On the way to downtown San Francisco on a rainy Saturday morning, the train is buzzing with energy. Notices at the stations announce “significant delays due to overcrowding”. Nearly all of us have the same destination: The Bay Area Women’s March.
Train passengers compliment each others’ placards, swap news from marches in other cities, and quote the weirdest phrases from Trump’s inauguration address. Three young women with hand-made signs give me beaming grins as I take their photo. “Thanks Trump!”reads one of the signs. “You’ve made me an activist”.
This is a common theme over the weekend. On Friday night, several thousand people attended the San Francisco counter-inauguration. “I think the election was a wakeup call for people like me”, said Mimi, a young woman who works in advertising. “People who haven’t been as active as they should have been, if not now, when?”
The crowd at the Women’s March tops a hundred thousand, filling the streets around United Nations Plaza to hear speeches and music. We march down Market Street as the rain intensifies – but nobody cares about the weather. Women chant: “Our bodies, our choice!”Men respond: “Your bodies, your choice!”
Demonstrators draw the links between all of the groups who will suffer under conservative attacks. “I’m here because I support equal rights for everybody”, says Russell, a flight attendant. “It’s not just about women, it’s about all minorities.”
Anti-racist chants are popular, too: “No borders, no nations! Stop Deportations!”and “No Trump, no KKK – No racist USA!”
Corey works in community radio. “Trump brought the racists out – I hate to say the word, but in a way he normalised it. We need to make them scared. We need to make racists afraid again.”His sign says simply: “Punch Nazis”.
Rhianon is a doctor. “I’m here because I think too many of our fundamental values are under threat”, she says. “We’ve become too complacent.”Her patients will be affected by Trump’s attacks. “Many of them are uninsured, poor, undocumented. A lot of people depend on the ACA [Obamacare] and all of that is threatened.”
Most agree that we need to keep organising, that this is just the beginning of the fight. In homage to Carrie Fisher – or maybe just because this is a city full of nerds – the starbird symbol of the Rebel Alliance emblazons many flags and placards. “A woman’s place is in the resistance”, says one sign, over a stylized Leia Organa. 
“We have to speak up and make our voices heard”, says Christen, a restaurant server. “We have to protect women’s rights, protect Planned Parenthood. We’ve got a long fight ahead.”

Kate Jeffreys

‘A long fight ahead’: San Francisco mobilises against Trump

SAN FRANCISCO – Anti-Trump protests rippled through the USA on Tuesday night and Wednesday, after an election that left many in shock. As soon as the result was called, students from UC Berkeley left their dorms to march through Berkeley and Oakland, chanting “Fuck Donald Trump!”
From east coast to west, thousands of students and workers expressed their outrage at the farcical election of this overgrown frat-boy – a man who brags about sexual assault and brain-vomits the kind of bigoted hate speech that most members of the ruling class prefer to keep with their private yachts.
Hundreds marched in Chicago; thousands in Boston. In New York City, protesters blocked off the streets around Trump Tower. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland, Seattle; all around the country people are flooding the streets to say that Donald Trump is not their president.
In liberal San Francisco, where I work, election night started with a mix of optimism and anxiety. Gradually, anxiety turned to dread, then despair and resignation as more and more states were called for the Republicans. It seems like nobody was prepared for this.
On Wednesday morning, grey-faced tech workers nursed their hangovers and commiserated. Meanwhile, high-school students around the San Francisco Bay Area led the way.
Berkeley High School students took to the streets around 9am, joined by several teachers. They marched to UC Berkeley, where university students joined them. Defiant, they waved Mexican flags, chanted and climbed the base of the Campanile.
After work on Wednesday, I join a thousand or so protesters on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. The march is in full swing by the time I get there, and I jog to catch up.
Immediately, the flat despair that infected me during the day is washed away by a joyful energy. The protesters chant and whistle as we march toward the Castro. There’s a chant for every conceivable topic. “Black Lives Matter!”, “Water Is Life!”, “Pussy Grabs Back!”
Jim is a white guy in his mid-thirties. “I was at home by myself”, he tells me. “Crying. I’m new here, I moved from Florida, and I don’t have friends yet. But being here …” He looks like he’s about to cry again, but I think he feels the same way I do – touched by the cheerful defiance of the crowd, the heartfelt solidarity expressed in chants, banners and placards.
“I don’t know why people would vote for Trump”, Jim says. “He’s a misogynist, a racist”. We talk for a block or so. He voted for Clinton, but he supported Bernie Sanders. “For me, the turning point was seeing Trump making fun of that reporter for being disabled. That’s what made me say, ‘Never Trump’.”
Ariel came to the rally with a friend, straight from work in her lab coat. “I’m here to express my outrage at the results of this election”, she says. “This man was supported by the KKK.” Ariel is a doctor. She tells me that her patients are underserved by the healthcare system. “They’re the ones who will suffer from this”, she says. “I’m here for them too. I’m so scared about what will happen to my patients.”
Ariel talks a lot about her fear. She’s scared, she says, over and over; but she’s smiling. It’s hard not to, as people stuck in traffic honk their support and waves of delighted cheers surge through the crowd in response.
I move through the march. It has doubled in size and it keeps growing. Again and again, demonstrators describe their confusion, grief and anger – while grinning like mad. The march feels like a carnival now. Toddlers and their parents wave from apartment buildings.
An orange-faced, blond-toupéed piñata bobs above the crowd on a pole. People take ecstatic selfies and lean out of bars to shout along with us: “Fuck Donald Trump!” We call back to them, telling them to join us, and some of them do. By the time we reach the Mission district, I look back down the street and realise I can’t see where the march starts or where it ends.
“This is history”, one of the march organisers calls. “Not this election – this.” She gestures at the crowd, and we cheer.
This election was a complete shitshow from beginning to end. The fact that this race was fought between Trump and Clinton – the two most unpopular presidential candidates in US history – reveals capitalist “democracy” for the sham that it is.
I’ll be proud to stand with students and workers who reject the results of this farce, and want to fight for something better. Protests, strikes, sit-ins and walkouts – these are the real politics of hope.

