As a sequel to my post on The Australian‘s series on the left, where I highlighted Guy Rundle’s take, I’m reproducing from today’s Crikey (with permission) his longer sequel to his take beneath the fold. Meantime, the Oz series meanders on, with a contribution from David Hetherington of Per Capita, proposing “a fairer design for markets”.
Update: Quadrant piles on.
Guy Rundle writes:
Years ago, I remember seeing a Hinze cartoon in the study of a friend, a Left Labor activist. It showed an inner city 90s teenager?—?opshop clothes, funny haircut?—?with a placard “no third runway” about to go off to a demo. “Coming to the airport protest Dad?” she said to an aging figure hunched over a chunky 90s computer. “No thanks, I’ve got to write another article on the death of the left,” said the harried, bearded figure.
It was clear that Hinze’s sympathies were with the kid, but it was also possible to read it another way. The idea that the left had come to be represented by this most pissant of campaigns, simply to stop something, not even a whole airport, just a runway. The father may have been despairing, repetitive, and quietistic, but he was thinking. He had passed up the blandishments of reflex activism for the harder yards. Faced with the temptation of losing himself in reflex opposition, at least he was doing nothing.
The global Left looked at its lowest ebb in the 1990s. In fact it a globally unified Left had died in the 1970s, the victim of failure on every front. The USSR had failed to liberalise and develop after Khruschev, and was a stagnant and seemingly permanent monolith. By the later 70s, Mao’s cultural revolution had come to be seen as less a triumph of proletarian culture than a process of chaos and destruction. The Western experiments in counterculture had largely collapsed, into heroin and hippie entrepreneurship. Finally, the social democratic parties in the West had retreated from such plans as they had to extend the transformation of the market economy.
The most significant of these was the Meidner Plan, originating from Sweden. Under this scheme the government and trade unions would gradually buy up controlling shares in the stock market, making in the end a net transfer of the major parts of the economy to the public sector?—?which would continue to be run as market entities for the most part. Small business and most retail would continue to be private, but the core of the economy would be set by social institutions. The plan, in various versions was part of the thinking of various governments, including Whitlam’s and Harold Wilson’s in the UK. Political defeat and the global ‘stagflation’ recession put paid to it, and the late 70s vacuum of cultural and political defeat served as a prelude to the Thatcher-Reagan era.
Up to the 1970s, whatever their manifest differences, a government as mainstream as the UK Wilson government could feel that it was part of a global left in dialogue with Cuba, Yugoslav market socialism, new left activist groups, western communist parties, democratic socialist parties, Nimbin communes, radical trade unions and so on and on. Variations around social issues?—?free love and drugs versus communist puritanism?—?were incidental to the core of a Left vision which was that the economy, the process by which society materially reproduces itself, should be controlled by other than private property.
By the mid 1980s, that phenomenon was sundered utterly. There was no Left. Social democratic and Labour parties had abandoned any notion of a counterpoint to the market, and had accepted instead what was known as ‘social market’ politics?—?let the market run things, regulate it to a degree, and supplement what it cannot do. The USSR was no model for anyone except dinosaurs, China was on the capitalist road, the failure of other third world models?—?from moral catastrophes such as Pol Pot’s Cambodia, to mere failures such as Nyerere’s Tanzanian ‘African’ socialism?—?had created a drought of alternatives, radical trade unions were transforming themselves into tech-progressive organisations (‘microchips with everything’ as the Communist Party Oz left review editor David Burchell titled Laurie Carmichael’s article on how unions should ram-rod the information revolution).
In the West, the left intelligensia were detaching themselves from Marxism as well. The works of Foucault and Baudrillard were making their way into the western academy, arguing that Marx’s materialist arguments were merely part of a 19th century framework of ideas, that there was no simply expressed ‘truth’. Ian Steedman’s key work Marx After Sraffa, a study of the Italian economist Piero Sraffa demonstrated that Marxist crisis theory?—?that capitalism was doomed by its internal processes?—?could not be sustained. By the account of Australian pomo theorybot McKenzie Wark (I’m sorry, but that’s his name) this was the exit point for many young theoretical things.*
Thus in the 80s and 90s, things took off in many different directions. The ‘Labor Left’ was no longer a left?—?it was a centre-right party supporting capitalism. The remnant ‘Marxist revolutionary left’ lost many of its sprightliest people, and became a set of ossified Troskyist cults, a cryogenic movement freezing itself until the revolution happened. The emergent ‘green left’ took up the remnants of the counterculture and the radical ‘new left’ critique of a system based on growth and consumerism, and the ‘cultural left’ based in a rising ‘new’ class of culture/knowledge producers, became focused on socio-cultural identity and rights.
