<p>R.J. Hawke, child of the manse, Methodist youth leader, self-confident to the point of bumptiousness, unquestionably clever but unburdened by scruple, fatally attracted to money and power and prepared to do anything to get his hands on both, was by 1969 hoisted into office by the left trade union bureaucracy. A middle-aged man in a hurry.</p>
<p>His shady dealings as a fixer and squelcher of strike activity, the full story of which is still suppressed by Australian libel law, brought him to the notice of big business as a coming Quisling. He presented himself to the working class public, particularly backward working class men, as a man of the people beer-swilling ocker, phony proletarian accent and all.</p>
<p>It is jolting, looking back, to see how much Hawke owed to the left of the trade union movement. When he replaced Albert Monk as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, he was assisted by the Communist Party – and the uproar from the right wing press was deafening. When introducing the pro-boss Prices and Incomes Accord as PM, he was again backed by the ALP/ACTU “left” and by the Communist Party, by then a political dog wagged by its union bureaucrat tail.</p>
<p>By 1983, he and the ALP he now led were the favoured candidates of big business, frustrated by the inability of Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government to deliver on their demands. Fraser had been put under heavy pressure to deregulate and privatise but had dogged it, ironically out of fear of backlash by a then much more powerful labour movement. </p>
<p>It was left to the Trojan Hawke to float the dollar, flog off public property, deregulate financial markets and float the dollar, bringing the power of international capital to bear on government policy. Reversing the educational reforms of the Whitlam government, Hawke introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, turning millions of Australian students into debtors.</p>
<p>During the pilots’ strike of the late ’80s, which challenged the accord by seeking wage rises outside the corporate profits-first guidelines, pilots’ negotiators were treated to the sight of Hawke getting up from the table from time to time to scurry into the next room to get his orders from Sir Peter Abeles, Ansett Airlines big shot and long-standing Hawke patron.</p>
<p>At a business awards ceremony during the 1987 election campaign, media mogul and brothel proprietor Kerry Packer and lifelong thief and future jailbird Alan Bond both endorsed the Hawke government. Bond said that “the government should be applauded for allowing Australian business to succeed”, while Hawke described Packer as a “close personal friend”.</p>
<p>“Hawke and Keating do more than enjoy the company of the new tycoons, they share their values”, journalist Brian Toohey explained in July of that year. “The Labor Party is an irrelevancy – an embarrassment that can be explained away to the people who count; a vehicle to deliver votes from those who don’t.”</p>
<p>For 13 years, the Hawke and Keating governments were the favoured option for big business – until the labour movement that went along with them had become a shadow of itself and the bosses felt confident to call in the Liberal Party “A” team.</p>
<p>The venomous pique that Hawke scarcely bothered to conceal when Keating won the unwinnable 1993 election, and his corresponding glee when he lost in 1996, tell the story of an egomaniac. The labour movement that fed him meant nothing to a man consumed by greed and malevolence. </p>
<p>By the ’90s, Hawke had transitioned from mere capitalist lackey to actual capitalist, part owner of CBD high rises, his sticky fingers into numerous pies, leveraging his contacts made as PM to do business with (usually odious) foreign governments. Among his best mates, all great blokes, were the Myanmar military junta and, always, Israel. He was now one of the globe-girdling corporate brigands he so slavishly idolised, to the extent that his unctuous flattery of Packer at an awards event was so self-abasing that even the subject of it expressed embarrassment.</p>
<p>Hawke was a big success as a big-noting union official and politician and in his shady post-politics business career. As a human he was a wretched failure. Now he’s gone, what’s left? Nothing positive: a nearly ruined trade union movement; a tertiary education system that lumps graduates with a mountain of debt; former nationalised industries – example Qantas, a sweatshop of the skies – generating super-profits for corporations.</p>
<p>The evils that men do live after them. If there is any good to be interred within Hawke’s grave, I will leave it to his corporate cronies, News Corporation and the Israeli embassy to do so. What he was like in his private life, although pretty awful, is not a proper subject for a political assessment. But as a public figure he has no claim to be treated with kid gloves. And we can disregard bleatings about respecting the dead, the feelings of his family and so forth. His many victims had families and feelings too.</p>
<p>Hawke was the worst opportunist and biggest phony (against a crowded field of competitors) that the Australian labour movement has yet produced. If we never see his like again, well and good.</p>

