Australian Capitalism Research Articles

Migrant Labour and Their “Capitalist Compatriots”: Towards a History of Ethnic Capitalism

The relationship between migration and Australian capitalism has long been a topic of robust scholarly debate in sociology and economics. Researchers in those fields have highlighted how migration has left an indelible imprint on Australian capitalism. By contrast, Australian migration histories have given scant attention to the role ethnic groups played in Australian capitalism. This lack of attention is particularly curious in historical studies of Greek Australia given the significance of small business in facilitating migration and settlement. From Federation onwards, Greek ethnic capitalism - or, more precisely, the relations between Greek migrant labourers and their petite bourgeoisie employers - became a topic of media coverage. In fact, the relations between Greek workers and employers were so important that newspapers routinely reported on the subject. This article examines this media coverage, its racialist and criminalising connotations, and historical relevance. It concludes with some observations on how histories of capitalism can productively engage with the histories of ethnicisation.

Aboriginal Worlds and Australian Capitalism

Australia has a fairly established literature that seeks to explain, on one hand, the pre-colonial Aboriginal society and economy and, on the other, the relationship that emerged between the First Peoples’ economic system and society, and the settler economy. Most of this relies on theoretical frameworks that narrate traditional worlds dissolving. At best, these narratives see First Peoples subsumed into the workforce, retaining minimal cultural residue. In this paper, I argue against these narratives, showing the ways Aboriginal people have disrupted, or implicitly questioned and challenged dominant forms of Australian capitalism. I have sought to write not within the earlier framework of what is called Aboriginal History that often concentrated on the governance of Aborigines rather than responses to governance. In doing this, I seek to bring into view a history of Aboriginal strategies within a capitalist world that sought to maintain the most treasured elements of social life - generosity, equality, relatedness, minimal possessions, and a rich and pervasive ceremonial life.

Managerial Capitalism and White-Collar Professions: Social Mobility in Australia’s Corporate Elite

This article considers the interdependence of managerial capitalism with the historical constitution of professional work in Australia. Using data on the composition of the boards of Australia’s largest companies between 1910 and 2018, we show a deep connection between the managerial class and the top layers of professional hierarchies. Professionals in Australia forged a managerial-capitalist elite within large corporations, relying on a combination of professional expertise and signals of legitimacy that were enabled through higher education and accreditation structures. Relatively low levels of professional enclosure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created opportunities for Australians from middle- and working-class backgrounds to move into the capitalist elite. These opportunities were reduced significantly from the 1980s onwards as pathways to managerial roles themselves enclosed and as managerialism - as a mode of production - increasingly dominated global capitalism. The result was that by the end of the twentieth century, Australia’s corporate elite more closely resembled the rest of the world’s in its homogeneity and inaccessibility. This demonstrates the central role of professions in the reproduction of Australian capitalism over time, and the influence of professional enclosure on social mobility and inequality.

The spaces of Australian capitalism: Making “place” out of “space” in The UnknownIndustrialPrisoner

Radical geographers have emphasised the centrality of class relations to the production of social space. In particular, this literature makes the distinction between the homogenising “abstract space” of global capital and meaningful, specific social “places.” The tension between the two expresses itself in spatial forms, creating the landscapes of capitalism. This political-economic conception of space and place is generally under-explored in the Australian context, particularly regarding the highly important post-World War II Long Boom period. This article interrogates the spatiality of this epoch through David Ireland's award-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. Rooted in the notion of literary geography, which argues that literature “knows” things about the space of the society into which it is born, the article argues that Ireland portrays and handles in a particularly vivid and powerful way the dialectical articulations, simultaneously contradictory and intertwined, of space and place in the spatiality of Australian capitalism. Whilst he ultimately concludes that the powers of capital's abstract space dominate, he nevertheless demonstrates that through explicitly spatial projects of place-making, workers can attempt to impose their own political economy on the spatial form.

Book Review: Regulation Theory and Australian Capitalism by Brett Heino

Book Review: <i>Regulation Theory and Australian Capitalism</i> by Brett Heino

Trading hours deregulation in Tasmania and Western Australia: large retailer dominance and changing models of development

ABSTRACTThe transformation of Australian capitalism from the 1970s onwards has exercised a tremendous impact on trading hours legislation. In the shift between an antipodean Fordist and liberal-productivist model of development, the competition principle has assumed central importance, eroding perceived legislative fetters to free competition and more generally spurring a withdrawal of the state from direct economic regulation. Trading hours legislation is a prime example of this reality. Whereas the 1960s was an era of more-or-less regulated and circumscribed trading hours, the movement throughout the 1970s–2000s has been towards progressively looser controls. This is a movement driven by large retailers, who have found themselves wielding immense economic and political power within the fabric of liberal-productivism. Their efforts to squeeze out smaller operators through the continual extension of trading hours also dovetailed with a general effort on the part of the national state to diffuse the competition principle throughout the Australian economy, represented most graphically by the National Competition Policy of the 1990s. Given the historically state-based character of shop hours in Australia, this movement is demonstrated by an analysis of two case-study states, Western Australia and Tasmania.

Capitalism, regulation theory and Australian labour law: Towards a new theoretical model

This article employs the methodology of the Parisian regulation approach to periodise Australian capitalism into distinct models of development. Within such models, labour law plays a key role in articulating the abstract capitalist need to commodify labour-power with the concrete realities of class struggle. Given the differential ordering of social contradictions and the distinct relationship of social forces within the fabric of each model of development, such formations will crystallise distinct regimes of labour law. This is demonstrated by a study of the two successive models of development that have characterised Australian political economy since the post-Second World War era: antipodean Fordism (1945 to mid-1970s) and liberal-productivism (late-1980s to the present). The result of this examination is a model of legal analysis that, although tailored to the Australian experience, is capable of application in other contexts.

Right to the City, Desire for the Suburb?

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective”. This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity”

Non-citizens in the exclusionary state: Citizenship, mitigated exclusion, and the Cronulla riots

Using the Cronulla Riots as a starting point, this article explores the way in which neoliberal ideology, and the social and economic practices associated with it, have transformed Australia from an inclusive nation-state to one founded on the premise of exclusion. From this foundation, relative inclusion is based on a person's utility to the economic requirements of Australian capitalism. More and more people live outside of Australian citizenship which, previously, marked the limits of the inclusive state. In this new order of relative exclusion, many white Australians, who previously had felt themselves to be entitled members of the Australian state, experience an increasing disenfranchisement. Resorting to nationalism as a way of asserting their membership of the nation-state, the Cronulla riots were a manifestation of the frustrations of many white Australians.

Making capitalism acceptable?: The economic policy of Australian social democracy since the 1970s

Labor governments since the early 20th Century have consistently attempted to boost business profits. The way they have done so has changed but their policies have been consistently shaped by both the shifting requirements of Australian capitalism and the ALP’s nature as a capitalist workers party. From the 1940s until the early 1970s, Labor advocated a program of Keynesian and protectionist economics. As the economics profession turned against protectionism, the Whitlam Government sought to integrate Australian capitalism more closely with the global economy. The Hawke and Keating Governments went much further in opening the economy, deregulating, privatizing and corporatizing than their conservative predecessor. In most areas, with the notable exception of industrial relations, they generally acted in line with the new, neo-liberal orthodoxy in economics. The logic of the Rudd and Gillard Governments’ responses to the global economic crisis, invoking a mixture of neo-liberal and Keynesian precepts, like the economic policies of its Labor predecessors, can only be grasped in terms of the ALP’s distinctive material constitution. 국문초록: 괜찮은 자본주의 만들기?: 1970년대 이후 호주 사민주의의 경제정책 톰 브램블 릭 쿤 20세기 초 이래로 노동당 정부들은 일관되게 기업이윤을 증대시키려 노력해 왔다. 그들이 수행해 온 방식은 변하였지만, 그들의 정책은 지속적으로 호주 자 본주의의 필요와 자본주의 노동자 정당으로서 ALP의 성격에 의해 만들어져 왔 다. 1940년대부터 1970년대 초까지 노동당은 케인스주의적 프로그램과 보호주 의적 경제학을 옹호하였다. 경제전문가들이 반 보호주의로 돌아서자, 위틀렘 정부는 호주 자본주의를 세계경제에 좀 더 밀접하게 통합시키려고 하였다. 호 크와 키팅 정부는 연정 전임자들보다 훨씬 더 나아가 경제 개방, 탈규제, 사유 화, 기업화를 추진하였다. 많은 분야에서, 노사관계에서 주요한 예외가 있긴 했 지만, 그들은 대체로 새로운 신자유주의 정설 경제학에 따라 행동했다. 루드와 길라드 정부의 논리는 경제위기에 대한 대응으로 신자유주의적 계율과 케인스 주의적 계율의 혼합물을 적용하였고, 이는 이전의 노동당 정부의 경제정책과 마찬가지로 ALP의 독특한 물질적 구조라는 관점에서 온전히 이해될 수 있는 것이다.

Uncertain lives: migration, the border and neoliberalism in Australia

Over the last twenty years or so there has been a greatly increased anxiety in Australia over those people now often identified as asylum seekers. In this article I argue that this change of attitude is connected with the ongoing reconstruction of Australia as a neoliberal state. I link the importance of the border of the nation-state with the development of capitalism and go on to argue that there is a direct relation between the assumptions of neoliberalism and Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the state of exception. With this argument I suggest that the state of exception is fundamentally raced. I discuss the Australian relationship between migrants, race and capitalism, which historically worked in terms of the White Australia policy, and think about how asylum seekers are understood to threaten the racialized, neoliberal order of Australian capitalism.

On the utopianism of painting from remote communities1

Some of the first Europeans in Australia speculated that the centre of the continent hid an inland sea surrounded by well-watered plains. In the late twentieth century, this utopian imagination transferred from an imagination of water to one associated with Indigenous Australians. In an era of global cultural traffic, the painting movement from remote Australia constitutes a utopian communication that wants to bring about better relations between Indigenous people and the rest of the world. Despite the many dystopian images of Indigenous communities and the Aboriginal art industry presented by scholars and media alike, here I want to argue that this painting is itself a utopian communication. It is, first, associated with Indigenous communities whose values are contrary to those of Australian capitalism. Historically, utopian fiction and utopian theory has been critical of capitalism. Painting from remote communities continues this utopian tradition, as it represents an alternative way of life. Second, the very act of painting is itself utopian, its communication between cultures staging a means for greater understanding. The Indigenous intervention, then, is one that is both critical of Western society and hopeful for better cultural relations.

Regime change in Australian capitalism: towards an historical political economy of regulation

Regulatory regimes of political economy have a high degree of stability. The old Australian regime of labourist–protectionism survived more or less unchanged since before the Great War. The key feature was the historic compromise between the classes and leaders of capital and labour, mediated via the state and the institutions created to implement it. In the 1980s the regime was radically and rapidly transformed into the neoliberal globalizing regime. Explaining such large–scale shifts in systems of political economy, the history of which follows a pattern of punctuated equilibrium, is a difficult task for historical enquiry. This paper seeks to articulate an appropriate theoretical framework, derived from the structurist (that is, historical and realist) tradition that emphasizes historicity, multidimensionality, a form of institutionalism, human agency, and neo–Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Australian and American Settler Capitalism: The Importance of a Comparison and its Curious Neglect

Why is Australia so little known about and studied in the United States when prima facie it is one of the best comparators for America; and why do Australian comparativists often ignore the American case? The discourse of difference has predominated in America rather than the discourse of similarity. But in Australia the opposite has been true. Here an equally powerful theme has been one of searching for comparisons, similarities, and generalities between Australia and other nations and societies. Through thinking about answers to these questions, partly via a discussion of some recent writing on America and Australia, this essay argues a case for the necessity for comparison within a world history perspective. More particularly, it argues that American intellectuals and journalists should pay more attention to comparators like Australia since its similarity with America affords valuable insights into American history, politics, economy, society, and institutions, just as the converse has proven to be valuable.

The Pursuit of Serviceable Labour in Australian Capitalism: The Economic and Political Contexts of Immigration Policy in the Early Fifties, with Particular Reference to Southern Italians

The paper examines the class context of Australian mass immigration from southern Europe, particularly from southern Italy, in the late forties and early fifties. I argue that economic and political considerations were primary in the minds of the industrialists (especially from the automotive and iron and steel sectors), politicians and senior public servants who developed policy on the size and composition of mass immigration at the time. These considerations included the desire to overcome chronic labour shortages through the importation of what was commonly considered to be 'docile'and 'hard working' labour. The industrialists who deeply influenced mass immigration policy were convinced that the mass immigration of southern Europeans (particularly southern Italians) would shift the balance of power between organised labour and capital further towards the latter. This created tensions within the councils of immigration policy development between the industrialists and those representing the trade unions. The role of the public service and of the Immigration Minister in quarantining the policy advice of the industrialists from excessive trade union intervention is also considered in this paper.