Through the 80s and the 90s, the neconservative right?—?neoliberal in economics, socially conservative?—?was in ascendancy (in Australia, Labor fought its tide to a compromise position), while the cultural left dominated the world of left ideas and possibilities. On the collapse of the USSR, the term ‘capitalism’ disappeared in the west altogether for most of the decade. The 1994 ascension of Tony Blair to head the British Labour Party, Paul Keating’s combination of privatisation and radical nationalism, issues of gay rights and identity, etc etc – the economic question simply disappeared.
It returned to the west in the late 90s, with the global ‘anti-capitalist’ movement, largely kicked off by the European solidarity wing of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which had started the resistance to NAFTA by taking over several towns in Chiapas in 1994.
Nevertheless, a unified Left has never returned. The mainstream Labour and social democratic parties manage and mitigate capitalism. The green and social movement left campaign for a range of global social justice issues, but not for a positive substantial alternative. The remnant Marxist parties have no connection with the dwindling industrial working class they purport to represent. The cultural left, having achieved practically all of their aims, can be stirred only to an occasional defensive measure, in issues like the Bill Henson photos case. A very small ‘theoretical left’ attempts to think beyond both eternal capitalism and the rigid categories of Marxism.
The anti-capitalist movement waxed and waned. Whether its rise and fall was due to its absence of a unifying positive message, or the impact of 9/11 and a set of changed global relations can be debated endlessly.
By the mid-2000s, the neoconservative movement that had captivated the last thirty years, had thoroughly exhausted itself. The victories of Rudd, Barack Obama, even the replacement of Blair by Brown, suggested a shift. Paradoxically, the victory of the European right?—?Reinhardt in Sweden, Sarkozy, Merkel?—?also strengthened this, since they changed almost nothing in their countries’ social market/social democratic base, their political victories thus consolidating that tradition, and putting a genuinely neoliberal European right even further out of reach (which, given that the growing alternative is a reactionary, chauvinist populist Right is not necessarily a good thing).
The ‘Left’ that has emerged as victorious is that ‘social market’ movement, its ambitions defined and delimited by the political culture of capitalism?—?market dominance of both the economy and the culture, of how people are shaped and their relationships structured, and an open-ended process of economic growth measured through the purely quantitive assessment of GDP.
That ‘social market’ politics is often mislabelled ‘social democracy’, most recently in Robert Manne’s long piece in the Oz’s ‘left’ series on Saturday. But social democracy was a movement still concerned with changing the very nature of society, by changing the basis on which it worked?—?from one dominated by property and profit, to one dominated by abilities and needs, and a qualitative assessment of better and worse – that a shortage of dialysis machines needs to be addressed by turning over some of the capacity for producing stretch limos, and the slightly crazed mantra (‘we can do it all!’) is no answer.
Today, there are all sorts of meetings or proposals for reviving ‘the Left’?—?all of which sound like a giant corporation trying to find a new brand to get behind, now that the spats industry has gone into decline. They are of little use, because they work on the assumption that society has not changed in fundamental ways that make the old idea of a Left obsolete.
What was the Left? It was the organised labour movement plus a number of leaders, intellectuals and activists, drawn both from its ranks, the liberal middle class, sections of the religious community etc. At its core was not only a class, but the assumption of a substantial rank-and-file?—?a sort of head-and-body form of organisation which mirrored the industrial world of the factory from which it sprang. Leadership, marching in lock-step, a focus on taking economic power were seen as ‘natural’ and the ‘way of left politics’, because they mimicked the form of life.
That left split with the birth of the ‘New Left’ in the 60s, which explicitly rejected that form and those priorities?—?and drew instead on its own life experience, largely that of student and bohemian life, to suggest a diffused and individualistic model of organisation, and an idea of imminently utopian change (‘sous les paves, la plage’ ? —?‘beneath the paving stones, the beach’ – meaning, in Paris 68, that in pulling them up and chucking them at people, you were also digging down to the natural, playful world).
From that movement sprang one that would prove more durable?—?the green left, emphasising for the first time that the Left should not be about more, but about less: less consumption, less waste, less destruction. In the ensuing decades, the political form the Green Left has taken is parliamentary and social democratic?—?its program is overwhelmingly one of restraint and regulation of economic processes, rather than of a change in their character.
More importantly, the rise of the green left also put two ‘lefts’ fundamentally in opposition to each other. The old Marxist/social democratic left had been interested in increasing society’s productive base, and running it in a different way. The new green left took the old ‘new left’ critique of industrial civilisation as alienated etc and twinned it with the growing evidence of biosphere destruction by business-as-usual. However the more parliamentary the movement has become, the more it has departed from suggesting an alternative basis to life, one radically buying out of the dominance of industrial civilisation, to one regulating it.
