Words Are Wind
In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) grabs a recorder and heads to the Labour Day rally. He interviews friends and comrades about the rally, what they think the impact of #ChangeTheRules has been, and if there is any opportunity to broaden and open up struggle? Due to a moments hestitation he didn’t try to interview Sally McManus as she walked past.
Music by Alistair Hulet
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Bill Shorten, the leader of the ALP opposition, strode the stages of the National Press Club and delivered a speech that The Australian described as ‘Corybn-like’ and a ‘populist pitch to low-income earners, unionists and left-wing voters’ (Brown, Chambers, and Additional reporting: Sarah Jane-Tasker 2018). But before we break out the red flags and rally around Comrade Bill we should pause and stop: for the content of Shorten’s speech was actually terrible, a continuation of the ALP tradition of class appeasement and compromise and wrapped in mystifications about the nature of capitalism, wages and class. It was the exact opposite of the approach that we need.
Those of us who want to overcome capitalism aren’t in competition with the ALP. The ALP is just another faction for capital in the political apparatus: it is one of our enemies. Our project and theirs are radically different. However, the ALP has a long history of sowing mystifications – that is reinforcing the ideology that strengthens capitalism. This is part of its historic role of acting to integrate the working class within capitalism.[i] These mystifications have two key claims:
Rather than being swept up in the appearance of some kind of radicalism or broadly pro-worker rhetoric it is necessary to be razor-sharp and expose all that is wrong with the approach of the ALP. As Humphrey McQueen has written the ALP is ‘fog-bound within capitalism’ (1977, 345). The point of critiquing the ideas of the ALP is not to change their minds but rather to help dispel the fog of illusions that threaten to cloud ours.
Continue reading “Anti-Shorten: The ALP is still selling bullshit”
Workers of the world unite, right? Okay, but how? This is a special episode where Shane Reside, an organiser with the International Transport Workers Federation, interviews Jamie K McCallum (@jamiekmccallum) author of Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing about a new kind of labour internationalism: the global union federation. What are they? Where did they come from? Are they any good? Do they challenge the inequalities between workers in the North and South or recreate them? How useful are the Global Framework Agreements that they use? Focusing on the history and experience of UNI Global Union Shane and Jamie talk about all this and more. There are no easy answers here. Whether you think the union makes us strong (you know who you are) or that unions are forces of recuperation (as do you) this is a must-listen-to conversation about the real experience of global labour institutions.
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In this episode of Living the Dream Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) talk with all-round good egg Troy Henderson (@TroyCHenderson) about the idea of a Universal Basic Income. Troy provides us with an intellectual history and we discuss if it is a techbro attempt to sure up capitalism, a radical social democratic attempt to fix capitalism or if it contains radical elements that point in an anti-capitalist direction? We also talk about why a Jobs Guarantee is horrid and shit.
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Some stuff we may have mentioned or should have:
Helen Razer UBI is just a bedtime story Elon Musk tells himself to help the super-wealthy sleep
Bill Mitchell A basic income guarantee is a neo-liberal strategy for serfdom without the work
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams Inventing the Future Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
Antonio Negri Benoît Hamon and Universal Income
Immaterial Workers of the World (Paolo Virno) What Did I Tell You?
Andrew Leigh Why a universal basic income is a terrible idea
Chapo Trap House Episode 123 – UBIsoft feat. Clio Chang (7/10/17)
Music includes Soft Pink Things and The Business both covering CRASS
In this episode of Living the Dream Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Godfrey Moase (@gemoase) the General Branch Assistant Secretary of the National Union of Workers. Godfrey had a number of criticisms of our last show . We talk about these and Godfrey also addresses the broader strategic and tactical possibilities for anticapitalist struggle and how they relate to trade unions.
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You can find some of Godfrey’s writings here:
Other things we mention include:
Music by The Sweatshop Union
(This podcast was recorded as ex-Tropical Cyclone Debbie drenched Queensland)
In this episode Jon (@jonpiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) talk about the recent cuts to penalty rates by the Fair Work Commission . We dismiss the idea that this attack is actual just a product of ‘the Right’; rather it is a continuation of the 100+ year tradition of arbitration supported by the ALP and the mainstream of the ACTU in the context of the real contradictions of capital accumulation. We discuss the movement against penalty rate cut as well as the Big Steps walk off of early childcare educators and the challenges the class faces to recomposing our power and secure emancipation.
