Amen, Ben.

At a time when increased automation of the production process demands increased income redistribution (if we are to avoid further wealth concentration and sustain a consumer economy), states engage in a “competitive advantage” race to the bottom.
With an increased range of industries to support, consumers need more income, not less.

Anyone you can’t see that is some kind of apologist who opposes the principles of True Freedom. Fap fap fap.

(And wtf is with all those footnotes for some guy called Matt? I bet he was a real statist motherfucker—only a vicious strongman goes around calling himself by one name.)

So by all means have an alliance of convenience with the old misogynists, but don’t mistake them for your friends.

I’m not sure if Paul B thinks this way, but there’s a tendency in some quarters to feel that anyone (DLP, NCC, ALP right, etc) who was anti-communist, must have been anti-worker, or worse. Fascist perhaps?

That seems simplistic and wrong-headed to me. Plenty of folk who wanted workers’ advancement saw communism as a dead-end, and abhorred CPA methods. They may have observed CPA tactics up close in their own union (in other words they had no need of the “capitalist press” to persuade them something was rotten in the state of Moscow).

I’m going by what I’ve read about 1930s-1960s Australia, including laudatory biographies of CPA leading lights, reminiscences by CPA and ALP leading lights, etc. Many quite revealing and self-critical.

I just can’t buy this “CPA-good, all-their-opponents-evil” mindset. More accuracy and nuance, I’d like to see that! And incidentally, I don’t think Santamaria or Evatt or Menzies or Mannix were blameless.

But I must check my facts with Mr Molotov……….

Santamaria’s ‘rural socialism’ was no such thing. He was much closer to the Fascist doctrines of Mussolini and Franco. They ain’t socialism.

Er, Paul, you don’t think the ideals of Santa’s National Catholic Rural Movement could just as easily be compared to William Morris’ News From Nowhere as to the falangists?

Also, haven’t you heard of Godwin’s Law? Okay, the post-split ALP orthodoxy was breaching Godwins forty years before the www was invented, what with all the talk of the DLP being fascists—but LP comments threads aren’t really governed by ALP orthodoxy, now are they?

Cobber, I’ve read a lot of what you write here, and I’m convinced your dominant theme is your beef with the fact that socialism was always a weak & largely ignored philosophy within the workers party/unions here in Oz. The Groupers and the Movement were never particularly anti-socialist—they didn’t create the antipathy towards that ideology, it was always there.

Though I suppose the DLP became the perfect whipping boy for a `Popular Front’ type Left organisation which included some actual socialists (though very militantly anti-fabian socialists, at that.)

OT but Santa is such a temptation!! BA Santamaria had (apparently, early on) a yearning for some kind of idyllic, communal, rural ’socialism’ (not industrial, not proletarian-based). I’m told there were even small groups living in Gippsland, trying to live out these ideas. Vague ideals, perhaps.

This is pre-Movement I think. Santamaria, after the NCC days, seemed to take all sorts of positions that might surprise anyone who subscribed to a simple NCC/anticommunist/anti-ALP/pro-Liberal reading of his political persona.

The Catholic church is – how you say? – “a very broad Church” !!

I don’t agree with much bin Laden says, but if he speaks for millions of Muslims, I’d be a dill to shut it out.

Pell is a loyal and obedient Catholic. He’ll be well quiet on this topic now.

To be fair, cartoonish stereotyping is a flaw to which we’re all prone. Frex, before LP opened, I’d mentally filed Comr. Bahnisch years ago as a lapsed-Catholic atheist (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Whereas my eyes have been opened by his recent bloggings. So now, if forced at gunpoint to categorise Mark’s position theologically, it’d be something like “That if God did exist, the Pope would be Her vicar on earth”.

B A Santamaria must be spinning in his sarcophagus: that sounds suspiciously like some sort of socialism.

Urrrgh, I don’t want to become the resident apologist for the frickin’ ‘Dirty Lousy Parasites’, but that mad self-publicist Bob Santamaria did campaign in support Chifley’s bank nationalisation, and was happy to boast about it ’til the day he died. He wasn’t quite an economic liberal.

Personally I blame the teachers’ unions.

“Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility.

“Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.

B A Santamaria must be spinning in his sarcophagus: that sounds suspiciously like some sort of socialism.