Newsletter No. 27
APRIL / MAY 2005
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Revolt of the outsiders There was a week of rioting in the south-west Sydney suburb of Macquarie Fields at the end of February, after two young men died in a stolen car being pursued by police. The riots recalled those by aboriginal youth in Redfern a year earlier after a young boy died, allegedly also with police in pursuit. Places like Redfern and Macquarie Fields are ghettoes of deprivation where police and youth regularly play cat and mouse games the kids cannot hope to win, but in which they dare to challenge an oppressive social order, that the police personify, as guardians of law and order and as users of the instruments of state power. Macquarie Fields is where those ‘with get-up-and-go got up and left’. Unemployment is 25 per cent, and for young people 35 per cent. Only a quarter of its residents finish high school, more than half the households are single parent, or broken homes; drugs & gambling have taken root and those who seek work carry the stigma of where they live. This high level of disadvantage correlates with high petty crime rates and levels of imprisonment (‘You call this a life?’ The Australian 1.3.05). Macquarie Fields is ‘typical of deprived working class suburbs that ring every major Australian city’ (Australia: Sydney suburb remains tense...’ 3.3.05). Ghettoes of this sort are, in fact, a feature of cities and regions throughout the world. Why do these concentrations of disadvantage exist throughout the global economic landscape? They are a geographical or spatial expression of a system that must create unemployment — a surplus labour pool, or industrial reserve army — to maximise its ability to exploit and to generate a surplus. ‘Capitalistic accumulation itself… constantly produces… a surplus population’ because technology is used to replace labour (that is, cut labour costs) and increase profit, rather than to free up the time the work-force must work to satisfy needs. So the accumulation of wealth on one hand and the entrenchment of destitution on the other, creation of networks of magnificent ‘global’ cities’ along with hinterlands that are dumping grounds for the unneeded, are integral to a global, capitalist economy. In this dysfunctional, non-sustain-able system these pools of ‘reserve’ population serve an insidious role: * they ‘weigh down the active labour army’ so serve as ‘the pivot upon which the law of demand & supply for labour works’ (Capital I, Karl Marx); * they become an underclass from whom the most reactionary forces can recruit criminal & racist gangs; * their treatment panders to class prejudice, so reinforces authoritarian government — for example, crack downs on ‘dole bludgers’, ‘single mums’ etc. Governments undertake ‘intensive mining of disadvantaged areas to fill an ever-expanding prison system’ (‘Punishing hapless is the true crime’ T Vinson’ Sydney Morning Herald 15.4.05). Labour must make special efforts to reach out to the entrenched unemployed by acting to achieve full employment, so uniting and strengthening the working class. This is intrinsic to achieving a just, sustainable society based on cooperation, not exploitation. These actions include: * education and apprenticeships, not prisons for young people; * closer links between work and community; and most directly * shorter hours to share work — if all work less, all may work! |