Anti-Trump protests spread across the US

We live in an age of racism. In Australia, the federal and Western Australian governments’ attempt to drive Aboriginal people in remote communities from their land is only the latest episode in the war on Indigenous people.
In the United States, there is an epidemic of police slayings of predominantly Black young men. In Europe, fascist and far-right parties have gained ground, attacks on the Roma people continue and anti-Muslim racism against refugees and migrants is extreme.
It’s clear that this is a global problem.
How did we get to this and how do we change it? Socialists locate the beginnings of racism in the birth of capitalism and argue that to truly challenge racism, we have to challenge the system that produces and benefits from it.
Capitalism and slavery
Nineteenth century revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described the realities of British industrialisation: child labour, the horrors of the mines and the mills, and the lives lost to the appalling working and living conditions of the time. Accompanying this was the mass kidnapping of African people and their sale into slavery in the colonies of the Americas.
“The veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal”, wrote Marx in Capital. “Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
Between 1500 and 1870, slave traders in the service of European powers kidnapped 12 million people from the coasts of Africa. A nightmarish journey across the Atlantic followed. The prisoners were chained together, unable to move and barely able to breathe. One in ten died in transit.
On arrival in North and South America or the Caribbean, plantation owners bought the survivors in a sickening imitation of the sale of livestock: “The purchasers examined them for defects, looked at the teeth, pinched the skin, sometimes tasted the perspiration to see if the slave’s blood was pure and his health as good as his appearance”, wrote historian C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins.
Work on the plantations was ceaseless and brutal. To keep human beings in subjugation, says James, required “a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism”. Slaves were forbidden to read and write, to gather in groups, or to use religion to express a common cause. Any actions that hinted of organisation had to be stamped out.
Around one-fifth of those sold into slavery died within a year of their purchase – worked or beaten to death.
Racism
It’s tempting to assume that vile racism on the part of the planters brought about this monstrous episode in history. Yet, as Eric Williams wrote in his classic 1944 work Capitalism and Slavery, “slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”.
The first source of labour in the new world had been white indentured servants. People who wanted a better life than that offered by the dismal prospects of Britain at the time would, in exchange for passage to the Americas, sell themselves into the service of a wealthier landowner for years at a time.
But this form of unfree labour could not satisfy the needs of the growing colonies. Small farmers were pushed aside by the rapacious encroachment of the plantation system, which produced not for subsistence, but for the mass export of monoculture crops. From the 1680s onwards, African slaves became the main source of labour on such plantations.
“The reason was economic, not racial”, Williams wrote. “[I]t had to do not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour … [the planters] would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labour. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”
A scaffolding of racism grew around the slave system to justify and reinforce it. Generations of people grew up in a society in which the word “Negro” was synonymous with the word “slave”. Racism was born.
All men are created equal?
The plantation, factory and slave ship owners of the 18th century made immense profits through the triangular trade.
“The slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured goods”, wrote Williams. “These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit, in exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home country.”
This colonial produce supplied the raw materials for industrialisation in England. In this way, the triangular trade acted as a motor for the development of capitalism: “By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade.”
Thus, as Robin Blackburn writes in The making of New World slavery, the emerging system of capitalism – characterised in theory by the sale of free labour on the market – built “one of the largest systems of slavery in human history”.
Along with this contradiction came a clash of ideology. The American Revolutionaries raised the ideals of human rights, democracy and equality. Radicals such as Thomas Paine supported abolition of slavery. But the champions of profit did not.
“How could the founding fathers of the US – most of whom owned slaves themselves – reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty?”, asks US socialist Lance Selfa. “The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill … to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers of the time argued that Blacks weren’t really ‘men’, they were a lower order of being.”
The defeat of slavery in the latter half of the 19th century did not bring equality for Black people; nor did it end racism. Rather, the ruling class of a transformed United States adapted racism for use in a new context. Racism, argues Selfa, “no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified second class status for Blacks as wage labourers and sharecroppers.”
Colonialism
The ideology of white superiority fit neatly with the age of empire. Rudyard Kipling exalted those who would “take up the white man’s burden”, imposing colonial will on “new-caught, sullen peoples – half devil and half child”. World powers competed for territory and resources, justifying their part in the scramble for Africa, and the conquests of Asia and the Middle East, with a racist narrative in which white heroes brought “civilisation” to lesser peoples.
Racism supported the British colonial project in Australia – an immense land grab that was subsequently justified by denying the existence of Aboriginal peoples. Although Terra Nullius was constantly disproved by the courageous resistance of Indigenous people, the British colonists steadily expanded their settlements, forcing the original inhabitants from their land.
The developing wool industry, and the need for vast tracts of grazing land for sheep, prompted some of the worst massacres of Aboriginal people in the 1830s and 1840s as the squatters pushed hundreds of thousands of people from the flat grasslands of eastern Australia.
As the Australian colonies grew, and with them their demand for labour, the emerging ruling class changed its policy in some locations. In response to the needs of industry, Aboriginal people were effectively enslaved, rather than exterminated.
A pseudoscience emerged to justify the actions of empire all over the world, and to refine the concept of “race” into its modern form of a set of biologically inherited characteristics.
Fighting racism, fighting the system
Progressive biologist Stephen Jay Gould, in The mismeasure of man, debunked the notion that race correlates with intelligence or mental capacity; and the work of scientists such as Richard Lewontin has shown that race is not a meaningful way to categorise people genetically. But simply disproving these poisonous theories is not enough to get rid of racism. Racism was born from the economic needs of capitalism and persists today because capitalism still exists.
Today, racism is still used to used to justify land theft and war, to distract people from attacks on their rights and living conditions, and, importantly, to turn working people against each other.
Divide and rule has been around a long time. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass described the process in 1866:
“The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each.”
Today, owing largely to the efforts of anti-racist movements, voicing a belief in the biological inferiority of non-whites is unpopular. Instead, the terrain has shifted to cultural racism: Muslims oppose democracy, Aborigines are bad parents, and other lies. But the function of the ideology is the same.
Identifying the roots of racism, and the reasons it persists, gives us a powerful tool in the struggle against it. If we know that these ideas are produced by a social and economic system that needs oppression and subjugation to function, we know that we need to fight this system if we are to challenge racism. Likewise, any genuine struggle against capitalism must be anti-racist and stand in solidarity with those subject to it.

