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Opportunities for growth: can the historical left be reinvented to move to the other shore?

Article Excerpt
Be realistic, demand the impossible

Situationist slogan, May 1968

In the last two decades, the effective implementation of neo-liberal economic and political policies by successive Labour and Liberal governments has contributed to the effective gutting of the Left in both its social-democratic and revolutionary guises. Whilst there have been numerous impressive demonstrations against the miserliness of spirit implicit in global capital, these expressions have been unable to forge themselves into an effective political strategy that can begin to counter the malaise within which we find ourselves. Two examples of movement against this powerful tide--the union-green alliance, Earthworker, and Boris Frankel's recent work, When the Boat Comes In (Pluto Press, 2001)--offer a vantage point to better understand 'the crack of history' that is revealing itself.

Earthworker is an attempt at re-invigorating the green-union project which was pioneered by the Builders Labourers Federation, especially in its New South Wales branch in the 1970s. Green-unionism is founded upon the principle that the interests of those who sell their labour and the interests of the earth are complementary. What is more, the people who do the work have the power (though it is often unrecognised or untapped) at the point of production to transform our relationship to the earth. In other words, the issue of sustainability could become as central to the concerns of the organised working class as those of wages and conditions. The air we breathe, the food we eat and the social environment affect workers directly--and we should have some say in this process! Earthworker was an attempt at re-inventing the green-union project within a different set of conditions. While Earthworker has for the moment largely come unstuck, the reasons for which will be...

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