Thursday, May 18, 2006

Is marxism relevant to the labour movement today?

This was the title of a forum held in Sydney on 16 May 2006, organised by Labor Tribune (http://www.labortribune.net/). Nearly 70 people attended to hear the views of Meredith Burgmann, Andrew West, Jack Mundey and Marcus Strom.

Here is a nutshell report of each speaker's case as I understood it, and questions arising from that particular case, that did not get canvassed on the night.

1. Meredith Burgmann, Labor MLC and President of the NSW Legislative Council put her case that marxist economic analysis is absolutley relevant, but marxism is not relevant to politics. Marxism is about materialism, and yes, money does matter. Women, for example, will never be equal with men, while they get less money than men. The idea that money doesn't make you happy only comes form rich people. People without enough money, who worry about how to pay their bills, do expect more money, up to a point, to make them happier.

Meredith was also proud to have been a member of one of the very few unions that voted against the Accord. Other speakers talked about pushing down the wall of capitalism to achieve socialism. Meredith said she has never been able to picture how that might happen.

I guess that as a longterm member of the NSW Labor Government, it would be very surprising to hear Meredith say that marxism is relevant to politics. Not many people would put the ideas of marxism and the NSW Labor Government together, and Meredith has not been in the news for running into serious bother with the ALP. However, more seriously - it is a worry that Meredith is so accepting of the separation between politics and economics that elected governments depend on in order to get away with bowing to the requirements of capital and the profit motive. Can a democratically elected government make decisions which would challenge profit-making, and so introduce an element of marxism to politics? I think so. For example state governments could decide to only invest public funds in publicly owned and operated services, such as transport, health, education, housing. State governments could set policies for environmental sustainability and improved health linked to providing positive alternatives, urban planning and regulations to reduce use of unhealthy products such as fast foods, tobacco, petrol. Political parties in government don't do these things either because they are in government explictly for the rich (the Liberals) or becasue they want the support of capital, and they either believe in or are frightened to oppose capital.

Questions for Meredith: What pressures are Labor governments, and the Labor Party under from capital? What are some decisions that you and fellow thinkers in the ALP and unions might like to see the Party make in government despite these pressures, and what might be the consequences of making those decisions?

2. Andrew West, journalist and Fabian argues that marxism is irrevocably tainted by Stalinism, and is of no current use. Instead 3 principles are needed for politics - fairness, community and sustainability.

Andrew sounds as though he's trying to modernise and popularise some older social-democractic ideals, and advocate them for an unknown political party. Popular opinion would get the supporting party elected, becasue the principles are so - well - fair and reasonable. This seems naive. It shows no recognition that there is more power outside of, than inside parliament, and that fair and reaonable ideas don't win the day in and of themselves. Business, capital, has extra-parliamentary power and the profit motive is not fair and reasonable.

Questions for Andrew West: Why do principles such as these strengthen or weaken at different times in history? What are the most powerful forces operating against these principles, and which social forces have the greatest potential and interest in advancing them? What are the likely actions of the powerful against attempts to assert these principles and how can they be answered?

3. Jack Mundey was a BLF leader during the Green Bans, and a former member of the former Communist Party of Australia.

Jack's case was that the best moments and achievements of 20th century history were inspired by Marxists, so despite errors committed in the name of Marxism, we need it. And especially we need unity against WorkChoices.

Although unionists, socialists, marxists are all against WorkChoices, there are differences over how to beat it. I think that an industrial campaign is needed, and can be prepared even if it is difficult ot launch immediately - because unions are out of practice at taking industrial action, because so few union leaders organise industrail campaigns, because they might fail due to lack of strength, becasue unions are out of practice at taking industrial action...etc, in a vicious downward spiral, that needs to be broken to realy defeat WorkChoices. High Court challenges, the possible defeat of the Coalition in a federal election, all might soften the blow a little, but none of them are going to restore union rights, the right to organise - without unions exercising those rights.

