The Australian is running a series on defining the left (!), kicking off with a contribution today by Tim Soutphommasane. Soutphommasane is apparently the go to person at the moment for all things social democratic, having written a book arguing that we should reclaim patriotism for the left.
Posing the question of “what’s left” begs the question of who the left are. Soutphommasane’s piece today appears to equate the left with Kevin Rudd, which is, to me, quite bizarre. There’s a broader question in his writing which goes quite unanswered – that of agency and constituency.
In an op/ed for The Age, he wrote:
Preferring the comfortable terrain of moral righteousness, the Australian left surrendered national values to reactionaries and racists in the culture wars.
I don’t know quite what “moral righteousness” means in this context, though I could hazard a guess. But let’s leave that aside. I’m more concerned, for the moment, about who this “Australian left” actually comprises.
We take our attachment to egalitarianism, mateship and the fair go seriously. Most of us have a warm affection for our country and its qualities.
No doubt we do, but what are those “qualities”? And who’s that “we”? And why should such an identification be central to political identity, or indeed constitutive of such an identity?
Egalitarianism has a sociological and cultural history, but it’s also one marked by exclusions – as is “mateship”. If Soutphommasane’s argument is that the Australian Labor Party needed to counter John Howard’s embrace of so-called national values for electoral reasons, no doubt he has a point. Governing parties are by necessity oriented to the state, and since we have nation states, must necessarily articulate some sort of discourse of the nation. But the ALP and electoral politics are not co-extensive with the left. I haven’t read his book, but in the newspaper commentary he’s authored, it doesn’t seem to me that the very good reasons why left wing movements have been suspicious of nationalist particularisms and in favour of cosmopolitanism and internationalism have been addressed.
Similarly, the argument about Kevin Rudd and social democracy makes two elisions. The first is the unjustified claim that Rudd himself is “the left”, and that – in the manner of New Labour – he needs some sort of array of philosopher kings (thinktankers and op/edders and other ideologists) to articulate and/or interpret an ideological narrative – of the left – for him. Well, maybe. Perhaps Rudd does feel that every PM should have some sort of ideological narrative. I’m not so sure he’d be all that happy to see himself as ‘the left’. In any case, whatever Paul Kelly might think, whether or not he has an ideological narrative (or indeed a coherent one) is probably electorally irrelevant.
Soutphommasane is probably right that a sort of generalised statism is the substance of what Rudd actually believes in. But I’m not at all sure that he needs to foster a debate on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach or whatever. Such a debate may well be useful, and interesting, but most of this stuff is just court theorising, as it were, and won’t make all that much difference to the Rudd government’s actual practice – composed of an amalgam of managerialism, “tough love” social policy combined with vague dicta about “social inclusion”, regulatory urges existing in an uneasy partnership with deregulatory ones, dreams of nation building, and so on. It’s too much to expect that all this will form a coherent ideational whole, though it can be woven together to form a political narrative that is electorally useful; and useful as an ideological justification.
As I’ve argued tons of times before, ideology is often just what politicians do – that is a social practice of governing – not the fantasy of a neat little Enlightenment style encyclopedia, or a mythical universal. It can be more or less coherent, dependent on the degree to which it represents a genuinely transformational project. And there’s little of that about Australian Labor.
That’s the second elision – between the political-theoretic fantasy of a master narrative and the pragmatics of politics.
Another elision, which is what produces the blind spots in Soutphommasane’s thought, is his own speaking position. I think, and this is not intended to be a personal criticism, it’s effectively that of the court philosopher. Demos style. That’s fine as far as it goes, though it would be helfpul, I think, if he were to clarify in what sense, and to what degree, he actually sees himself as speaking on behalf of ‘social democracy’ or ‘the left’. Where I find his thinking problematic is that it’s relatively disconnected from any actually existing social movement, or indeed social base. That’s a huge part of what’s wrong with most Anglo-American style political philosophy. To the degree that it has an effect – a political effect, that is, rather than the hermeneutic exegesis of books written by dead white men – it’s addressed to power, and it speaks the murmurings of dusty books and canonical texts.