The link between capitalism and racism

The latest climate research shows that carbon emissions continue to rise at a frightening rate. The Global Carbon Project reported on 21 September that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production increased by 2.3 percent in the last year – the highest level of emissions in human history.
The World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin reports record concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the highest annual increase in concentrations since 1984. The WMO report also details an “unprecedented” rate of ocean acidification, as the world’s oceans absorb more than a quarter of all carbon emissions.
These levels of emissions, if they continue, leave the planet, its ecosystems and human populations with a grim future. As the average global temperature increases, there will be more extreme and unpredictable weather events, reduced biodiversity and uncertain prospects for food production. Small island states – especially the atoll island nations of the Pacific and Indian oceans – face “partial or virtually total inundation” from rises in sea levels, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In the face of this crisis, world leaders are paralysed by their allegiance to the profit system. The UN climate summit in New York on 23 September, like previous UN summits, produced a deluge of bluster and rhetoric with no binding agreements to cut emissions. Faced with a choice of protecting people or profit, governments time and time again favour the interests of energy giants, industrialists and resource corporations.
Graça Machel, widow of Nelson Mandela, addressed the summit with damning remarks. “There is a huge mismatch between the magnitude of the challenge and the response we heard here today”, she said. “The scale is much more than we have achieved.”
Proponents of the status quo like to tell us that climate change is a “very complex issue” that workers, the poor and the disenfranchised couldn’t possibly understand, let alone make rational decisions about. Even those establishment figures who admit that global warming is a problem cling to profit-generating fossil fuels as a source of energy, advocating delusional non-solutions like “clean coal”.
Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE), an Australian-based climate think tank, shows, in a series of plans for stationary energy, transport, agriculture and building design, that the technology to meet energy requirements solely with renewables already exists. Wind turbines and small- and large-scale solar storage technology could supply Australia with reliable, 24-hour energy.
We do not need to choose between jobs and the environment. Transitioning to a zero-emissions economy would create jobs, not destroy them. The kind of change that BZE proposes would need engineers, labourers, town planners, architects, social scientists, trainers, and dozens of other types of skilled and unskilled workers to implement. Skilling-up and retraining people to perform these jobs would require expansion of university and TAFE courses as well.
The problem isn’t the technical viability of renewable energy technology, nor is it the social aspects of transforming the economy. Rather, the barrier to a zero-emissions economy is capitalism’s drive for profit.
In 2008, economist Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review, estimated that an investment of 2 percent of global GDP per year could stabilise atmospheric carbon concentrations at 500 to 550 parts per million. Two percent of GDP seems like a tiny sacrifice in the face of the catastrophic consequences of inaction. But as we see in successive world climate summits, profit overrides rationality.
The US government consistently refuses to commit to even the most minimal of binding emission reduction targets, arguing that reductions should be “voluntary”. This, of course, means they simply won’t happen. The Australian government’s attitude is even worse. Any administration knows that its primary task is ensuring the steady flow of profits of the corporations it serves – especially the powerful energy giants.
The IPCC estimates that 80 percent of the world’s fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground if we are to have any chance of avoiding a rise of more than 2°C in average global temperatures. Following through with this would write off $US 20 trillion in assets of the world’s largest corporations.
The energy giants have no intention of leaving fossil fuels where they belong. In March, ExxonMobil reported to shareholders that it intends to use all of its current hydrocarbon reserves and more, and predicted that carbon-based fuels would continue to meet about three-quarters of global energy needs through 2040. In May, Shell told investors that it expects high energy prices, and reaffirmed the market value of its own hydrocarbon reserves.
With governments firmly on the side of these profiteers, summits and global talks are simply forums for blame-shifting, delaying tactics and public relations. We need to reject the profit system and look outside it for ways to deal with climate change.

