Australian Capitalism and the Politics of the Early 1970s (original) (raw)
Related papers
Capitalism in Australia: New histories for a reimagined future
Thesis Eleven, 2020
Capitalism is back. Three decades ago, when all alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets appeared discredited, talk of capitalism seemed passé. Now, after a decade of political and economic turmoil, capitalism and its temporal critique of progress and decline again seems an indispensable category to understanding a world in flux. Among the social sciences, historians have led both the embrace and critique of this ‘re-emergent’ concept. This roundtable discussion between leading and emerging Australian scholars working across histories of economy, work, policy, geography and political economy, extends this agenda. Representing the outcome of a workshop convened at La Trobe University in November 2018 and responding to questions posed by conveners Huf and Rees, five participants debate the nature, utility and future of the new constellation of ‘economic’ historical scholarship. While conducted well before the outbreak of COVID-19, the ensuring discussion nevertheless speaks ...
Australians have long compared their country to the United States of America, and they have often reflected upon the relationship between the two nations. Throughout the twentieth century-often dubbed the "American Century"-numerous people have asked if Australia is being or has been "Americanised This article explores how various intellectuals, primarily on the left, have viewed capitalism in both countries through this lens since the 1950s. It observes that, on the one hand, several commentators have asserted, implicitly or explicitly, that American capitalism is antithetical to Australian capitalism. On the other, it shows that opinions have varied over whether Australian institutions have been undermined by American dominance or influence. This article explores these positions and shows that while they have merit, they are nonetheless generally predicated upon concerns about preserving real or imagined institutions and asserting national identity within a rapidly evolving global order. As a result, such interpretations tend to convey the history of capitalism in and between both nations as somewhat static and unidimensional. Following this analysis, the article then briefly explores how Australian intellectuals have been marginalizing this framework since the 1990s by favouring more dynamic approaches. It is argued that these newer analyses offer a blueprint for exploring how capitalism can be interconnected and multidirectional, whether that be between Australia and America or elsewhere.
The Birth of Australia: Non-Capitalist Social Relations in a Capitalist Mode of Production?
Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE), 2012
"In the final chapter of Capital: Volume 1, Karl Marx discusses E.G. Wakefield’s insights into the colony in the Swan River district in Western Australia and pokes fun at the ‘unhappy Mr Peel’ (1976: 933). Despite Thomas Peel’s foresight to bring ‘means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000’, along with 300 working class persons, he failed to arrange for ‘the export of English relations of production’ to the isolated district (ibid.)1. In the years that followed the colony’s establishment in 1829, it approached collapse. Unable to generate capital and extract surplus labour, by the early 1840s colonists were petitioning for the first ‘free’ colony of Australia to introduce convict transportation2. It was ultimately through the introduction of unfree labour to Swan River in 1850 that capitalist social relations were able to advance, and almost 10,000 convicts were relocated to the location by 1868, when transportation ceased. A question that emerges from the story of Swan River, and from the early years of the other Australian colonies further east, is whether a land lacking virtually any ‘doubly free’ labour should be considered part of the capitalist mode of production. This article argues that, despite the early Australian colonies encompassing the extensive use of unfree convict labour and a virtual absence of wage-labour, the ‘English relations of production’ (definitively capitalist relations) were present from the start. That is, the colonies were, during the first few decades after 1788, part of the British capitalist mode of production. The colonies were not pre-capitalist because they were largely a gaol and penal state, as some have argued, but were capitalist because that goal served an important social purposefor British capitalism. Further, this article argues that the failure of the colonies to trade within the world market is not itself sufficient to argue that another mode of production, non-capitalist or pre-capitalist, was in place.
Networks of power: Australia's relationship to the transnational capitalist class
2008
This paper looks at the apparent contradiction of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) within the Australian nation state. It first asks whether such a class does indeed exist, and if so what its relationship is to the Australian capitalist class (ACC). Is their relationship comfy, cooperative, or conflictual? The test for these likely scenarios is material that comes from a longitudinal study of interlocking directors and major shareholders (drawn from the top 30 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) from 1992-2 0 0 7 a n d 3 0 0 t o p Au s t r a l i a n c o mp a n i e s l i s t e d o n t h e Hu n t l e y ' s 2 0 0 7 s h a r e h o l d e r database) plus interviews with top 30 company directors over a 15-year period, from
Big Questions in Australian Economic History: From the Outside Looking in 1
Australian Economic History Review, 2007
The conventional story of Australian economic history is worth challenging. Rather than just assuming a national economy with conventional turning points such as Federation, economic historians would do well to investigate more complex processes like the interplay between regions, races and development, and the changing patterns of interaction with the outside world. The big question for economic historians is whether in the future they can undertake economic research which informs history and so contributes to the national debate.
Capitalism Imperilled? Business Perceptions in Wartime and Post-War Australia
The coming to office of the Australian Labor Party in Australia in 1941 signalled the virtual disintegration of the conservative United Australia Party, which business saw as its principal defender in the political arena. When the Australian electorate resoundingly endorsed Labor at the 1943 election, the ALP was encouraged to not only tighten its already stringent wartime control over the economy, but also to lay plans for comprehensive post-war reconstruction. The prospects of post-war reconstruction offered the realisation of a socialist dream -a planned society, a society no longer at the mercy of boom-bust extremes, depression, mass unemployment and misery. The brave new world, it seemed, was close at hand, and was entirely within the provenance of the Australian Labor Party. The business community viewed these developments with alarm, seeing in Labor's popular mandate and growing influence the spectre of socialism at the expense of private enterprise. The experience of wartime regulation had fuelled hopes that such government authority might also be used in peacetime to achieve greater socialisation of the economy; to some, liberal and conservative ideas in Australia were very much under challenge. Out of these concerns grew the current Liberal Party of Australia, the most successful political party in the nation's history, formed initially to fight the rising tide of socialism and defend the rights of private enterprise.