Swedish wage policy and Australia three years after Australia reconstructed

During the 1980s, and with increasing speed, there have been major changes in the determination of wages in Sweden; changes which involve the substantial breakdown of the ‘Swedish model’ of social and economic policy which had developed since the 1930s. These changes are of much interest in themselves but have a special relevance to Australia because of admiration for the Swedish system within the Australian labour movement, exemplified by the major report Australia Reconstructed, published in 1987. Some of the complexities and difficulties involved in the Swedish system were not fully dealt with in this report, while others have become clear since its publication. Australians, as well as others, need to appreciate what has occurred. Centralised wage negotiation, essential to the Swedish model, has in fact survived better in Australia than in Sweden; though in Australia too it is potentially vulnerable to tendencies towards decentralisation. Those interested in the concept of ‘corporatism’ should also note these developments, Sweden having been thought of as a highly ‘corporatist’ polity.     

Rites of the living,transformations of the dead

Huntington, Richard, and Peter Metcalf. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. xv + 230 pp. including maps, photographs, bibliography, and index. $34.50 cloth, $10.95 paper.

Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry, eds. Death and the Regeneration of Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. x + 236 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $29.50 cloth, $8.95 paper.     

The Nature of Things: Dead Labor, Nonhuman Actors, and the Persistence of Marxism

This article is about the question of social agency in the animation of things , and about how this problematic has been conceptualized in Marxist and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches to human–nature–technology relations. Notwithstanding many obvious differences, we note that each tradition was founded on a radical shift to a relational ontology, a world of relations and processes and not things-in-themselves, and that each has developed, partly as a consequence of this move, analytically useful ways of investigating and talking about the work that things do, or appear to do, in the world. By relating the ANT category of non-human actors to the Marxist concept of dead labor, and by revisiting Marx's own dialectics of technology as embodied in his figure of the "living machine" in Capital , we explore the different implications of these approaches for our understandings of the nature, materiality, and the efficacy of social agents. We argue that ANT's reconfiguration of agency as a collective social and technical process—a process wherein the "nonhuman" can have very real social effects—can be deepened and given some political efficacy only if we take seriously the ontological problems of causality, accountability, and the directedness of social relations (and things) which ANT, and its wider, still evolving ethos among the social sciences and cultural studies, would have us forestall.