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The ACTU’S Change the Rules Campaign draws attention to the “broken rules” – from the point of view of workers – in the Fair Work Act 2009. The campaign is borne out of a system that adds to employer power and this enables wages repression. The system thus contributes to growing poverty and inequality.
Broken rules galore
At the same time we can create a list of other “broken rules” that attack the environment we must live in, living standards, democracy and humanist values. For example:
First Nations peoples exploitation, oppression, incarceration
The finance and banking system
Taxation – powerful corporations pay little or no tax;
Social welfare payments – denying a dignified life to tens of thousands;
Climate change – now no rules at all;
Trade policy;
Immigration and refugee policy;
Corporations law.
One can go on.
Put the transnational corporations in even stronger command?
It is clear that parliamentary democracy, in its current, Australian form has seriously broken rules also.
On climate change the government has morphed into being so bad that the large corporations are saying, through the Business Council of Australia, that they will go it alone on climate change mitigation.
Maybe that has been the objective all along.
Let the most powerful have more power to control the future. After all, that’s 21st century capitalism.
Its not just the LNP government who is the protagonist, although they are at the extreme end. The ALP is a co-creator of some of them, or insipid in its efforts to “solve the problem”.
Recently, the TTP (trade policy) is a good example. A closer look at Labor’s control of the negotiations for the Fair Work Act 2009 that reproduced or established “the broken rules”, reveals another.
Broken rules: separate? Or connected?
The big question is: are all of these sets of broken rules separate and discrete?
Or, are they – in various ways – connected and mutually dependent … systemic?
If the answer to these is “No” and “Yes”, that must lead to a very different response from all of those engaged in the largely discrete struggles and campaigns against them.
The challenge from a real alternative: the seeds within the separated struggles
All of the separated struggles contain an analysis of what is wrong with the :”broken rules” and, to one degree or another, an alternative set of ideas, proposals and sometimes specific demands. Many stand well as a real alternative, new rules that are democratic and reverse exploitation of people and nature, many require further development in the realm of power and democracy.
Defeating the sets of requires a unifying programme of demands and proposals, and a strategy for a unifying Organisation that can bring them together and put them in the hands of the people for further development and political pressure. That would include an approach that “unites the identities” (gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, disabilities) based on a working class framework.
The driving principles would be solidarity and unifying across the struggles, more power in the hands of the people, especially at work, equality, environmental renewal, and equality.
Leaving the politics of dissatisfaction as they are now – an inadequate combination of 1) silo campaigns, 2) protest driven electing of “independent” and right wing nationalists, and 3) click activism – will not put the majority in charge of their futures.