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An end to all our labours?

Article Excerpt
Some time around the beginning of the twentieth century, working people began to seize state power. Whether you date that from the world's first, faltering, Labo(u)r government in Queensland, or social democracy in Norway, or the October Revolution; and whatever one might say about the failures and disasters of these projects, whether from timidity or corruption, or hubris or something worse, the fact is they happened, and that taking state power for the purpose of social transformation was part of the political imagination within which people worked.

That possibility is now more out of reach than at any time since the nineteenth century and that single fact governs a great deal of politics today. Across the world, and especially in the English-speaking world, lack of media outlets with a left or progressive perspective, and the economistic orientation of the trade union movement has created a cycle of disengagement which has now been at work for a generation--since the commencement of the Reagan-Thatcher era, and the economic rationalist turn of the ALP. To a degree this can be...

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