Governments full of hot air on climate

When we say “class struggle”, the images that come to mind are usually of strikes and picket lines, of go-slows and mass meetings, of union flags carried proudly on demonstrations.
Even in times of relative industrial peace, workers and bosses engage in a constant tug-of-war over the conditions and terms of labour. The fight for time is part of this: workers fight for the right to have a life outside work and bosses fight to extract more working hours out of our day.
In Australia, the building trades won the eight-hour day in 1856. But today, the slogan of “Eight hours’ work, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest” seems anachronistic. We still struggle to protect our time from erosion by the demands of work. A 2013 study by the Australia Institute revealed that 3.8 million employees don’t take a lunch break. And while official figures put the number of unemployed Australians at more than 750,000, 14 percent of the employed are working more than 50 hours per week.
In a system ruled by profit, the technological advances that should improve our lives actually make it harder for workers to keep our leisure time our own. It would be hard to imagine a switchboard operator or a machinist eating while working, but 3.4 million Australian employees manage to do so; and one-quarter check email outside of working hours.
In the information technology industry, we can do a lot of our work from home with a computer and an internet connection. Many IT support workers are rostered “on call”, meaning that in return for a (usually pitiful) daily allowance, they are expected to keep themselves available for a call or email from work at any moment of the day or night. Modern technology means that even your day off might belong to your employer.
Time, alienation and ideology
Capitalist work processes demand a constant awareness of time, and of how we should or should not be spending it.
Our education system instils this awareness in young people, in preparation for work. At school we are taught to arrive at the same time every day, to wait in line, to work on one subject for exactly forty-five minutes until the bell tells us to stop and (less successfully) to hand things in on time.
At work, we must account for our time to our supervisors. We must take breaks when we’re told to, stay at our desks or work sites until permitted to leave and perform our work to deadlines. Time is of the essence. The experience of work gives us a continual sense of anxiety about time, which comes directly from the way work is organised under capitalism.
Workers have no control over the way we produce things – instead, our ability to work is a commodity, which we sell to a boss in exchange for wages. When capitalists buy any commodity, they need to know how much of it they are buying. Labour power, as the most important commodity on the market, has to be quantified – packaged for sale into hours, minutes and seconds.
Once labour power has been quantified, capitalists want as much of it as they can get for as low a price as possible. Bosses use all kinds of measures to achieve this end, including unpaid overtime, increasing the pace of production and cracking down on breaks. This makes work stressful, alienating and oppressive.
Frederick Taylor, the founder of “scientific management”, observed in 1911: “Whenever an American workman plays baseball, or an English workman plays cricket, he does his very best to make the largest possible number of runs … Any man who fails to give out all there is in him in sport is treated with contempt by those around him.
“When the same workman returns to work, instead of using every effort to turn out the largest possible amount of work, he plans to do as little as he safely can … if he were to do his best, he would be abused by his fellow-workers, even more than if he had proved himself a ‘quitter’ in sport.”
As a proponent of the profit system, Taylor could not understand that while playing sport with friends is an enjoyable collective activity that we choose to take part in, labour under capitalism is alienated: we don’t get to decide how to play the game, so why should we care who wins?
Taylor devoted his efforts to the science of making people work faster, advocating an analysis of the most minute physical motions involved in manufacturing processes. A long succession of theorists on productivity followed in his wake. As employers implemented these techniques, they divided the labour process into tasks so small as to be meaningless to the individuals performing them. No wonder people would rather play cricket.
Capitalism supports such profiteering techniques with ideology, elevating anxiety and stress about time to a moral code. We must be productive. We must be efficient. We must perform.
Changing conceptions of time
This finely honed conception of time is unique to capitalism. Pre-industrial societies saw time quite differently, measuring intervals in terms of natural events, or domestic and agricultural tasks. British historian E.P. Thompson, in the 1967 essay “Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism”, identified descriptions of lengths of time such as “a rice-cooking” and “less than the time in which maize is not completely roasted”.
A day might be divided into intervals by a combination of the perceived movements of the sun and the tasks of the day – letting the goats out to graze and so on. Different cultures had their own ways of measuring and thinking about time.
Industrial capitalism required, and developed alongside, technological advances in time measurement. The historian Lewis Mumford even suggested that the clock, rather than the steam-engine, should be regarded as the key breakthrough in industrialisation.
The clock was “a new kind of power-machine, in which the source of power and its transmission were of such a nature as to ensure the even flow of energy throughout the works and to make possible regular production and a standardised product”. The clock allowed capitalists to coordinate the production process, matching workers with the machinery they used. The precise measurement of time was as vital to the development of industry as were precise measurements of length, volume and weight.
The rising bourgeoisie (the capitalist class) had to inculcate workers with these new ways of thinking about time. This didn’t come automatically – as late as 1835, one theorist of the factory system complained:
“It is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft operations, into useful factory hands. After struggling for a while to conquer their listless or restive habits, they either renounce the employment spontaneously, or are dismissed by the overlookers on account of inattention.”
Nineteenth century revolutionary Friedrich Engels vividly described in The condition of the working class in England the experience of British factory life. The work was “tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year.”
Managers and overseers had to enforce time discipline strictly: the factory worker “must not take a moment’s rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines …
“Here ends all freedom in law and in fact. The operative must be in the mill at half-past five in the morning; if he comes a couple of minutes too late, he is fined; if he comes ten minutes too late, he is not let in until breakfast is over, and a quarter of the day’s wages is withheld, though he loses only two and one-half hours’ work out of twelve. He must eat, drink, and sleep at command. For satisfying the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least possible time absolutely required by them … The despotic bell calls him from his bed, his breakfast, his dinner.”
In the textile mills and engineering workshops of the nineteenth century, bosses used every dirty trick they could think of to cheat workers out of more of their time. A witness from Dundee said, “the clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression”.
Some factory masters tried to prevent workers from being able to tell the time at all. One worker recalled: “We worked as long as we could see in summer time, and I could not say at what hour it was that we stopped. There was nobody but the master and the master’s son who had a watch, and we did not know the time. There was one man who had a watch. It was taken from him and given into the master’s custody because he had told the men the time of day.”
Middle class moralists directed an endless stream of time-related propaganda at the working class to enforce discipline, productivity and social order. This propaganda didn’t stop once workers left the factories and the mills; its scope extended into people’s leisure time as well. John Foster, a Baptist minister and essayist, wrote in his “Essay on the evils of popular ignorance” about the scandalous behaviour of manual workers who were left with “several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please”:
“We shall often see them just simply annihilating those portions of time. They will for an hour, or for hours altogether lie down on a bank or hillock, yielded up to utter vacancy and torpor … or collected in groups by the road side … practising some impertinence, or uttering some jeering scurrility, at the expense of persons going by.”
Time in the modern economy
While the structure of the economy and the nature of work have changed since Engels’ day, the moralising tone of time ideology has not. Intrusive attitudes towards workers’ use of time are alive and well.
Just as contemporary moralists preach about our sexual preferences and drinking habits, they also scrutinise our punctuality (or lack of it) and the way we choose to spend our personal time.
“I believe in a government that rewards those who work the hardest, not those who complain the loudest”, said Julia Gillard in her prime ministerial acceptance speech in 2010. “The people who play by rules, set their alarms early, stand by their neighbours and love their country.”
In their wildest dreams, bosses fantasise about employing workers with these qualities: obedience, self-sacrifice, credulity and punctuality. Unfortunately for the capitalist class, workers are human beings, not robots.
We can see the struggle over time in the modern capitalist economy – in call centres, for example, a type of workplace that people are determinedly unenthusiastic about showing up to.
Analysts for the customer service industry cite punctuality in call centres as a big problem, although they prefer to use management-speak such as “team productivity challenge”. Companies have to offer “incentives” (obviously these incentives don’t include decent pay) to workers to coax them out of bed in the morning.
“It can be a challenge getting those outside the call centre industry to understand this”, complains David Bradshaw, vice president of a Canadian telemarketing company. “You are essentially giving incentives to people for the basic requirements of the job (showing up on time for work).”
The pressures of capitalist competition mean that business owners are constantly trying to outdo each other. Workers are pressured to work faster, to subordinate their physical and mental needs to the requirements of their jobs and to exploit every fraction of every second.
A look at the work process in modern call centres – which some have called “electronic sweatshops” – shows a reality not so far removed from Engels’ descriptions of oppressive, alienating factory work in the 19th century. One study of UK call centres says this about the experience of the typical operator:
“In all probability, work consists of an uninterrupted and endless sequence of similar conversations with customers she never meets. She has to concentrate hard on what is being said, jump from page to page on a screen, making sure that the details entered are accurate and that she has said the right things in a pleasant manner.
“The conversation ends and as she tidies up the loose ends there is another voice in her head. The pressure is intense because she knows her work is being measured, her speech monitored, and it often leaves her mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted.”
Call centre managers use the most intricate monitoring techniques to control their workers’ time, literally to the second. Computer systems measure the amount of time workers spend handling a call, gathering their thoughts between calls, entering information into a database, taking meal breaks, even going to the toilet. Throughput targets pressure workers to churn ceaselessly through call after call.
One UK call centre introduced a “talk and type” policy which demanded that workers complete their data entry while talking on the phone. Under “call quality” monitoring systems, with the constant awareness that their every word is being recorded, workers must not let their tone of voice slip even for an instant to convey boredom or irritation.
The effects of management policies like these are well documented, call centre workers disproportionately suffering from work-related mental illness and depression.
The oppressive nature of time under capitalism, compelling us to live our lives subject to the tyranny of the bell and the clock, is yet another reason why this is an inhumane system that needs to be demolished.