If there’s a left left, we might do better to criticise the Rudd government’s actual practice in the realm of social justice, rather than engage in an abstract debate about how Kevin Rudd should understand social justice. Ruthless criticism of all that exists, and all that.
Incidentally, if anyone is serious about eliciting exactly what the Rudd ideology is, I’d suggest looking at the now seemingly unfashionable concept of labourism, and reflecting on the phrase “socialism without doctrines”.
Mark says:
Soutphommasane is obviously going by reliable instincts, although the classification of nationalists as “racists, reactionaries and ratbags” is maximally tendentious and meretricious. Left-wingers have not always been “suspicious of nationalist particularisms and in favour of cosmopolitanism and internationalism”.
In general, it is no accident that, since the advent of modernity, the evolution of the Left is organically connected to the evolution of nation states. We see this very clearly in the French Revolution which more or less simultaneously gave birth to the modern Left and the modernising nation state.
In French politics, one might prefer Liberty or Equality. But one had no choice but to declare oneself for Fraternity (ie the national community). It is no accident that the strongest Left wing parties and successful Left-wing policies emanated from the most cohesive nation states (France, Germany and now the Scandanavians).
Mark says:
The Left-Centre-Right issue is mainly about the struggle for status within the state. The local-national-global issue is more about the struggle for status between states.
The Left is that ideological movement that wants to empower the lower-status (coloreds, women, gays, republicans, atheists, petit bourgeois, workers, indigenes, and now animals and plants).
The Right is that ideological movement that wants to establish the higher-status (white, male, straights, royalty, Christians, landed gentry, professionals, early settlers, industrialists and financiers).
The ideal scale of political organization is not deducible from ideological axioms. A nationalist can be Left-wing. A globalist can be Right-wing. Or vice-versa. For example, many global institutions, such as Roman Empire, British Empire, Catholic Church, IMF, WTO, IBM, Masons, were/are obviously not particularly Left-wing. Quite the opposite, in fact, they tend to be regressive.
Conversely, many local institutions, such as kibbutzes, councils, churches and so on, can be very Left-wing ie progressive. Nations are obviously an intermediate scale of political organization between local and global. They are big enough to make a difference on a global scale. But not so big that they are remote to the local scale. The happy medium, if you like.
The Left split on the issue of national versus global loyalties in the First World War. In that instance the working class voted decisively for national clan over global class. As the Kaiser said after the SDP voted for war credits: “I see no parties, only Germans”.
The Left only started to go “cosmopolitan and internationalist” with the advent of the Soviet Union. This was not exactly an auspicious agency for such values. Ask any Ukrainian.
In fact it is liberals, not the Left, who are the most consistent internationalists. Liberalism favours open borders, free trade and free flow of capital. Transnational corporations are agency most likely to effectively spread the modernity across borders. Truly, “capital has no flag”.
I don’t quite get how someone who uses the terms ‘patriotic kitsch’ and ‘crass sentimentalism’ is qualified to look down on others values.
And where does this attitude of ‘John Howard re-invented national pride’ come from? As a kid I saw Hawke and co. spruik the Bicentennial and the journey of the old diggers back to Gallipoli (& there was a Vietnam veterans march I don’t quite remember), I saw Keating and co. do the fiftieth anniversaries of WWII events, plus the burying of the unknown soldier at Canberra. I distinctly got the impression that all those occasions were supposed to mark the passing of some old ‘One Day of The Year’ syndrome in postwar Labor.
(Maybe this instant expert thinks the Maralinga Royal Commission, Mabo & the Redfern Speech were the only times Howard’s two predecessors ever addressed the national character? Wink, wink, know what I mean.)
Though I guess if this Soutphommasane character were to only focus on latte Left strawmen & totally ignore electoral politics he wouldn’t be so useful to the Oz.
