Rick Kuhn is a life member of the NTEU. He is also the co-author of Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class and a winner of the international Deutscher Prize for his biography of the Marxist economist Henryk Grossman.
The Shortest History of Economics
There’s a little girl. She’s maybe 8, maybe 10, with huge eyes. In a quiet, little voice, she describes what happened to her in late February in Huwara, a Palestinian town in the West Bank. “We started to hear sounds from outside the house. I moved to the windows in our room but there was shooting so I got onto the floor then they broke the windows”, she tells an Al Jazeera journalist.
Major pay cuts and worse conditions are part of a university deal that National Tertiary Education Union officials are touting as the way forward for the whole sector.
At the heart of capitalism’s impressive economic dynamic there is a dirty secret. And it’s a BIG secret.
Australian governments and their counterparts around the world have largely succeeded in desensitising us to avoidable mass deaths and disease. In the week to 6 July, 294 people died of COVID-19 in Australia, more than 40 a day.
From early in her political career, Rosa Luxemburg was concerned with the struggle against imperialism and war. Her analysis and the tactics she advocated weren’t all correct, but she was always on the side of the working class and its independent organisation, and of the oppressed. That was true in her approach to the “national question”, her responses to wars and her theory of imperialism.