John Scott

Hawke: Labor’s Laval

<p>Ten years have gone by since the death of Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008), for much of his life a sort of unofficial socialist poet laureate, today most widely known as the lyricist of the song “Victor Jara” recorded by Arlo Guthrie – a homage to the martyred Chilean left wing writer and musician.</p>
<p>Although I think he is in little danger of being forgotten, for memories to remain green, it is necessary to water them occasionally.</p>
<p> He was an industrious writer of verse, prose and works for the stage, but I predict he will be remembered chiefly as a poet. And as a poet, he stands comparison with contemporaries and near contemporaries like Ted Hughes and W.H. Auden. As a student in the 1950s, he was drawn to jazz and blues; their riffs and rhythms are found throughout his work, although his lines are much more than just song lyrics.</p>
<p> A writer from the age of nine – when his first work for the stage, The Animals’ Brains Trust, was produced at his school – he passed through the Oxford University Poetry Society and New Statesman, in which he published the first ever interview with the Beatles, en route to a career that encompassed screenwriting (his anti-colonialist reworking of Robinson Crusoe taken from his novel Man Friday, filmed with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree, was a high point) and novels such as Wartime and a great deal of verse and prose intended for children.</p>
<p> His work for the stage included the anti-war classic US and the English-language version of Marat/Sade, both collaborations with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Tyger!, a celebration of his literary model, William Blake.</p>
<p> Often angry, often gently erotic, always compassionate, frequently at his most self-revelatory in his moments of English self-effacement but always buttressed by a strong moral and didactic purpose, he wanted to expand the poetic audience beyond the boundaries of literary coteries that were inevitably middle class and above.</p>
<p>“Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people”, he was fond of saying, as he set out to communicate with a public largely excluded by the cultural establishment. He read at rallies, in pubs and clubs and, increasingly in his later years, for children (he had six grandchildren and increasingly relied on them as his test audience).</p>
<p>His pacifism was, well, at war with his equally felt revolutionary impulses. Socialists would be happy with friendly revolutions in which the ruling class sensibly agreed to bow out peacefully. But examples from Charles I and Marie-Antoinette onward indicate that they never will – at least not until the relationship of forces is so overwhelmingly favourable to the rising class that they are left with little alternative. </p>
<p>Adrian Mitchell was, however, principally an artist. And the standards one observes with an artist are different from those one would adopt toward, say, a political current; some ambiguity and contradiction are inevitable, as they were with other revolutionary creators such as Mayakovsky or Rivera.</p>
<p>His sincere attempts at collaboration with organised socialist currents, as in the case of the International Marxist Group’s political underground paper Black Dwarf, were usually unsuccessful and led him to condemn “dogmatic men and automatic dogs”. </p>
<p>His political engagements thenceforth were those of an unaligned free radical; always available for readings at demonstrations or often simply as another face in the crowd. He was or became a confident public performer because of his public readings (he probably gave thousands of them), but was a naturally modest man who didn’t seek fame.</p>
<p>Sharing one of his best-known pieces, “To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)”, I was impressed recently by the passionate reaction – not just from people with memories of the era, but from people unborn at the time – to his biting, searing emotional commitment, which went beyond sorrow into rage and resistance. </p>
<p>It seemed that people saw in it not just the Vietnam War, but every imperialist war: Iraq, Afghanistan and other ruling class wars that do not necessarily take on military form (the war on the environment, the war on knowledge, the war on science and reason).</p>
<p>For as long as the struggle to replace an outworn and now carcinogenic social system endures, Adrian Mitchell’s works and the example of his personality – warm, indignant, combative, courageous – will be companions on our journey.</p>
<p>I have quoted little because I would like you to seek his works out for yourselves. His verse works 1954-1979 can be found in For Beauty Douglas. The volume On The Beach At Cambridge brings him further up to date. </p>
<p>The novels Wartime and Friday are out of print, as are US, Marat/Sade and Tyger!, but they could be found with some assiduous delving. In addition, much of his work is online; I refer you particularly to his remarkable performance of 11 June 1965, at the Albert Hall, of “To Whom It May Concern”, in which the intensity of an anger born from love is on full display.</p>

