of Living the Dream Feargal and Bill report from the campsite out at Deebing Creek. They have a chat with Shale and James about what is going on, the nature of the struggle, the relationships of solidarity that are being built and what they think will happen next.  Follow the struggle at Deebing Creek here: Yuggera Ugarapul Tribal Elders Save Deebing Creek Mission   Sign the petiti...

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Elena Jeffreys (@ElenaJeffrys) from the sex worker organisation Respect Inc . Elena talks about the history of sex worker self-organisation, the conditions of sex workers in Australia today and the importance of the struggle to decriminalise sex work to improving the working conditions and lives of sex workers. Elena digs into the what is wrong wi...

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with excellent comrade Alexander Brown about the anti-nuclear movement in Japan. Alexander talks about the role nuclear power plays in Japanese society, the pre-Fukushima influence of the New Left, the freeter movement and alter-globalisation struggles, the impact the Fukushima disaster had, the tactics and strategy of the movement, its links with the...

In this episode Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) review ACTU Secretary Sally McManus’ book On Fairness. We try to dig in to how McManus fails to understand the actual dynamics of capitalism – rather blaming bad people and bad ideas for the problems we face. This means the book points us in the wrong direction. Rather we need to address the core dynamics in our society if we want to fi...