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.

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.

the late Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio got it right when he argued that the left always gave priority to solidarity and equality over liberty in the trio of Enlightenment political virtues. But he also, and very crucially, emphasised that true liberty is only possible through equality and solidarity – something that the social democratic tradition at its best understood well.

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’:

Hutton sees dominant American values as differing from European “around the three clusters of values that define European civilisation - the stakeholder view of property, the belief in the social contract and the commitment to a vital public realm”.

Briefly, the story is this. In Europe, the ownership of property (or ownership of the means of production) carries inherent social obligations, traditionally from feudal times and today exemplified in the German constitution. In America property belongs unequivocally to the individual. The only obligation is to do something useful/productive with it. Hence the native Americans could be relieved of their property, as they were doing nothing useful with it.

In terms of the social contract, Europe believes that everyone deserves to live decently and productively, not just survive. In America if you are poor it is because you choose to be. Welfare is morally corrosive.

The role of the public realm in America is to protect your property rights and stay out of the hair of the individual. In Europe the Public realm is for collective action in the general good, which includes installing and maintaining the notion of an infrastructure of justice. This includes the provisions of education and health so that no matter who your parents are society and opportunities are essentially open.

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.

Leaving aside the obvious pathologies of the Leninist party form, Immanuel Wallerstein has a good explanation for why – the parties of the Second International – and their counterparts in liberation movements in the post-colonial world failed. They failed for two reasons…

As far as I can see only one reason is given.

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.

In the meantime, this paper from Andrew Scott gives a lot of background on what it was all about:

http://www.australianreview.net/journal/v7/n1/scott.pdf

And I’ll substitute “hate” for “heat” later on. Editing pdfs is a bugger!

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.

we should be reading “hate” for “heat”? Unless yer pushing the meteorological metaphors in ways that quite elude me.

Perhaps suggesting that the circumstances of Robert Manne’s departure as Quadrant editor resembled a medieval Spanish auto-da-fe?

Can’t abid page numbers. Citation is over-rated.

“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.

As I understand it we are in a period of transition now whether we want to be or not, it’s not a choice.

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.

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.

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.