Beyond Medicare—Towards Wellness By Humphrey McQueen Seeing Red, 2003, slightly updated) The current campaigns to defend and extend Medicare offer the opportunity to diagnose the commodification of life, both by merchandisers and by corporatised medicine. Whether health care is treated as a human right or as a commodity will always be the outcome of social […]
Budget responses
Melbourne first protest rally this Sunday 2pm Assemble State Library. VTHC Organising a working class response. Re: Budget Fight back – Mass Meeting Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have handed down the most brutal budget in recent history. It cannot go unanswered by our movement. There will be an All Unions General Meeting – 6pm […]
What keeps capitalism going?
What Keeps Capitalism Going? by Michael A. Lebowitz Michael A. Lebowitz is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, and is the author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 and 2010 second edition). This essay is based on an address to the Rebuilding the Left […]
Unions attacked
The class attack on Australian unions. Here are these 12 recent union stories. Update: Politically predictable under instructions Dyson Heydon starts with muckraking against Julia Gillard and an AWU “slush fund” in the 1990s! But Dyson Heydon is not to investigate Liberal/National party slush funds!- see Dave Oliver ACTU request at end of this post. […]
More on reviving unions
Update: This is a great read “Unions need to build power.”Verso has published the first paperback edition of Jane McAlevey’s “Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell)”, a memoir of her decade-long work in the labor movement. Here is an extract with relevance for Australian unionists.”Every strategy available to our union side relies upon sustaining high participation. […]
More on left union challenges
Again as Australian unions follow US unions, this detailed criticism on US unions is relevant for Australian unions An Interview With Staughton Lynd About the Labor Movement by Andy Piascik http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/an-interview-with-staughton-lynd-about-the-labor-movement/ For more than 50 years, Staughton Lynd has been a leading radical in the United States. He was an engaged supporter of the Black […]
Developing left unions
This debate is on challenges for developing left Australian unions. 1. From Don Sutherland http://donsutherland.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/theses-toward-the-development-of-left-labor-strategy/ “I am very interested to see where discussion by Bill Fletcher about these theses heads? see below It is very much about the situation in the USA, but I know that several concepts that are addressed are directly or indirectly […]
McQueen on Anzac
Anzac ‘History wars’ are about how to control the future. They are not disputes over the past. Rather, stories about the past are pressed into service to buttress the needs of each class and imperium. Nowhere is this practice more blatant than in the reinvention of ANZAC since the 75th anniversary of the invasion of […]
Indonesia, Australia and the Edward Snowden Legacy: Shifting asymmetries of power
Indonesia, Australia and the Edward Snowden Legacy: Shifting asymmetries of power Richard Tanter posted from Japan Focus The Asia Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 10, No. 3, March 10, 2014. http://japanfocus.org/-Richard-Tanter/4088 Précis A near perfect storm has descended on Australian relations with its nominal strategic partner and largest neighbour, Indonesia, to the point where the […]
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