The ‘promethean’ left and the green left clashed as early as the 1970s, in Australia with the tussle over the Green Bans movement in Sydney. The leadership of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation?—?Mundey, Owens and Pringle – had sparked a mass social movement which not only saved much of heritage Sydney, but extended the idea of what unions should do (as Pat Fiske’s great doco ‘Rocking the Foundations’ shows, one of the final strikes was against a Sydney Uni college, to force it to change its policy of expelling homosexuals.) The NSW BLF’s point was that workers making a qualitative assessment of what they did and didnt build was a massive political shift, and movement forward.
The NSW BLF campaign was knocked on the head by Norm Gallagher and the federal leadership, Maoist-oriented, who were partly concerned (reasonably enough it might be said) that the increasingly wild worker-student-anarchist campaign would expose the union to an attack it could not win – but also that the business of Marxists was not to be preserving the old, but creating the new, and eventually taking control of it.
Today, a lot of those Maoists and Prometheans?—?Chris Pearson, Keith Windschuttle, Piers Akerman?—?have turned up on the right rather than the left, from whence they reserve their greatest fury for the Greens. But it is effectively a restaging of an earlier intra-left dispute. (You can also see this in the substantial anti-Green campaigns by the UK Spiked group, the successors to the small-but-influential Revolutionary Communist Party).
Thus we have the strange spectacle today of a Labor ‘left’ which is really a centre-right regulatory outfit, a ‘green left’ which is really a social democratic-left regulatory outfit, and a ‘cultural left’ which has no real interest in the economic base at all. The genuine Marxist left is a small, ossified remnant, whose capacity for discipline and focused work can still generate impressive change (despite the high profile cultural leftists, 90% of the grunt for the anti-mandatory detention movement was Trots, in the end) is useful, but whose broader message sounds like something from the 3rd century church fathers.
There is, in that respect, no ‘Left’.
So why is this man smiling?
The answer is firstly that the contradictions of the global system (yes, yes, The Holy Grail) are now so obvious, apparent, and in motion that not merely the prospect but the necessity of real cultural-political change in the future is now evident – though it is harder to see from Australia than just about everywhere else.
The second is that those who look for old-style parties and lock-step organisations for signs of political life are looking in all the wrong places. Without rethinking it, they have taken up the old metaphor of the road, and the journey as the image of left political struggle, seen that we’re not very far along it, and concluded that things are dire. But society has changed so that that metaphor no longer applies, and causes you to miss what is immanent (though not imminent) in global society.
Take the contradictions first. The global financial economy is based on a model that has barely lasted a decade without shuddering in a near-collapse. It involves the western economies turning themselves over to consumption, service sales and rents (on IP mainly) as their core activities, supplied by China, India etc, who are turning themselves into giant factories to supply them.
This arrangement has allowed the global economy to cook the books on the main problem that capitalist development always faces – that of overproduction (keep wages low, and you deprive yourself of consumers. Raise wages and you lower profits). China’s enormous supply of labour has made it possible to operate as one giant factory, with the consumers elsewhere (ie in the West). How do you keep this going? You lend the West the money to consume beyond any possible return of its own withered productive base.
Whatever patches have been put on patches since September last year, one thing is obvious – the West is broke. It has been broke for five years, if not longer. Australia is an exception, due to resources, Sweden due to retaining a high-end industrial base. But the big guys?—?the US, the UK, continental Europe?—?are in deep trouble.
But so too are the developing nations, for a declining ability to sell to the West means the necessity of developing their own consumers?—?at which case the roaring growth rates begin to slow. This is primarily a political problem for at that point, China gets ‘stuck’. Its current social contract between city and country is that city people will get very rich, and offer country people the chance to make better money than back-breaking subsistence farming, with the prospect of intergenerational betterment. Once that slows, the
Ditto in India, which hasn’t really begun to modernise. The short expression of all this is that global capitalist development is not a replay of western capitalist development?—?for the simple reason that western capitalist development depended on imperialism and third world underdevelopment to keep firing. The idea that these billion+ societies are going to turn into western countries, with 1% directly involved in agriculture, is fantastical. The levels of industrial overproduction would be so monumental that we would have to find people on Jupiter to sell shit to.
Long before most people realise that things simply cannot happen that way, the gears will have crunched. What will animate the world in this century will be conflict between country and city (and country-within-the-city, ie the global slums) in a way that makes the Chinese Revolution of 1949 disclose its true character as mere curtain-raiser. Once it becomes clear to the global country that the flow of wealth has diminished to sub-trickle.