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Stuff we mention includes:
Fair Work Commission 4 yearly review of modern awards – Penalty Rates
Elizabeth Humphrys, ‘Australia Under The Accord (1983-1996)’
A Fiery Defence Of Sally McManus: Thank Civil Disobedience For The Gains Of Today
The problem with ‘Join your union’
Insights into Low Wage Growth in Australia
Top industrial judge resigns in disgust over ‘biased’ system
Music by Barrett Strong
180 (or 179 depending who you ask) days after losing their jobs 55 Carlton & United Brewery workers won them back. This struggle – #CUB55 – has been probably the most prominent industrial dispute in Australia of 2016. This struggle has been taken up by elements of the union leadership as a key fight over wages and conditions and the role that labour-hire and contracting plays in holding down both down. It has taken on a national dimension. It drew in a fraction of the class that is involved in a few of the blue-collar unions and the Left (maybe in the 10,000s?). More generally the shafting of the CUB55 became a symbol in public debate of worsening working conditions – especially those of skilled blue collar workers.
In this episode of Living The Dream, Dave (@withsobersenses ) chats with Carmen about the Workplace Organising 101 training she recently provided in Brisbane. Carmen talks about the purpose and structure of this training, its relationship to anarcho-syndicalism and reflects critically on the contribution it can play to developing our collective power and overcoming capitalism.
Organisations mentioned include:
Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union (FAU)
Music by Dolly Parton and Marianne Faithful
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In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) and Rob talk about how the provision of welfare and social services are changing. We chat about the concept of social reproduction, the welfare state and its evolution and critically investigate new developments. As the mining boom ends, the world teeters on a the edge of another economic meltdown and states struggle with increasing amounts of debt we ask what’s going on with welfare and how can we struggle on this terrain in ways that point to a better life and a better society.
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Material referred to includes:
Multi-million dollar ‘green bonds’ could fund Qld’s climate change strategy
Global Social Impact Investment Steering Group
Back ground on Debt and Social Reproduction can be found at Australia you’re standing in it part 2: Debt & Social Reproduction
An earlier show on the struggle of No Shelter! A Collective Against Gendered Violence can be found here
Everyone should read this issue of Viewpoint on Social Reproduction.
For an inspiring historical of the unemployed struggling over the conditions of welfare see The WOW factor: Wollongong’s unemployed and the dispossession of class and history
And listen to this killer track by Mutant Death (which features an on air argument between the scumbag Bob Hawke and dear comrade and friend Nick)
Over the last two hundred years a vast divergence of revolutionary ideas and theories have emerged as part of the struggle for emancipation. The relationships between different approaches have often been antagonistic and sometimes literally deadly. These days whilst the shooting has stopped it is not uncommon for a particular radical ‘tradition’ to caricature, mystify and turn into straw-men divergent ideas. A recent example of this practice is Sean Ledwith’s (2015) The steam and the piston box: is autonomism an alternative? Published by Counterfire, which is one of the many fragments and splits from the Socialist Workers Party – the centre of the International Socialist Tendency. Common to the genre Ledwith tries to critique a specific approach to anti-capitalism in the UK and locate this apparent error in the theory that stands behind it.
For Ledwith in the wake of the Tory election victory and the pathetic behaviour of the Labour Party and Trade Union leadership there is a danger that the new wave of struggles that have emerged may take the wrong course. There is a:
… danger that some involved in such events may believe that traditional organisations of the left such as the trade unions and the Labour Party are now obsolete and should be bypassed.
This notion may develop further into the view that any type of formal leadership is counter-productive and that the way forward for radical politics is total avoidance of anything resembling an organisation with a hierarchy.
The danger then is that people will act in a way different from the strategy of Counterfire and organise in ways different from how Counterfire organises. Behind this error lurks ‘autonomism’, which Ledwith defines as ‘hostility to formal organisation by sections of the left’.
Whilst this article is written in a UK context you can be sure that it will be used on a social media as an easy go to whenever this strange beast ‘autonomism’ needs to be addressed. Since it might be used as a blunt weapon to bash heads with it is worth showing just how bullshit it is.
