Why join a union in a university?

University of Sydney 2013

A couple of weeks ago I sat on the stage in a graduation ceremony in the Great Hall at University of Sydney – the one that looks like a piece of 15^th century Cambridge built by a terrible surveyors’ mistake in an Australian paddock.  One of my PhD students was being awarded her degree, after 5 years’ hard work.

As I looked at the other side of the hall, where the parents, partners and children were sitting, I could see why public universities matter, and need to be defended.  For all the depressing news from Canberra about funding cuts, fees, league tables and the rest, universities are important institutions, which people in the wider community value.

Rightly.  This is the most advanced part of our whole education system, responsible (among other things) for producing the knowledge and the workforce for the rest of the education system. Though Australia doesn’t produce more than 3 or 4 percent of the world’s scientific publications, our universities produce most of the knowledge about Australian society and environment – and bring knowledge from the rest of the world into Australian life.  This country would be a sadder as well as poorer place without a flourishing university system.

But universities are becoming more difficult places to work in.  The neoliberal era since the 1980s has seen seen a spectacular decline in real government funding of university budgets, and a heavier and heavier reliance on student fees.  We have seen the rise of corporate-style management, with million-dollar-a-year Vice-Chancellors and their entourage sounding, and behaving, like big businessmen.

That means more authoritarian decision-making, undermining of industrial democracy, downward pressure on staff wages and conditions.  That is not temporary, nor a product of bad character.  It is a logic now built in to university management.  And it is undermining universities as public institutions.

When I wrote my open “Letter to Michael” during the 2013 enterprise bargaining struggle at U of Sydney – triggered by management’s attempt to degrade conditions as well as cut real wages – I told our Vice-Chancellor that unions are an important asset in university life.  Among other things, unions will cut through the public-relations guff and tell what the real problems are, where the shoe pinches.

Now I have studied some of the bizarre proposals about university futures coming from management consultants, not to mention the latest round of toxic policymaking in Canberra, I would say more than that.  The union is now where the most creative and well-informed policy discussions about universities are happening.  If Australian higher education is to change for the better, much of the thinking will come from the active membership of the National Tertiary Education Union.

Being a unionist is not just about protecting our own interests and security – though that’s not a trivial matter, with proposals for more casualization and outsourcing surfacing almost monthly around the country.

"I love teaching but casual work breaks my heart!"

Being a unionist is also about taking responsibility for what happens to our colleagues and fellow-workers - for making sure there are fair deals across the workforce. That has become particularly important as managements have pursued divide-and-rule strategies.  Universities now have groups of staff in very different situations, in terms of insecurity as well as income, and it is important to have strong links across these differences.

There’s an old union song called “Solidarity Forever”.  Though it’s too sentimental for many people now, it makes a valid point.  Responsibility is shared, and it’s joint action rather than individual action that counts most.

Joint action creates a certain culture in unions, and a certain personal experience in being an active member.  I’ve been in a number of different union branches, and I’ve always found shared membership a source of deep support.

I know that unions can become hierarchical, bureaucratic or factionalized, and I’ve known some that are all three.  But unionism always has democratic possibilities.  Unions express, in a way that nothing else does, the ideas, concerns and needs of the people who work at ground level – who actually make the economy work.  Unions can be vibrant and inventive.

(An aside: it says something about where creativity comes from, that there’s a great wealth of union and social movement songs, and a great absence of management songs.  Can you imagine a group of middle managers sitting around a camp-fire in the gathering dark and belting out a chorus about next year’s financial modelling, or the unique thrill of sacking workers who don’t meet their KPIs?)

Being an active union member gives you responsibilities and it does impose demands.  You have to commit time and energy.  You sometimes have to follow a majority decision that you disagree with; that’s part of respecting your colleagues. You may be called to act in local disputes that become highly personal; at other times you will be called to think about broad strategy.

Being an active union member can be hard.  It can also be exciting and creative.  Shared activism generates energy, as well as demanding it.  You are dealing with important issues and you have a chance to make a real impact on them.  In some ways it can re-shape your life, with new ideas and new friendships.  When I look back, I realize that the union has been an important part of my life, and my thinking, throughout my career. I hope that is true for a new generation too.

