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Hi folks, as usual we have been very busy at the blog. Our biggest new piece is one offered to us by a fellow blogger about his experiences as a worker in the modern NZ office; in his case he was doing data processing. It's a fascinating tale of alienation and employer mechanisms of control in offices across twenty-first century NZ. Read it at: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/diary-of-an-office-worker-2/ Last Sunday, Q&A dragged has-been Don Brash out of the cobwebs to tell us that low productivity growth in NZ is the fault of too many people coming into the country. He seemed mystified that the economic reforms of the late 80s and early 90s hadn't produced the results they were supposed to. Instead of drawing the logical conclusion that there must therefore be something wrong with his theory, he trawled around for a scapegoat. The real reason for sluggish productivity growth, we suggest, is that employers are relying so much on making workers work harder, faster, longer, rather than investing on the level required in new plant, technology, machinery and R&D. See: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/26/the-ridiculousness-of-don-brash-on-immigration-and-low-productivity-growth/ Mike Roberts look at the new wave of turmoil in global markets: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/yet-more-market-turmoil/ Philip Ferguson looks at the anti-Chinese racism of the early NZ Labour Party and the infatuation of people like Michael Joseph Savage with 'racial purity: 'https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/labours-racist-roots-2/ We also look at the problem of blaming 'bad banks' for our woes, when the problem is actually in the productive economy itself: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/from-the-vaults-bad-banks-or-bad-capitalism/ Another article suggests that it is long since time that we had a campaign to get unions to disaffiliate from the anti-worker Labour Party and started to build a new movement of, for and by workers: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/22/12932/ There has been quite an interesting discussion in the comments section for the article on disaffiliation; you might be interested in joining in the discussion. We've also had over 500 views on the piece on how the 'left' in the Australian Labor Party essentially simply services the right. If you haven't already looked at this article you might take a look: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/how-the-left-in-the-australian-labor-party-services-the-right/ And for a take on the role of lefts in Labour parties in general, see: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/labour-parties-and-their-left-oppositions/ Lastly, in the month that has marked the70th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, folks might be interested in reading about wartime opposition to the dicatorship in Japan: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/wartime-resistance-in-imperial-japan/ All the best, Philip Ferguson for the Redline blog collective PS: Please do think about leaving comments in the comments section under any articles that particularly interest you. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
