As mentioned in a previous post, I’m speaking on Sunday at a forum organised by the Search Foundation in Brisbane. The idea is to discuss how we in the left might formulate some objectives that transcend both particular campaigns and electoral politics - in short, an exercise in re-envisioning goals. I’m circulating my paper in advance of the meeting, and I’ll be talking to it rather than reading it, but since there was some interest on the previous thread, I’m also posting a link here. [pdf]
I’m looking at a subsequent magazine publication, so any feedback and discussion is greatly appreciated, and as I’ll be extemporising around the text on Sunday, I’d also be delighted to incorporate any constructive comment in the talk itself.
Mark, what’s the time and venue for the event, and can anyone attend?Sorry, just checked the link where this is all explained. Unfortunately I’ll have to miss the event because I have a lecture to prepare.
That’s an excellent paper, Mark.
Yep, good piece!
The noise you can hear is the sound of collective towel throwing-in.
Interesting and thought-provoking piece, Mark. The section on utopianism took me back to undergrad days when I took a class by Martin Krygier at UNSW on his Boyer Lectures - Between Fear and Hope. The whole course was his critique of utopianism very much along the lines of what you touch on - and boy did it piss me off! I had the gall back then to write my essay on exactly why he was wrong
To give him his due, he gave me a good mark and still likes me…
Also feeds into some thoughts I’ve been having on defeatism in climate policy globally. Very interesting to see how you tie that in with Fukuyama. Gives me a broader perspective on the issue.
Out of interest, where are you thinking of submitting it? Overland?
Interesting paper Mark.
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One pedantic point: Eric Hobsbawm referred to the 20th century as ’short’ not ‘long’.
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Also I’m not sure how useful it is to bring up Jameson’s notions about postmodernism and ‘late capitalism’. Firstly Jameson is tiresomely indulging Marx’s primary error - to engage in prophecy. Secondly if we are in ‘late capitalism’ how is it that it is only this year that the urban population of the world will (slightly) outnumber the rural? A highly urbanised population is a feature of capitalism in which market activity is the predominant mode of the economy. Urbanisation is a key indice. It’s a little early to be speaking of ‘late capitalism’. Indeed I’d suggest refraining from doing so until capitalism is behind us.
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‘Postmodernism’ I’d wager is possibly best understood as the genesis of a post-industrial culture. Its questions are typical of a time of shifts in cultural assumptions and values and it’s empirical realities are emblemic of such things as free assocation and wide ranges of choice associated with consumer culture, that is: capitalism. That’s just a counter-view. The tendency to historicize oneself is a feature of ‘postmodernism’ I’d rather not engage in.
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And shouldn’t ‘utopianism’ be dispensed with? Realistic’ or not? I like ‘progress’. But perhaps old-fashioned humanism is too naff for those who dream of the Grand March.
Fukuyama was engaging in hyperbole. Equating the eventual triumph of democracies and the decline of totalitarian dictatorships is premature and hardly ‘the end of history’. In fact there seems to be a new trend where the worst aspects of capitalism and communism are combined. This manifests in a wide range from Pushkin’s Russia to Melbourne’s public transport system. Never underestimate the capacity of monkeys to stupidity.
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If Fukuyama meant to suggest the eventual triumph of the Right because of the collapse of the Soviet Union he’s barking. He may wish to take note of certain places - Sweden for example - which have ’socialist’ characteristics and are hardly on the brink of collapse. China which comprises a good chunk of the Earth’s population is also not exactly a liberal democracy.
Thanks for the correction on Hobsbawm, Adrien, I’d been reading a book by Giovanni Arrighi with that title! (His 20th century goes back to the sixteenth - or rather he wants to trace a story about the origins and shifts of financial capital).
I’m sure you’ve had the argument about the use of the term “late capitalism” with Kim on an earlier post. I’m not sure it’s all that productive to go into it again. The Hobsbawmian point about urbanisation has a lot of force, but I don’t see it as being a particular criticism of Jameson’s thinking on economics. And I’m unsure why you think he’s in the prophecy business. Anything but, on my reading. And you appear to agree with him about postmodernism!
I don’t think utopianism should be dispensed with - and certainly not in favour of “progress” but that’s something I’ll be writing a lot more about shortly. Nice to hear about Krygier (the mark not the course!), tim!
Fukuyama, of course, has backed away from his argument at a rate of knots since he disavowed neo-conservatism. But I’m not so much concerned with what he meant but the way he was read and how his work was put to use. Again, I might have something to say about Fukuyama’s text as such later on.
Tim, yes, I’ve been in touch with Overland.
I muchly enjoyed the paper, Mark. Two quick comments, some more tomorrow night, perhaps.
I agree with keeping the notion of utopias, because not all of them will be progress.
I wonder whether you need to flesh out the notion of “transition” a bit more. As I understand it we are in a period of transition now whether we want to be or not, it’s not a choice. But it may help to give some shape to this transition - what is changing or breaking down?
Maybe it’s there and I missed it.
Yes, Brian, I agree with that. But how we give it direction is a choice.
As to the question, yep, a good idea. Maybe I’m trying to pack too much in. But on the other hand I don’t want to make it too long.
Typo alert! Surely in:
“First, that the left can be identified with the figures the culture warriors love to heat…”
we should be reading “hate” for “heat”? Unless yer pushing the meteorological metaphors in ways that quite elude me.
