En Passant

The last few decades have seen governments wage war on our universities writes Declan Murphy in Socialist Alternative. We need a different path – one in which education is a right and where learning is valued as a social good.

A return to class struggle offers the best opportunity to reintroduce equity into the tax debate.

So although Thatcher and Gillard have or had seemingly very different approaches to industrial relations, their goal is the same – to shift wealth from labour to capital to address falling profit rates. They use different strategies on occasion to get there. Thatcher tried to manhandle unions into a strait jacket. Labor in Australia asks workers nicely to try it on and compliments us on the fit. The way to fight the neoliberal Abbott is to fight the neoliberal Gillard.

The ALP has lost its working class heartland, not because of who leads it but because of its rotten neoliberal policies. Abandon the neoliberal policies and personalities, Labor.

Going to university should be a liberating experience. It should train us to critique rigorously all orthodoxies and dogmas. It should be about unlocking intellectual and practical abilities, giving us the tools to help transform society for the better writes Jordan Humphreys in Socialist Alternative.

However, universities, like all other major institutions, are shaped by the needs of the capitalist system – an authoritarian order run in the interests of the rich and powerful, who put profit above everything else. Going to university is an alienating experience because educational institutions take on the authoritarian, profit-driven dynamic of the system as a whole.

It is because Labor’s policies have been the policies of neoliberalism, of kowtowing to the rich and powerful, with occasional rhetorical flourishes of class war merely showing how far removed we are from it, that it offers no class analysis of society and the way forward for workers that Tony Abbott will be the next Prime Minister.

Rather than this being a rupture it is a continuation of Labor’s politics of neoliberalism. As Hawke and Keating led to Howard, so Rudd and Gillard are now leading to Abbott.

The solution for workers seems clear enough. Fight both brands of neoliberalism, not with television advertisements but with strikes.

It is important to fight every manifestation of Labor’s neoliberalism now, its attacks on workers, its racism, sexism and homophobia, its kowtowing to religious bigotry.

But that will not be enough because any gains, even if won through mass action, itself problematic in today’s environment of class peace, will be under attack as the needs of capital for more and more profit reinforce the attacks on women, Aborigines and the discrimination against gays and lesbians and the acquiescence to religious bigotry of all parties in government, Labor or Liberal.

A revolutionary workers party, big enough to offer an alternative vision of real democracy and production to satisfy human need, is needed now. That is what Socialist Alternative and its unity project is about.

Yours truly in today’s The Age on Jenny Macklin, the dole and driving single Mums into more poverty. I argue we need to fight industrially against the neoliberal Labor Party to end this sort of systemic misogyny.   Here are a few snippets:  ‘The rich are getting richer and we are not bothering to fight [...]

The dominant forces in the Greens are driven by electoralism and an attachment to neoliberalism (or fiscal responsibility, as they prefer to call it). Regardless of the odd press release tacking left, the Greens have just legitimised the neoliberal agenda Gillard is implementing. And as they have done so, they have further accommodated to the establishment.

Marx never went to a Boxing Day Sale. He didn’t have the money. More importantly Boxing Day sales are a recent invention of neoliberalism to make more money out of workers.