Welcome to Flood Media’s link roundup! Each week, we bring you fresh Flood-approved content from around the web, covering current events, debates, and hot takes. It's worth noting that Flood editors and contributors hold diverse opinions on a range of topics. Many of the articles we link to will represent points of debate or disagreement within our editorial team and the Left in general. We don't shy away from this diversity of views - in fact we think it makes our project more interesting, and we invite our readers to reflect and engage alongside us.
First up this week: HAVE YOU READ Asad Haider's Mistaken Identity? I finished it last week and loved it. The chapter on 'Racial Ideology' was particularly fascinating, and this article drills down further into it. I particularly liked this quote from Noel Ignatiev, which presents a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between race and class than that usually advanced: “To suggest that the acceptance of white-skin privilege is in the interests of white workers is equivalent to suggesting that swallowing the worm with the hook in it is in the interests of the fish. To argue that repudiating these privileges is a “sacrifice” is to argue that the fish is making a sacrifice when it leaps from the water, flips its tail, shakes its head furiously in every direction and throws the barbed offering.”
Wages for Housework was a foundational text in my political development, so I was excited to read this interview with Silvia Federici. In particular, her opinion on identity: "What people often criticize as identity is actually the position that a person has had in the capitalist organization of work ... [but] identity is often used in a way that hides that exploitation. That’s when it becomes problematic ... The problem has been the wedding of “identity” with the politics of rights, as when we speak of women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities and the possibility of a common struggle."
Piping Shrike can always be relied upon for a good take, and this post about Labor's leadership instability is no exception. Like most things the Labor Party does these days, it's hollowed-out and pointless.
On Let's Talk, local indigenous activist Boe Spearim talks with Gunnai-Gunditjmara woman Lidia Thorpe, the first indigenous woman to be elected to Victorian Parliament. Boe and Lydia talk about the nuts and bolts of Treaty, particularly the process underway in Victoria right now. Includes an update on the campaign to save 800-year old sacred trees in western Victoria.
"Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one." Helen Andrews traces a brief history of meritocracy's journey: from a reformist dream to universalise public institutions and eliminate patronage, it has transformed the norms and functions of government and produced a new technocratic elite, one just as dependent on who their parents were, but secure in the sense that their power was earned, not given.
Did u know Marx made some mistakes? Wait, wait, don't go. Resident Flood Media Political Economy Nerd (okay, one of many) Liam Flenady recommended this article by Michael Lebowitz, exploring some of the areas insufficiently theorised by Marx in Capital. Lebowitz argues that class struggle enters as a category into economic relations themselves, and that the division of the working class becomes an economic operator as well. Capitalism wants to produce a worker in its own image, but the working class can do the same.
And now for something completely different: We formally endorse Loona Revolution, the kpop fan account that really didn't take well to Elon Musk endorsing their faves.
Until next week!