Remembering Adrian Mitchell, the socialist poet laureate

<p>The scene on which the sun rose in 1968 was one which, in the years since World War Two, had shown a remarkable recovery. Not a return to the 1930s, but a seemingly stable environment of rising living standards, a mixed economy, expanded opportunity, a welfare state and a liberal cultural climate. Above all, despite the Cold War and the contained threat of nuclear war, there was bourgeois self-confidence.</p>
<p>Establishment propagandists proclaimed the end of ideology, the end of class and revolution as the opiate of the intellectuals. The world of tomorrow was to be the recent past projected into the infinite future: consumerist, complacent, above all capitalist.</p>
<p>There were clouds on the horizon: civil rights and white racist backlash in the US, a rising unofficial strike movement in Britain, the intractable and, as it transpired that very year, unwinnable US war in Vietnam. </p>
<p>Local difficulties only, it was thought. By the end of the year, these illusions lay badly shattered. The next 10 years were years of serious class contestation: for badly rattled rulers, years of fear, for many millions of people around the world, years of hope. </p>
<p>If some of the revolutionary hopes aroused by 1968 have failed, or have failed so far, to come to fruition, how much more of a chimera was the fantasy world of the rulers and their apologists? </p>
<p>Neither side knew it, but 1968 marked the end of stasis and the beginning of a rolling crisis that still hasn’t ended. </p>
<p>On 30 January 1968, 300 student protesters from Poland’s National Theatre School and the University of Warsaw demonstrated for student rights and were clubbed by state-supported thugs. The beating initiated escalating protests, joined by the broader public including many workers, which shut down all of tertiary education. </p>
<p>In a process that will surprise few students of Polish politics, the Stalinist government of Wladyslaw Gomulka labelled the protesters “Zionists” (meaning in this context Jewish) and, under the supervision of interior minister Moczar, began an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign. By the end of the year, most remnants of the once imposing Jewish community of Poland had been forced out of the country. Among them was the heroic Red Orchestra leader Leopold Trepper, whose underground fight against Nazism had been rewarded with 10 years in a gulag.</p>
<p> Also on 30 January, the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front launched the Tet Offensive, which made it clear – to world public opinion, to the US antiwar movement and even to the more far-sighted among the US ruling class – that the “light at the end of the tunnel” was the burning of US initiative in the war and of LBJ’s presidency. </p>
<p>In West Germany in February, students from 108 universities rose up, demanding the removal of professors with Nazi pasts. For instance, at the University of Bonn they fought for the removal of the university president, a builder of concentration camps. </p>
<p>Also in February, three unarmed black students were murdered at a civil rights demonstration in Orangeburg, South Carolina. In March, students walked out of public schools in East Los Angeles, protesting against wide racial disparities in educational resources and conditions.</p>
<p>On 4 April, the US and the world were rocked by the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis, and Black America exploded in ghetto uprisings of righteous rage. Three weeks later, students at Columbia University occupied buildings and took admin staff as hostages.</p>
<p>Then, beginning in May and extending through June, Paris and much of France erupted. Detonated by students at Paris/Nanterre, initially over dormitory and fraternisation issues, the unrest led to confrontations with the brutal CRS security forces, barricades and pitched battles, and then to the bourgeois nightmare of a political general strike as millions of French workers downed tools and occupied workplaces.</p>
<p> President Charles de Gaulle, a bourgeois figure of some substance, was far more rattled by the events than he had been by World War Two or the Algerian war of independence. Describing the uprising as a pre-revolutionary situation, he fled to Germany, seeking assurances of military support from French troops stationed there if a working class uprising occurred. </p>
<p>However, the Stalinist-controlled CGT union federation settled for wage rises and some concessions on union recognition, and the situation was defused. But it was years before the French ruling class attempted serious attacks. Even now, 50 years later, they have to take account of the possible reaction to austerity measures.</p>
<p> August: Prague spring past and a withering winter to come; the last credible attempt at internal reform of “communism” was crushed by Brezhnev’s tanks. It was another nail in the coffin for Stalinism, adding to the betrayal of the French general strike. Notably, the sharp left turn of large numbers of mainly young people in 1968 bypassed official communism and the social democratic parties. </p>
<p>Instead, “groupuscules”, small revolutionary socialist propaganda groups, often of venerable lineage, went from dozens to hundreds, from hundreds to thousands, initiating a rediscovery of revolutionary thought that made bourgeois publishers happy to reissue revolutionary Marxist writings long buried under the Stalinist rubble.</p>
<p>Mexico City, 16 October: in an unforgettable display of dignified defiance, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, with bowed heads and clenched fists, affirmed their African-American identity and solidarity with victims of racism around the world, following in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali in their refusal to be well-behaved Black sports stars.</p>
<p> The Mexico Olympics also brought frightful massacres of university students as police, paratroopers and paramilitaries fired on a student demonstration, killing at least 100 unarmed protesters. The toll probably was several times that number.</p>
<p> The year ended with the ruling class shocked and psychologically destabilised, and with the oppressed throughout the world heartened and ready for further struggle after 12 months of events with no recent precedent. </p>
<p>Over the top journalistic appreciations of the year described it as a new 1848, but it wasn’t. Within a few years, the ruling class internationally embarked on a concerted counter-attack, signalled by the Chilean coup of 1973, a process only now beginning to run out of steam.</p>
<p>Will there be two, three, many 1968s? Certainly. Lenin described the revolutionary process as “mysterious”, and if it was mysterious to him, it must be more mysterious to most of us. But time and again the planets move into alignment and things happen. </p>
<p>The events of 1968 breathed new life into the far left around the world and contributed to the rise of a new revolutionary generation; the year underlined the international nature of revolutionary struggle; it spanned continents and social systems; it spared neither the imperialist rulers nor Stalinist satraps nor neo-colonial puppets. And it put revolution firmly back on the agenda. Despite backlash, a massive bourgeois propaganda war and our own mistakes, it remains there.</p>
<p>To close on a personal note: as a very minor spear carrier in the revolutionary opera – who began the year with a sound hatred of Cecil Rhodes, Henry Ford and particularly racism, but little else in the way of political furnishings – the events, for me as for millions of others, were life-changing and life-enhancing.</p>
<p>Despite Wordsworth’s ultimate rejection of the French Revolution, I can happily affirm: “Joy was it in that dawn to be alive; and to be young was very heaven”.</p>

