Power, Unions and Networks of Care: an Interview with Student Ben Wyatt

Interview by Elizabeth Fewster

Ben Wyatt is undertaking the Master of Philosophy at the ANU. His research looks at union organising in the modern economy.

Ben and I spent a challenging year together doing our Honours theses at the University of Melbourne, amidst never ending lockdowns. We got to know each other and our research interests over long hours in the library, zoom writing sessions, and (when permitted) many stress induced pub sessions. I sat down with Ben to chat about the research he’s kicking off soon.

Well, I haven’t done it yet, so I’m not sure where it’s gonna go. But the idea is that, historically, the economy has functioned because material things were understood to have value, and because of that, workers were able to say either “ we create this thing” or “we helped created this value”. Either way, their refusal to work was an effective way of leveraging that power. So in that context, unions became one form of labour organising that was relatively effective, and it helped working people to get political rights.

The economy is very different now and things don’t seem to have value in the same way. Now value is more symbolic and it’s more driven by speculative systems than material goods. So the question is, what is the value of labour in this new context? But also there’s a political question, about what it means for people who labour to gain political power, through their labour, in this new economy.

You can see it in a lot of different facets, but fundamentally things have become more abstract. For example, in Melbourne when there’s a protest, you either meet at the State Library, and protest there, or you walk to somewhere else, so there are certain avenues where you protest, they disrupt traffic to some degree, but the ritual of protest is domesticated.

For the people protesting, it’s a statement, right? They get to externalise that they’re doing something, but it’s not an exercise of power, because the powers that be - the government, corporations, whatever - they’re allowing it. Whereas the significance of a strike historically is the workers are showing through their actions that “you may own this factory, but we’re the ones creating its value, so we are going to get what we want”. I think that, especially for young people today, for all of our engagement with politics, things are very symbolic. We’ve sort of lost that way of thinking about how to exercise ourselves politically. So young people, we’re concerned about climate change, but what do we, as our generation, have that we can mobilise to get what we want?

Personally, I think it’s important that we strike, but for me, it’s more about civil disobedience and how you gain power. Constitutionalism is important, it’s important that there are rules to society. But I support civil disobedience, for example, the Harbour Bridge person, I support their right to protest and I think what they did is good. But the issue is that it’s still symbolic, right? Even if they’re actually being disruptive, and even if they get a heavy court case thrown at them, at the end of the day, whether they are arrested or they go home, it’s over, it’s an event, it’s a spectacle that comes to an end. It’s not forcing change in the same way.

This is the thing about the broader economy: seventy years ago if a factory shut down, the supply chain would be disrupted and the people that owned factories would be upset because their profits would be hampered. But today that profit isn’t driven by production, so, for example, even if workers shut down the factory to a standstill for a year, profit was driven by speculation on the company that owns the factory, not the goods that get produced.

So speculation has a lot to do with credit and debt. Mortgages are a great example of this, we expect that properties will always gain in value. So you take a mortgage out on a property, pay down the mortgage on the expectation that the asset will be worth more when you sell it. People don’t just buy houses to live in anymore, they also buy them as investments. So homeowners support policies which continually push up house prices. New homeowners might be able to still buy a house, because even if their mortgage is expensive, they expect the house will be worth more in the future. So now they also have to support the same policies. All the while, their house was overpriced to begin with, and the longer this carries on, the greater the catastrophe for most homeowners if and when the bubble pops.

So speculation is both the idea that these sorts of assets will keep growing in value, and that that growth is normal. Beyond this pushing more people into insecure housing, it also changes the meaning of housing in society. Housing is a material need, but that need comes up against this financial structure that frames housing not as a need, but as an avenue for profit. Your right to shelter is pitted against my right to profit. But because speculation says profit is guaranteed, and a lot of people have bet a lot of money on it being so, your rights are now a privilege. But more importantly, we’re seeing a massive widening of inequality in society between those who have inherited property and those who haven’t.

But in the broader economy, what speculation means is that investors aren’t saying “you’re creating a useful product, let me invest” or “you’re producing more efficiently, let me invest”. Instead, investment in society and the economy is flattened into short term returns and gambling on stock prices.

There’s two types of fascists. There are the leaders, and then there are members. In almost every situation, leaders of fascist movement, whether they admit it or not, just want power, and they will do whatever they want to get power, and they’ll use the state and the state structures that already exist - and those that don’t - to get power. They should be criminalised. The issue with the members of fascist movements is that they’re there for a reason. If you look at Germany in the 30s, or America and Australia today, it really is driven by economic anxiety, and the problem is that that isn’t taken seriously.

I’m Jewish. My grandfather moved around the world to fight the Nazis. My friends and I have protested them constantly. History shows that the only way to stop Fascists is with physical opposition. Whether it’s the 43 Group or today’s American antifascists, you can only stop Fascist leaders by stopping any attempt to normalise their presence. So punching Nazis is good precisely because it forces a conversation about violence, a conversation they don’t want to have while claiming they bring security and calmness to people’s lives.

But punching Fascists isn’t enough. You have to find the root cause. If you’re a white working class man, who every day is being fucked over by the economy, and for 50 years or 100 years, you’ve been told “don’t talk about class, talk about gender and race”, or “it’s not your employer , it’s migrants and women taking your job”, that’s the issue. That’s the cause of fascism. The cause of fascism is that there are genuine issues in society and people are given the wrong solutions. Find a scapegoat to protect the status quo, but feel like change is coming. It comes back to structures of power.

So anti-fascism doesn’t begin and end with punching a fascist in the street. It’s about community building and networks of care. It’s a much broader thing about rebuilding a frayed society instead of waiting for the next Fascist march and asking “what should be done?”

Ideally what you need is communities that are marginalised, not just being visible, but developing a public. Politicians and advertisers often talk about or to a public. A sort-of imagined normative community who represents Australia. They are spoken to in the media and in politics, and they’re the people that policy is made for. Marginalised communities developing their own public really means building spaces and discourses that can sustain life, not just moments of protest.

So in my own community, we started a newspaper, we’re trying to foster debate and discussion around important things in my community, and we also run events. We’re soon going to start up mutual aid networks and things like that. There’s a million different things that can be done. But the fundamental point is beginning with the concrete questions like “what do we as a collective need?”, “what structures would help alleviate this?”, “how can we facilitate ongoing dialogue instead of speaking at one another?”

Returning to this sort of grassroots structural stuff isn’t to say that protesting is less important or that things aren’t urgent. But change comes about when people display their power to act. And we can only do that if we can sustain one another. Networks of care are not ready-made models for community, they have to be about the real people in front of you and their real needs. The tediousness of the solutions are important because they unravel our affection for a broken system, and help us to work out what leverage we have to force a change for good.

Photography by Hima Panaganti