Of course this conflict intersects with another contradiction?—?that of biosphere impact. Quite aside from climate change, it is obvious that levels of consumption, and the management of production, is so chaotic that radical change?—?involving a shift in the idea of property?—?will become necessary. Two matters in particular cannot not have an effect?—?the collapse of global fish stocks, and a resultant collapse in the food chain, and global demands on ground water due to commercial agriculture, and resultant regional eco-catastrophes. Both of these conditions threaten within a generation, both are beyond our current ability, and possibly any conceivable ability, to create a techno-fix. They will become motive forces in history, because they will intersect with the above raw deal between the city and the country. It is not western Greens who will be driving this, but hundreds of millions of peasants, whose only two choices are struggle or death.
The third contradiction is in the West, and it is the deforming effects that the political-economic system has on our culture. Uniquely in history, the contemporary west has made the cultural system subject to the economy, made it its market, raw material and dumping ground. For a century or more this process was held in check by conservative institutions, and, when these collapsed, attacked by the counterculture, which provided an alternative. When that collapsed, the commodity and the commodified image moved to the centre of social life. Since the commodity is essentially nihilistic – a commodity is simply something whose value is expressed in terms of every other value – its effect, initially liberating from inherited authority (the church, etc) is ultimately nihilistic too.
Socially, the effects of this are to create increasingly atomised societies, in which it is increasingly impossible to imagine solidarity or close connection beyond the immediate family – and then to offer as a substitute either a cynical and masochistic celebration of atomisation (ie most reality TV shows) or literal-minded religiosity, essentially channelled from the middle ages, ie from the last pre-capitalist period.
Psychologically, the effects are to create increasingly ungrounded people. If the society you grow up in is atomised, then an identity never ‘sets’. The liberation that offers is the freedom to determine your own identity. What it removes is the capacity for any identity to be meaningful.
The effect is that a vague depressive sense of nothingness becomes the psychological common cold of hypermodernity. It is then addressed as a disease, and treated with medications (anti-depressants) which stimulate the brain chemicals (such as serotonin) which used to be replenished by meaningful social life. Push this sort of culture for another generation, build a world where ever larger numbers of people live in this world of shadows, and eventually that deep-seated and often unvocalised sense of deep futility will become a historical force in its own right.
Really, I think most people, reflecting on the world as it is, have some intimation of the triple crisis as I’ve sketched it out above. What does not appeal is the idea that socialism is any sort of answer – associated as it is with state-heavy systems, either torpid or lethal or both. Nor does any sort of party or organised political activity suggest itself as even comprehensible to people who live within an atomised world.
What does make radical change possible, sudden and likely however is that processes of self-management are immanent, there beneath the surface, within hypermodernity, in a way they haven’t been previously, to a sufficient degree. That’s a result of better education, intellectual labour – but also about the fact that we all spend so much time thinking about how systems work.
Imagine for example, that the next global capitalist crisis – 2010, 2017?, December? – caused the holding corporation that owned our power utilities to collapse, in a way that was beyond the government to refloat with a bailout (because the government itself was now all bailed out out). Would we simply persist in darkness? Or would, after some disruption and confusion, the engineers and managers who had been running the thing anyway, simply continue to run it. Would they and others be able to use the networks already existing to keep power supply intersected with other areas of the economy, using a mixture of money and free exchange, but without the notion that this was simply being done to return dividends to shareholders? Would they appoint an interim board of control, preserve managerial and scientific hierarchies etc.
Would it then become clear, from practice, not from theory, that a power station is a social institution, not a private one, and that a whole set of arrangements that are neither private ownership nor state control can be made in running our lives?
Does that not only seem a morally better alternative, but the more likely outcome of the century than the continuation of existing arrangements? And a reason why it was better, in that Hinze cartoon, to do a bit more hunching over a laptop, and a little less reactive protesting?
The question of course is whether all that I’ve suggested can be argued as a moral rather than simply necessary development?—?which will have to wait for part three of this two part series.
*Piero Sraffa could lay claim to be the zelig of the 20TH century. Settling at Cambridge University in the 1920s, he is cited in the prefaces to both Keynes’s General Theory and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a key contributor and essential inerlocutor. He edited the 14-volume collected works of Ricardo, though, as JK Galbraith remarked, this sometimes involved no more than a few minutes work a day. His sole book, a 1960 work, a 62-page work Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities took him 32 years to write (or get around to writing), and provides a logical demolition of both Marxian labour value economics and neclassical economics. Those interested in his proof that neoclaissical economics is logically incoherent voodoo should see Steve Keen’s Economics, the Naked Emperor.
Some input from The National Times
Shrinking safety net for jobless
Update: Quadrant piles on.
“a whole set of arrangements that are neither private ownership nor state control can be made in running our lives”
Sounds like worker’s management socialism, Yugoslav-style, which was all the rage in a small part of the Left from the mid 60s to late 70s.