Political writing, universities

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Love, fear and learning in the market university

In April this year, in the course of the industrial struggle at University of Sydney, the local branch of the NTEU (National Tertiary Education Union) held a public lecture on the condition of universities.  I was invited to give the lecture; a colleague kindly recorded and transcribed the event. 

Here it is, lightly edited for readability.

education, neoliberalism, Political writing

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A moment in the strike, University of Sydney

Police at the Picket

A vigorous officer, striding in his armoured vest,

Silver his hair and shoulders, points where his troops should go,

Crisp: “I want this traffic moving faster”.

Sorry, friend.  The academic dialogue goes on.

education, neoliberalism, Political writing

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You've read the letter...Now see the movie!

For a VIDEO made by University of Sydney staff based on the letter in my previous post, and available on Youtube, please go to new video; and for letters by more members of staff about their conditions and the issues of the strike, posted in Dropbox, please go to letters.  (Apologies, the previous link to the video didn't work, we have now updated it and this one should work.)

education, neoliberalism, Political writing

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Strike at University of Sydney

The industrial dispute at the University of Sydney, where I work, is continuing.  On the first day on the picket line, I wrote a letter to our Vice-Chancellor (for overseas readers, that's roughly equivalent to University President) explaining the reasons for the strike.  The letter has been quite widely circulated.  Here's the text.

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Source: USYD NTEU

7 March 2013

The Vice-Chancellor

University of Sydney

Dear Michael

Why I went on strike today

Thank you for your emails of 12 and 20 February, and Stephen Garton’s of 1 March, and Boyd Williams’ of 5 March, giving me the management’s views about the enterprise bargaining and our industrial action. In return, I will try to help you understand why a significant part of your staff are on the picket line today.  I’m one of the oldest inhabitants of the village – my first job at the University of Sydney started in 1971 - I care a lot for this place, and for the people I work with.

University staff don’t take industrial action lightly.  As you may know, a strike rarely has a single cause.  It generally grows from a build-up of frustrations, setbacks and conflicts that result in a loss of trust in management.  That is the case at the University of Sydney.  It is the same in much of the Australian university system, which has become more troubled, and more tense and distrustful, than in previous generations.

Universities as employers have not made it their priority to have a secure, committed workforce.  Over time, university managers have responded to funding pressures by making job insecurity grow – through outsourcing of general staff work, erosion of tenure, and above all, casualization.  Our glossy brochures don’t admit this, but around half the undergraduate teaching in Australia is now done by temporary staff.

To management, this looks like flexibility.  To many of my younger colleagues, it looks like a life of precarious labour, scrabbling for short-term, part-time and totally insecure appointments.  These are poor conditions for building an intellectual workforce.  From an educational point of view, it means a mass of teaching done by staff who can’t build up the experience, depth of knowledge, or confident relationship with students that are needed for the very best teaching.

The full-time staff too have been under growing stress.  You will be very familiar with the worsening student/staff ratios in the last generation.  No pretence that we can work smarter can reduce this pressure, on both academic and general staff.  The industrial relations colleagues call this “labour intensification”, and it’s a reality at the chalk face in this university.

At the same time there has been more micro-management and surveillance of how we do our jobs.  The staff of this university are increasingly enmeshed in a thicket of anonymous online control systems - to document our courses, get permission to travel or to do our research, get our “performance” managed, and many other things - taking increasing slices of our time and energy.  In other ways too, we have been losing autonomy in our day-to-day work.  Have we agreed to these changes?  In most cases we were never asked; they have simply been imposed on us.

That’s part of a broader decline of organizational democracy and self-management in the university.  We don’t have any forum, or set of forums, where the problems of this university can be debated in a participatory way, with some prospect of influencing outcomes.  The nearest we have is the Academic Board, where good discussions do occur, but most academic staff aren’t invited and of course non-academic staff aren’t represented.  What we do have in abundance are media releases, “staff news” (comprising PR and commercial “offers”), all-staff emails from you and Stephen, threatening messages from the HR Director, even videos that you send us - in short, announcements from the management.  It’s not a good substitute.

With performance management, online surveillance systems, and closed decision-making, it appears that the university authorities these days don’t really trust the staff - to know our trades, to act responsibly, or to share in running the place.