A brief history of time

Dozens of people gathered in Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall on 6 September to protest the Abbott government’s proposed “anti-terror” laws and to oppose foreign intervention in Iraq.
Co-organiser Tasnim Sammak linked the Abbott government’s calls for intervention in the Middle East to domestic politics – in particular, the unpopularity of the Liberals’ horror budget. “They are using Iraq and Syria to distract from domestic issues”, she said. “And they are playing on stereotypes. The Australian people should be concerned: these laws are giving ASIO huge spying powers. We don’t know their extent. It is an issue of privacy, of civil liberties. We call ourselves a democracy, but we are losing democracy every day.”
Mohammed Ramahi, 25, is an Australian-born Palestinian. “I get told every day to go back to my own country”, he told Red Flag. “I’ve spoken to people who’ve been kicked off flights, detained and had to explain every photo in their phone. Everyone deserves rights, and Tony Abbott is taking away every one of them.”
Asil, 17, shares Mohammed’s courage and passion. “I call myself Asil al-Iraqi”, she said. “I’m a peace activist. I’m here to say no to war.” We talked about how the climate of fear affects her: “I feel so unsafe. I feel that this government doesn’t care about people.”
Asil took the microphone and addressed the small crowd: “Iraqi children used to play outside. Now they can’t. Iraqis are afraid to go outside. Iraqi children see guns and tanks every day. If you go to school you must hug your mother goodbye because you might not come back.”

Speaking out against war and racism

Australia’s pensioners are already struggling. Yet the message to working class people from the Abbott government’s budget is clear: when a lifetime of wage work has used you up, and your body and mind are too worn out to generate more profits, to hell with you.
A Salvation Army report tells the story of 65-year-old pensioner Agnes. After suffering back and neck injuries, Agnes was unable to continue caring for her husband, who was moved into a nursing home. This took a devastating chunk out of Agnes’ income, as the couple were forced to use her husband’s part of the pension to pay for his care.
At least Agnes, at 65, actually qualifies for the age pension. Under Abbott’s changes, the retirement age will be lifted to 70, taking precious years away from working people’s lives.
In the December 2013 quarter, the official poverty line for a married couple with no kids was $575.55 per week; the pension for a couple in this situation scraped in above it at $671.40. But stories like Agnes’s show that in reality, someone surviving on a pension alone is one serious medical problem, one big-ticket appliance malfunction, one family emergency away from destitution.
Eve, another pensioner mentioned in the Salvation Army report, is isolated and housebound due to mobility problems. For this 80-year-old single woman, without transport, medical appointments are greatly stressful. When Eve’s washing machine broke down, her laundry began to pile up. She was forced to turn to charity for a replacement.
Australia’s older people already experience one of the worst rates of poverty in the developed world. A Bank of America Merrill Lynch report on ageing populations places Australia 57th in a global ranking of countries by income security in old age. The report illustrates that even before Abbott’s attacks on pensioners, working class people suffer the indignities of poverty in their later years.
The federal budget proposal to change the way increases to the age pension are indexed will make this situation even worse. Previously, pension increases have been based on average male wages. Transferring this indexation to CPI increases will, over the long term, cut pensions catastrophically in real terms.
The Australian Council of Social Service estimates that Abbott’s indexation changes will reduce pensions by about $80 within a decade. In May, the Australian Financial Review reported an even more damning analysis, which estimates that pensioners would be getting 35 percent less than they otherwise would have in around 30 years’ time. A couple would receive a full basic pension of $63,000 per year, instead of $97,000 under the arrangements prior to Abbott’s attacks.
Ian Yates, chief executive of the Council for the Ageing, says the changes are harsher than the recommendation of the Commission of Audit that the age pension be set at 28 percent of average weekly earnings. “At least it was linked to wages”, says Yates.
The federal government says the changes to the pension will save around $500 million over five years. To put this in perspective, Mark Wakeham of Environment Victoria criticises the budget for continuing to grant $10 billion in fossil fuel subsidies to big polluters every year.
If the message wasn’t already clear, it is now. While the Abbott government has been swamped with complaints from angered pensioners, this isn’t just an attack on older people – it’s an attack on workers. Abbott is telling workers that, after a lifetime of contributing to the economy, paying taxes and working hard to support ourselves and our families, we will have no dignity in retirement.
If the Liberals get their way, we’ll be discarded like broken machinery.­­

Pensioners discarded like broken machinery

Abbott and Hockey have a vision for toll roads, dirty energy and environmental destruction.
Showing our political leaders’ disdain for both the environment and our health, the 2014-15 budget pulls federal funding from state public transport. Federal funds have been scrapped for urban rail projects including Melbourne Metro, the Brisbane Cross River Trail and rail networks in Perth. Instead, the $50 billion infrastructure package will go towards funding new motorways in every state.
This budget, according to Mark Wakeham of Environment Victoria, is “a freeway builder’s dream”. And in the context of global climate crisis and the highest rate of carbon emissions in human history, more freeways are the last thing we need.
In May, the OECD reported in The Cost of Air Pollution: Health Impacts of Road Transport that between 2005 and 2010, the number of Australian deaths from air pollution rose by 68 percent. 1483 people died from air pollution in 2010. This is the other road toll, and it killed more people than did traffic accidents in the same year.
“It is pretty clear where the government’s ideological bench is”, said Ben Pearson from Greenpeace after Abbott and Hockey released their destructive budget. “They’re not interested in dealing with climate change … at a time when fuel for ordinary motorists is going to go up because the indexation has been unfrozen, the mining industry continues to have a fuel tax credit which gives it billions of dollars a year in subsidies … those are big industries that we’re told are extremely profitable - they can pay for their own fuel.”
Abbott has abandoned even the pretence of investing in renewable energy. His budget cuts $1.3 billion from ARENA, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which the Coalition had previously claimed to support. The cuts leave ARENA, which issues development grants for new technologies like concentrated solar energy, with an uncertain future.
The government is also attempting to shut down the CEFC (Clean Energy Finance Corporation), and has scrapped the $500 million program to provide subsidised solar energy for low-income households. Greg Hunt’s promised $100 million for “solar towns” has become $2 million for sports clubs and scout halls to build a few solar panels in some marginal electorates.
Instead of renewable energy, if Abbott gets his way, it’s business as usual for fossil fuels. Abbott and his state counterpart Denis Napthine will unveil $50 million worth of grants for brown coal projects in the La Trobe Valley.
The Abbott budget is a step backwards for a country that already ranks 11th in the world for emissions of carbon dioxide per capita. This means we’re doing worse per head than the United States, which alone accounts for 17 percent of the world’s emissions. Even the conservative IEA (International Energy Association), of which Australia is a member, calls for transforming the world energy system to replace fossil fuels with renewables. “A radical change of course at the global level is long overdue”, says IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven.
Australia’s pre-budget renewables initiatives were heavily corporatised and market-oriented, and would not have delivered the dramatic restructuring of industry we’ll need to stop irreversible climate change. Many of the proposals ARENA received were from mining companies that sought, through using off-grid electricity, to lower their energy costs in the remote landscapes they’re digging up. But the government’s moves to scrap investment in renewable energy reflect Abbott’s aggressive anti-environmentalism.
Abbott has appointed a climate change denier, former Caltex Australia chairman Dick Warburton, to review Australia’s (already inadequate) target to generate 20 percent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020. Warburton’s sole credentials for his posting seem to be his extensive experience sitting in corporate boardrooms, and his willingness to make an idiot of himself in the service of the coal industry.
Barely two months into his prime ministership, Abbott abolished the Climate Commission, the Climate Change Authority and the Minister for Science. And in keeping with the Liberals’ approach to scientific inquiry (i.e. “stuff it”), the CSIRO also took a hit of more than $110 million in the federal budget.
The ditching of renewables, continued handouts to mining bosses and obsession with building more and more roads show that this government has as much regard for the environment as it does for the human beings who depend on it.