Engaging with these “teh Left must do this or that” narratives is the ultimate waste of time.
There is no single Left, and whatever “must” be done is generally some kind of (Labor) right distraction.
It’s just trolling really.
Lovely post. A couple of disparate points:
Old Vladimir said at one point in 1905 that “the mass of workers” were “miles to the left” of the Bolshevik cadre. It’s worth noting, in the light of Soutphommasane’s curious identification of “the left” with the Ruddster, that on a whole series of questions (not the least privatisation of state assets) the majority of the electorate has always been to the left of Labor governments, state and federal. It’s like a certain sort of “court intellectual” (lovely phrase that) has to shop around for the tiny handful of issues where the electorate, to paraphrase Auden, “resembles Eichmann” – usually social questions that lend themselveds to shock jockery. The demand is then raised that social democratic politicians need in some way to make an obeiscance to the popular will – “listen to its base” etc. But on the issues where the electorate is to the left of Labor, most commonly on economic questions, there is silence. So you end up with a demand, as Labor continues to slash health and education (the odd primary school monument to Julia notwithstanding), privatises in NSW and QLD, and fails to un-privatise in Victoria, that they take a leaf from Howard’s book and distract with patriotic noises.
On the last sentence of the post you talk about the “unfashionable concept of labourism”. I wasn’t aware that it was unfashionable – I haven’t been so mortified since I admitted to a niece that I’ve never texted. What’s supposed to be wrong with the concept? I would have thought, in any case, that to replace the concept with the phrase “socialism without doctrines” would be even more out of place. Is there anyone, anywhere, who would consider describing Rudd, even in jest, as a “socialist”? Perhaps “unsocial social democracy” might do.
“Soutphommasane’s piece today appears to equate the left with Kevin Rudd, which is, to me, quite bizarre.”
Well, it’s not that surprising giving that he’s a member of the ALP and has worked for both Bob Carr and Kevin Rudd.
I’ve come to assume that no writer in the Fairfax opinion pages will give any constructive criticism of the Left from a genuinely Left position. Cf. the feminist bashing articles we find on the opinion page constantly. ((example)
Robert, I don’t know what’s meant to be wrong with the concept but I hardly ever hear it employed these days!
As to “socialism without doctrines”, emphasis on the “without doctrines” bit. And I was being a bit cheeky. Though Rudd did once call himself a Christian socialist!
Mark, you say: “…we might do better to criticise the Rudd governments actual practice in the realm of social justice…”.
What’s there seriously to criticise? Large sums spent on social housing? A serious effort on Aboriginal housing (even with the problems it’s had)? A stimulus package that has allowed us to avoid mass unemployment? A serious increase in the base rate of the age pension (especially for singles who need it the most)? The imminent introduction of paid maternity leave? Less punitive treatment of the unemployed? I could go on and on.
The only reaction to anyone on the Left seriously concerned with policy – and not stale Left rhetoric – would have to be, gee, I had no idea it would be this good!
I enjoyed Soutphommasane’s piece. I especially liked how he went to the heart of what should be a central debate of the Left – especially post GFC. That is, the tension between equality of opportunity (essentially education) and equality in incomes etc. I’m strongly of the opinion that equality of opportunity is only the start, that the massive inequality that has grow up in the last 30 years will have to be reversed at some point – it is simply untenable in a democracy for inequlality to continue to grow the way it has.
If he can avoid writing in think-tankese, he’ll be an interesting young thinker to watch.
There’s your answer, I think, Ginja:
Socialism without doctrine? Sounds suspiciously to me like Lenin’s definition of Australian socialism circa 1917, though I don’t remember the exact quote and I don’t have anything to hand on my bookshelf to get it from.
I also seem to recall a French critique of Australian left politics called (in translation) Socialism Without Doctrine.It was published here in the late 60s I think, but I think it may have been written in the early 1900s. I think the late great Russel Ward wrote a forward to it. (here I was going to say the turn of the century.)
