Australian financial review subscription, australian financial review magazine, australian financial review rich list, australian financial review app, australian financial review pru goward, australian financial review modi cartoon, australian financial review modi, australian financial review podcast, australian financial review cleanaway.
Here some Australian Financial Review on Reddit:
@Heavy_Revolution
Lol, when liberals think they know what "marxist analysis" is. The tone of this is all over the place. On one hand, the lower underclass is to be despised and contemptible and then in the very next sentence, they're basicially responsible for all truth telling to power and they're a beacon of enlightened freedom that our society should not seek to snuff out. I can't believe people actually make money writing this shit.
@disintegore
Every class is self-interested. It's not scrupules or morality that separates them, it's material conditions and economic interests. Their respective cultures emanate from this. Pru Goward's biggest mistake (beyond the egregious classism she puts on display) is in failing to understand this. Let's do better than her.
@tentafill
Yeah the only reason this got all fucked up is because the capitalists disrupted class consciousness so thoroughly that we have a lot of workers without self interest, to the detriment of almost literally everyone
@oiyeahnahm8
"That’s strange. It gave me access to the whole article earlier - now it doesn’t.
Maybe the AFR changed its status.
I still have the window open so here’s a copy paste."
Why you shouldn’t underestimate the underclass
They are damaged, lacking in trust and discipline, and highly self-interested. But the poor are still a force that Australia needs to properly harness.
Pru GowardOct 19, 2021 – 12.44pm Opinion
Pru Goward Columnist “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” So said one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers thinly disguised as a novelist, George Orwell, in his spookily prescient work, 1984. I believe my lifelong fascination with the underclass began when I pondered that declaration of independence against a futuristic form of government oppression, which has turned out not to be so futuristic.
As a shopkeeper’s daughter, I understood poor people; they obeyed the law, worked hard, sent their kids to the same primary schools I attended and were equally ambitious for their children. But the underclass, small as it then was, behaved differently.
An area of Collingwood about to be cleared for social housing, Melbourne, 1964. The underclass has actually increased since the 1960s. The Age Archives Like the stoats and weasels of the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, yet another English children’s book on the topic of class, they rejected the rules and lived by their own. They were to be feared and were, to use my mother’s words, not very nice. It took Orwell to turn the noble Marxist proletariat into the proles.
Since the 1950s there has been a remarkable growth in the number of proles. The welfare state is not entirely to blame, as the world of Dickens attests. Government agencies view them with alarm as huge cost centres; they are over-represented in their use of government crisis services and are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day.
Of course, they are always seen as a deficit. Social workers, traditionally good young men and women who thought it would be nice to be kind for a living, despair of their appalling housework, neglect of their children and, notably, their sharp and unrepentant manner when told to lift their game by the patronising do-gooder.
Oh yes, and they don’t vote often, although, as I found door-knocking, it will be issues such as refugees and threats to the national flag which will get them out the door rather than the budget deficit or how much we spend on public education.
Orwell was right. The underclass can smell a fake at 50 paces, distrusts conceptual rhetoric and cannot speak a word of Newspeak.
Despite the billions of dollars governments invest in changing the lives of proles, their number increases. Their birth rates far outstrip those of professional couples and they are now a significant potential contributor to our workforce.
Except their children languish in the growing number of behavioural support classes in general high schools where they learn little and teachers itch to send them to the local TAFE to do some form of home-schooling and get them off their books.
Essential honesty
Once graduated with a basic studies completion certificate and little else, their prospects are not great. The discipline of work and often its thanklessness, especially at the unskilled end, also have little appeal.
But Orwell was right. The underclass can smell a fake at 50 paces, distrusts conceptual rhetoric and cannot speak a word of Newspeak, the language of lies made famous in Orwell’s 1984. They know what they want and see no reason why they should take notice of some man or woman in a suit when they get in their way.
They were a significant part of the anti-vax protests because they don’t like being told what to do and even though many drew their inspiration from spurious websites, they had correctly identified the freedoms the rest of us had been only too happy to give up. State leaders might have deplored the demonstrations, but they also knew they represented the tip of a sentiment the rest of society keeps hidden from view and only reveals in the privacy of the ballot box. Freedom has gathered pace.
The underclass is not always a happy place to be and bumping into the rest of the world mostly does not go well. People with chronic mental illness, cognitive disabilities and childhoods of trauma are mixed together in a sometimes brutal way, chaos and crisis never far from their door, living in a Wild Wood in their streets and public housing blocks or caravan parks.
And yet, I like them. I like them because they call us out. They are honestly self-interested, and you always know what they think. I know many of them. So many clever, actually very clever, kids and adults, although often damaged and almost entirely lacking discipline, trust in the system, trust in anyone who represents the system.
I am convinced we can do better to harness the force that the people of the underclass represent. We need to make it a focus of social policy, not a by-product of it. We have little choice, or we will continue to import our workforce and in growing numbers, as risk management parenting forces the birth-rate lower.
So long as we keep looking at the billions of dollars they cost us, we will continue to dislike them, reject them and write them off. Yet, in an age when cultural hegemony is now as strong as it was 70 years ago, only different, never have we needed them more to challenge modern meekism. The child who cried “look at the King” in The Emperor’s New Clothes was surely a member of the underclass.
@RubixKuber
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Australia is one of the most conservative Western countries on the planet. We have historically had strong labour movements that helped workers rights, but we remain a culturally and politically conservative island in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean.
I'm always amused when non-Aussies discover Australian conservatism for the first time. Yes, we have beaches and a laid back culture. But our media narrative is also driven by Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, who has a monopoly over the printed press in the country.
@myaltduh
Not Australian, so total guess:
I'd imagine it has to do with the groups that immigrated to Australia. Australia is significantly whiter than other major former UK colonies and the white people are less diverse as well, with the large majority hailing from the British Isles.
Furthermore, and to be more speculative, I'd guess that intellectuals and scientists in Europe more likely to be potential leftist thought leaders would be more likely to immigrate to the US or Canada than to Australia.
Finally, Australia's media is pretty much run by the Murdoch family, which skews everything right.
@RIPGunnersaurus
If anything, reading garbled messaging like this where the writer goes out of their way to claim they’re applying “Marxist analysis” while clearly degrading the working class…idk it strikes me as purposely incorrect, just fodder for conservative pundits to highlight and slam.
@whubby777
Marxist analysis, as she mocks and patronizes the “proles” and stops just short of openly calling them scum and leeches (JUST short)
Literally the opposite view of what Marx would hold, but sure you tell yourself that deluded neo-lib
@TopazWyvern
Ehh, the professional class is generally seen as a proletarianised petit bourgeoisie, caused by the ever greater need of capitalism for specialists, which were initially all petit bourgeois. Hell, attaining petit bourgeois status proper is still very much a prospect for the professional class, eg. a doctor opening his own clinic.
Where they'll stand on the class struggle depends on how screwed over by capital they currently are, and how much the indoctrination they received during their education holds. Self-employed professionals side wholly with the bourgeois more often than not, while those on the lower strata of the class tend to have a proletarian class consciousness.