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Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956) were prolific Australian authors who co-wrote, under the pseudonym “M. Barnard Eldershaw,” five novels and four works of nonfiction published between 1929 and 1947. Their final collaboration, a future fiction entitled Tomorrow and Tomorrow, first appeared in Melbourne in 1947 and was reissued by the London feminist publisher Virago in 1983. Lyman Tower Sargent’s bibliography of Australian utopian fiction describes the novel thus: “Dystopia. Public opinion sampling used to limit liberty.” This is a reasonable enough shorthand description of the novel’s frame narrative, set in the “Tenth Commune” located somewhere in what is now the Riverina district on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, at some time in the twenty-fourth century. This article will argue, however, that the Tenth Commune is closer to a flawed eutopia than an outright dystopia; and that the novel’s truly dystopian content lies in its core narrative, Knarf’s novelistic account of mid-twentieth century Australia, which culminates in a quasi-apocalyptic destruction by fire of the city of Sydney. The extraordinary violence of this account will be contrasted to the essentially nonviolent character of the Tenth Commune and both will be situated in relation to Barnard’s growing involvement in the pacifist Peace Pledge Union.

There are no independently Australian translations of Thomas More's Utopia. Nor is there any equivalent in Australia to the Society for Utopian Studies in North America or the Utopian Studies Society in Europe. Nor are there any extant formal research groups or undergraduate or graduate courses in utopian studies. There are, however, distinctively Australian traditions of utopian writing, both eutopian and dystopian, and also a limited field of Australian utopian studies, essentially the work of individual scholars. This article attempts a brief description of both.

The autonomist Marxist critique of determinist Marxism offers even more valuable insights for labor historians than that mounted by earlier antideterminists, such as Sartre and Thompson, who emphasized proletarian agency to counter determinist orthodoxy in which the accumulative logic of capital unilaterally shapes the world. Autonomist Marxism is more far-reaching. It places labor at the very beginning of the labor-capital dialectic: Labor can exist independently of capital, but capital needs to command labor to ensure profit; therefore, capitalist development does not occur due to internal momentum but in reaction to labor's tendency to unloose itself from capital. Linebaugh and Rediker offer a similar hypothesis in exploring the myth of the many-headed hydra—and demonstrate the fruitfulness of such an approach. By contrast, the notion of the multitude in Hardt and Negri'sEmpirehas not been well received by labor historians due to its inexplicable abstraction when read in isolation from other autonomist texts. This article attempts to rescue the ideas of autonomist Marxist philosophers, especially Toni Negri, from the enormous condescension of labor history.

According to Lyman Tower Sargent, utopias are repositories for individual and collective hopes and fears, which sometimes unleash energies that can achieve at least part of what is hoped for. The Australian green bans movement of 1971–75 can be understood as a utopian project in this sense. During this period, the construction workers organized in the New South Wales branch of a labor union, known as the Builders Labourers' Federation, refused to work on ecologically or socially harmful projects and publicly argued for their collective right to socially responsible labor. Coining the term “green bans” to describe environmentally motivated withdrawals of labor, they halted projects worth five billion Australian dollars at 1970s prices. When enthusiastic resident action groups mobilized in support of these bans, the union grew into the core of a more general social movement. The success of the green bans movement suggests that the power of subversive imagining can be especially effective if coupled with the power of workers at the point of production. The movement's basic premise—that workers, acting in the general public interest, should decide what can be built and where—represented a direct challenge to the dominant power relations. Ultimately, such impossible demands could not be conceded either by the employers or by the state. But the practical effects of this utopianism nonetheless secured substantial environmental improvements, which brought the green bans activists significantly closer to their dreams.

According to Lyman Tower Sargent, utopias are repositories for individual and collective hopes and fears, which sometimes unleash energies that can achieve at least part of what is hoped for. The Australian green bans movement of 1971-75 can be understood as a utopian project in this sense. During this period, the construction workers organized in the New South Wales branch of a labor union, known as the Builders Labourers' Federation, refused to work on ecologically or socially harmful projects and publicly argued for their collective right to socially responsible labor. Coining the term "green bans" to describe environmentally motivated withdrawals of labor, they halted projects worth five billion Australian dollars at 1970s prices. When enthusiastic resident action groups mobilized in support of these bans, the union grew into the core of a more general social movement. The success of the green bans movement sugg ests that the power of subversive imagining can be especially effective if coupled with the power of workers at the point of production. The movement's basic premise—that workers, acting in the general public interest, should decide what can be built and where—represented a direct challenge to the dominant power relations. Ultimately, such impossible demands could not be conceded either by the employers or by the state. But the practical effects of this utopianism nonetheless secured substantial environmental improvements, which brought the green bans activists significantly closer to their dreams.

Australian utopian fiction of the 1890s and 1930s reflects the traumatic impact of the economic crises of these decades and expresses desire to avoid the insecurities of capitalism. There are significant differences, however, in the imaginative reach of the utopias devised in the 1890s and those formulated in the 1930s. In Australia in the 1890s, the possibilities for progress and perfection were varied. Unionism, socialist legislation, the formation of ideal communities based on socialist or anarchist principles, militant forms of protest, attempts to inaugurate direct rather than mere representative democracy were some of the various strategies pursued in this decade that promised a better world. The methods depicted in the utopian writings of the 1890s for achieving ideal societies are as diverse as the real politically radical currents of the time. By the 1930s, the starkly singular conception of emancipation offered by the Soviet model dominates the imagination of those who wrote of better futures. The utopian literature of the 1930s is thus diminished by its fascination with an alleged model of perfection in the real world. The differences between the utopian literatures of two decades undergoing similar upheavals confirms Darko Suvin's observation that the parameters of utopian imagination are produced by the particular radical milieux around those who dare to dream of alternatives.

Globalization has adversely affected working-class organization and mobilization, increasing inequality by redistribution upwards from labour to capital. However, workers around the world are challenging their increased exploitation by globalizing corporations. In developed countries, many unions are transforming themselves to confront employer power in ways more appropriate to contemporary circumstances; in developing countries, militant new labour movements are emerging. Drawing upon insights in anti-determinist Marxian perspectives, Verity Burgmann shows how working-class resistance is not futile, as protagonists of ­globalization often claim. She identifies eight characteristics of globalization harmful to workers and describes and analyses how they have responded collectively to these problems since 1990 and especially this century. With case studies from around the world, including Greece since 2008, she pays particular attention to new types of labour movement organization and mobilization that are not simply defensive reactions but are offensive and innovative responses that compel corporations or political institutions to change. Aging and less agile manifestations of the labour movement decline while new expressions of working-class organization and mobilization arise to better battle with corporate globalization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of labour studies, globalization, political economy, Marxism and sociology of work.

In countless parades and protests, working-class people have proudly presented themselves, as producers, creators of the wealth expropriated unfairly from them by the exploiting classes and analysis of the content of this agitation. Propaganda suggests that these parades and protests express a politics of identity based on class. Protests such as the unemployment movement of the great depression, expressed a shared identity based on economic exploitation or disadvantage, and drew strength from class conscious rhetoric to engage in defiant political action.

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

“From Syndicalism to Seattle” was first delivered to ILWCH late in 2000, conceived during the highpoint of post-Seattle euphoria and before the events of 9/11. In some obvious ways the anticorporate movement in North America and Australia has since fallen on harder times due to: the necessary diversion of radical energies into the antiwar movement and opposition to inept and authoritarian counterterrorism initiatives; a reluctance on the part of some NGOs to continue campaigning in the prevailing conservative political climate; increased surveillance and repression of all forms of dissent and protest; and greatly reduced media coverage due to obsession with the “war on terror.” However, in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa, gigantic mobilizations and/or spectacularly stubborn day-by-day forms of resistance have continued and grown. Obituaries to anticorporate activism, invariably focused on the United States, are generally ignorant of these important struggles. In any case, despite the harsher political environment in the United States since 9/11, there are also positive developments that reveal the extent to which the critique of corporate power has gained public attention and political traction. Consider, for instance, the recent emergence of anticorporate blockbuster movies, such as Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, and Outfoxed. This new cinematic genre bears the imprint of Seattle: it builds upon the radically democratic anticorporate analysis brought to prominence by the worldwide movement that burst upon the political scene late in 1999; and it provides a valuable and previously unavailable avenue for dissemination of anticorporate ideas. Rather than dying—as those who pen its obituaries fervently wish—the anticorporate movement in the heart of Empire is instead assuming new forms and finding new ways to promulgate its message.

Between 1971 and 1975 Australian building industry workers withdrew their labour from environmentally irresponsible projects and, in coining the term ‘green ban’ to describe their action, originated the political designation ‘green’. Alienated from the products of their own labour and committed to ideas about the social responsibility of labour, they directly confronted what Lamarche [1976] has identified as the ‘planning role’ of property capital. They hindered the means of production by withdrawal of labour and also the reproduction of the relations of production by successfully challenging the legitimacy of private appropriation on the grounds of its adverse ecological effects. Green bans in New South Wales halted development worth A$5 billion and had a significant impact on environmental legislation, town planning and public attitudes.

