Union & Community Summer School 2010

Comrades,

There’s a Union and Community Summer School next weekend (December 10-11, 2010) @ Melbourne Trades Hall. It’s a “public forum to build practical unity within the labour movement, for workers’ rights, social justice, economic democracy and environmental sustainability.”

Yadda yadda yadda.

Hopefully, what this means is that one day me and the rest of the Magpie Army can afford to see a dentist.

Pop voted for the Country Party.

You can find out more here.

See also : Michael Costa is an odd fellow (May 10, 2008).

Trade Union Membership as Proportion of Employees, 1912–2001:

Social Democracy: No Future?
Introduction to Articles on the Retreat of Social Democracy

Relating to the retreat

The question of how we grasp social democracy and its current retreat is now more than ever a practical one. The institutions of social democracy continue to be the focus of many contemporary struggles. In the UK context, this is exemplified in recurrent conflicts over privatization, employment rights and cuts in welfare spending. Hence we face the question of how we relate to these struggles: what do we want and how should we fight?

The question always arises because our immediate experience as proletarians of the institutions of social democracy is characteristically twofold. Consider the example of the welfare state. In the first place, the organs of the welfare state – benefits, health care, free education – present themselves simply as a means of survival. But our experience of such organs is also one of domination, control, objectification. These institutions do not belong to ‘us’; their processing of us often seems to be for alien and bureaucratic aims and purposes – for ourselves only as bourgeois citizens, or in the interests of ‘the public’, ‘the law’ or other such abstractions.

Leftists, emphasizing the first aspect of this immediate experience, campaign for the maintenance and extension of the conditions of the post-war settlement: full employment, the restoration of ‘trade union rights’, reversal of cuts in the health, education and benefits systems, plus a meaningful minimum wage. Yet ‘defence of the welfare state’ and the other leftist demands represent either adherence to reformist social democracy as progress or a misconceived and disingenuous strategy of ‘transitional demands’.

An anarchist or ‘ultra-left’ analysis often emphasizes instead the second aspect of our immediate experience of social democracy: social democratic institutions as control mechanisms. Some anarchist types claim that, without the welfare state, genuine forms of mutual aid will necessarily develop, and thus that we need not resist attacks on the welfare state. However, while it is undeniable that the welfare state has served to atrophy working class community traditions of mutual aid, given the present absence of growth of militant networks and organs of support, this kind of analysis is simply ahistorical posturing. The restructuring of the welfare state is taking place at the initiative of capital and the bourgeois state – albeit in response to previous rounds of working class struggle. This is a time of chronic weakness in the working class and revolutionary movement. Simply to accept the present programme of ‘welfare reform’ is a capitulation to the autonomy of global finance capital and its ideology of neo-liberalism – a force which is currently growing in self-assurance and audacity. This kind of account seems to see the working class as passive and in need of a good kick up the backside to get it to do anything – the more life-threatening the kicking the better. The present New Labour Government’s abandonment of social democracy will not in itself bring us closer to communism: only the self-activity of the proletariat can do that…

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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4 Responses to Union & Community Summer School 2010

  1. mikey says:

    surely Eddie could chip in a few quid for the army?

  2. @ndy says:

    too busy helping Mick help sick children:

  3. Paul Justo says:

    That’s a fine list of the Aussie left, everything from People’s War supporting Maoists to all 57 flavours of Trotskyism, Euros, Gorby lovers, the whole kit and caboodle.

    “The drink will flow and blood will spill and if the boy’s wanna fight you better let them”

    Hopefully a few supporters of Royal Prince Crack Pot Kin will front up to add to the shenanigans.

  4. Pingback: Union and Community Summer School 2010 | slackbastard

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