And I have to say it – Rudd Labor = left? Pshaw!
Paul – it is indeed a quote from Lenin, describing Antipodean socialism.
Thanks, Mark. its been centuries since I read some of the old fellow.
I read the article and responded of sorts on my blog. Rudd on the left? If that’s the case then we are not leftists. It struck me that Tim’s piece highlighted one problem for social democracy – it is now a practice in search of a philosophy, a philosophy that justifies capitalism but at the same time pays lip service (and perhaps more) to ‘working families’ and their role at the heart of the system.
I think Lenin’s formulation about the Labor Party being a bourgeois workers party gets there,as does Gramsci’s comment to the effect that reformism is the left wing of the bourgeoisie, not the right wing of the labour movement (from memory). It will be interesting to see what other left wing thinkers the Australian drags up. None who will rock the boat of capitalism presumably.
“It will be interesting to see what other left wing thinkers the Australian drags up. None who will rock the boat of capitalism presumably.”
It will. Has it finally occurred to them that they might sell a few more newspapers if they cater for readers other than the far right?
Tim’s getting around, he also wrote in the NewMaltilda, a very similar argument. When they start discussing alternatives to capitalism I’ll start paying attention…
For the ALP and organised labour, this alleged suspicion is of historically recent origin.
The most notorious “nationalist particularism” in the Australian experience was the White Australia Policy, which was until the latter part of the 1960s the central plank of the broad labour movement.
Cosmopolitan leftism was until the latter part of the 1960s the preserve of small marxist splinters of Australian leftism.
Such sentiments didn’t become an influential component of the broad left in Australia until the rise of the New Left. The rise of the New Left coincided with the final eclipse of marxism-leninism as an important component of Australian leftism.
Baby boomers eschewed mass commitment to both mainstream labourism and marxism-leninism for a variety of reasons.
One leading rationale for suspicion was that both streams of organised leftism were perceived as morally compromised by associations with exploded doctrines and with practices of self-righteous brutality and callousness.
And if a movement has lost the baby boomers it is disqualified as a mass movement.
Mark, socialism without doctrines wasn’t from Lenin, it was from a Frech bloke whose name escapes me.
And I happened to mention some substantial things Rudd has done to reduce income inequality in my post. Rudd has made a decent start on income inequality.
As far as I know, Soutphommasane is from the Left. I haven’t read anything by him that is anti-union (my test for whether you’re a really on the Left).
For some, one prerequisite for being undeniably on the Left (or, indeed, undeniably on the Right) is a “crusading” attitude or demeanor. Whatever else he may cultivate, Kevin Rudd doesn’t do crusading- he picks his battles based on cooler considerations.
The original French title of the book is Socialisme sans doctrines. Albert Metin was a French Radical politician when he visited Australia in 1900. The interesting thing about the thesis is it was written when Labour was still a minor party, one mainly cooperating with the radical liberals—the socialists Metin writes about includes some of the Deakinites.
Paul, Katz, I don’t understand your impulse to bring up either working class or New Left narratives—Soutphommasane is really going after the post materialist Left that was (kind of) invented by the likes of the Donald Hornes and the Patrick Whites (though obviously the New Left is closely related to this intelligentsia, I’d argue real New Left theory is very tangential to the great narratives from the sixties onwards. The victory of Gough over Dr Jim is a good, high profile, unusually political example of this, IMHO. Of course Soutphommasane probably just sees all post-materialists & New Leftists as being the same latte crowd…)
I don’t understand your use of the word “narratives” above.
If by “narratives” you mean how the left understands and explains itself, only denialism could downplay the world-changing effects of New Left thinking on the entire left.
As a result of the upsurge of New Leftism in the late 1960s the ALP became a battleground for an intense war of ideas whose long-term results have been the eclipse of union power in the ALP and in the rise of the “new classes” to dominance within the ALP, and the end of the ALP as a party controlled by its rank and file membership.
