ACTU

The Cabinet leaks keep coming: Now it’s the Fair Work Act

Larvatus Prodeo - July 29, 2010 - 11:55am

… Now Robert Gottliebsen at Business Spectator has one.

The thrust of this allegation is that Julia Gillard produced a very business friendly draft of the Fair Work Act, and Greg Combet and Kevin Rudd intervened to make it more favourable to unions.

Gottliebsen, of course, is over the moon that Gillard didn’t want the “former ACTU boss” to have his way. If it’s true, Labor supporters will be less so.

I wonder if there’s going to be a drum beat of this stuff every day. The end result is not just to destabilise the Labor campaign’s progress and allow the opposition to talk up a narrative of “government instability”, but also to instill doubts about Gillard’s beliefs among a raft of different segments of the electorate.

It’s diabolically clever. Read more »

Penrith: Is reformism dead?

en Passant - June 20, 2010 - 7:39pm

It was Karl Marx who said that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.

Most struggles in society today are fought out within the boundaries of class relations and the class consciousness of capitalism.

The limited nature of bourgeois democracy is the sine qua non of Parliament, the grundnorm of its existence. The long and bitter struggle of the working class for democracy within capitalism has resulted in the democracy of capitalism, that is the consensual dictatorship of capital.

This political democratisation of capitalism (at least in some of its developed heartlands) saw working class parliamentary parties arise to seemingly challenge the direct rule of the bourgeoisie.

History has shown that rather than challenge the capitalist class, reformist parties have been the mainstay of capitalism.

At their best they seek to ameliorate the rate of exploitation of workers. When the times do not suit, they use their links to the working class to impose reforms that benefit the elite.

At their worst they use the forces of the capitalist state to smash working class resistance and revolt. Read more »