Questions for Jack Mundey: What is it most important to unite around? How do we deal with the contradiction that many union and Labor leaders do not do the best they can by their members? Does this mean for example that you think it is wrong to debate the best way to beat WorkChoices, and wrong to argue for an industrial campaign, against official ACTU or Labor Council policies that are ineffectual?

4. Marcus Strom, editor of Labor Tribune. Marxism is relevant with a much broader concept of class struggle, which should be about politics, democracy and a republic, rather than narrow economism. Strikes and elections are both tactical issues and not the essence of Marxism. Labor Tribune is for a democratic republic, which would obviously strengthen workers rights, and make it possible for workers to build a struggle for socialism.

I'm not at all sure who other than oganised labour Marcus would want to lead the struggle for a democratic republic. And if organised labour were to lead such a struggle, why Marcus would not also advocate that it be socialist? Marcus labelled concern for industrial politics and industrial action as narrow economism. The last time I remember hearing left-wingers warn of the need for something bigger and more political than narrow economism, it was when they were advocating - the Accord! Yes, this is a dfferent project than the Accord. But the argument is a false counter-position, which was used last time to argue not FOR a broader vision than industraial action alone, but as an alternative which required the forsakimg of industrial action. Marcus made valid criticisms of the central control of the Rights at work campaign, which made it so difficult to set up local and grass roots activist groups around Rights at Work. But he also was at best equivocal about the need for an industrail campaign.

Questions for Marcus Strom and LaborTribune: Can the labour movement make a mark on politics when it is industrially weak? Can the labour movement be strong if it does not have the capacity to take industrial action? How can the labour movement have the capacity to take industrial action when its leaders by and large see such action as dangerous, and the vast bulk of the membership has very limited if any experience or practice at it? In these conditions isn't the capacity to take industrial action something that has to deliberately built with the knowledge of the rank and file, rather an option at the fingertips of officials that can be pulled out swiftly and unannounced, as a "tactic" might be.

Conclusion
The meeting itself was rather inconclusive, not surprisingly, but there was general welcoming of the establishment of a forum for discussing the topic. Here is a contribution to that discussion. If by any chance any of hte speakers think that I have not done justice to their argument, I'd be very pleased to have a clearer explanation. The aim of this is not to present their argumetns weakly in order to knock them down, but to understand their arguments in order ot evaluate their usefulness. So - I should follow up with positive proposals. Another post soon.

Childcare - conflict of interests

(originally published May 2006 in now defunct Livejournal blog)

ABC Early Learning is taking over community based child care and making big profits. It couldn't make the profits without government subsidies, which add up to $128 million in 2005, or without its anti-union practices which reduce the amount of its income it shares with its workers. Meanwhile fees for working parents are very difficult to afford. Can parents and childcare workers unite to reclaim childcare to be run to put children first, not profit-making?

The SMH of 11 March reported on this - http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/cradle-snatcher/2006/03/10/1141701698670.html.

Some points are worth highlighting.

"A spokesman for ABC - Groves declined five requests for an interview over five weeks - confirmed the company received 44 per cent of its income from government subsidies: $128 million of its $292 million revenue last year.

Messara's calculations give investors an even juicier insight. In the five years to 2008 he expects ABC to make net profits of $379 million. If that figure of 44 per cent remains constant, this will represent $167 million of taxpayers' money transferred directly into the pockets of Eddy and Le Neve Groves and their fellow shareholders - on top of the $400,000 salary packages the two receive."

"But there is also a dark side to ABC's operations that is little discussed, because the company is fiercely litigious towards competitors and critics alike.

After complaints in 2004 that ABC had been underpaying its staff and forcing them to clean toilets and buy their own uniforms, the Queensland branch of the union that represents child-care workers, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, handed parents pamphlets which Groves says portrayed him as "mean and greedy" and implied he was "trying to drive down low wages of child-care workers to line his own pockets".

In an unprecedented action, Groves sued the union's Queensland secretary, Ron Monaghan, for defamation. This has had the extraordinary outcome that none of the union's officials contacted by the Herald would risk commenting on the pay or conditions of ABC staff.

