Technology
I'm writing to you out of concern for the growing development of technology. I'm beginning to believe that it's not creating work, and with the many problems we're having with unemployment at the moment, it has me thinking.
Believe you me, I think that everyday technology is brilliant. I couldn't live without a heater, stereo, microwave or video recorder. Who could? But when we start placing robots and all these computerised electronic machines in factories, that begin to take the place of a human's job ... I believe this is where we should begin to draw the line. These machines keep making their way into the workplace, while people make their ways to the unemployment queues.
I'm only in year ten at school, but I most definitely do not want to finish school and hit the unemployment queue because of a blasted machine! And I imagine a lot of people feel the same way.
There are also a lot of other aspects to take into consideration, like: higher tax rates because of the unemployment benefits, the pollution factor, younger people not going to uni because they are not so assured of a job. The crime rate rising due to unemployment, and the list goes on.
The pollution aspect especially scares and bothers me, as we're increasing our machines in factories, we also increase the amount of pollution being dumped into our atmosphere. At least humans don't belch out poisonous gases, (well not the highly dangerous kinds) unlike that of factories and machines.
I don't know what can be done, but something has to be done. It's my generation growing up with it, and I sure don't want to be the one to clean up the mess.
Honor Freeman
Bordertown SA
Peace actions
Sometimes it can be quite disheartening to involve oneself in the sort of political activity
featured in Green Left Weekly. I know this because I have spent a large amount of my 22 years attending every conceivable type of rally, protest, march, meeting, sit-in and blockade. I am sure all these actions were carried out for the most important of causes but on reflection I realise how ineffectual most of them were.
Since last Easter I haven't but been able to notice an increased amount of discussion in the mainstream regarding U.S. bases on Australian soil. Farmers, airline executives and an increasing number of economics commentators think they should be used as bargaining chips in trade negotiations with the U.S. Roy and H.G. reckon we should tell the yanks what they can do with their bases if they are going to poach our top athletes.
While I know that some members of the South Australian Peace Action Collective wouldn't consider these the ideal context for debate of the bases issue, I think congratulations are in order.
The Easter mobilisation at Nurrungar, mostly organised by PEACE, has been highly successful. The U.S. war fighting presence on Australian soil is once again an issue and given the increasingly tense state of diplomatic relations between the 2 countries will remain so.
As well as giving PEACE and their fellow travellers to the South Australian desert, a pat on the back, anyone involved in using extra-parliamentary or extra-legal routes to political change should look at the Nurrungar demonstration and see why it worked when so many others seem to be a waste of time.
I think it was a combination of a traditionally sensitive issue, effective use of the media, utilisation of the national peace activist network and creative forms of protest that made Nurrungar 93 a resounding success.
So congratulations to PEACE and here's to creating one, two, many Nurrungars.
Dan Murphy
Convenor, Student Campaign Against Militarism
Flinders University
Food for thought
It is truly ludicrous to see the eagerness with which the Americans offer food to the Somalis, at the same time gunning them down; meanwhile they not only continue their 32-year-old trade blockade of Cuba in an attempt to starve her out, but they are also trying to get other countries to join the blockade as well, as stated in the Torricelli Bill.
Rosemary Evans
St Kilda Vic
.PC 35
Northern Ireland
Recently, most Australian media outlets extensively covered the reaction in Dublin to the lamentable deaths of two young men as a result of an Irish Republican Army bombing at Warrington in England. At the time, however, no mention was made of the continuing policy of the British authorities to not act on IRA bomb warnings.
At the same time, the media could not find room to mention the murder of a 17 year old Belfast supermarket attendant by a pro-British death squad while he was at work. Damien Walsh died the same day as the second victim of the Warrington bombing and was the seventh Catholic in 48 hours to be shot.
There was also no mention of the sixteen children killed from plastic bullets fired from British guns. It also suited the press not to mention that some of the families of the victims of this violence in the North were verbally abused and refused permission to speak on the platform of the Dublin peace rally because some organisers feared it would appear anti-British and pro-republican.
British and Dublin imposed censorship on the republican movement guarantees that very little information gets out to world news services about the true situation in Northern Ireland.