That’s an important reason for the depth of anger about the redundancies issue in 2011-12.  We are grown-up people, we know universities have financial problems, we too want to work out solutions – and we know there are many ways for institutions to handle financial pressure.  Instead of an invitation to work on the problems together, we saw colleagues threatened, tenure weakened, arbitrary rules imposed, and mysterious exemptions granted.  And then a further round of redundancies was mishandled too.  I don’t know what your original intention was; but as these events unfolded, staff saw the management behaving unpredictably, wrecking the livelihoods of valued colleagues, and undermining security for all the staff.

It’s not encouraging to see university managers across the country increasingly resembling the executives of big corporations – in pay and conditions, in language, in techniques of running an organization, and in hard-handed approaches to the workforce.  Corporate managers are an increasingly powerful, rich and selfish group in Australian society.  The more that university managers integrate with them, the bigger the gulf that will open with the staff of the universities.

When it came to the enterprise bargaining, then, there was a big question: would you and your colleagues recognize these growing concerns and use the enterprise bargaining to build a positive relationship with the staff, or treat it as an occasion to beat the staff and the union back?  Unfortunately it was the second, and that’s basically why this strike has happened.

Source: USYD NTEU 

I’m not on the bargaining team; I follow what is happening from union report-backs, management announcements (including Ann Brewer’s welcome visit to my Faculty), and the documents.  Some things have been obvious.  Management wasn’t trying for a prompt agreement.  When management did put proposals on the table, they weren’t proposals for improved staff conditions – they offered weakened rights and less security.  I know that management contest the NTEU’s statements about this, but I’ve looked at the documents, compared management proposals with the previous enterprise agreement, and the union is right.  On some points management proposed startling increases in managerial prerogative, and weakened accountability by management to staff.  On a number of points the proposal erodes existing protections for staff.  What management did in writing this offer was moving in exactly the wrong direction.

On the pay issue, I’m not a specialist but I do have common sense.  To suggest that one of the richest universities in Australia, which you tell us in other ways is prospering, which can afford major new building works and salaries for senior staff (including me) on the current scale, will be driven broke by more than a 2% wage deal for the staff – well, like Alice, I may be urged to believe six impossible things before breakfast but I can’t believe that.

I’m glad you have recognized that to drop the guarantee of intellectual freedom from the enforceable industrial agreement was a wrong move.  Thank you for changing approach on that.  Please look at the other issues in the same spirit.

Since the Dawkins ‘reforms’ twenty-five years ago, Australian governments have tried to get an expanded university system on the cheap.  The decline of public sector funding, and the bizarre doctrine that intensifying competitive pressures will make under-resourced education systems work better, are background problems we all have to cope with.  But there is room for manoeuvre.

I think the most difficult thing, for your generation of university administrators, is remembering that you are running a billion-dollar institution that is not a corporation.  Our staff, both academic and general, are proud to work here precisely because it’s a university.  It’s concerned with the making of highly sophisticated knowledge and with the most advanced and demanding forms of education.  These are the public interests for which Australian society puts resources into the university system.  The staff are trying to make this happen, and a good personnel policy for a university will respect and support them.  The very last thing a university needs is an intimidated and conformist workforce.

Most of us would welcome a more cooperative and respectful relationship with the university management.  There are benefits for you – including benefits from a better relationship with our unions.  The unions will tell you the tough stuff, the hard truths about working life in the university; and it’s in union forums that the best thinking about higher education in Australia is currently happening.  It’s a funny thing, which you won’t hear from corporate advisors: for navigating the next stages of university life in this country, the unions are your best friends.

In the next few years, especially if we have an Abbott government, university managements might try to weaken the unions and casualize the workforce more.   It seems some Vice-Chancellors and their advisors would like to try this - but not all.  I hope that Sydney’s managerial group will follow a more intelligent path, because there is something at stake here beyond staff morale and a particular log of claims.  The future character of our university system is involved.

The staff on the picket line here are the people involved in building universities for the twenty-first century, in practice as well as in imagination.  We’d rather do this with your cooperation.