The battle between Gough and Dr Jim doesn’t map particularly well with New Left vs The Rest. Both men represented different faces of both the Old and the New Left at the time of their complex and subtle struggle for the soul of the ALP.
For example, Dr Jim was closely associated with the industrial wing of the party, while at the same time becoming the most prominent figure-head of the counter-culture within the ALP. Meanwhile, Gough was dedicated to his own version of a cultural revolution in Australian society, while at the same time distancing himself from the countercultural upsurge that threatened ALP voting traditionalists.
@17 and @19 – yes, Metin it was! My mistake.
Katz, before I rebut your criticism of my use of the word narrative I’d just like to point out that my argument continues Mark’s distinction of electoral versus non-electoral politics, and I’ve added my own beliefs about political ideology versus politically-informed social attitudes.
I have only just read Soutphommasane’s Australian piece, and I see it’s concerned with his vision of a social democratic project. When I first contributed to this thread I had only read his Age article.
(And I confess that in my brief skimming of that piece at my local cafe I’d thought it was a load of soft culture-war boilerplate, so when I cut`n’pasted from it for my comment @ 2 I went with two paragraphs that reinforced my interpretation of his thesis being nothing more than ‘John Howard re-invented patriotism’.
Yet having just reread that article I see I mistaken; his theme is that he thinks Howard ‘corrupted patriotism’. That ambivalence was lost on me the first two times I read it.)
Anyway, admitting that I was responding to you and to Paul @ 19 without knowing the context of what you two, separately, were commenting on (the Oz article, a piece which is basically a now familiar defence/advocacy of the third way, whatever that is) I still think I’m broadly right.
The social trend which you identify as “Baby boomers [eschewing] mass commitment to both mainstream labourism and marxism-leninism for a variety of reasons” is most certainly post materialism (though I think you’re also saying that the New Left contained every progressive who rejected either Marxism or old Labor, which is far too large a net to throw over such a disparate group of people, IMO).
If anything I think you’re wrong to attribute the rise of a newer progessivism (whether New Left or not) to the generation that came of age as late as the sixties. I mentioned Horne & White as being representative of a Left that wasn’t Old or New, and most certainly wasn’t driven by a movement—this is a generation that came of age during the Depression and the war years, though they only achieved a dominant role in the world of ideas of the sixties in this country. They were ‘new’ but not that youthful.
I think this is the old debate about whether simple, widepread attitudes can be the equal of an ideological doctrine, or an organisation.
Thus the broader societal narrative I see but I doubt you do.
I disagree. The idea of the ‘new class’ rolling the horny handed sons of toil (leading to the implementation of economic rationalism?) in da party is a long bow to pull. This is as emotive a portrayal of history as the very middle-class Kim Beazley, Sr., saying, “When I was young Labor conference used to attract the cream of the working class, now it gets the dregs of the middle class.”
I’m saying or implying nothing of the sort. All sorts of social, political and cultural tendencies arose in the late 1960s. Many never associated themselves with the New Left. I’m talking about those who did.
Well, yairs. There were many cultural progressives who wrote, debated and attempted to organise for cultural change at least since the end of the Great War. Melbourne, for example, had an active bohemian fringe since the 1920s.) But until the arrival of the baby boomers they were voices crying in the wilderness. I’m the first to acknowledge that boomers didn’t invent these ideas. They were more characteristically the first mass consumers of those ideas.
The above is a caricature of my argument, which I stressed was about a “complex and subtle struggle for the soul of the ALP”. In any case, this change in the nature of the ALP took place when the union movement itself was experiencing massive change with the decline in manufacturing and the blue collar trades and the rise of white collar unionism. These changes were driven by very material realities — the de-industrialisation of Australia.
Democratic socialism is built on a toxic quicksand waste mixture of Fabianism and union thugs and goombahs (like Paul Mullet) Thank fuck that all this crap will soon be cast onto the ash-heap of hirstories discarded lies – mainly by LIBERTARIAN socialism ( anarchism ) and others.
