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Common Action, starting in Sydney, is trying bring together the dozens of points of opposition to the Australian neo-liberal Agenda of the Abbott government. And out of that develop a common, comprehensive and independent alternative economics and programme.
For more on Common Action click here and also follow them at their Facebook page and Twitter account.
As part of their actions they are organizing a post budget activists meeting, details as follows:
Wednesday May 21, 6.30pm-8pm, Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, 280 Pitt St, Sydney. 6.15pm for a 6.30pm start $5
What an excellent idea!
We use to do this in Adelaide in the 70’s and it was a great opportunity for young activists to learn about the political economy of budgets, especially how to analyze a taxation or spending decision (or proposal) through the prism of what it would mean for working people, the unemployed, women, ethnic communities and so on.
Those post budget sessions analyzed the Liberal budgets of the Liberal Party’s Fraser governments.
The sessions and analysis was led by political economists who were committed to plain language and working class oriented perspectives. Economics was thus demystified and turned into the common property of workers and other activists who had not gained either secondary or post secondary economic learning opportunities.
The contributors ranged from Keynesian and the more powerful critical analysis of independent Marxist views. However, there was practically nothing in the line of ecological perspectives. Women activists insisted, sometimes but not always with support of men, that the specific discrimination against women in budget decisions, be brought into the analysis.
After a few years these events waned but not before a new popular economic concept evolved: the social wage. The social wage described the connected impact on the standard of living of BOTH the industrial wage (the outcome of industrial, union led wage bargaining) and taxation / government spending, ie the social wage. We could see therefore, that in the dominant framework of Australian capitalism, the possibility that industrial wage gains could be nullified by a bad outcome in the social wage, mainly delivered in budgets Federal and state level).
The connections between inequality, the industrial wage and the social wage were described in an outstanding pamphlet: Australia Ripped Off. Australia Ripped Off was produced by the National Council of then Amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrights Union (now the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union). Its foremost author was the recently late Ted Wilshire from the unions National Research Office. (Australia Ripped Off followed close behind an earlier pamphlet, Australia Up Rooted, that dealt with the impact on manufacturing industry of the biggest mining boom (up till then) in Australian history. Australia Up Rooted sets the standard in Australia for plain language economic education and learning for workers. It featured the wonderful cartoons of Bruce Petty.)
There is an opportunity for this revived form of activist learning re-ignite this class based, critical analysis of the Budget, connect that to what is happening to the finance sector, and integrate a strong environmental / ecological dimension. We lay, then, a foundation for a strategy that can eat away at the dominant economic messages of neo-liberal capitalism.
On this point, we who attend must demand that this is what the Common Action organizers provide: pressure from below can prevent the tendency for economic analysis that is soft and founded on assumptions that accept the dominant economic framework.
The system, 21st century capitalism, is founded in two interacting and mutually depend exploitations: the exploitation of most humans by a minority, and the exploitation of NATURE by that same minority. Associated with this, the system can at best offer only a very stunted form of democracy, that is, a somewhat compromised parliamentary democracy.
Finally, we can – collectively – build a coherent and unifying ALTERNATIVE political economic dynamic: both in policy and also strategy for that policy and its underpinning principals to challenge and become dominant. The potential for this exists in the dozens of campaigns that are points of resistance already to the dominant destructive momentum that is in our face every day.
These resistance campaigns are fragmented but they can be brought together and harnessed in a new and dynamically democratic alternative. We then have class based struggle happening again in a 21 st century form, just as it is forming in many other places around the world.
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