In 1848 Marx and Engels famously announced in the Communist Manifesto that: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the World, Unite!" They believed the continued development of capitalism would create the conditions necessary for workers within each country to unite, because capitalist development encouraged the growth of a proletariat better able to organise and mobilise as a result of being brought together in workplaces. By the same token, they believed the spreading of capitalism around the globe provided conditions for the workers of the whole world to unite across national borders and express their shared interests in challenging the capitalists who exploited workers everywhere…

L’arme ultime des syndicats de travailleurs reste le refus de travailler. Dans les annees 1970 en Australie, cette arme a ete utilisee par des syndicats radicalises afin de faire avancer des causes qui depassaient largement l’interet immediat de leurs membres et mettaient en avant la « responsabilite sociale et environnementale du travail ». En decretant des boycotts pour raisons ecologiques, sociales et urbanistiques, le syndicat de la construction a Sydney a cree une forme inedite de lutte ecologique radicale en provenance de la classe ouvriere.

Experiments with workers' control occurred in many countries during the late post-war boom period in circumstances of heightened industrial militancy and a crisis in employer and state authority. They are again popular under different conditions, especially in Argentina and Venezuela. Such episodes demonstrate that labour can exist without capital, whereas capital is always dependent on labour. This essential autonomy of labour from capital is a notion elaborated most cogently by 'autonomist' Marxists, especially Antonio Negri. His concepts of autonomy, self-valorisation and political crisis are used to describe and analyse Australian workers' control experiments during the 1970s, focusing especially on the Sydney Opera House work-in of April-May 1972, the Whyalla Glove Factory occupation of November 1972 and formation of a workers' co-operative that lasted until September 1973, and the Nymboida mine work-in and takeover under workers' and union control from February 1975 to August 1979.

This article attempts to explain the similarities and parallels between Labour/ Le Travail and its Australian equivalent, Labour History; as well as analysing Labour/Le Travail's distinctive interests and concerns, which reflect the peculiarities of the Canadian. It suggests, in particular, that the timing of Labour/Le Travail's appearance was propitious and that it was well positioned for various reasons to take advantage of the Thompsonian moment in labour historiography. Further, by responding to the rise of the new social movements, it was able to enrich further the study of labour history through attention to forms of oppression other than class. With class nonetheless remaining its central focus, a degree of political pessimism is understandably evident from the mid-1980s onwards, with the downturn in labour movement activity and allegations about the death of class. By the same token, signs of working-class remobilization in the late 1990s have encouraged a renewed sense of political purpose in the journal. It is argued that this situation also offers opportunities for new forms of dialogue between academics and activists challenging corporate globalization, enabling the journal and those associated with it to continue to reach out to audiences beyond the academy, to place their knowledge of labour's past at the service of movements contesting the current circumstances of the working class. Resume Cet article essaie d'expliquer les similarites et les comparaisons entre le journal Labour/Le Travail et son equivalent australien, Labour History; ainsi que d'analyser les preoccupations et les interets particuliers de Labour/Le Travail, qui refletent ses singularites canadiennes. Il suggere, en particulier, que la publication en temps opportun du premier numero de Labour/Le Travail a ete bien planifiee pour plusieurs raisons afin de profiter du moment Thompsonien dans l'historiographie de la main-d'œuvre. De plus, en reponse a l'ascension de nouveaux mouvements sociaux, le journal a ete en mesure d'enrichir davantage l'etude de l'histoire de la classe ouvriere en faisant attention aux formes d'oppression plutot qu'a la classe. Gardant neanmoins la classe comme son point de mire, un degre de pessimisme politique est tout naturellement evident a partir du milieu des annees 1980, avec la baisse des activites syndicales et la pretention de la mort de la classe. En outre, les signes de la remobilisation de la classe ouvriere vers la fin des annees 1990 ont favorise le renouvellement du but politique bien precis du journal. Il a ete constate que cette situation donne aussi des occasions de nouvelles formes de dialogue entre les universitaires et les activistes qui protestent contre la mondialisation des entreprises, permettant au journal et a ceux qui s'y rattachent de continuer a atteindre des auditoires au-dela des universites, mettant leurs connaissances du passe au service des mouvements qui luttent contre la situation actuelle de la classe ouvriere.

union practices, and also the necessity of working-class action in defence of the environment and in support of women, homosexuals, and indigenous Australians. His success as an 'organic' working-class intellectual stemmed from his ability to present working-class ideas as representative of universal interests, and trade union work bans as activity on behalf of the whole of society. Mobilising an enthusiastic 'subaltern counterpublic' in support of bans, Mundey and his movement prompted a significant change in attitudes, creating a public mood much more critical of developers and development.