>>Sounds a bit thin Doug. You saying Junior & co. make capitalism seem comparatively benign?
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>Not at all. They put a nasty personal and partisan face on it, so a lot of activists focus on getting rid of them, thereby ignoring impersonal and nonpartisan forces. One virtue of having the more "liberal" party in power is that it's easier to focus on underlying suckiness.
I come to the opposite conclusion, that it is better to have the conservative party in power. Simply because, here, when Labor is in power, activists tend to get sucked into participation in the processes of power. Rather than taking action at the grass roots.
The classic example was the Accord years of the Hawke Labor government through the eighties. The union movement throughout that period relied almost entirely on national level negotiations with the government to fight its battles, enforced by the Industrial courts. There were many gains of course, but the long term result was a catastrophic degradation of the union movement at the grass roots. The shop floor base of the union had been rendered totally irrelevant and in fact had to be suppressed by the union leadership during the Accord, since the union movement's part of the deal was industrial 'peace'.
In fact the leadership of the union movement had to make very many obscene compromises over those years on basic principles. Which in the end have destroyed it as an effective force. It went from being a movement based on active participation by union members in the struggle for better wages and conditions, to one which is not a movement at all, but a representative body where members are expected and expect to be passive recipients of professional services.
The same problem applies to other activist organisations. In general, if a Labor party is in power they will tend to place less emphasis on participatory activities and more on representative politics. Instead of mobilising their members and supporters, the leadership of these movements will be sucked into various influence peddling activities set up by the Government to co-opt them. The price of co-option is always to restrain the people you nominally represent, which destroys the very basis of the activist group.
It even happened with the Greens. By the time the Tasmanian Greens attained balance of power status within the state parliament here, they had a massive and powerful grass roots organisation that could reliably mobilise tens of thousands of people onto the streets and into direct action campaigns in the forests and wilderness. And they did it regularly. They were a force to be reckoned with. Once they attained some political power, they started becoming irresistibly drawn away from direct action. Street demos and grass roots activity was scaled back and had to controlled, so as not to interfere with the back room haggling.
The Greens never totally committed suicide, mainly because they weren't in power long enough for the vigorous grass roots activists to be completely suppressed. But there was a dramatic swing in that direction and more to the point, they achieved a great deal more before they got into power than they did while in power. The shift in emphasis from mobilisation at the grass roots to electoral politics does not get the goods.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas