Mbongeni Ngema
I was excited by Norm Dixon's review of Mbongeni Ngema's new play Magic at 4am (GLW #139). In 1992 I watched a videotaped performance of one of his earlier plays, Township Fever, on SBS and found it simply the most exciting play I had seen in ages. I then spent the next two weeks trying to track down a published copy of his work without success. (That's a hint,Norm!)
Norm's call for someone to arrange a tour of the production through Australia seems a great idea. But why must it be a tour for an elitist theatre-going public when its resonance concerns many more of us? Instead of waiting for some theatrical entrepreneur to make a killing, why can't a tour be organised by drawing together the sponsorship of trade unions, community arts and cultural groups, local actors and writers, political parties,university drama departments, solidarity activists, etc with subsidies from the Arts Council?
Profits could fund projects in South Africa. Such a collective effort would harness thousands of Australians behind the quest for a new South Africa and maybe help reorient theatre in this country to social relevance.
In the meantime maybe SBS could screen the documentary on Township Fever which was run in May 1992. Why don't you write in and ask them?
Dave Riley
Nundah Qld
Hope
Continually fighting a rearguard action on issues while the rest of us retreat, or flee, is not good enough. Too many of the older campaigners are looking backward — biography writing. Too many younger people believe wholly in the god "Democracy". What will they do, when they discover that their votes have little value? Since I left school at fourteen, during the depression, to learn sleeper-cutting from Black Bob Edmil, I have seen too many of the ideals and achievements we worked and struggled for, dismantled and destroyed.
Today's reality is that capitalism will crash. Because events are moving towards us exponentially faster, the crash will happen much sooner than any of us can imagine.
How do I know? The boy sleeper-cutter became a pilot with No.31 Beaufighter Squadron during the 39/45 war. So I know something about the limitations of human artifacts.
Capitalism, call it what you will, is a fallible human artifact. Now having taken on a life of its own, it has within itself the logic of destruction. This is surely the character of a malignant cancer.
We might be able to control it if so much effective power did not reside outside parliament. Also the sub rosa feudalisms of merchanting are not the only rising aristocracies taking advantage of our compliance and increasingly dominating us.
So can we survive the cancer of capitalism?
Can we establish control over our own consciences?
First try to be more transcendental in our outlook. Digital thinking will never understand or control our analogue world.
But there is hope if we think about it, talk about it, and try to understand it. Humanity's innate ancestra-archy is both our weakness and our strength if we but knew it.
But let us face it now. There will be turbulent times ahead.
So be prepared!
Richard Frank Chiffings
Gosnells WA
The ALP and the left
The action against the ALP's budget, organised by the Sydney Cross Campus Education Network on April 28th, drew an enthusiastic crowd of 150 people. Prior to the action the CCEN discussed the issue of politically tackling the Labor Party through the rally. This debate centred on the slogan "Neither Labor nor Liberal, but jobs for all", proposed by Resistance.
The International Socialist Organisation voted down this proposal on the grounds that such politics would alienate ALP students. This, they claimed in a letter to GLW 142, would "limit our ability to build mass campaigns".
"There are thousands of ALP members who hate every attack" the ALP implements, they claimed.
The scale of the ISO's miscalculation became apparent at the rally. The ALP failed to attend, save the one ALP member who the ISO fought to have speak.
The ISO makes a mistake when they focus on a minority of ALP members and not the rest of the population suffering under the ALP's attacks. It is the mass of the population that will affect social change, not the ALP. These are the people we should focus on mobilising. The ALP left acts as a block to mobilising these people.
The ALP's co-option of student campaigns through organisations like NUS limits the ability of students to organise themselves. The failure of NUS to produce posters in time to build the AVCC rally on the 4th of May is demonstrative of this.
The ISO's defence of the ALP compromises the CCEN's independence, leaving it open to precisely this sort of co-option. Still worse, it gives credence to ALP students who advocate the dead-end strategy of working through the Labor Party.