The Northern Ireland Information Service spends over £12 million (1989/90 figures) each year flooding the world media outlets with pro-British and anti-republican propaganda. The end result is reports like the recent Sixty Minutes report on Northern Ireland that portrayed British soldiers as innocent victims of a senseless war. The only images of British soldiers in that report were of those playing with young children. This is certainly more useful to the
image of the British presence in Northern Ireland than shots of fully armed patrols terrorising the Catholic population of Derry or Belfast.
Bernie Brian
Wollongong
Sydney University
In New South Wales there is currently 174,467 empty houses (Bureau of Statistics). At the same time there is over 50,000 young people homeless in Australia (Burdekin Report, 1989). There is a 7 year waiting list for public housing in emergency situations. It is a great shame to find that many of these empty properties are owned by government and public organisations.
The University of Sydney currently owns a large number of vacant properties in Darlington, Camperdown and Glebe. Young people and students desperately in need of affordable accommodation have repeatedly approached the university to negotiate use of these residences. The university has ignored these requests and forcibly evicted and charged homeless people for living there. One good example is Rose Street in Darlington where most of the houses have been demolished in order to stop young people living there.
If you walk down this street today you will see a huge vacant block with a few solitary houses on either end. These houses have recently received eviction notices from the university. Old people from the area tell of how the university has gradually taken over and divided the once bustling suburb of Darlington. There is a strong feeling within the community that the university must now become more responsible and accountable to the community, and give something back in the way of access to resources and housing rather than always taking.
One of the latest plans of the university, which has been a well kept secret, is to build an "Advanced Technology Park" on the site of the old Eveleigh Goods Yard in Redfern. This land was initially intended for public housing for 2000 people.
The government seems to be once again ignoring the needs of the local community and putting profits before people. A recent public meeting of
local residents and students opposed the plans and called on the University of Sydney to make use of its existing vacant properties before it appropriates another large parcel of public land which is much needed for public housing, open space, parks and community facilities.
Monique Morrison
Enmore NSW.
William Calley
The billionaire press said that Lieutenant William Calley was punished for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, on March 16, 1968. In this instance of the long-drawn out massacre of the Vietnam War, over a hundred women and children were raped, mutilated and killed.
The facts are that Calley was given life, by court martial, but it was cut down to 20 years, then to 10 years, and then to 35 months. Of these, he spent four months in gaol, and the rest, at home, under house arrest. He did not get the sack from the Army, but retired (honourably) to work in his father-in-law's jewellery store in Columbia, Georgia. None of the other United States Army officers, leading and conducting the My Lai massacre, were arrested, charged, reprimanded, or served any time in gaol.
Denis Kevans
Wentworth Falls NSW
Ernest Mandel
I would like to say how astonished I was to read the following passage from a speech you reprinted in the June 9 edition of GLW. "We need power in the hands of social forces which can prevent individuals, classes and major class fractions from imposing their will on society". Has Ernest Mandel flipped? These are surely not the words of a "Leninist"? Perhaps these are not even the words of a Marxist in the strictest sense of the word? This is, for those who still have the intellectual courage of the generation of '68, a welcome and seductive change, one that bears serious reflection by socialists (perhaps a reflection whose grains can be found in Trotsky's last years).
I think that Mandel is correct to question the assumption that the proletariat constitutes the central agency for social change and the assumption that its triumph as a social class constitutes the final legitimation of the socialist project.
What may be suggested here is that a project for social emancipation will be born out of a wider range of social forces whose configuration is substantially different from that described by the Marxist, Leninist and Trotskyist traditions.
For example, I cannot imagine how the concept of a "dictatorship of a social class" is at all compatible with any socialist project that incorporates democracy, pluralism and the idea of rights, let alone "categorical imperatives" in morality. I believe Mandel has effectively junked any defence of a dictatorship of the proletariat. While some may cling to Leninist concepts in theory, the practice of revolutionary groups like the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance is precisely what Mandel is suggesting. The idea that a single class or class dominant party will be the agency to realise an emancipatory project like socialism is a mistake, a false hope and a recipe for failure within the Australian polity.
I would argue that the relative success of organisations like the DSP and Resistance is because it has effectively stood outside of the Marxist-Leninist paradigm, a fact which should be taken as a compliment and not an insult.
Any attempt to return to that paradigm will sow the seeds of failure in politics. We cannot afford to waste the talents of another generation of radical activists. Ernest Mandel has issued a great challenge to the left. A line has been drawn between the past and the future. On which side of that line will we belong?
Jeff Richards
Prospect SA