Liberals stuff the environment

The tool we use to think, write and talk about society – language – is contested.
In Death Sentence, his polemic against corporate and bureaucratic language, former political speechwriter Don Watson lamented the decay of political and corporate language into impenetrable sludge. “All kinds of institutions cannot pass on the simplest information without also telling us that they are contemporary, innovative and forward-looking”, he wrote.
It’s not just about bad writing or stupid marketing buzz words – irritating as these are. The same sterile language euphemises war, famine, brutality and exploitation. Journalists, politicians and others seek to desensitise us to the horrific, to cover the destruction of human lives with a few carefully chosen stock phrases.
Asylum seekers who arrive by boat are dubbed UMAs – “unauthorised maritime arrivals”. Those whose claims are denied become “unlawful non-citizens” – like Josefa Rauluni, a Fijian man who, in despair after being told he would be deported, jumped to his death from a first-floor balcony in Villawood detention centre in December 2010.
According to the Department of Immigration, Mr Rauluni was detained “during a routine compliance operation” because he had “failed to make departure arrangements” from Australia.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) describes itself as “fostering global monetary cooperation”, “helping countries restore macroeconomic stability”, and other nonsense phrases. This is the organisation that, along with the World Bank, ran the “structural adjustment programs” that sent developing countries into chasms of debt and their populations into brutal poverty.
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible”, wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. “Villages are bombarded from the air … this is called pacification.”
Journalists loyal to – or at least uncritical of – US forces during the Iraq war twisted language in the same sickening way. Selling a war is a public relations exercise, requiring as much sophistry and deception as the sleaziest corporate cover-up.
Watson critiqued modern war reporting. In using words like “attrited” and “deconflicted” to describe the murder of civilians, embedded journalists “join the military in denying the common humanity of ordinary soldiers”, he wrote.
The Commission of Audit report, released in May, encouraged Abbott in his quest to destroy Medicare as a universal healthcare system. The commissioners warned of the dire threat of people exploiting the system by spending 10 hours waiting in a hospital emergency room to scam free treatment for the sniffles. To stop this rort-waiting-to-happen, the report recommended charging a still larger amount of money to be seen in a hospital. Whoops – I mean, it recommended “providing price signals that direct patients to access the most cost effective treatment setting”.
Even bureaucrats whose main job isn’t war, economic extortion or impoverishing the sick use ridiculous jargon to conceal their aims.
In the University of Melbourne’s 40-page Growing Esteem discussion paper, the words “strategic” or “strategy” appear 75 times. The reader is invited to consider the university’s strategic choices, strategic initiatives, strategic agenda, strategic plan, strategic challenges, strategic dilemmas, and on and on it tediously goes.
Variations on “engage” and “engagement” appear 98 times. There’s corporate engagement, professional engagement, public engagement, community engagement … The university, writes vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, has even “given voice to engagement”.
Why use corporate newspeak in a discussion paper for a university? Because administrators want to run their institutions as profitable corporations. Students are the raw materials; staff, the machinery. To say so outright would be rather gauche, so instead we get 40 pages of strategically enhanced bullshit.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity”, wrote Orwell. Bureaucrats, politicians and senior managers want to obscure reality and confuse us.
Nobody who honestly wants to be understood produces this brand of linguistic garbage.
This is why you’d never have caught Karl Marx writing, “Value-adding human resources of the global community, form strategic partnerships; you have nothing of which to be divested but your counter-emancipatory devices!”
While the language of oppression numbs the brain, the language of struggle has the power to wake us up. We need more, honest, straight talk that brings to light the “us” and the “them” of the real world. That’s not enough to break the power of the bosses – only the workers’ movement can do that. But it’s a damn good start.

How about we try a bit of honest straight talk?