1968, a year of wonders

<p>Old enough to have sat in the Kings’ Road Chelsea at the fag end of the ’60s and observed the passing parade of rock stars (“Hi Mick! Hi Keith!”) and members of the nobility and landed gentry making la passeggiata in their hugely expensive hippie outfits, and noting a decade later David Jones displays of high-priced punk regalia, I have long been clear about the inadequacy of merely cultural rebellion.</p>
<p>Styles and sounds, however superficially confrontational, are rapidly commodified and merchandised. And however much they may have their roots in subjectively sincere existential revolt, unless they are tied to liberatory movements – in the way some of the music of the ’60s was an accompaniment to the anti-war and civil rights movements – they will fail as rebellion, whatever their continuing merit as art.</p>
<p>All this was dealt with ably many moons ago by anarcho-surrealist George Melly in Revolt into Style – as you will discover should you find one of the few intact copies of a production job which gave “burst binding” a new meaning.</p>
<p>A younger member of our family got me the Jann Wenner biography Sticky Fingers for Christmas. Wenner co-founded Rolling Stone magazine. The biography explains the phenomenon whereby a music originating in barrel-houses and honky-tonks and performed by Memphis truck drivers and London gravediggers ended up in Studio 54 with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol, and in Spandex-bedecked caperers on MTV.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be the first person to note the more than coincidental co-emergence of rock and roll – a music compounded of electric urban blues and country music with a dash of pre-rock era pop – and the US civil rights movement.</p>
<p>Many white teenagers made contact with Black popular culture through music. And many white fans and performers were genuinely anti-racist, throughout the years when US radio was more segregated than a Birmingham bus prior to Rosa Parks.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t until the so-called British Invasion, and the repertoire of Motown (Beatles) and Chess (Stones) covers, that a mass white youth audience in the US intersected with a culture growing up all around them on a dusty part of the radio dial they weren’t used to visiting.</p>
<p>That’s when people like Wenner, a superficially liberal hustler, came in to package, homogenise, corporatise and de-fang the dangerously edgy music. Unlike the fanzines and early underground music mags, Rolling Stone was a corporate product from its founding in 1967. It had a commercial dependence on record company advertising, which conditioned the often fawning nature of its reviews and features.</p>
<p>You could be forgiven for thinking that rock music was invented by white people. Despite Rolling Stone having a Black readership roughly commensurate with the proportion of African-Americans in the general population, I doubt if more than one cover in 10 featured a Black artist – and even then that artist might be Michael Jackson at his whitest.</p>
<p>The ethos of the record business is tooth and claw capitalism (and actual, literal, gangster capitalism – see Roulette Records and its head Morris Levy, whose silent partner was the Genovese family, the model for Hesh in The Sopranos). And although the business was an equal-opportunity exploiter happy to steal even from white people, as ever, the burden fell more heavily on Black artists.</p>
<p>For example, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, finally assured that he would get songwriting royalties – including those accruing from Elvis Presley’s cover of “That’s All Right Mama” – got his children dressed up and went down to the HQ of music publisher Hill &amp; Range only to be told, “Oh, we think it would cost us less to defend a lawsuit than to just pay you, so no royalties for you”.</p>
<p>Music biz prominenten like Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, who did a great deal for Black artists like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, were musical plantation owners who signed Blacks to horrible contracts and became rich while many of the artists died in destitution.</p>
<p>Even the folk music movement, a revolt against the bland pop of the early 1960s, with its roots in the leftist tradition, was not resistant to the emollient effects of success, mainly meaning money.</p>
<p>Artists like Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones, who drew a line in the sand over touring apartheid-era South Africa or appearing in front of segregated audiences in the Jim Crow US south, have been de-radicalised to the point that they happily perform in Israel despite Palestinians requesting them not to.</p>
<p>But after all that – after the passage of a musical movement now mostly consigned to the record collections of nostalgics – people in revolt against the system will continue to come across things like Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Going To Come”, an aching evocation of both suffering and hope, or Creedence’s “Fortunate Son” about rich fratties like Donald Trump dodging the draft while poor kids were sent to Vietnam to die in their stead.</p>
<p>And they’ll get an inkling of the power of vernacular music to arouse and inspire the oppressed and to provide a backing track to struggle.</p>

