The left in Australia has no class

The first is a persistent, though the essays by Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn are a special category, error made in the book, namely that the "the market," and neoliberal ideology that reified the market, should be the core concern of the Left.

The key issue, rather, is corporate power. Ours is an economy and society dominated by corporations. It is not the "invisible hand" of the market that governs economic, social and political affairs. It is the very "visible hand" of corporations, which engage in central planning and develop strategic alliances, that largely dominates the economy and structures public policy.

It is not intellectuals, the Manne view, or the market, the Left Turn view, that rules the roost.

Consider what is often called "global trade." International trade transfers mostly occur within the subsidiaries of multinational corporations and interactions between strategic alliances linked through global supply chains. We are supposed to stare in wonder as economists regal us about the wonders of comparative advantage and "free trade." Neoclassical economics functions as an ideological shield behind which the real centres of power, corporations, advance their interests and concerns.

Even when we speak of consumption and the consumerist society, a key concern of the chapter by Guy Rundle, it is not the sovereign consumer that underpins the "law of supply and demand." Rather, a massive public relations industry, through emotional imagery backed up by extensive research into the formation of public attitudes and desires, manufactures wants.

We buy a dress because Jennifer Hawkins wears one. We buy deodorant because it is brutally male. In a truly free market economy not dominated by corporations the sovereign consumer has no need for a public relations industry to tell her what she wants.

The Left, new or otherwise, would be making the most basic of errors were it to suppose that the task that lies before popular movements dedicated to social change is to overcome the sovereignty of markets or the power of neoliberal ideas. No. The objective must be to overcome corporate power and the sway that these highly hierarchical and amoral profit maximisers have throughout the social and political domain.

Within the pages of Left Turn, unfortunately,plenty can be found about "markets" even "neoliberal markets" but very little about corporations; what they are; how they operate; the means by which they influence public opinion and the realm of the possible in the political sphere; their specifically Australian history and so on. Consider the words of Woodhead cited above; in an era dominated by market logic. If that were true there would have been no bank bailouts.

The Left cannot create a new world if the current world that is the subject of critique and that is to be the object of struggle is not adequately identified and analysed.

Bramble and Kuhn are Trotskyite Marxists, one of the editors, Jeff Sparrow, also has been a noted Trotskyite, and they do not readily succumb to the above error. However, their writing displays a disturbing ideological rigidity. Kuhn frames his analysis through standard Marxist political economy and so dedicated is he to this analytical framework he even couched his chapter within Marx's labour theory of value. There are many Marxists, let alone your ordinary run of the mill bourgeois economist, that see this as one of Karl Marx's great mistakes but it would seem that for Kuhn Marx could do no wrong.

If that's the case then why a "new left"exactly?

There are in fact little alternative voices within the Left presented in the book. There are no chapters written by anarchists, libertarian or autonomous Marxists or even from prominent members of the Socialist Left of the ALP. What do they say about our times and the alternative paths that the Left might take? One cannot know by reading Left Turn.