In the early 1840s, Friedrich Engels’ wealthy father sent him to work in the offices of his holdings in Manchester, hoping to cure his son of radicalism. Instead, the 22-year-old spent his time documenting the brutal reality of working life in industrial Britain. Everything he saw convinced him of the need for dramatic change to create a better society.
In the preface to his book The condition of the working class in England, Engels railed against his contemporaries. German intellectuals, he wrote, “have far too little knowledge of the world as it actually exists … they have never been driven by ‘the cold facts of hard reality’ to demand reforms which would sweep away the social abuses of our time”.
In developed countries, we no longer live in the era of the workhouse, the child labourer and the cholera epidemic. Because the working class is not dropping dead of overwork en masse, according to some we have nothing to complain about. But a look at modern work, and conversations with the people who perform it, reveal that the alienating nature of work under capitalism hasn’t changed much since Engels’ time.
“The supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative’s thinking powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things … [It is] tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year.”
Most people are aware of the dangers of occupational overuse injuries in repetitive work, but many aren’t familiar with how it can affect us psychologically. “You start to shut down”, says Josh (names of current workers changed) of his factory job bending metal for a small Melbourne engineering firm. “Your mind kind of stops working. I would finish a job and then I couldn’t remember whole chunks of it … All of a sudden there’s just a pile of steel sitting next to me.” While working, his workmates on the factory floor seemed “like zombies … they would look at you, but not really look at you. You just get sort of spaced.”
Mark worked as a voice picker for a major warehousing company in Melbourne’s north-west. Voice pickers wear headsets with microphones attached, and take instructions from a computer-generated voice. For eight hours, or longer if working overtime, the voice picker follows directions through their headset, driving a piece of machinery to the specified locations and picking stock.
Mark describes this work as “mind-numbing”. One of the more frustrating aspects of the job: “You can’t sing, because it would trigger the voice activation.” There was music playing over the PA, but accidentally singing along would cause the computer to respond, trying to verify the worker’s “input”.
Mark describes workmates on bad days pulling off their headsets in frustration and swearing at the computer as if it was a person.
Asked how he coped with the boredom, Mark says, “Most of the time you just deal with it. You develop mental coping skills or disengage, but you still have those moments throughout the day where you’re completely flipping out – How did I end up here? Am I going to be here forever?”
“[The factory worker] must not take a moment’s rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines …”
Every moment of Mark’s time was monitored in some way. The workers’ movements were tracked through the computerised system, so that management could compute their pick rate. A basic human interaction like stopping to chat in the aisle would bring a supervisor to ask what they were talking about. A low pick rate prompted invasive questioning. “They’d call someone up and there’d be two of them, big guys standing there going ‘Oh, so what’s going on today? Anything wrong? Something going on at home?’ It’s intimidation.”
Workers at Mark’s warehouse were consistently picking heavy items from low heights, and the repeated strain caused injuries. “We had about 20 percent of the workforce on modified duties because they’d injured themselves.” Weekends were a welcome rest, but Mark hated the fact that he was so exhausted that he couldn’t use the time. “I’d wake up and my lower back would feel like warm jelly”, he says. “I used to take a bit of codeine, just to feel normal.
“As voluntary, productive activity is the highest enjoyment known to us, so is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading punishment. Nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do some one thing every day from morning until night against one’s will … It is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. The worker’s activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from thinking of anything else …”
Amelia is a 29-year-old student who earns money working supermarket night fill. Asked whether she can escape into her thoughts from the monotonous work, Amelia says it’s possible in some stores, but not the one she currently works at. “I feel even though we don’t talk much that I can’t really stop thinking about what I’m doing. I don’t want to break anything, I don’t want to drop anything, so I concentrate more; I try to stay in the zone. There’s not as much of my own thinking time.”
Headphones are banned in Amelia’s current store, so all she has to listen to is the store music. “They play the same ads that you hear in the store during the daytime”, she says. “Over and over again.”
The pressure to work faster is “constant”. Although her current employer never bothered to instruct her on safe lifting techniques, Amelia is familiar with them. However, there isn’t time to lift safely. “Because we’re pressed for time”, she says, “we’re often picking up, twisting and dropping, not actually lowering”.
Capitalist ideology promotes the illusion of freedom. Workers are “free” to come and go from paid work as we choose, only in the sense that we are also “free” to have our electricity cut off, our families made destitute and to be evicted from our homes.
In reality we are not free, especially not at work. “Here ends all freedom in law and in fact”, writes Engels of the factory system in industrial Britain. “[The operative] must eat, drink, and sleep at command. For satisfying the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least possible time absolutely required by them.”
In the 21st century, workers in the developed world are still subject to such humiliations on the job. A UK labour research organisation found in 2010 that many British workers don’t have free access to toilet facilities at work. “One call centre gave workers in teams a wooden spoon. To go to the toilet, a worker had to take the spoon. If someone else already had the spoon in their team, no one else was allowed to go.”
This year Lily Prince, a 51-year-old Minnesota woman, was forced to urinate in a cardboard box after her supervisor refused to let her leave her position on the assembly line to use the toilet.
Since workers are seen as mere extensions of productive technology, our bodies’ needs and vulnerabilities are inconveniences, to be either avoided or ignored. Injuries or even deaths are just glitches in the production line. In 2010, Sarel Singh was decapitated by a piece of machinery at the Baiada chicken processing plant in Melbourne’s west.
What happened after the death? “They just stopped the line for two hours”, said his workmate Prabhu. “After that they continued production, that’s not good for a human being. Give respect for the human being.”
Respect for the human being. It’s a pretty basic concept – one on which capitalist labour processes completely fail to deliver.

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Pensioners discarded like broken machinery

Liberals stuff the environment

How about we try a bit of honest straight talk?

The condition of the working class today

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