Our task is not done, but we turn to the future with hope, optimism and purpose. In , Closing the Gap remains a shared commitment. It is the story of a shared journey to continue to work together and enable and empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to live healthy and prosperous lives.
This journey continues to draw on the enduring wisdom, strength and resilience learned over thousands of years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander civilisation.
The past 10 years of Closing the Gap have also provided governments with valuable lessons. One of the key lessons we have learned is that effective programs and services need to be designed, developed and implemented in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Governments have also recognised the importance of taking a far more holistic approach involving agencies from across government to develop policies and deliver services to First Australians.
The Closing the Gap framework was established in to address Indigenous disadvantage. Ten years on, the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have improved but more gains need to be made.
The Closing the Gap framework provides an annual national snapshot of progress made against the targets — and helps maintain our collective focus. While acknowledging this, it is important to recognise the success and achievements of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, demonstrating that when equal opportunities are provided, disadvantage can be overcome. The chapters in this report detail the progress made against the seven Closing the Gap targets — and focus on health, education, employment and community safety.
They also showcase a range of Indigenous success stories — from inspiring individuals, to growing businesses and organisations making a positive difference to their communities. All of the Closing the Gap targets are interconnected. Progress in one area helps progress to be made in others. For instance, improving education standards helps to increase employment rates and levels of health.
And community safety is fundamental to ensuring children attend school and adults maintain employment. Lenin's plans bore fruit; the periodical Iskra the Spark --which gathered as editors both the most prominent young leaders, such as Lenin and Julius Martov, but also the founders of Russian Marxism, such as George Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod--was able over a period of three years, from to , to win over the majority of Russian committees to Lenin's proposal for the all-Russian party.
Lenin outlined his plan in a number of articles in Iskra. The first step, he said, was an all-Russian political newspaper. This passage gives a hint of the urgency of Lenin's call; he believed that the working-class movement was advancing by leaps and bounds, and that the socialists, with their purely local, agitational work, usually centered around lending assistance to workers' economic struggles, were lagging behind these developments.
The working class, he wrote, "has demonstrated its readiness, not only to listen to and support the summons to political struggle, but boldly to engage in battle. Lenin and his cohorts were waging a political fight against other trends in the movement--namely, the trend known as "economism," centered around a newspaper called Rabochaya Mysl Workers Thought , but also the eclectic trend around the newspaper Rabochaya Dyelo Workers Dawn , which seemed unable to take a firm stand on anything.
In Lenin's opinion, the economists made a virtue of the socialist movements' weaknesses, arguing that the task of socialists was merely to support workers' economic struggles. The elitist assumption was that workers weren't ready for political agitation. The economists, argued Lenin, were the Russian variant of the German "revisionists," led by Eduard Bernstein, who famously wrote that the movement was everything and the final goal nothing.
In Russia, Lenin argued, the economists were attempting "to narrow the theory of Marxism, to convert the revolutionary workers' party into a reformist party. Lenin's beef with the Dyelo group was that it downplayed the danger of economism, alternatively criticizing and flirting with their ideas. The Dyeloists also were uncritical of terrorism, and though it is rarely acknowledged by Lenin's critics over the years, Iskra spent some time engaging in a polemic in favor of the methods of mass struggle and against individual terror, on the grounds that this tactic "disorganizes the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution.
For Lenin, the main imbalance was between the rapid growth of class struggle--strikes, even general strikes, and May Day demonstrations--while the organization of socialists that could provide a national leadership and unite the disparate struggles into a common front against the autocracy was lacking. Worse, there were political trends in the movement that saw this as a perfectly fine state of affairs. The context is precisely what is missing from most accounts of this work. Lenin noted the fact as early as "The basic mistake made by those who now criticize What Is to Be Done?
Historians, borrowing from Lenin's contemporary critics, have continued the trend, presenting this work not as a particular polemic for a particular time, but as a timeless work that stands as the founding text of "Leninism.
In the process, they have distorted it beyond recognition. Various passages are used to "prove" that Lenin had, at this point, lost faith in the working class' revolutionary potential, and paradoxically, also feared the spontaneous struggle of workers--and on that basis, now advanced the idea that only a hyper-centralized party of bourgeois intellectuals could lead the revolution to victory. One only has to read What Is to Be Done?
Lenin's work is infused with confidence in the "spontaneous" strivings of the working class toward socialist consciousness in Russia. But he is also aware that these strivings will mean nothing unless a unified socialist party is built that can provide political leadership in the struggle--that is, can organize the working class to play not merely a role as a stage army used by liberals, but to lead in the fight to topple the autocracy.
It is with this in mind that Lenin emphases the importance of centralization the movement had been completely decentralized , without which the autocracy could not be defeated; of the need for an all-Russian newspaper, without which a national party could not be built; and of creating an organization of professional revolutionaries that is, people who devote themselves full time to party work.
He wore inexpensive but durable clothing. At first he kept a piece of limestone on his desk, but later he threw it away when he discovered how much time had to be spent in dusting it. He collected his fuel, free, from the woodside.
What little extra money he needed, he earned from various day-labor jobs; he found that a man is able to support himself for a year with what he can earn in a few weeks. He advises his readers to follow his example by similarly simplifying their lives. Once out of the economic rat race, he said, they will have the leisure and tranquility to study, meditate, enjoy nature, and begin creating a spiritually rich life.
Like the narrator, they will find that life can be a cause for celebration; life does not have to be a reason for weary complaint.
The narrator concludes this chapter by advising his readers not to go out and try to change the world once they have thrown off the fetters of tradition and materialism. The beginning of all real reform, he says, is the perfection of each individual. Once an individual has critically observed his shortcomings, his first step in reforming his life should be to turn inward, as the narrator did when he left society, and discover what he, alone, is capable of being.
Within his self, he will discover a near-infinite potential for spiritual perfection which can be actualized. If, like the narrator, he designs his life to realize his potential for spiritual perfection, and avoids the world of trade which "curses every thing it handles," life will become a constantly growing state of ecstasy.
Walden begins with the narrator's explanation of why he chose to address himself to his audience in the first person singular voice. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Thoreau desires Walden to have a forceful impact on society. His narrator will be explaining the rich changes in his life and how superior his life is when compared with that of the average American.
He will explain how he achieved such a marvelous life, hoping to convince the reader to improve his own life. In doing this, he may become liable to the charge of hyper-egotism or smugness.
The narrator may be judged a braggart by the reader, and Thoreau counters this possibility by having his narrator immediately admit that his life is the subject at hand. Later the narrator almost deferentially tells his reader that "unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.
There is, however, a more sophisticated level of meaning in the narrator's early comments about himself and his story. In emphasizing his use of the "I" voice, the narrator focuses the reader's attention on what is the primary subject of Walden: the subjective entity, the inner being, the self that will experience spiritual rebirth and growth at Walden Pond.
Natural scenery, social criticism, economic and political theory — all of these have a prominent place in Walden, but all are subservient to the book's core: the quest to realize the "I" voice's vision of an ideal existence.
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