Rock is dead, long live rock

<p>Onetime Canadian PM Jean Chretien got himself into hot water several years back. Believing himself off-mike at a political dinner, he remarked to the person next to him that what was standard practice in the US Congress would be jailable conduct in most other Western countries. When his remarks were leaked, there was much righteous indignation on the banks of the Potomac, but little attempt to rebut the essence of his message.</p>
<p>Perhaps he was thinking of little gems such as former house speaker John Boehner stalking the Congress with, yes, an actual chequebook, dispensing lobbyist-sourced largesse on the eve of an important vote; or of senators asking their secretaries if visiting constituents had donated to their campaigns. Answer “no”? No meeting with their senator for them …</p>
<p>Two of the most devastating drug plagues of recent years are directly traceable to the Babylonian corruptions of US politics. In the 1960s, the downer marketed in the US as Quaalude and in the UK and Australia as Mandrax (responsible for the deaths of thousands) was subjected to restrictions and ultimately taken off the market in 1984.</p>
<p>Attempts by organised crime to resume illicit production in India and Mexico were successfully stymied by the Drug Enforcement Agency targeting precursors. What was in danger of developing into a major abuse epidemic was stopped in its tracks; the first and so far only victory in the War on Drugs.</p>
<p>With the election of the Reagan Administration and the beginnings of the Ice epidemic, localised among bikers in the Pacific Northwest, the same people who had stopped Quaaludes presented a proposal to the Justice Department to ban production of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.</p>
<p>Called to a meeting in Washington, they expected discussions to be limited to their departmental superiors. But they found themselves confronted by an army of pharmaceutical lobbyists and Reagan donors. Facing a choice between stemming a manageable threat, and prioritising the profits of a larcenous industry, guess what? Pharmaceutical interests 1, public health interest 0. These drugs have destroyed lives and communities across the US, where they attach themselves to deindustrialisation, poverty and misery, making worse existing social breakdown.</p>
<p>An opiate epidemic, especially the heroin-like product Oxycontin, now overshadows the others. It is expected to claim 64,000 lives in the US this year. There was no demand and little medical use for Oxycontin – except for terminal cancer patients. But after aggressive promotion to the medical profession by Purdue Pharma, the producer of the drug, it was prescribed widely for low-level pain conditions previously managed via other, less powerful, but much less profitable medications.</p>
<p>In the early 1990s, the Purdue patents on milder pain treatments, its main assets, were about to expire. The company set about developing and getting regulatory approval for Oxycontin.</p>
<p>“From 1996 to 2001, American drug giant Purdue held more than 40 national ‘pain management symposia’ at picturesque locations, hosting thousands of American doctors, nurses and pharmacists”, writes Joanna Walters in the Guardian. “Health care professionals had been specially invited, whisked to the conferences to be drilled on promotional material about the firm’s new star drug, Oxycontin, and recruited as advocates, the US government later claimed.”</p>
<p>There was no sound medical reason for developing this product. But there were compelling commercial reasons and the company encountered little resistance from the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, being licensed by the US government to market the ultimate capitalist product.</p>
<p>Oxycontin addicted millions and killed cumulatively hundreds of thousands – often, people psychologically predisposed to addiction in areas of economic decline, such as the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia and the Midwest rustbelt.</p>
<p>The company was fined $600 million for misconduct; chicken feed set against the company’s $3 billion in annual revenues. So in a country where there are tens of thousands of mostly black prisoners doing long, and sometimes life, sentences for petty weed offences, a capitalist corporation can be licensed by government to kill tens of thousands of people yearly, sacrificed on the altar of profit.</p>
<p>Increasingly, day to day life under decaying capitalism resembles the plot line of the 1953 dystopian science fiction novel <em>The Space Merchants</em>, by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, in which the US Senate is a Mussolini-style corporate chamber (“the senator for Burpi-Cola” …) and it’s legal to sell morphine-laced cornflakes. I used to think of it as satire; now I realise it was prophecy!</p>
<p>Don’t like it? Don’t like capitalism.</p>