The union's officer responsible for child-care workers in NSW, Jim Lloyd, said: "I am not able to comment on ABC at all." When asked whether this was connected with the litigation in Queensland, he said: "Good question."

So it has been left to MPs such as Labor's child-care spokeswoman, Tanya Plibersek, and Michael Danby, Labor's deputy whip in the House of Representatives, to take up the cudgels on behalf of ABC's workers. Speaking under parliamentary privilege in 2004, Danby said that to cut costs "ABC centres refuse to hire sufficient cleaners, refuse to pay staff a decent wage, and require staff to bring in their own music to play to children".

Even after the substantial rises granted this week, the minimum award rate for a child-care worker with one year's experience is $611 a week. However, ABC workers' pay cannot be independently verified because they are required to sign confidential agreements. Groves has pointed out that, in return, they are issued with 150 shares (currently worth $1200) as a signing bonus - and he says he has a low staff turnover rate of 8 per cent a year."

Experiments in the telling of history enriched by struggle to make history

(originally published Feb 2006 in now abandoned LiveJournal blog)

Stephen Muecke challenged John Howard's demand for a more conservative approach to teaching history in schools.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/experimental-history-wont-change-the-battle-of-hastings/2006/01/30/1138590440563.html
(SMH January 31, 2006).

Howard is critical of "post modern relativism", and I am happy to read Stepehn Muecke declare postmodernism dead - although I am not convinced that he is right there. More later.

Stephen defends the usefulness of what Howard denigrates as "relativism" in history - there are many stories to be told, from many points of view. Howard's preference for the "absolute" in history is stifling of innovation.

I concur with Stephen Muecke when he writes "Innovative thinking asks the big 'what if' questions. The freedom to experiment with thought is a precious legacy, which is why we should not listen to Howard when he is trying to shut down thinking in this way...This thinking opens up new domains of facts. "What if there were such a thing as women's history," someone once asked - and a new subject was born. It is a question of adopting a new perspective, as Henry Reynolds said, as he, too, opened up the new field of Aboriginal history, making him one of the most influential public intellectuals of the last couple of decades."

These questions about women's history and aboriginal history did not emerge simply as experiments in the telling of history because there were innovative historians. These questions about history arose with particular force in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s because there were campaigns, movements, struggles by women and by aborigines for their rights, for liberation even, a term we hear rarely this decade. The experiments in the telling of history were demanded by those who had been oppressed, marginalised and omitted from history, because they were struggling to make history themselves.

Stephen places the era of intellectual postmoderism as the 1980s and the 1990s. I think its influence has been far wider than in the disciplines of literature and aesthetics, it permeated all the social science and humanities disciplines that I have come into contact with (as a librarian, I am acquainted with many). Indeed postmodernism is now less energetic and influential. It is not surprising that the postmodern decades followed the liberation decades - the women's movement made many achievements within the structures of Australian society, some recognition had been won by aborigines. But the post-war boom was over, and all over the OECD world, governments began to "manage the economy" with curtailment of union rights and other policies for restoration of profit growth, i.e. increasing the wealth of the wealthy. This weakened and set back all the liberation movements. What was to be salvaged from the liberation movements by many in the academy ... stories, perspectives, the telling.. all valid, all in parallel. But for the post-modernists this was no longer in service of actual movements to change history. Many identities could be accommodated in parallel, carving out their own spaces within the system.

But the curriculum in school still reflects this - I referred in an earlier post to the teaching of history in my daughter's school. She is frustrated that all the "stories" and all the points of view are treated as "valid" - rather than representations of different possibilities for society, to be examined and chosen between by a youthful citizenry which is anticipating its own future role in making history. But - Australian citizens are not expected to make history, just vote every few years, and that'll do. The telling of history from various perspectives helps to expand an appreciation of humanity, but unless students are also learning to be critical of perspectives and to adopt their own perspective on the past, and therefore on future possibilities, they are not really learning to make history themselves, only to be sceptical of how John Howard wants it to be told. The "history wars" of the conservatives make sense as a culmination of their war on unions, aborigines, migrants. The post-modern fantasy was that capitalism would have to accommodate multiple identities and this would be the best sort of human liberation we could hope for.

