The Australian far left blogosphere today

When I started this blog, it was in part to correct what I perceived to be an absence of far-left perspectives on Australia in the blogosphere, and moreover, in the light of Australia's invasion of the Solomon Islands and East Timor, a general lack of dedicated analysis of Australia in the blogosphere full stop.

Political blogging at this stage was somewhat-accurately summed up on the Melburnian paean to ressentiment, The Spin Starts Here. As you might expect from apolitical jesters, they manage to characterise the economically-far-right Catallaxy as 'centrist'. Nevertheless, political blogging in Australia seemed to run the gamut from far right to centre left, without the far left bloggers that exist in other countries. The lone serious left voice (I don't count myself, because my blogging never exhibited sustained seriousness) was Evan Jones' Alert and Alarmed. As a one-man and quite understated operation, I felt it wasn't enough.

Since starting this blog, however, welcome new forces in the blogosphere have emerged. The most recent is the mostly-Marxist leftwrites, which has some real star names on it and basically great analysis, atlhough is broad enough to have somewhat-variable quality. Another force, though not technically a blog, which started up shortly before this blog, though I wasn't yet aware of it, is the Labor Tribune.

Still, I see us as doing complementary and not overly-overlapping work with these other blogs. While lw is made up of Australian voices looking at the world, we are, thus far, non-Australian voices talking about Australia per se. LT is closer to us here, but like lw is much more heteroclite tha we are, offering a forum for debate. While Mike and I have different perspectives, my aim is not to provide a forum for debate per se, but rather to produce a coherent critique. And that's why I'm still keeping this blog simmering and still hoping it will build.