Verity Burgmann

From Syndicalism to Seattle: Class and the Politics of Identity

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the worlds economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

The social responsibility of labour versus the environmental impact of property capital: The Australian green bans movement

Between 1971 and 1975 Australian building industry workers withdrew their labour from environmentally irresponsible projects and, in coining the term ‘green ban’ to describe their action, originated the political designation ‘green’. Alienated from the products of their own labour and committed to ideas about the social responsibility of labour, they directly confronted what Lamarche [1976] has identified as the ‘planning role’ of property capital. They hindered the means of production by withdrawal of labour and also the reproduction of the relations of production by successfully challenging the legitimacy of private appropriation on the grounds of its adverse ecological effects. Green bans in New South Wales halted development worth A

Contesting the injuries of class

5 billion and had a significant impact on environmental legislation, town planning and public attitudes.

APSA presidential address 2003: The beginning of politics and the first human

In countless parades and protests, working-class people have proudly presented themselves, as producers, creators of the wealth expropriated unfairly from them by the exploiting classes and analysis of the content of this agitation. Propaganda suggests that these parades and protests express a politics of identity based on class. Protests such as the unemployment movement of the great depression, expressed a shared identity based on economic exploitation or disadvantage, and drew strength from class conscious rhetoric to engage in defiant political action.

The Green Bans Movement: Workers' Power and Ecological Radicalism in Australia in the 1970s

We live in interesting times—unfortunately. Amongst various other crimes against reason and common decency were the Tampa and Children Overboard incidents in 2001. It is one of the many hypocrisies of our age that capital enjoys unprecedented freedom to globetrot at the whim of profitability, while migrating labour is obstructed, vilified and endangered. In fact, all lives are now endangered, as the Bali bombings indicated. When I filled out Melbourne University’s Risk Assessment Form before I undertook the precarious and obviously foolhardy journey to attend this conference, I had to assess the level of risk involved in flying Qantas to Hobart. I responded that there were no untoward risks, despite the foreign policies of the Howard government. Back at home, this government has continued its war against trade unions that it commenced with its manoeuvres against the Maritime Union, for its liberalism is not so consistent as to tolerate the freedom of association expressed in the right of workers to bargain collectively. Also depressing has been the performance of the Labor Party at the 2001 election, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Coalition in its use of desperate people as a cheap electioneering stunt. The global hegemon has invaded Iraq against the express wishes of the international community. If the American government had responded to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City building by strafing the hills of Michigan in the vague hope of destroying cells of militiamen, Americans would have been able to recognise this as futile and counterproductive: not so with the bombing of Afghani and Iraqi civilians in response to 9/11. We are witnessing also the emergence in many countries of the neo-liberal strong state. This process began before 9/11—the protester in Genoa was killed several months earlier—but the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have become convenient excuses for increased suppression of anti-corporate campaigners, who have far less in common with militarist, misogynist, fundamentalist religious zealots than those initiating the new repressive measures. Counter-terrorism developments in Australia such as the Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act allow for the pre-emptive control of political dissent

Futures without financial crises: Utopian literature in the 1890s and 1930s

The power of labor to confront those who would damage and pollute the environment is commonly discounted in academic discussions of ecological problems. Th is tendency reveals the influence of new social movement theory, dominant in the late 1970s and 1980s, which typically denigrated the labor movement for becoming institutionalized and incapable of opposition, and sharing with big business a commitment to growth.1 In the 1990s such assumptions and prejudices persisted. For example, Ulrich Beck ignores the role of unions when dealing with the question of how to confront ecological irresponsibility. He writes about the importance of a strong, competent public debate, “armed with scientific arguments,” the need for “dissenting voices, alternative experts” and alternatives to be developed systematically, so there would be “‘discursive checking’ of scientific laboratory results in the crossfire of opinions.” He says hazards become public and scandalous through “the needling activities of the social movements.” Yet public outrage in the instance he discusses—a lead crystal factory dropping flecks of lead and arsenic on nearby Altenstadt—achieved nothing.2 If you lived in Altenstadt, would you rather rely on the workers employed in the off ending factory refusing to continue working there until the polluting emissions ceased or on “discursive checking”? In Australia in the early 1970s, and particularly in Sydney, people concerned about the impact of environmentally damaging development had despaired of “public debate” and had found that “dissenting voices” and “alternative experts” were

Green Bans, Red Union. Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation.

Australian utopian fiction of the 1890s and 1930s reflects the traumatic impact of the economic crises of these decades and expresses desire to avoid the insecurities of capitalism. There are significant differences, however, in the imaginative reach of the utopias devised in the 1890s and those formulated in the 1930s. In Australia in the 1890s, the possibilities for progress and perfection were varied. Unionism, socialist legislation, the formation of ideal communities based on socialist or anarchist principles, militant forms of protest, attempts to inaugurate direct rather than mere representative democracy were some of the various strategies pursued in this decade that promised a better world. The methods depicted in the utopian writings of the 1890s for achieving ideal societies are as diverse as the real politically radical currents of the time. By the 1930s, the starkly singular conception of emancipation offered by the Soviet model dominates the imagination of those who wrote of better futures. The utopian literature of the 1930s is thus diminished by its fascination with an alleged model of perfection in the real world. The differences between the utopian literatures of two decades undergoing similar upheavals confirms Darko Suvins observation that the parameters of utopian imagination are produced by the particular radical milieux around those who dare to dream of alternatives.