With best wishes,

Raewyn Connell

education, neoliberalism, Political writing

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Feminism's challenge to biological essentialism

The debate over sex differences has a considerable history in the Western world. Here is a short article I wrote reflecting on the women's movement's challenges to biological essentialism first published to the Occupy Times of London website here. And in Australia, my two cents were included in a piece on cognition and sex differences in the SMH last February also. You can read it here.

Gender: Biology, Roles and Activism

Thirty to forty years ago, there was a “great debate” pitting biology versus society in relation to the role of gender. Just as there had been in relation to IQ and school success, and in earlier generations about class and race. Which was more important: nature or nurture?

The reason this debate flared up in the 1970s was the advent of the Women’s Liberation Movement, which confronted gender inequalities and the oppression of women. Women’s Liberation challenged stereotypes about women, inequalities of income and domestic labour, men’s predominance in positions of power and, in due course, men’s violence towards women in the form of rape, domestic abuse, and femicide. All these were seen as social patterns that could and should be revolutionised.

This soon brought the movement up against the cultural justifications of gender inequality. Some justifications were religious, some were folkloric, but some were expressed in more modern language. The most powerful, in the English-speaking world, were the arguments that came to be called “biological essentialism”.

Image source: http://www.scilogs.eu/

According to this ideology, the social arrangements that feminism challenged expressed differences in character (emotion, intellect, attitude, etc.) between women and men, which were rooted in biological sex differences. These in turn were explained by survival imperatives that had shaped the early stages of human, or hominid, evolution. Thus it followed that men, who did the hunting and fighting, had to be aggressive, dominant, promiscuous, rational, etc. While women, who had the babies and tended the home fires, had to be nurturant, passive, monogamous, emotional, etc.

Biological essentialism itself has evolved. It started by emphasising sex differences in size and muscular strength as the explanation for male dominance. In the era of “sociobiology” such matters as endocrine differences were emphasised, and men were supposed to have a hormonal “aggression advantage”. As the field of “evolutionary psychology” developed, differences of reproductive strategy were emphasised; some of the more toxic literature of this type provided pseudo-biological justifications of rape. In the 1990s, seemingly all attention became fixed on the brain and we began hearing a lot about dichotomous “brain sex”. This notion infested schools for a while, with bizarre ideas about boys’ fixed brain-based “learning styles”. (I have always thought this idea was an insult to boys, who actually have many ways of learning.)

Curiously, whatever biological mechanism was appealed to, the argument always ended up in the same place: Conventional sex roles, gender divisions of labour, and inequalities of power, were biologically determined and therefore could not be challenged. Feminist activism was coming up against nature and so, ultimately, it was futile.

The idea that gender relations are biologically fixed, is shown up as nonsense in the light of the ethnographic and historical evidence of cultural diversity and change. But we can’t substitute a simple “sex role” model instead, assuming that attitudes and emotions are determined by dichotomous roles. One of the most important empirical findings of gender research is that in contemporary affluent societies (at least), there are very few substantial differences in psychological characteristics (attitudes, emotions, intellect, etc.) between men and women. This conclusion flies in the face of popular stereotypes, but is supported by a large body of quantitative evidence.

Biological essentialism gets its influence from the enormous cultural prestige of biological science since Darwin; from its match with the familiar stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in European-derived popular culture, and from its value in shoring up existing structures of power and privilege. It does not get its influence from being good science. Most of it is not science at all. It is, rather, a conservative social rhetoric that cherry-picks those fragments of biological and social research that fit into a pre-determined set of conclusions. It is ideology that uses the rhetoric of science, much as ideology a few hundred years ago used the rhetoric of religion to justify the marginalisation of women. (I can think of a few archbishops, popes and muftis who still do.)

Building a genuine scientific understanding of gender and gender relations is an immense task, involving both biological and social science as well as a rethinking of human history and human evolution. The Women’s Liberation Movement is rightly seen as the modern starting point of gender studies, opening up this whole terrain to serious analysis. Some of its formulations, we can now see, were too simple, but the movement was right in its perception that gender arrangements can and do change historically.