Of course we also should relate to and involve any ALP members genuinely disaffected with the Labor Party. The way to do this, however, is to provide them with an active political alternative, not to tail-end the politics of the ALP.
The ISO's lobbyist approach to the ALP prevents them from building political alliances with those forces already working to the left of the ALP. Such alliances are necessary to build a viable political alternative to the major parties.
Michael Tardif
Sydney
Genetics
I would like to congratulate GLW for publishing Dave Riley's review (May 4) of Lewontin's recent genetics book. Science is generally distorted and sensationalised in the popular press (like Green and Left politics) and it was good to see an accurate, balanced review.
However, I would like to point out that Lewontin is not as unorthodox as Dave thinks. Most biologists would agree that variation in individuals is a consequence of both genes and developmental environment. They simply haven't informed the public.
Furthermore, I have yet to meet a scientist who had any interest in "nature vs nature" per se. Lewontin's rejection of the "debate" as a ridiculous oversimplification is almost certainly the standard view.
Unfortunately, while scientists "talk" to each other, through their own literature, the popular press publishes what it wants. The misconceptions that arise from poor science reporting are misused by politicians for their own ends. Thank Dave for a good review. They are few and far between.
Ian Van Tets
Wollongong
Peace offering
I am the neighbour of Judge X, a federal serving legal decision maker. We are in conflict over land rights issues. My peace offering is to help make him less ignorant than before, and hopefully forge a friendship with my neighbour.
I am not a rich man but am willing to spend $20 improving both my relationship with my neighbour and improve his knowledge of other views on the world.
The sole reason for choosing this paper is that I sat next to an attractive woman on the train going to Perth, thought of this idea and asked for the subscription portion. She obliged, and did me the honour of giving me the paper after the train stopped.
Now I am no longer so ignorant either, the material is good and I feel more confident than before in offering this gift to my neighbour. [A subscription for his neighbour was enclosed.]
David Pontton
Perth
Sustainable politics
David Kault (Write on, May 4) has added to the population debate the previously unheard information that Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population are advocating a program for a future socialist society. It is comforting to learn that AESP are not pursuing the hopeless (and therefore ultimately reactionary) utopia of an ecologically sustainable capitalism.
However, their explanations are clearly inadequate: I would wager that 95% or more of people aware of AESP believe it is advocating large population reductions prior to any significant social change.
Still more pertinently, there will never be an improved social or ecological order if the majority of people become convinced that greens or socialists share David's goal of reducing the world's population by 90%. Politics too have to be sustainable.
Allen Myers
Sydney
White paper
The Keating government has ratted on the ALP and the labour movement by reneging on Chifley's guarantee of full employment for all Australians which was embodied in the 1945 White Paper.
The new Keating white paper proposes nothing to create jobs and, at best interpretation, it settles for a level of permanent unemployment never less than 5%.
In actual fact, by the year 2000, unemployment in Australia is likely to be well over 12% because we will then be in the middle of the next and much worse Depression. (Each Depression since '74-'75 has been conspicuously worse than the last, and none have been followed by a full recovery.)
Nowhere in the paper is there any analysis of the causes of either cyclical or structural unemployment, nor any recognition of the realities of the capitalist economic system which is responsible for the crisis. The whole paper is cast in the false framework of cutting budget expenditures and deficits in order to keep overseas finance conglomerates and speculators happy.
The emphasis is on cutting wages, while endlessly retraining the unemployed without getting them jobs, but nevertheless cutting them off the dole and out of the statistics. Public expenditure programs are ignored except for some minor regional and environmental schemes.
Many of the industry proposals for increased productivity and "efficiency" are designed to increase profits and the exploitation of workers, but will actually reduce the demand for labour and lay the basis for greater levels of permanent structurally unemployed.
Bruce Toms
Secretary, Marxist Initiative
Sydney