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Book Review
| Verity Burgmann, Power, Profit and Protest : Australian Social Movements and Globalisation, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2003. pp. viii + 392. $39.95 paper.
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| It is easy to see why Verity Burgmann wanted to rewrite her 1993 book, Power and Protest: Movements for Social Change in Australian Society. Running through her survey of five Australian new social movements was a sharp argument: that activists should understand their own strategic weakness, see through the fashionable dismissals of class, and attempt to win the 'old social movement' to 'new social movement aims' so that together they could realise the aims of both. By contrast, in Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation, she can enthuse over the beginnings of the kind of common political project she could only hope for a decade earlier. The anti-corporate/anti-capitalist movement that was born at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in November-December 1999 has transformed discussion about social movements, capitalism and class. Power, Profit and Protest is a terrific introduction to the many issues involved. |
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There are several new themes running through her discussion of the Aboriginal movement, the women's movement and the green movement. The triumph of neo-liberalism within both the Labor party and the Coalition has seen a rolling back of many of the gains won by social movements in the past. For indigenous people, the victories over land rights and native title have been subordinated to the profit-driven imperatives of pastoralists and mining companies. Feminism has brought real gains for all women, but the neo-liberal ascendancy has seen working-class women face attacks on their working conditions and child-care provisions, while the greatest and most enduring gains have gone to highly placed femocrats, amongst whom she includes secure academics. The earlier victories of the environmental movement have given way to ever-more extensive logging and an expanding uranium industry. |
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Burgmann draws out several pressures at work to produce the general rollback of the past two decades. The related ideologies of neo-liberalism and globalisation have led governments to systematically dismantle as many as possible of the obstacles to corporate profit and corporate investment agendas. Social provisions have been cut; environmental controls lifted; working conditions driven down; human rights ignored. This demonstrable link between worsening conditions and the strengthening of capital has underpinned the emergence of a global anti-corporate movement. |
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Burgmann also discusses the tensions within social movements between those who seek to influence corporations and government by working cooperatively with them, and those who insist on independence and mobilisation. The experience of co-option has also contributed to a wider radicalisation. The acceptance of ATSIC by some indigenous leaders was seen to undercut the struggle for self-determination, leaving unsympathetic white bureaucrats in positions of power over indigenous communities. Feminist public servants increasingly had to prove their neo-liberal qualifications to gain promotion, while affirmative action gave way to equal opportunity legislation, which did nothing to tackle gender stratification in the workforce. We read of the co-option and manipulation of Greenpeace so that the Sydney Olympics might have a green gloss; a story which ends with two ex-Greenpeace staff members launching successful careers as consultants for future Olympic bidders. |
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Power, Profit and Protest is predominantly focused on the history of social movement issues. Until we get to her discussion of the anti-corporate/anti-capitalist movement, the actual movements themselves and their protests, events, tactics and significant moments are only lightly dealt with, and this makes the first half of the book drier than is warranted. Put simply, there is too little of the view from below. By contrast, the demands of the movements, their manifestos, and their view of the world are more fully sketched than the experiences of grass-roots activists, along with many of the debates amongst them: over whether men are the enemy of women; over the role of humans in the environment; over whether or not Aboriginal people should ignore or embrace the reconciliation movement; over pornography and sexual liberation; and over the dangers of racism in deep ecology. |
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But it is the chapter on 'Anti-capitalism and Anti-corporate Globalisation' that is the triumph of the book. It is informed, passionate and analytical. Burgmann rejects any notion that the movement is anti-globalisation, quoting participants from a variety of backgrounds who insist that they are internationalists, and against 'the capitalist command over globalisation'. By contrast the capitalist pretence at globalism involves playing 'people off against each other on the basis of the "nation"'. The new movement is drawing on both a new militancy amongst rank and file workers, as well as a new recognition within social movements that capital is the enemy; and naming the enemy is empowering. Thus Seattle, our own S11, and the many summit protests since, have all put class back into the picture. |
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In doing this, the new anti-capitalism represents 'a rebuke to the labour movement for discarding its role as social movement of the economically exploited', and finds the union movement ambivalent towards it, having both promoted and resisted restructuring and market-oriented arguments in the 20 years since Bob Hawke's election. But if the unions are contradictory, the Labor party has gone over to the other side, becoming 'the alternative party of capital'. I think this is too simplistic. In her book In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885–1905, Burgmann herself described the betrayals of Labor politicians from the very beginning of the party in the 1890s; moreover, the performance of federal Labor in the 1930s, when it campaigned for the Premier's Plan and gave its preferences to the conservatives rather than to Lang Labor (in New South Wales), seems just as pro-capitalist as today's mob. Faced with losing its influence over the working class, Labor has shifted to the Left before; and it would be a brave person to suggest it cannot do so again. Indeed, a less right-wing Labor party may well be one of the consequences of the anti-capitalist movement, should it grow — a possibility consistent with Burgmann's broader analysis. However, she is right to point out that, for many workers and activists, Labor was once the anti-capitalist movement. They might have been wrong about that, but that belief had a basis in some of the party's propaganda. Only the cognitively challenged could see that in Labor today. |
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As in any book, there are problems. Her review of the literature on social movements, while interesting and useful to other researchers, would be difficult for the general reader and hard work for most undergraduates as well. To avoid discouraging readers from reading on, it belongs at the end, as an appendix. While focusing on three social movements is wise, it is disappointing that she does not attempt at least a brief survey of the movements she leaves out, if only to give some perspective and suggestions for further reading. Even as she was finishing her book, she would have seen the rise of the massive and radicalising refugee rights movement; and the omission of any discussion of the peace movement is unfortunate in the wake of the, albeit brief, eruption of activity against the invasion of Iraq. Rather than informing the book as a whole, the anti-capitalist movement arrives in triumph two-thirds of the way through. |
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When Power and Protest was published, it soon became the standard text on Australian social movements. Power, Profit and Protest is even better, not least because the world has changed. Few will agree with all aspects of Burgmann's argument, but all who care about our common future should be stimulated and informed by it. |
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| University of New South Wales |
PHIL GRIFFITHS | |
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