Actually, I'm with Karl Marx - "the history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle" - it's no accident that the struggle to remake history for women and aborigines was set-back by the decline of unionism, and the ALP as forces for industrial, political and social change.

No school curriculum is going to teach our children to believe that they could make history themselves, unless there are grown-ups out there organising to challenge the status quo, whether it is the power of Howard and his supporters, or his successors. But I'd like to see a history curriculum that tells the bigger narratives of struggles to make history, as participated in by leaders, citizens and the marginalised.

Good by-products of WorkChoices?

(originally published Feb 2006 in now defunct LiveJournal blog)
Could there be one good by-product of WorkChoices? - Apparently all the bullshit that goes into workplace documents that is supposed to make work sound all rewarding, cosy, secure and equal - can be considered to be part of a job contract. This is according to an article by Nick O'Mally Weasel words warning to bosses. http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2006/02/03/113895ses8911095.html. If it is part of job contract, then employers can be sued for breaking the contract if the job doesn't match up.

It's not the sueing that interests me - I wonder if it will sharpen up employee's perceptions of their relationship to their managers and bosses if companies cannot afford the legal risk of the sugar-coating on the pill?

Organising model and the attacks on union rights

(originaly pubished October 2005 in now defunct Livejournal blog)

Michael Cosby in Workers Online discusses the IR changes.

Michael Cosby is an advocate of the "organising model" for unions. He says that unions could fall over in the next five years, as they did in New Zealand. "I don't want to be a doomsayer, but let's understand clearly what the Howard Government is doing. They are designing the worst legislation in the world for workers to have power. Their aim is to destroy the Australian union movement. To the extent to which legislation can do it, it will do it. Now, it doesn't mean that it happens. Our response is critical. If we respond correctly, if we change as we need to, then we will survive it."

What is Cosby's "correct response"? "The problem with the campaign is that it is not enough. No matter what we do - even if we win the next election on the back of this campaign, we will still have the world's worst industrial relations legislation. When that happens we have got to have unions that are capable of surviving in that environment. "

Cosby proposes some essentials for survival - "the capacity to win".. "activists everywhere you look. Members of the union have got to be absolutely engaged in every part of the union they are members of. And the union needs to have money."

But Cosby implies that the union movement now does not have the capacity to beat Howard or the "world's worst industrial relations legislation". The "capacity to win" seems to mean capacty of individual unions to win against employers, but not capacity for the union movement as a whole to win against a government. "Unions are about giving workers power at work. Well, we have got to describe to members exactly what kind of union will give them power. They don't want to pay cheap rates and lose! They are prepared to pay whatever it will take to change their lives, to get some power at work."

Even though union density and membership has declined, there are still a couple of milion unionised workers in Australia, with considerable industrial and political clout. The currently unionised do have the capacity to defend the union rights that will give workers more power at work and in politics. It is disappointing that Cosby who is advocating an agressive campaign to rebuild Australian unionism with the organising model, takes such a narrow and passive view of the union movement's capacity to force a backdown by Howard.

Who is making history now?

I am interested in the history that has been made by organized workers, health and safety at work, limiting hours of work, green bans, equal pay for women, and aborigines, parental leave, minimum wages and opportunities at work, the right to stand up for oneself, pensions, Medicare, public education, solidarity with Indonesia, with East Timor etc. I cannot see any other force that will make history positive for humanity, that can be the force to challenge poverty, injustice, environmental destruction, repression and oppression.

But Howard is securing state powers that will make the remaking of history by workers all the harder, that could set it back by decades if he is not stopped.

My daughter learns history in high school. When I studied history in high school, I went home every night and saw history being made on TV, in the newspapers, by people, workers, students, women taking to the streets against the Vietnam war, for equal pay, for the right to choose whether or not to become a mother, in Defence of Government Schools, etc. In high school we studied the 19th & 20th century “isms” – nationalism, socialism, fascism, communism – and I learnt about people struggling to make history over a century earlier on the streets of Paris in 1848, and then on for the rest of the century and into the next. Very soon afterwards I joined those people on the streets to play my part in making history, and to taste the sense of freedom and excitement that comes from it. Now in high school history my daughter is taught that there are many different points of view at any point in history. So far so good. But, all these points of view are potentially of equal merit. A side need not be taken. I think that without learning to take a side in history, you cannot learn to be a maker of history. It's just a curiosity. History and progress are disconnected.

