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Towards an independent working-class
Agenda
There is an alternative
The way we live now is not the best of which our species
is capable.
Inequalities mount to feed corporate wealth
and power. For many, misery is added to poverty. We are pushed to do more in
less time. The lack of good sleep is unhealthy and threatens caring
relationships. No one is left untouched when our lives are organised to benefit
global corporations.
Corporations are forever intensifying
their plunder of nature to shovel the wealth to a few. In the process, they foul
our nest with garbage.
We don’t have to turn on the ‘news’ to
hear of wars and rumours of wars. War and ‘free trade’ are sides of the same
corporate coin. Surveillance by governments and corporations weakens our
ability to fight back on every issue.
Every one of us has some awareness of
these facts. After all, we suffer their effects everyday.
To move forward, we need to think from
scratch about how the vast majority of us live. What issues do we grapple with
everyday? .
The answers can be found by
re-connecting with those needs. Our daily needs are not signs of selfishness. But our needs are distorted by billions of
dollars in mass marketing. Corporate capitals have to over-produce to maintain
profits. That is driving the destruction of nature.
Build
a broad-based Social Movement:
Focus
on Work, Housing, Transport, Health, and Education.
To engage with concerns of our daily
lives demonstrates our care for the needs of the vast majority. Struggles for
social justice, whether Aborigines, refugees and gay marriage, do not have an
hourly impact on how most of us cope with our responsibilities. The same gap is
true for the Middle East, trade treaties or US bases. To get people involved on
those issues, socialists must show in action that we care about their pressing problems.
The environment is different because it
affects the air we breathe. So are civil liberties because they affect our
ability to act on every question.
What is vital
to us all?
Housing, Transport, Work, Health and Education
impact on us all every day and every night.
Work, we know, is no longer arranged
by set hours, five days a week. Even for permanent employees, schedules are
casual, begin at all hours and continue over weekends. Overtime, paid or unpaid, is the order of the
day. Time-poverty rules when flexible hours suit the boss.
Getting from one place to another is one
more pressure on time. For example, there is the distance between where we live
(housing), and where we work (employment). We try to bridge the two
(transport).
Then there is the problem of how to
get to places of education? We know the rush of drop-off and pick-up of kids
from school, to and from sport and for arts practice, or from their part-time
jobs. Some of us try to do the lot within the limits imposed by public
transport – a truly mighty task. It is no a surprise that running two-cars is essential
for many families.
Mining companies have a devastating
impact on our communities, They employ workers only on condition that they fly
in and out. That policy blocks the building of relationships and friendships. Isolation
undermines collective action in unions.
Laying some
foundations
Our personal experiences let us see
that the bits do fit together - somehow.
Less widespread is an understanding how
they control our lives.
Our sense of the social and the personal
provide a foundation on which to develop an agenda for action.
Three tasks face social activists:
First, we must engage with people to frame policies that
deal with the nitty-gritty. We need to speak about interest-rates and cycle
paths, bulk-billing and school lunches.
Secondly, we must present the hourly grind within the larger
questions of pollution and corporate clout.
Thirdly, our activities and thinking must show how
changes in everyday doings can lead towards a different way of life, one which enriches
our humanity.
The political responses are threefold:
1. Bring the local and the global together;
2. Link awareness of these issues as a step towards action;
3. Understand how and why and how the entire political
and economic system should and can be replaced.
An agenda ‘independent’
from what?
One fact of life is the unbridgeable conflict between our
need for a fulfilling life and the demand that we sacrifice our happiness for
the needs of corporate capital.
To survive, we need an agenda that is
independent of the Business Council of Australia. Corporations and their
lobbyists buy access to ‘their’ governments. They do not need to vote.
We need an agenda which does not trail
behind the ALP or the ACTU.
To put pressure on the ALP and ACTU, we’ll
have to revive policies and practices that they have sidelined, for instance, a
peoples’ bank.
Bread-and-marge issues have to become
ways to challenge the power of capital.
Offence is
our only defence
We cannot win on any particular issue
if we do no more than react to the next assault.
The current battles over health care have
to advance to calling for the provision of wellness. It’s time to kill off a
system which enriches the drug peddlers who thrive on sickness.
In the case of Medicare, we must not
get cornered into defending a flat-rate tax/levy that has never offered a
national health service like the one in the UK or Cuba. While we campaign to
stop the co-payment, we must end the class bias of the
health industry.
In 2014, we are so far from this
agenda that its development will take a year or more to get airborne. The
train-wreck has been decades in the making. We can’t leap over the hard slog of
research, re-thinking and testing in practice.
An agenda around Five Pillars does not
exist as a blueprint waiting to be written out. Still less is there anything
ready to be put into practice.
An alternative can emerge only through
our efforts to know the present by changing it. We have to learn how to move
ahead through taking action around where the shoe pinches, here and now.
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