It was, of course, a complete failure.
Right. Sure. The cultural conditions in Yugoslavia had nothing to do with that, of course. Or its coincidence with a fundamentally anti-democratic regime. One can find many non-Yugoslavian exemplars of cooperative management (including in the finance and retailing sectors in Great Britain, before we even get to Mondragon, etc). And you might care to go back and have a look at some of the contemporaneous literature before you pronounce so blithely on what was actually happening in Yugoslavia.
Well yes there are plenty of co-ops which work up to a point. There have even been attempts in serious enterprises, like the unsuccesful go at Lucas Aerospace (scuttled by the bastardry of the English trade union movement and the Callaghan Labour gvernment). But Yogoslavia is the only place where an entire economy has been based on the idea.
And with good reason, that being that the co-op approach does not solve the fundamental problem of surplus and accumulation. If you don’t have the first you can’t have the second and your economy stagnates and dies. We try to solve the problem with capitalist property rights. Stalin forced the surplus out of the Kulaks. Both approaches have their problems. The co-op approach simply evades the issue.
I don’t see that. It depends very much on how you conceive both of the nature of value created and the basis for its distribution. I don’t accept that a command economy is the only alternative to a decentralised one, and in fact no one does, except in ideological flights of fancy. The Soviet Union’s economic model really did more or less assume that market and barter transactions would take place, and the Anglo model of capitalism is nothing like one based on free exchange through markets.
I think they would continue with the way things have been going over the last few decades but be more ruthless about it – they would price the majority out from having a decent quality of service and banish the poorer wage earners to the outer suburbs of cities through high housing prices and high rents. If a lot of people start to become angry and try to retaliate, the elite will do what they are doing now – ignore them completely, perhaps start to set up walled communities if things get bad and invest in counter terrorism. They might start to define a campaign of protests as a form of terrorism that might cause ‘psychological harm’.
I like the idea in the article that social democracy is about looking at social and political relations qualitatively, as opposed to a market mentality that is almost exclusively quantitative in outlook. I am interested in HOW the ‘left’ think they can decide on what The qualitative Good actually is. I sense a whiff of authoritative opinion.
I wonder if he has any sources for the idea that China will inevitably falter or need to follow his proposal for how their economy will change.
There also seems to be a section of his article missing here.
The analysis of events to this point isn’t generally a reliable indicator of future developments especially in such a vast and uncoordinated place.
Bombard the headquarters! Gee, Maoism is indeed alive and well in Melbourne. I wonder if the Crikey offices are anywhere near the Independence Bookshop.
I wonder if Gough or any one of his dozens of ministers had ever heard of this supposed commitment to Scandanavian industrial democracy Guy attributes to them. Why do I get the feeling that ‘Yeah, the Left were well focussed on Meidner back in the day’ is an attempt to cover up for the fact that the revolutionary Left was nothing but a bunch of tired old anti-intellectual blowhards by the seventies.
Don Dunstan was interested in industrial democracy, yet he didn’t have much time for Maoists (his favoured government colleagues looked surprisingly Catholic Right, despite SA not officially having a Labor Right back then. Of course they later dismantled his pet economic project when he stood down as premier.)
Industrial democracy being at odds with a militant 1970s Brit union movement kind of shows it to be incompatable with traditional Anglo Saxon institutions, IMHO. Perhaps the solution for this incompatability is multiculturalism?
Hands up every multiculturalist here! (Hint, I at least know I’m one
)
Is this what it’s all about, the competing groups claiming social democracy for themselves?
Well, sorry Guy, but it’s the evolved-Whitlamites that Prof Manne is aligned with (Kev & Julia et al) who get first call for identifying themselves as SDs, at least before the revolutionary or post-revolutionary Left does. (Heh, I just wrote S-D-S. Not that I wanted to invoke the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society of the Vietnam era. New Left splitters!)
The people you champion here, the ones whose legacy you mourn & believe should be revived, they thought social democratic Fabianism was part of the capitulation to the bourgeoisie & the money power, brother.
It’s a matter of historical record that the Meidner Plan formed one of the themes of the papers published by left unions, including prominently the Metal Workers from the 1970s onwards as part of the search for the Alternative Economic Strategy which was common in both union and labour intellectual circles to Britain and Australia. It’s not too hard to find this out – it’s documented in most of the scholarly literature on the Accord, as a lot of these ideas fed directly into labour movement and Labor Party thinking (and that of the CPA) in the 70s and 80s.
I’m sure Whitlam, as a self described intellectual, would have read some of the prominent books in the 70s, eg. by Stuart Holland, from UK labour figures and political economists, which talked about all this stuff.
Rundle knows his labour history.
Huh?
Yes, the industrial democracy movement in Britain in the 70s didn’t enjoy universal union support. But it was actually the subject of a Royal Commission set up by the Labour government. And it had a lot of support within the TUC.
Your snark seems to rest on incorrect assertions about history, I’m afraid.
It’s good that this has provoked a debate on the far Left and the Right – thanks Rupert!
Where I guess I’d differ with Guy Rundle – the thing that those from the Marxist tradition never grasped – was that small-ish reforms, added up, lead to a serious qualitative change in society.
A free dental scheme might not seem like a New Jerusalem. 20,000 new social houses might not seem a big deal either. But do enough of these sorts of things – that is create enough security for every member of society – and people begin to relate differently to each other in places like work. You can’t tell me that decade after decade of progressive reform hasn’t changed – hopefully permanently – the way Swedes treat each other.
And I’d just note we’re just coming out of the nadir of the Bush-Howard years and already the Left is getting all utopian…..perhaps that’s no bad thing.
I’m not convinced at all that Rundle is the “far left”, just on Manne’s say so, unless being something of a radical democratic socialist, I am too. If that’s the case, to paraphrase the wife of Nixon’s attorney-general, this country has been turned so far right I don’t believe it!
But, yep, it’s been a useful debate – at least here and in Crikey. Not so sure about the Oz itself (and Quadrant!)…
Yep, but the difference is that in Sweden, serious transformation of the capitalist economy has taken place – ie businesses being forced out of the market if they compete by undercutting on the price of labour, a flattening of remuneration and differentials of wealth, etc, etc. I’m very much in favour of free dental care and housing, and to the degree that it has flow on effects, that’s great, but I’d be more excited if there was attention to policy changes – in an integrated way – that gave me more hope that sustained structural class and gender and racial/ethnic inequalities wouldn’t be built in to the permanent social architecture of Australian life.
There we can wholeheartedly agree!
Mark, I wasn’t snarking when I wrote “Industrial democracy being at odds with a militant 1970s Brit union movement kind of shows it to be incompatable with traditional Anglo Saxon institutions, IMHO.”
I don’t know the details of the schemes attempted back then but I do know 20th century British political culture, my grandfather was a Lloyd George radical born in Wales who lived in the Home Counties, he voted Labour in the great landslide of 1945 after wartime service.
I see nothing wrong in asserting that the 1970s TUC wasn’t much interested in any advanced form of corporatism, primarily because the British union movement was pretty culturally & socially monolithic during that era.
However, I did write “Hands up every multiculturalist here! (Hint, I at least know I’m one)” precisely because Rundle has declared himself against multiculturalism.
Yet that doen’t mean I was’t serious about multiculturalism being a viable tool to get Anglo Saxon-derived unionism to the point where it might adopt industrial democracy. What other great social force would do that in the Australia we live in? Seriously, if you want to transform society what else can you use?
Sorry, Nickws, that’s just not right. There are a range of books that aren’t too hard to find about how corporatism played out in Britain in the 1970s (and a lot of it was something of a model for the Australian Accord). Yes, in the end it broke down, but not so much because of union culture, more because it was economically unsustainable. I did my honours thesis on all this stuff – it might have been a decade ago, but I’m still pretty well versed in it, with respect!
And I also fail to see what cultural homogeneity or otherwise explains about receptiveness to industrial democracy. If we wanted to pursue your argument, then the German union movement which succeeded in having legislated the sorts of changes the British TUC was interested in in the 1970s decades before was similarly homogenous in those terms. Both movements to greater or lesser degree excluded or failed to meaningfully include non-white workers, but I’m really struggling to understand your argument (which in any case, rests on a false premise, as I’m suggesting).
Try a google search on the string “corporatism britain 1970s tuc” and take your pick:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=corporatism%20britain%201970s%20tuc&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Pretty reasonable analysis, Guy. And I don’t really find it at all pessimistic. The challenge is to work out the sort of practices that are appropriate if you don’t see a party mediating the process, that is, where the mediation is to be provided by the existing social relations themselves.
Looking forward to part three.
I don’t know enough about the subject, you’re a specialist in the subject, but is the British seventies union movement the best example of corporatism being exported outside of continental Europe? Perhaps my understanding is too general, but I’ve never heard of the TUC being committed to ID as a major objective. It sounds like just another cause that might have been given the catch-all pejorative of ‘Bennism’. Failed, minority initiatives don’t count—if they did Dunstan would have achieved what he set out to do in South Australia.
Really? I don’t think I’m exactly going all Jack Strocchi in pointing out that cultural heritage played a large part in the dysfunctionality of the British union movement. They lacked the ability to produce a conciliator like Hawke (imagine how easily he would have talked them all into accepting ‘In Place of Strife’), and during the eighties they bet everything on a roulette wheel gamble in supporting Scargill, a truly bad leader who could never have been elevated to any equivalent position in Australia.
