School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
-
ItemLabour victories: a comparative study of the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party and their electoral success in the immediate post-war period( 2014)This thesis offers a comparative analysis of the British national election in 1945 and the Australian federal election in 1946. Both elections resulted in Labour victories. Through an in-depth analysis of these election campaigns, the study aims to identify similarities and differences in the form of ideological appeals, and especially in the deployment of the languages of ‘class’ and ‘nation’. It thereby seeks to shed new light on the changing form of electoral appeals, the nature of post-war Labour ideology and the contribution of both of these to Labour’s political success.
-
ItemPicturing politics: cartoons of Melbourne's Labour Press, 1890-1919( 2008)This thesis undertakes a comprehensive survey of the cartoons published in Melbourne's labour press from 1890 to 1919. Through an examination of the picturing of labour politics, this thesis points to the role of social recognition and collective identification in the formation of the political labour movement. It is argued that the key icons of the Worker and Mr Fat embodied an esteemed identity, a labour collective self, which subsumed different forms of labour movement politics and presented a number of claims for rights and social recognition. In addition, these icons relied on contemporary standards of masculinity to give respectability to labour's new form of politics. The criticisms made in the cartoons of the commercial press are examined. These criticisms help show how the idea of the public was employed in the legitimisation of the labour politics. The representations of politicians are also explored. Conservative politicians were shown as hopelessly mired in their own particularity. In comparison with depictions of the generic Worker, the cartoons were ambivalent in their representations of labour movement politicians and the Labor Party. The cartoons also tapped directly into the historically contingent and varied discourses of race and nation. The nation was always defined by its working-class characteristics and labour's enemies were shown as inimical to genuine Australian values. While the cartoons rarely treated race as a subject, they did employ it as a tool in presenting other issues, in particular class and political enemies. There was a consistent pattern of depicting enemies—the Fatman, or conservative politicians—as less than white. Finally, allegorical women were far more commonly depicted than actual women. By consistently using the female form to represent things other than women, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge women in their own right, the labour movement cartoons failed to recognise women as a valid subject of politics. It is argued that this points to a misrecognition at the heart of labour politics.
-
ItemOn Marx's three formulations of labour and the human being( 2010)This thesis is a study of the oeuvre of Karl Marx that explores the basic concept that Marx’s experiments with different modes of material production were all born of his belief that humanity is a highly mutable thing, yet literally impossible to change except via an alteration of the technique of production. This thesis breaks down the oeuvre of Marx into three paradigms of labour and the human being: one in which ‘life’ and ‘work’ are combined; one in which ‘work’ is overcome; and one in which ‘life’ and ‘work’ are institutionally separated into distinct spheres. Each paradigm of labour is expected to engender a different genus of human being: the human being as a whole, profoundly connected to the earth; as a cultural being rich in time; and as a free master of itself and its world. This thesis is a critique of the last paradigm of labour (qua ‘work’) as poiesis, something purely technical, the goal of which (‘life’ qua freedom) is external to itself; and it is an argument for the first paradigm of labour (qua ‘work’/’life’) as praxis, in which the goal—the high quality/individuality of the human being formed by labouring in this particular manner—is internal to, or realised within, the homogenised labour process. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute moment of becoming? In bourgeois economics—and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end ...
-
ItemThe domestic peril: the radical alien and the rise of corporate Americanism, 1912-1919( 2010)In the years preceding the First World War, corporate propaganda in the United States weighed in against the menace of the ‘radical alien,’ said to be a clear and present threat to American freedoms. This propaganda blamed strikes and other manifestations of class antagonism on unassimilated immigrants, who it claimed were, at best, vulnerable to peddlers of ‘un-American’ unionism, and, at worst, importers of the ‘alien’ ideologies upon which organised labour was said to be founded. This thesis argues that this propaganda was part of a conscious campaign of class warfare conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers and other representatives of Corporate America, who formed the vanguard of Corporate Americanism. Corporate Americanism, an ideology equating the self-interest of Corporate America with the interest of all, proclaimed as its operating principle that ‘those who are not for America are against it.’ In reaction to the Lawrence Strike of 1912, composed mostly of foreign-born workers and led by the hated Industrial Workers of the World, big business manipulated half-truths through propaganda to develop the mythology of the ‘radical alien,’ responding to the perceived peril with the movement to ‘Americanise’ the immigrant. Under the guise of providing lessons in English and Civics, this movement functioned to neutralise the threat of union militancy on the part of foreign-born workers by indoctrinating them in Corporate Americanist civic orthodoxies. The movement to Americanise the immigrant led to an experiment in Industrial Americanisation in Detroit in 1915, an experiment that sought to combine the indoctrination process of Americanisation with the benevolent paternalism of industrialists such as Henry Ford to provide a means of incorporating foreign-born workers into an industrial order in which they would be submissive pawns. With the onset of war the mythology of the ‘radical alien’ menace combined with war-fever to produce conditions in which the Americanisation movement would be accepted as state policy and the core principles of Corporate Americanism would come to be seen not as the self-interested ideology of a powerful lobby group, but rather as the desirable traits of citizens. Representing a significant shift towards corporate oligarchy, this thesis argues that these changes laid the foundations for the Red Scare of 1919-1920 as well as providing continued political cover for Corporate America’s campaign of class war.