This doesn’t mean that bodies are irrelevant, far from it! Feminism around the world is deeply concerned with perinatal mortality, infant survival, motherhood, HIV/AIDS, unequal nutrition, domestic violence, rape, occupational health, sexual desire, contraception, abortion, and the increasing impact of biotechnology. All of these are issues about embodiment, for which sophisticated biological knowledge is necessary. What we can see now, more clearly than a few decades ago, is that on all these fronts, human bodies are caught up in a historical process, and to understand that, sophisticated social science is also necessary. The knowledge base for activism thus continues to change and develop, but the social justice imperative for activism remains unchanged.

feminism, gender, Political writing

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Mourning and activism

I have recently been at a sociological congress in Buenos Aires, and on my last morning in the city, a Sunday, I walked to the Plaza de Mayo.  The name of the square celebrates the start of the independence struggle against the Spanish empire.  The cathedral there – its facade looks like a Roman temple – has the tomb of the Liberator, San Martin.  At the opposite end of the Avenida de Mayo, which leads out of the square, is the imposing building of the national Congress.  The place is a powerful symbolic site for the Argentine republic.

Picture taken 2009 by Paula

That’s doubtless why it was chosen for the extraordinary action by the women known as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo – the Mothers of May Square.  In sight of a cathedral full of images of the Mother of God, the Madres broke the silence imposed by Argentina’s military dictatorship about the arrest, torture, and murder of thousands of left-wing activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Even the generals found it hard to deny a mother’s right to ask what had happened to her child. 

I guess many of the women at the first gatherings must already have known.  If so, what they were doing was a first stage of public mourning, as well as criticism of the dictatorship.  The death of that generation of young intellectuals is still felt in Argentina’s universities and public life.  After the dictatorship ended, the Madres continued a long campaign to document the ‘disappearances’ case by case.

I mourn them too, and not just abstractly.  They were part of my generation of intellectuals, the new left of the sixties and seventies.  Though an ocean and a continent away, I understand something of what the Argentine comrades were about, something of the energies and hopes that went under in many parts of the world, in that decade of repressions from the Prague Spring to the Argentine darkness.

I’ve been wondering if there is a more general interplay between mourning and activism.  Some forms of activism, at least, are deeply coloured by loss.  AIDS activism, indigenous land rights activism, and campaigns about femicide, all deal with irrecoverable loss.  Activism in such circumstances involves public mourning as well as social change.

The campaigns against nuclear weapons, which now seem to have faded, surely involved an anticipatory mourning for the end of human life.  And in the environmental movement there is mourning for the habitats, species and experiences already gone, as well as for the losses to come.

I don’t think this is a bad thing.  A politics that has no space for mourning would be unbearably cheerful, and we have enough of that in the self-help section of airport bookshops.  Politics is about constructing social futures, for good or evil.  I think a transformative politics has to respond to the full range of social experience, not just a narrow band.  There are versions of progressive politics that leach out the emotion: a mechanical marxism is one, an obsession with measurable outcomes is another.

The difficult side is that a transformative politics has to grapple with the destructive as well as constructive possibilities in human life.  Politics has to do this at a collective level, as intimate relations, and therapy, do at a personal level.  That means engaging with the emotions that destruction produces.  There’s a book by W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, which I’ve thought about a lot; it reflects on the mass bombing of World War II Germany, and pulls no punches about the effects.  Well worth a read; not for the faint-hearted.

The Plaza de Mayo, it turned out, was not a good place to explore these thoughts, even on a Sunday morning.  It’s now a tourist hub, with buses of sightseers, a souvenir market, a museum.  There is a political demonstration there, but it’s not about the disappeared.  It’s a camp set up by veterans of the Malvinas war, with belligerent banners against the English, and declarations of patriotism.  “Patria o muerte”, one of the slogans said, Fatherland or Death.  Thirty-five years ago, Argentina got both.

Argentina, intellectuals, Political writing

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Article in The Drum: Ideology of the marketplace underpins school "reforms"

Originally published by the ABC 16th March 2012 here.

Last weekend the NSW government announced the most far reaching reforms to school education "in a century".

The main proposal was to give more power to school principals. Hidden in the announcement were proposals for more temporary staff, and confirmation that the Government is intending to introduce performance pay.

Actually there is little new here. For the past 25 years, Australian education has been steadily re-shaped on market lines. We have had a drum-beat of "reforms": university fees, corporatisation of TAFE, overseas students as cash cows, more subsidies to private schools, national achievement testing, MySchool website, de-zoning of public schools, more selective schools - and more.