But postwar Germany was a country with a genuine social market system designed to rebuild a devastated nation, with a union movement that was divided between the SPD and CDP, with said SPD adopting Bad Godesberg (while the equivalent Gaitskellite revisions failed in British Labour).
I’m not making an argument about homogeneity, but about exceptionalism. The twentieth century Anglo Saxon union movements weren’t the German or Swedish union movements, no number of position papers changes that.
(a) Yes, ID was a major objective of the TUC.
(b) Sure, the British union movement was a different kettle of fish to continental movements, but I still have no idea what the reference to multiculturalism signifies.
The discussion of Left and Right always assumes underlying agreement on liberalism.
Left-liberal social democrats and Right-liberal free-marketeers define the acceptable boundaries of “ideological discourse”.
But liberalism is the thing that is causing ideological confusion and conflict.
Liberalism, the philosophy of untrammelled individual autonomy, is not compatible with cohesive institutional authorities such as families, churches or states.
(And maybe even companies, going by the self-destructive tendencies in financial markets.)
Liberalism also tends to lead to natural dysfunction, at the micro-level with obesity and macro-level with global warming.
But its sacred tenets are never questioned.
I think that liberalism has a narcotic effect on its victims, inducing a life-long intellectual stupour when it comes to examining its own assumptions.
Nickws @#21Sep 29th, 2009 at 2:28 am
Yes, if we want to keep “no enemies to the Left” then we must at all costs avoid the awful fate of “going all Jack Strocchi”. I am strangely flattered that this tendency is considered a symptom of dangerous ideological heterodoxy amongst sections of the Left.
Of course homogenous cultural heritage plays a critical role in the democratic polities propensity to accept progressive re-distribution, whether by trade unions or tax departments. This follows from the fundamental principles of post-Hamiltonian genetic anthropology (sometimes called socio-biology). Hamilton’s Rule explains why ant colonies, termite mounds and bee hives are willing to accept socialist redistribution.
The theory of kin selection argues that propensity to accept redistribution for any given breeding population is directly proportionate to its degree of genetic relativity. So the maximally re-distributive agency is the family where everyone is related and everyone shares the wealth.
What goes for the family at the personal level goes for the state at the political level. Granted that states and trades unions are somewhat more culturally sophisticated than ants, bees and termites. Humans are the least Darwinian of all creatures, but we are Darwinian enough for all of that.
So kin selection theory roughly predicts the propensity to accept social democracy in democratic states. (Hence ethnic unity is important for trade union solidarity.)
States which have a fairly high degree of genetic relatedness (such as Finland or the pre-multicultural UK) will accept a fairly high degree of redistribution. States that have a fairly low degree of genetic relatedness (such as the US) will accept a fairly low rate of redistribution.
Its no accident that social democracy first emerged in through the good offices of Chancellor von Bismark, in the European nation where ethnic unity has always been the most powerful political factor.
This genetic relatedness factor is the most obvious underlying cause for the evolution of historical nations, natural breeding populations for ethnological-based states. This anthropological fact is obviously of the utmost importance when trying to predict the voting behaviour of nation state citizens.
But I dont see much effort being expended by the Left in coming to grips with the fundamentals of genetic anthropology. Despite the fact that, in matters of race and gender which are the Left’s strong-points, these issues are of paramount importance.
Except in the UK where elements of the Centre-Left are gradually tumbling to the importance of anthropology. Hence David Goodhart at Prospect is trying to develop a new philosophy of the Left which embraces family, church and nation.
But he had better hurry up or else the BNP will grap that share of the electorate, which used to be firmly in the Labor Party’s column.
Righteo then. Argument closed.
Kim #25 Sep 29th, 2009 at 12:20 pm quotes Jack Strocchi:
No Kim, argument opened. Read what I wrote two pars down, emph. added:
That point doesn’t “close the argument”. But it does punch a gaping hole in Left-liberal’s Blank Slate theory of human nature. I don’t see much evidence that Left-liberals have grasped how this constrains their ideological ambitions. But they cannot avoid it in the US where ethnological tribalism now trumps ideological idealism everywhere.
The Left, given the emasculation and deracination of the trade union movement, is now almost totally identified with Left-liberalism. Left-liberal ideologists have in turn almost completely swallowed the (false) Blank Slate theory of human nature.
This may suit Left-liberal personal and professional purposes but it will not sell politically if the majority still wish to aspire to traditional high-status role models based white-picket fence families, church-based schooling and national triumphalism.
Most ambitious people wish to leave a legacy, usually comprising an estate and ancestors. Left-liberalism tends to discourage that instinct amongst the classes and clans that most need to follow it.
