Books
How Labour Built Neoliberalism
Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre of constructing neoliberalism? How might corporatism have advanced neoliberalism? And, more controversially, were the trade unions only victims of neoliberal change, or did they play a more contradictory role?
In How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project, Elizabeth Humphrys examines the role of the Labor Party and trade unions in constructing neoliberalism in Australia, and the implications of this for understanding neoliberalism’s global advance. These questions are central to understanding the present condition of the labour movement and its prospects for the future.
How Labour Built Neoliberalism was published in 2019, and is available in paperback from Haymarket Books, and in academic hardcover from Brill.
Reviews and praise for How Labour Built Neoliberalism
“Humphry’s brilliant How Labour Built Neoliberalism utterly transforms our understanding of modern Australian politics and compels us to rethink established ideas about the role of the trade union movement in the making of neoliberalism. I consider this to be a landmark work in Australian political sociology and an invaluable contribution to the literature on global neoliberalism.”
— Melinda Cooper, University of Sydney, Author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017)
“This book offers a groundbreaking account of the transition to neoliberalism in Australia, focusing on the role of the Labor Party and the trade unions in the economic, social and policy shifts involved in that transition. The book is scholarly and informative, and it sets the standard for studies of neoliberal transitions elsewhere. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the emergence of neoliberalism in Australia, or the contradictory role trade unions can play during an economic crisis.”
— Alfredo Saad Filho, King’s College London
“… a tremendously important new book…find yourself a copy of How Labour Built Neoliberalism… [Humphrys] makes a serious, well-researched and persuasive case, which challenges a great deal that’s been written about the recent past. If you’re at all concerned about the state of the Australian left, you need to engage with her work.”
— Jeff Sparrow, in: Sydney Review of Books, 23 September 2019
“[…] I wish to pay a huge tribute to Liz Humphrys for her book How Labour Built Neoliberalism. This publication is hugely significant. I feel we have waited 30 years for this analysis.”
– Lee Rhiannon, Former Commonwealth Senator for the Australian Greens, in: Progress in Political Economy, 24 March 2019
“ How Labor Built Neoliberalism is a scholarly, erudite and persuasive account of Labor’s neoliberal turn and of the Accords. It should be widely read by labour historians, political economists, unionists and Labor politicians.”
– Tim Lyons, in: Labour History 118 (May 2020)
“The great strength of Humphrys’ book is its almost forensic examination of what others have said and why the evidence suggest we need to tell a quite different story. This book is crisply and clearly written. … it decisively scotches the myth of the Hawke-Keating governments as progressive.”
– Rob Watts, in: Journal of Australian Political Economy (Summer 2020/2021)
“The book opens up a discussion about the contemporary ‘profound disorganisation of trade unions’ not with the end of lamenting that which has been lost but as the starting point for how workers can win back control over their lives. […] How Labour Built Neoliberalism points to the dead-end that is resolving a crisis of capitalism on capitalist terms. This is the strategic value Humphrys’ work brings to the present predicament of the labour movement.”
— Godfrey Moase, United Workers Union, in: Overland, 1 April 2019
” How Labour Built Neoliberalism is an important contribution to the critical study of a period of history that has largely escaped honest appraisal. It builds on the work of Tom Bramble, Rick Kuhn and others, joining a small but important offering of literature that frankly explains the genesis of the unions’ current crisis. […] How Labour Built Neoliberalism is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand the context of today’s trade union crisis.”
— Steph Price, in: Marxist Left Review, Issue 18, Winter 2019
“In pointing out some of the unique characteristics of neoliberalism’s triumph in Australia, Humphrys enriches our understanding of the different pathways and contexts, including the incorporation of the labour movement, that can bring about such dramatic economic and social transformation in the interests of capital without massive social unrest.”
– Sarah Gregson, Labour History 118 (May 2020)
“[…] Written in a beautiful and highly accessible prose, [Humphrys] makes clear that trade unions are not automatically progressive or reactionary. Ultimately, trade unions too are sites of class struggle, which decides on whether a particular trade union is a force for social justice or not. […] Humphrys’ book is a must-read in guiding our explorations of this question and the search for alternative, progressive strategies.”
— Andreas Bieler, Professor of Political Economy, University of Nottingham, UK, in: Progress in Political Economy, 14 January 2019
“[Humphrys’] critique offers both useful conceptual tools for understanding neoliberalism and an important caution in rushing towards the state for solutions. That is a challenge, particularly in Australia, where unions have often looked to political means to solve industrial problems. Her call also resonates with a growing number of critical voices within the union movement urging a renewed focus on industrial organising.”
— Ben Spies-Butcher, Macquarie University, in: The Economic and Labour Relations Review (2020)
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe
Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze.
In a challenging book published in 2011, a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it. The book is available open access.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik, a right-wing writer and activist, killed more than sixty young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya island. Captured alive, Breivik was more than willing to explain his actions as a ‘necessary atrocity’ designed to ‘wake up’ Europe to its betrayal by the Left, and its impending destruction through immigration.
Breivik’s beliefs – expressed at length in a manifesto, ‘2083’ – were part of a huge volume of Right-wing alarmism and xenophobia that had arisen in the last decade. Yet Breivik, we were told by the Right, was simply a madman – so mad, in fact, that he had actually believed what the Right said: that Europe was in imminent danger of destruction, and extreme action was required.
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe is a response to this attempt to deny responsibility, and any connection of Breivik’s act to a rising cult of violence, racism, and apocalyptic language. The editors and authors shine a light on Breivik’s actions, and argue that they cannot be understood abstracted from the far-Right racist and Islamophobic social and political conditions in which it emerged.
Organised, written and produced within three months of the killings, On Utøya is a challenge to anyone who would seek to portray this event as anything other than it is – a violent mass assassination, directed against the left, to terrorise people into silence and submission to a far-right agenda. It concludes with an examination of the manufacture of hate and fear in Australia, and considers what is needed in a Left strategy to deal with the growing threat of far-Right organising.
Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze, with essays by Anindya Bhattacharyya, Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O’Shea, Richard Seymour, Jeff Sparrow and the editors.