I’m sitting here at my weekend day job, converting VHS tapes to DVD at a union. It’s been immensely satisfying today, with documentaries from the 1980s about:
B.A. Santamaria and The Movement/Democratic Labour Party — the vanguard of Catholic anti-Communism in the Australian labour movement;
the place of U.S. Catholic bishops in the nuclear disarmament movement; and
the suspicious death of unionist Karen Silkwood, most probably at the hands of the Kerr-McGee energy corporation.
A more general observation: while the union’s content choices are obviously weighted towards “politics”, I’m nonetheless getting the impression that current affairs programs of the ’70s and ’80s were much more open about the conjunction between economics and (social) power. This is regardless of whether the content is “progressive” or “reactionary”; for example, last week I encoded an outrageous 60 Minutes segment on how Australian workers should learn from “the Japanese example” of internalised, militarised workforce discipline and respect for the boss, but which necessarily acknowledged the relationship between labour and capital. Meanwhile, today, “economics” tends to be presented simply as a fantasyland — as the impact of things like interest rates on “consumers”.
[ tags: nuclear-energy, karen-silkwood, politics, dlp, ba-santamaria, democratic-labour-party, church, catholicism, catholic-church ]
yup - that’s neo-liberal hegemony for you.