We’re young; they’re old and thats life
It, the left-right paradigm, can serve as a guide but when you have people saying that ‘Paul Howes is a “lefty” because he is associated with unions’ then you really only have ignorance.
Never start defining your political views by reference to your opponents it’s a sure fire way to dig yourself in a hole, as any good defense lawyer would know. Start with a view of what human beings are like and how to best fulfill their potentialities.
Soutphommasane’s piece today appears to equate the left with Kevin Rudd, which is, to me, quite bizarre.
.
It’s not so bizarre. There are two parties capable of winning govt. The ALP is the one that normally advocates policies more in line with ‘the Left’. The Left tends to prefer Labor governments. Naturally the Labor govts always disappoint ‘em. It’s not accurate to equate the ALP with the Left but for the purposes of discussing actual politics it seems to me that, if the terms are valid at all, then they can be used that way.
.
Of course if you use the political compass you see that most politicians are in the upper right-hand box: socially authoritarian ‘free’ marketerrs. I imagine Kevvie is probably closer to the upper left hand box than we’ve seen in a quite a while. And even further away from the X axis than Howard.
I’m not sure to what extent this excursion into semantics is useful. It’s in the nature of the limits of language that the validity of any abstract term can be questioned. What this guy is really doing is arguing for a return by the ALP to its core raison d’etre that is a social democratic political economy. In other words a jettisoning of the vicissitudes of identity politics which alineated people in the last bit of the Keating years.
.
The social Left and the economic Left are not the same thing. Rudd gets this. And it seems to that this riff is just the latest blast from the Labor artillery which aims to reacquire the blue collar base it lost to Howard and establish itself as the ‘natural’ party. To do this it can’t be spending too much time on those things seen as periferal to ‘battlers’.
.
ideology is often just what politicians do – that is a social practice of governing – not the fantasy of a neat little Enlightenment style encyclopedia, or a mythical universal.
.
I tend to think ideology is always distorted, compromised or outright given the boot in politics. It’s people in places conveninet enough to regard politics from a safe distance that are the ideological purists.
Fair enough. Though when you responded to my point about Whitlam v. Cairns being important in both electoral and non-electoral terms you yourself raised the spectre of the new progressive majority that wasn’t New Left (the people Whitlamism was–indeed, is–appealing to).
I stand by my notion of post materialism being the dominant Leftleaning idea of the sixties and after. The dedicated New Left has always been too wedded to the idea of re-inventing militancy, IMHO, even as they shared the cultural reform & quality of life agenda of post materialism (the greatest post materialists now being the Greens.)
Katz, I’m surprised that you’d bring up the concept of the ‘New Class’ apparathchiks and then insist that I take your whole argument as being as nuanced as your (quite accurate) observation that Gough was all about walking a thin line between radicals and traditionalists. The New Class is a red rage to a bull, it’s the favoured line of attack from the ‘Oddrant’ Right. It’s originally about Eastern Bloc bureaucrats, for heaven’s sakes.
I must repeat my caveat @ 22 (“this is the old debate… [can popular] attitudes can be the equal of an ideological doctrine, or an organisation[?]“) that until that post I thought this whole thread was about non-movement social beliefs, as per the Age article I was originally commenting on. Hence my slight reference to Horne’s cool, sceptical, political analysis in The Lucky Country, a book which revolutionisd what it meant to be Leftleaning in this country IMHO.
That said, the micro-economic revolution in Australia and the fight for control of the ALP/union movement (as you put it) were just not contiguous. They didn’t happen at the same time. I don’t think anyone was aware that Australia was losing occupations and sectors before about the late seventies, and even then the concern was with unemployment levels, not rustbelt decline.
I think you’re lumping these things all together in order to blame the Labor Right(s) from across several decades for what eventually happened by 1990.