Also, would it really hurt to number your fucking pages in the top right hand corner? At the very least it would make open-source proofing a lot easier - eg: “Page 6, para 1 - query ‘heat’ for ‘hate’?”
As for the overall premise - well the future’s gonna pull your finger. Unpredictability is the one thing you can always predict will happen next.
It was a typo originally but I liked the metereological metaphor! Allusive rather than elusive?
Can’t abid page numbers. Citation is over-rated.
Perhaps suggesting that the circumstances of Robert Manne’s departure as Quadrant editor resembled a medieval Spanish auto-da-fe?
Mark, I picked up the typo that Nabs did and was going to email you. Can I say it still looks more like a typo than a metaphor!
In the first para in section 11, I wonder whether you might usefully add the word “ironically” to read ‘but there was a good reason why he was ironically dubbed “Honest John”.’
I agree about not making the paper any longer. In general there is an assumption that the audience knows a fair bit about politics/sociology, which allows a lot of clever and amusing references. On the second page in the para beginning “There is justice in the critique…” I thought the last part from “as Russel Jacoby has argued..” was good, even brilliant, but might stretch the prior knowledge of the audience.
I liked the paper, and was left wanting you to flesh out the details of the Australia Reconstructured project some more, in the sense of this being the point at which the threads of your paper knit together. Also, why do you think this project failed?
I’ve just been reading bits of the Don Watson Keating biography and Watson argues that Kelty was keen to get Regional Development plan off the ground in the mid 90s but was thwarted. Any thoughts on this lost opportunity?
Ag, thanks for that. Gotta pop out in about half an hour, so I’ll get back to you on Australia Reconstructed, Kelty etc.
In the meantime, this paper from Andrew Scott gives a lot of background on what it was all about:
[link]
And I’ll substitute “hate” for “heat” later on. Editing pdfs is a bugger!
Great paper, Mark.
You sure have read a lot of books.
I counted my bookshelves a few weeks ago, dk.au, and there were fourteen. Lest I become a crazy person living in an apartment where you have to creep through things to actually live, I think I’m heading for a cull soon.
Ag, on Kelty - I think his ideas were pretty sketchy - something that he cooked up with Lindsay Fox and on which Keating humoured him. I suspect that it also got swallowed by the bureaucracy. Kelty’s responsible, imho, for some big strategic mistakes - but that’s another story maybe.
With the politics of Keating’s Prime Ministerial period, a few of the ideas in AR were picked up - eg union controlled industry super funds, ANTA, etc. But very much according to PJK’s own priorities and stripped of their overarching policy content. Enterprise bargaining was also supposed to achieve some of the objectives but really became either a useless bureaucratic exercise in terms of identifying productivity gains that may or may not have been in some sectors or a safety valve for the better organised unions to play catch up for wage increases foregone in the 80s. Though in some areas, useful stuff was done in terms of skills/pay alignment.
The politics of all this is probably well covered in Don Watson’s book on PJK, and Scott has a good summary in the paper to which I’ve linked. A lot of the dissipation of the impetus also had to do with the internal politics of the labour movement, most crucially probably being Laurie Carmichael’s marginalisation.
On the bigger picture stuff, the reason why I see AR as crucial is that it represented a significant long term strategy for Labor incorporating a different vision of economic policy. Whitlam killed off traditional Labor socialism, but didn’t really replace it with anything. A lot of what Keating was up to made sense, but didn’t have much in terms of a social vision beyond the restructuring agenda.
Mark, thanks for the explanation and link to Scott’s essay. Your essay reads even better 2nd time around - especially liked the Benjamin and Bloch references. The question I’ve got about AR is that if was valuable because of its long-term vision, technocratic blueprint detail, and ex-communist intellectual provenance, that what social, cultural and media forms would such a ‘plan for the future’ arrive in now?
And that’s a very good question, Ag. That’s what I think we should be thinking about - but I think we need to think about desirable ends first and start with cultural, social and economic analysis. That’s kinda my point in the paper - do that rather than start at the policy level.
I think I’ve found another glitch:
As far as I can see only one reason is given.
Second reason is that they didn’t satisfy the desires and expectations inspired by the cultural shifts of the 60s. Is that not clear in the wording?
I think it was Wallerstein, was it not, who said that no-one had achieved a polity wherein all three were given equal emphasis. Whether they can be, and be developed fully, is moot, but it’s what I would be looking for in any arangement we might transition to.
Will Hutton in his book The world we’re in addresses what he calls ‘core values’:
That’s from a piece I did five years ago wherein I was bouncing around on the troubled seas that Mark grasps with his meta-analysis.
Values are a necessary part of deciding “how are we to live well”, but the difficult part is how do you ground them, how do you decide one set of values is superior to another? You might say “The greatest good for the greatest number” but that only introduces the question of the nature of “the good” or gets you into head counting, which doesn’t do it for me.
Well, that’s utilitarianism, isn’t it, Brian? Values, remember, are intersubjective things - not individual choices (or not really, contra liberalism). The trick to any successful truly democratic political or social movement is the emergence of shared values and renegotiating how to live according to them. We should be familiar with this model because it’s how successful interpersonal relationships work. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When it happens, it’s really exciting. The two big questions are how to maintain it, particularly in unfriendly territory, and how to universalise it.
I think it’s always got to be a work in progress. A conscious work. Probably the attempt to impose a solution to what is a tension inherent in the dialectic between individuality and the commons really is a coercive utopia. Lenin and the “New Man” etc.