Towards International Solidarity In Progressive Politics
By Upul Wickramasinghe -July 23, 2013
Upul Wickramasinghe
The National Education Conference (NEC) 2013 was held on 10-12 July at the University of Adelaide under the facilitation of the National Union of Students (NUS) and I was privileged to participate as an international student. The idea behind this article is to discuss several matters related to the conference, which are politically important.
In Australia, which is considered as a developed capitalist country, right wing capitalist parties, the Liberal party and Labour party (ALP), politically dominate. Hence, it is obvious to expect that student movement also dominated by right wing student groups. Proving this to be true, the agenda of NEC-2013 was scheduled in order to fulfill the political interests of ALP by focusing on preparing students for the coming up election on September against the Liberal party. This is well exemplified when looking at the programs included in the agenda.
Anaesthetizing people politically is a very important thing for the existence of the capitalist system. In other words, in a context of people are adopting to a competitive life style; working hard with their maximum strengths to gain personal goals and achievements, they lose or minimize their potentials and possibilities to understand social injustice and inequalities in a broader sense and collectively fight against it. As Marx clearly puts, the capitalist system destroys human values and human relations are transformed into competitive relations that are heading to achieve personal successes in the market economy. In this context, the individual happiness or satisfaction is really based on up to which extent I am ahead of others or others are behind of me. One of the main strategies of anaesthetizing of radical political activism is, offering economical concessions or allowances for a selected group of individuals who involve with radical politics and encouraging others to get that kind of benefits. Read More