Are young workers without any sense of history with a part for them? How did the workplace and your way of life come to be the way it is? How did you get the freedoms you enjoy? Who stands to gain when you lose? Why don’t you have the opportunity, the time, the carefree outlook, the optimism to challenge authority and to struggle for and live your dreams about a better world for everyone?

Fit to muscle out Howard's IR laws

(Originally published in now abandond Livejournal blog, Sept 2005)

I hate everything that John Howard is doing, and so do most people who I know.

What baffles everyone I speak to, is why do people have trust in Howard? In fact there is considerable opposition to what Howard is doing on both Telstra and industrial relations – but that opposition is not stopping him.

Enough people voted for him to win 3 elections. Why and who are they? I think that part of the answer is that when confronted with anxieties about their own way of life, many Australian workers can’t see anyone they trust more to protect what they do have.

And Howard is looking like a winner. He is a winner.

I like to think that the way to beat Howard is for unionized workers to take him on.

Over the last few months since the Rights@work campaign was launched, there have been mixed feelings. There is a sense of hope and strength, that Howard could really be going too far and that this attack on unions could be the reviving tonic that the labour movement needs. But many key union officials do not seem to have confidence that the membership has the will and the muscle to come out on top. Unless the unions do take him on before the legislation which amputates workers rights is passed, not only will their industrial muscles get weaker and more unfit, they will have severe legal disabilities that will make it even harder to enter the struggle for rights at work.

Union officials are talking about the need to be smart in dealing with Howard, not to be hot headed and rush to use the industrial muscle. Yes, there is a need to be smart, but it’s not very smart not to notice, that throughout history the victor is not the one who is polite and reasonable, but the one who gets the upper hand and uses it. Those of us who hate Howard, those of us who recognize that he is dangerous can only mobilise those who have previously placed their trust in Howard, by showing that we can beat Howard, that we have an alternative to Howard. The smart thing to do is to work out the best way to maximise our industrial muscle and to choose the best time to use it. And it would be smart if that were before the amputation of more legal rights.

Unions need to try to stop the legislation going through parliament, by giving all the wavering politicians plenty of reason to think that the laws would provoke too much unrest to be workable.

Unionists and ALP should oppose Scott Parkin's deportation.

(Originally published in now abandond Livejournal blog, Sept 2005)
Anyone who wants to make history, especially anyone who wants to make Howard history, should be very, very nervous about the deportation of Scott Parkin. The community activist, teacher and airline employee is an expert on the power, wealth and greed of US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s favourite corporation Halliburton. Parkin was on a tourist visa in Australia giving workshops on non-violent methods of resistance. Howard had lied a few days earlier that no one opposing the war on Iraq need worry that the new police powers pushed through parliament would target them. They were only to prevent terrorism. It took less than a fortnight for the laws to be used against a person campaigning against the Iraq war.

In his cunning way Howard is testing the electorate, and softening Australians up. He tells Kim Beazley the secret intelligence, presumably gathered by an ASIO agent infiltrating Greenpeace or some other campaign. It will blow the ASIO agent’s cover if the "evidence" against Parkin is made public. Parkin may well have been explaining peaceful tactics for disrupting Halliburton. Beazley buys the deportation and the secrecy of the reasons for it according to Marian Wilkinson and David Marr in SMH of 18 Sept. . That is, Beazley accepts the violation of standard civil liberties, the very freedoms that “terrorism” is meant to threaten. He shows just how pathetic and useless the Federal Opposition is.

Union campaigns often need to disrupt commercial operations in some way to have any chance of winning. Parkin's deportation signals danger for the union movement and any one in it who discusses or proposes to take effective action against an employer.