Crap pix from “Your Rights at Work” ‘protest’ in July last year
These pics are crap, and they’re late, and they’re from the shittest ‘protest’ ever, but what the hell.
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The time is nigh for organised anarchy. Not merely the anarchy that leaves us squabbling about who’ll be eaten first by the wolves of 4th wave industrial reform. We need organisation, but how do we get it? How do we get a mass of members, how do we put politics across?
Slogans are passe. Cute, tricky actions that make people think twice are passe. There’s no longer any time to think twice. Australian workers are being overridden by a squat cowboy and his tall deputy sheriffs.
What are we doing? What can we do? What can we possibly do at this stage to stop IR reform? To work within the unions is to work in a corrupt oligarchy that depends of keeping workers down and preventing them from striking. To work outside the unions is to work without resources and be labelled a sectarian loony leftist. To criticise the unions is to create a wedge between possible allies. (Are the unions my allies? Not really, but perhaps they masquerade as the enemy of my enemy well enough at this time.)
I’m no intellectual. I can’t sit and watch the world crumble while I write about it with a knowing whimsy. C’est laVie.
Is there a “we” who will do something? I doubt it. Organisation is difficult, and those who have it tend to have ulterior motives so entrenched that they aren’t capable of moving swiftly enough to call it spontaneity. But those who don’t have it aren’t capable of moving decisively or in large enough numbers to make themselves felt (even to themselves).
Solidarity is passe these days. There are those who write the line, those who tow the line, and those who defy lines in an ever-striving movement toward clarity. Clarity mean criticism, and criticism is rejection. Solidarity might mean standin by someone even though you are critical of them. It might also mean forming convenient alliances and betraying them when the joint threat gets too near.
What’s wrong with Australia’s youth that they won’t join unions?
Education and generation Perhaps its education. Us young’uns have been forced into uni by well-meaning working class parents with a dream of success. We believe that our own hard work will pay off - landing us in a cushy job far away from the lifestyle we were born into. We believe we will “do better than our parents did”.
Yeah right. How many woking class kids actually do make it by going through uni? How many are left at the end with a profound understanding of Focault, not enough marketable skills and a HECS debt the size of a barn? At 23, we graduate to the cold-coffee reality that we’re actually competing against those 16 year old ‘loser’ school leavers for low-paid, low-security jobs. But we dream of the big time.
We dream and believe, no doubt spurred on by the fantasies of grandparents that any lack of success is brought of our own laziness and not systemic bias against the working class. We conveniently forget the feeling of fate that our parents have about work - born into an industry, die in an industry. The spectre of casual employment and re-skilling for a new career every 10 years can seem like novelty compared with 40 years in a coal pit. It might look glossy from the outside, but the choices are just as limited. (more…)