This kind of negative thinking is one reason I’ve come to admire Keating’s ‘big picture’ over the years since I first had such an ambivalent reaction to him as a teen.
Quite simply, the above is untrue.
The Whitlam government revalued the Australian dollar by more than 15%. At the same time tariff protection for a wide range of industries (notably textiles) was removed. These events occurred in 1974. These actions were highly contentious both within and outside the labour movement. These actions were the first time since the Great Depression when the goal of maintaining full employment was eschewed by government.
At more or less the same time several huge white collar unions sought and gained membership of the ACTU. These unions represented the industrial interests of prime exemplars of the new classes. A classic example of this process was the union that represented bank workers. In the late 1940s their union opposed bank nationalisation vehemently and were stridently anti-ALP. By the 1970s they were in the ACTU.
(BTW, I see noting politically incorrect with the nomenclature “new classes”. The term is a convenient shorthand to identify a salariat of knowledge workers and administrators called into existence by the huge post-WWII growth of government involvement in the economy and the explosive growth of the service sector in general.)
Katz, I think you’re applying hindsight with the idea that the Whitlam anti-McEwenite tariff cut (strongly approved of by Cairns for policy reasons, even if as the minister responsible for tariffs he was rudely kept out of the loop during its conception) was considered a serious ideological restructuring of the Oz economy at the time, comparable to what happened in the eighties. (And keeping the dollar cheap was a McEwenite policy, wasn’t it? Exactly what Australian Leftwing thought that was the natural way of things back then?)
Your lumping in the Whitlam economic reforms with the real micro-economic revolution of Hawke/Keating (I chose that term with care @ 29) reminds me of the British Left theory that Dennis Healey was a proto-Thatcherite because he forced the UK budget to comply with IMF guidelines.
Yeah, well, the AWU also joined the ACTU during the Whitlam years, I think that probably balanced out any influx of the ‘dregs of the middle class’ to the peak workers forum. I’m pretty certain all these new members were water off a duck’s back for the young hairy-chested Bob Hawke of the seventies. Anyway, how did any of this ‘de-proletarianise’ Labor or the Left?
A number of my family members were teachers back then, and I honestly can’t tell you if their union was affiliated with either the Labor Party, ACTU or the state trades hall at the time. But I can tell you that they were very sympathetic to Curtin/Chifley Labor values.
Heh, you do realise this is a place where (I feel) the expression ‘totalitarian Left’ is unfairly frowned upon for historical debate?
Yet “New Class” gets under even my skin. It’s Tony Abbott language. (I’ve heard him use “Femintern New Class.”)
FWIW, Nickws, the people in Australia who use “New Class” most often without post-Soviet irony aren’t the Tories at all but Michael Thompson and the New City lot.
So just who is this Tim Sophiemasson anyway?
Your lumping in the Whitlam economic reforms with the real micro-economic revolution of Hawke/Keating (I chose that term with care @ 29) reminds me of the British Left theory that Dennis Healey was a proto-Thatcherite because he forced the UK budget to comply with IMF guidelines.
.
There is coninuity between Whitlam and Keating and between the Labour govt of the late 70s and Mrs Thatcher’s regime.
.
In the first case the continuity can be found in the concern by (mostly) those is the ALP that Australia was a lucky country that’d lived high on the hog as a colonial province enjoying special status and protectionism. In the second place the move by economists back to laissez-faire approaches was a wave that begins in the late 70s. The same thing happened with the Carter administration. That British Labour and the Democrats may have been disinclined to advocate these policies on the basis of ideological disposition does not change the fact that politicians normally do what ecobnomists advise them to. (Sorta.)
.
The ALP’s socialist disposition likewise does not change the fact that it is the party of reform in this country and, regardless of where you stand on the economic spectrum, this country needed to learn how to compete.
So just who is this Tim Sophiemasson anyway?
.
Someone who really needs to change his name if he’s ever gonna be a Trip Hop MC?