The left in Australia has no class

Indeed at one point Sparrow states that the old debates within the Left, say between Marxists and anarchists, are no longer relevant. Sparrow asks what Bakunin, Marx's key anarchist protagonist, might have to tell us about social media, but then immediately goes on to praise Marx.

One of the key concerns of the book is the Occupy Movements, which are singled out for repeated praise.

Yet these Movements, with their emphasis upon self-assembly and self-governance, even their use of autonomous information networks and media, are heavily influenced by, and indebted to, anarchist and autonomous thought.

Surely it would have been easy for the editors to include chapters from both an anarchist and ALP left wing perspective; there are still members of the ALP Left that have a commitment to socialism, believe it or not. Either they didn't want such perspectives or couldn't find anybody to present such perspectives. One suspects the former.

A very serious omission in the book is the absence of any discussion of the international dimension.

Australia is a small country on the periphery of the global economic system. The prospect for social transformation of the type often discussed in the book, for example from Tad Tietze and Elizabeth Humphreys who argue that action to alleviate global warming requires going beyond market mechanisms such as an emissions trading scheme, requires coordinated international action.

Even mild social democratic reforms to humanise capitalism need international coordination. The Australian Keynesian social welfare and developmental state was able to exist and thrive because the Bretton-Woods global economic system constructed after World War Two limited the free flow of capital and regulated exchange rates.

Australia is far too small to get away with transforming capitalism on its own. The Left in Australia, new or otherwise, needs to be cognisant of this and It needs to link up with social movements elsewhere and to analyse contemporary affairs in a way that pays special heed to the international dimension.

The study of international relations and Australia's role in the world is an absolute necessity for emancipatory social movements. Don't expect to find much of this in Left Turn.

Christos Tsiolkas writes a superb chapter. He states that much of the Left is bourgeois. It is. When the Left is seen as being largely constituted by intellectuals and public commentators then the Left has a problem. The Left is the collection of grassroots social movements dedicated to promoting social justice, overcoming illegitimate authority and expanding the realm of democracy. To a very considerable extent the Left must, in a capitalist society, consist of a labour movement based on the working class.

But that's, as Tsiolkas points out, the Left's problem. It has no class. The voice of the Left for too long, precisely during the "neoliberal era," has been academics armed with the latest fashions from the intellectual salons of continental Europe. In the public mind the Left no longer is about unions, about picket lines, about class and class consciousness, and so on. Indeed we have a supposedly left wing Prime Minister whose main philosophical idea is that class struggle is but merely "yesterday's battle."

It isn't. It is today's battle. And it is tomorrow's battle so long as we continue to live in a capitalist society, dominated by corporations, where the key point of social stratification and differentiation occurs across class lines.