Globalising Australian Capitalism.

This book tells the story of Australia's integration into the international economy. It traces the Australian economy from Federation to its inevitable downturn in the 1970s and assesses the current state of play as Australia struggles under the pressures of economic globalisation. Bob Catley argues that the insistent protection of domestic commodity industries has left Australia tied to slow growth industries at the expense of expanding the manufactured goods and services industries which now make up the bulk of world trade. Topics include the inadequacies of the dirigiste dual economy, the necessary rise of economic rationalism, demographic and geographic repercussions of globalisation, and the implications for Australian international relations of the emerging power of the Asia-Pacific region. Catley argues that structural changes are still required to ensure a competitive Australian economy in the world market.

BobCatley, Globalising Australian Capitalism. Oakley, Vic. and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. pp. xii + 241. Hb. $90.00. Pb. $29.95.

Australian Economic History ReviewVolume 37, Issue 2 p. 170-171 Book Review Catley, Bob, Globalising Australian Capitalism. Oakley, Vic. and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. pp. xii + 241. Hb. $90.00. Pb. $29.95. Paul Robertson, Paul Robertson University College, UNSWSearch for more papers by this author Paul Robertson, Paul Robertson University College, UNSWSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 January 1997 https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.372br3AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume37, Issue2July 1997Pages 170-171 RelatedInformation

The state and the welfare of immigrants in Australia

Post-war immigration to Australia has been accompanied by two processes associated with the development of Australian capitalism the urbanisation process and the proletarianisation of the immigrant population. These processes brought with them major social problems and the potential for social conflict. The welfare system provided a means to control the immigrant population, which failed to assimilate effectively into Australian society, as had been expected by the immigration planners of the 1940s. The government policies shifted from assimilationism, to integrationism and then on to multiculturalism and most recently, mainstreaming. In each case the basic economic contradictions of Australian society provide the context for welfare policies directed towards ethnic minorities. * I wish to acknowledge the contribution of Helen Meekosha, whose involvement in and reflections on struggles in the ethnic welfare industry, have provided many of the insights used here. 1. Capitalism, immigration and welfare in Australia

The Formative Years of Management Control at the Newcastle Steelworks, 1913-1924

Australia's transformation from a rural economy to an industrial nation hinged upon the establishment of a viable steel industry. As a result, the opening of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company's (BHP) Newcastle Steelworks in 1915 was one of the critical events in the development of Australian industrial capitalism. Although the history of the steel industry is well documented, the nature of management strategy and labour response has been largely ignored. This reflects a more general neglect of the evolution of labour management in Australian industry, particularly the employer's role in controlling the work environment and the actions of labour. This paper analyses the origins of management's control over its workforce in one of Australia's first large-scale private-sector industries. It examines how such control was achieved and maintained, and what factors shaped the nature of control over time. The years 1913-1924 were critical in the formation of BHP's basic policies on industrial relations. Whilst there were changes in the control strategies of BHP management in later years, the general theme of control was established during this period.1 The paper is structured around four periods: the establishment of control during construction and early production at the Works (1913-1916); a period of conflict culminating in the 1917 strike and a turning point in the nature of control (1916-1917); the consolidation of control and the fostering of a company union (1918-1921); and a period of economic crisis and rationalisation for the company (1922-1924).

Book Reviews : MANAGING LABOUR? ESSAYS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AUSTRALIAN CAPITALISM Edited by Mark Bray and Vic Taylor. McGraw-Hill, Sydney, 1986, 263 pp., $14.95 (paperback)

Book Reviews : MANAGING LABOUR? ESSAYS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AUSTRALIAN CAPITALISM Edited by Mark Bray and Vic Taylor. McGraw-Hill, Sydney, 1986, 263 pp., $14.95 (paperback)