Beneath this visible story are hidden changes in the way schools, colleges and universities work. The idea is to make them more like little corporations competing with each other, and less like cooperative public institutions. The power of managers has grown, and workforces have become more casualised.

Both Labor and Coalition governments have supported this agenda, at state and federal levels. It has become the common sense of policy-making. If something is a problem, apply market logic to it. If something is still wrong, apply more market logic.

Urged on by the Business Council of Australia, our Federal Labor Government is on the point of re-introducing that fine 19th century innovation, Payment By Results for teachers. Ideally, business expertise will take over the whole sector. We have a splendid model in the pre-school department, where ABC Learning led the way.

Many people have been uneasy about these changes – teacher and parent organisations especially. But with the major parties in agreement, and the mass media in support, and business pointing the way, where do critics turn? The unions, for instance, are easily dismissed as a "special interest" resisting reforms that benefit the whole community.

Does the market agenda benefit the whole community? Actually, I doubt that it benefits anyone but a privileged minority. It is time to put the whole agenda under scrutiny.

Are we comfortable about testing systems with systematic social biases? Do feel-good stories about happy winners each year outweigh the fact that competitive testing requires losers, lots and lots of them – and that defining students as losers destroys their education? Do we really want to subsidise gated communities in education, where parents pay to keep the rubbish people out?

Markets commodify things, that is basic: markets are based on buying and selling. Actually you can't commodify education as a human process. But you can commodify access to education. If you ration education, you can sell a privilege to those with enough advantage, and you can reduce the need for public investment in education for all. That's what the market agenda in education basically does.

You can commodify privileges such as entry to universities, smaller class sizes, better facilities, better-trained or less-stressed teaching workforces, curriculum materials such as textbooks, or (with the help of PR firms) the prestige of schools or universities. You can even commodify certificates and degrees and the labour market privilege they deliver, though that's usually defined as corruption rather than market logic. The more you commodify, the more you hand advantages to groups who already have privilege. Twenty-five years of market "reform" has done nothing to close the social gaps in Australian education.

Crucial to the market logic of competition and the rationing of access is a means for defining and then measuring "success" vs "failure" - and making it look objective. That's why a competitive testing regime has become central to Australian education policy. It's also why our policy-makers have turned away from negotiated curricula, community participation, multicultural education, and the other democratic initiatives in education that don't go with competitive testing and managerialism.

For teachers, the market agenda has meant growing insecurity in employment (sharply increased, in TAFE), growing inequalities and new forms of surveillance (in the name of "accountability"). Above all, where the testing regime is in force, it means pressure to teach to the test – and that means narrowing the curriculum, reducing the richness of education.

Teachers resist this pressure, of course. Overwhelmingly, teachers want education to be good for all their students, not just a high-scoring few. But there are limits to how far they can resist the self-affirming logic of the whole system, not to mention parents' and students' anxiety.

Market fundamentalism in business places power in the hands of top management. That's why we have those huge salaries and bonuses for CEOs. In education too, management prerogative has grown at all levels, the recent NSW announcement being another example. An important consequence is a top-down policy process, driven not by educational expertise nor democratic decision-making, but by market logic and the agendas of ministers and their minders.

We can do better. There are other possibilities in education. Before they can emerge, we need clarity about where the problem actually is. At the next panic about test results, ask whether we need these tests at all. At the next website launch, whether it's MyUni or MyKinder, show a little tough love and ask the awkward question: what interests are really being served by this?

education, Political writing

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Political Writing

My first political demonstration was in Melbourne, when I was an undergraduate student and didn’t yet have the vote.  It was raining, and we marched silently from the University down to Parliament House, following a single bass drum.   We were protesting against the Victorian state government’s decision to hang a man, convicted of a brutal murder, who was obviously insane.

That was in the early 1960s.  By the late 1960s industrialized murder was being done on a large scale in Vietnam, the Australian government was complicit, and I had become active in several movements.  I began writing about political issues for magazines published by students, unions and progressive groups.  Over the years since, I’ve tried to expand the terrain, thinking of the politics around culture, gender, education, and privatisation. 