The space out merchants

<div>A common theme of paranoid, visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick was the manipulation of reality by the powerful to suppress any undesirable tendencies toward self-emancipation by the masses, through drugs (<em>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch </em>and<em> A Scanner Darkly</em>), gambling (<em>Solar Lottery</em>), permanent war hysteria (<em>The Penultimate Truth</em>) or corporate entertainment.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Downtrodden proles live in a squalor ameliorated by a fantasy existence produced by ruling class psychological conditioning. Check.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>In <em>The Three Stigmata</em>, published at the high tide of the Barbie age (1965) , it takes the form of Perky Pat/Barbie playsets and the drug Can-D, which for 15 minutes allows users to enter into a virtual reality experience.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>For a quarter of an hour, you can live in Perky Pat’s Beverly Hills mansion or Perky Pat’s sports car: the full “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” until the Can-D wears off and the user falls to earth in his/her roach-ridden hovel.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Sound familiar? It ought to.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>His extrapolation of trends in US society in the 1950s and ’60s has come to partial fulfilment in the age of reality TV, from which, it is pointless to deny, many derive comfort in an increasingly comfortless world.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>From out of this world, grotesque reality TV president Trump has emerged – a Gothic figure who openly boasts about sexual assault and who is a Perky Pat fantasy fulfilment figure to many of his followers.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>This cultural moment has produced apparently unending revelations of sexual extortions and impositions practised by powerful showbiz producers, stars and so forth, their victims usually powerless aspirants to film and stage careers.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>A film company under current conditions is a capitalist workplace, not fundamentally different from many other workplaces where sexual harassment abounds, and where the same dynamics of a top-down authoritarian system act as a licence for perpetrators.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Frederick Engels, a sharp observer of his world, including the sexual exploitation of the workforce by northern mill owners, would find the contemporary scene familiar.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>To the inhabitants of the ruling class ecosystem, their victims are just little objects to be manipulated.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>This is in the nature of power; this is the reality of a class society with ever more concentrated financial and political dominance in which a microscopic minority decide the destinies of billions. This is a world in which a bank that has just declared a profit of $6 billion can casually announce that it is vaporising the livelihoods of 6,000 people; a world in which decisions of fateful consequence for the future of the biosphere are in the hands of a few hundred thousand people to whom the next quarter’s profit projections vastly outweigh the future of, among others, their own grandchildren.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>To those who hear echoes of the <em>ancien régime</em>, a parasitic aristocracy dancing on the edge of the volcano, your hearing is good. Commenting on the Paradise Papers, the latest tax evasion racket of the 0.1 percent, an analyst said:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>“It won’t be lost on wealth managers and those in the offshore industry that we are reaching sort of French Revolution levels of inequality and injustice.”</div>
<div> </div>
<div>As long as power resides in a minority ruling class, it will be “abused”, i.e. used in ways that exceed the normative expectations of official culture and the legal system: wage theft, debt peonage, constant surveillance and invigilation, sexual harassment and so forth.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>But the very existence of power is an abuse. Although it may be a distant goal, we have to strive toward a society in which no individual has power over any other individual.</div>

Hawke: Labor’s Laval

Remembering Adrian Mitchell, the socialist poet laureate

1968, a year of wonders

Rock is dead, long live rock

The space out merchants

Sci-fi not so fictional in our abusive capitalist world

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