The list below is a cross-section of this work.  Like most political writing, these pieces address particular moments, issues and audiences.  I don’t think intellectuals hold the secret of politics, and I’ve always rejected doctrinal systems, whether religious, marxist or neoliberal.  But I think intellectual work does matter, and I think intellectuals have a responsibility to engage with issues that matter.

Politics is hard, action always involves exploring, and we can’t know the answers in advance.  We can search for common ground between issues.  For me that common ground involves participatory democracy, social equality, shared resources, and peace.  That’s the positive side, the hope.  The negative side of the same issues is oligarchy, patriarchal power, obscene wealth, greed, environmental destruction, and violence.  That’s the reality that progressive politics struggles to change.

TEN PIECES FROM DIFFERENT TIMES

The femicides of Juarez.  The Scavenger, 2010, http://www.thescavenger.net/people/the-femicides-of-juarez-48124.html.

Free trade, export-processing factories (maquiladoras), labour migration and the drug trade have transformed Ciudad Juárez, on the northern border of Mexico.  A horrifying pattern of murder of hundreds of young women, often with rape and torture, emerged in this city.  I am a member of an Australian solidarity group, and wrote this as part of our campaign.

Bread and waratahs: a postcard to the next Left. Overland, 2010, no. 198, 17-24.

In the last decade I have written a number of pieces for the Australian progressive literary magazine Overland.  Approaching its 200^th issue, the magazine commissioned essays, and I took the occasion to reflect on the past, present and future of the Australian Left.

The new right triumphant: the privatization agenda and public education in Australia. Our Schools/ Ourselves, 2006, vol. 15 no. 3, 143-162.

With the rise of neoliberalism and its sustained attack on common schooling – in Australia an amazing amount of money has been diverted to private schools – the defence of public education became important.  I have written a number of times about the issue, and when the wonderful Canadian magazine OS/OS compiled a world-wide survey of the issue, I contributed the Australian chapter.

Social justice in education. Overland, 1999, no. 157, 18-25.

Social justice in education has mainly been understood in distributive terms, essentially about the statistics of access.  I argue that justice centrally concerns what is taught, i.e. issues about curriculum and the effects of education; and that we can formulate principles of curricular justice.

Politics of changing men. Socialist Review (USA), 1995, vol. 25 no. 1, 135-159; Arena Journal (Australia), 1996, no. 6, 53-72.

A ‘men’s movement’ in the rich Anglophone countries emerged in the wake of the new feminism, but was very divided politically.  Since I had done research on masculinities, I knew the terrain, and wrote a number of pieces about how men could contribute to gender equality.  This is the most detailed.

Socialism:  Moving on. In D. McKnight, ed., Moving Left: The future of socialism in Australia, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1986, 9-45.

By now the New Right was influential and the Labor Party was abandoning its mild reformism of the 1970s.  David McKnight tried to stir a re-thinking of socialist ideas in Australia, and I wrote a lead article that reflected on the movement’s history and the new situation, on good grassroots practice and feasible programmes.

Democratising culture. Meanjin Quarterly, 1983, vol. 42 no. 3, 294-307.

Published in Australia’s leading literary magazine – perhaps not the perfect venue for it – this essay considered culture as an arena for democratic politics, defending popular culture but not commercialization.

Socialism and Labor: an Australian Strategy. Sydney, Labor Praxis Publication, 1978, reprinted 1981.

Published by a group in the Labor Party and union left, this was an ambitious attempt to describe a democratic socialist agenda informed by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s – a kind of synthesis between new left and old left.

On the autonomy of universities. Vestes, 1969, vol. 12, 141-149.

I was involved in setting up the Free University in Sydney, and other attempts to democratise higher education and contest the alignment of universities with state and corporate power.  This essay appeared in the magazine of the academic union – and I am still a member.

Labor in the age of Whitlam. Outlook, 1968 no. 2, 11-13;  no. 3, 5-7.

This was my first attempt to think strategically about politics, at the grand age of 24.  It saw the labour movement as the key to mass politics in Australia, but in need of change.  Gough Whitlam, the new leader of the Australian Labor Party, was a right-wing modernizer who compromised about the Vietnam war and sought an expansion of central state power and public services.

Political writing

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