That is why I predicted that the Left will have to reject its elitist cultural liberalism if it wants to sell its more populist economic “corporalism”. Which is exactly what is happening in Europe and Australia. And will have to happen in the US if they want universal health care.
Even the crustiest conservatives usually prefer to keep their ancestors in the ground.
However, some New Guinea tribes used to eat their ancestors. Are these New Guineans the only folks in the history of humanity who have swallowed the essence of the Strocchiverse?
Jack Strocchi@#26 on Sep 29th, 2009 at 1:39 pm stands corrected:
I give Katz marks for paying attention to typos. Although, as usual, he scores nothing in the substantive “facts and logic” department.
Katz says:
So far as the eccentricity of the “Strocchiverse” world-view is concerned I look at the predictive scoreboard as the fairest measure of intellectual realism. Apart from Quiggin & Leigh (full time professional social scientists) I have the best record in Ozblogosphere for predicting elections, recession and (perhaps) anthropological trends.
Plenty more where they came from. And I always immediately admit when I am wrong.
Katz, so far as I can see, does not have it in him to get boot to leather in this game. And so is relegated to carping from the sidelines.
Guy Rundle says:
Rundle severely understates the Cultural Right’s political hegemony in Europe, a trend that I have long predicted. With the forthcoming loss of the BLP there will be clean sweep (excepting Spain) of Centre-Right parties dominating major European governments ie Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland. As Newsweek remarked (with a shudder of horror):
But its not as bad as it looks for the Left. The modern European Right is Right-wing almost exclusively in civic matters. In economic matters it is tending Left-wing. Here is the Times on the Euro-Right’s mixture of cultural and financial populism:
It is no “paradox” that the Euro Right is tending to socialism on economic matters and nationalism in civic matters. Both are instances of political populism on behalf of the nations citizens. Both arms of this strategy are proving to be successful, as I have long predicted.
PS A big problem for the Left is that it sets itself on the unpopular (and frequently immoral) side of the Culture War. I fail to see what is so “reactionary, chauvinist” about opposing honour killings, cousin marriages, FGM, people smugglers, bare-backing, sex-slaves, drug traffickers. The kinds of citizens that the Left needs to win transformative majorities are not the kind of people who look fondly on such diversions and perversions.
Well, it was also a major objective of Don Dunstan, and SA ended up without ID—just like Great Britain didn’t get anywhere with industrial democracry.
Yet we can only blame Maggie Thatcher for one of those results.
Which brings us to the unspoken nub of this debate. Mark, apart from shoehorning the Accord system into your conceptualisation of ID (whereas others—older Leftwingers who bemoan the demise of the traditional working class, for example—dismiss it as nothing but wage controls) why doesn’t workplace participatory decision-making culture exist in the Australia of today?
I’m not saying it’s just the result of social orientation.
It’s mostly the ideological orientation of Australian unionists, past, present, (and almost certainly future?). Left, Right, non-aligned.
I was (sincerely) engaging in a thought experiment as to how to change Australia enough to get something like Rundle’s vision implemented.
You don’t see a problem with his opposition to multiculturalism? How does one try to develop a Big Political Idea for the future of this country by excluding (even denigrating) MC?
Have to add this link in relation to 350 and the cooperation conundrum, an ‘enlighted’ interview with Lord May.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2690404.htm
OOps wrong thread,
Jack Strochhi
How the hell am I understating the rise of the european reactionary right if I say that they have replaced the neoliberal right as the major force. ‘As you predicted…’ thanks Nostradamus. You and half the world.
What’s reactionary and chauvinist about opposing:
honour killings, cousin marriages, FGM, people smugglers, bare-backing, sex-slaves, drug traffickers
you ask?
Well, i don’t know what bare-backing is in this context, I presume its not unprotected sex. Cousin marriages are a cultural issue – half the Scottish immigrants to Australia were children of first cousin marriages.
As to the rest, as well you know the left opposes such things too. The reactionary, chauvinist part is the claim by the right that non-white migrants are responsible for all crime – among other reactionary and chauvinist policies.
god help us
Guy, Guy, it’s just the Strocchiverse. You need to speak-a its language. (iSnack 2.0 sandwich optional, but I wouldn’t.)
guy rundle #33 on Sep 30th, 2009 at 6:59 pm says:
Guy,
You understated the “rise of the european reactionary right” by mentioning only three European governments proving “the victory of the European right?—?Reinhardt in Sweden, Sarkozy, Merkel”. By my last count there at least seven more Centre-Right governments in European office – Italy, Czecho, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Poland. (There are more micro-Euro states swinging Right but, by this stage, who’s counting?) With Britain’s Right-ward shift a mere formality in-waiting.
That makes a near clean sweep (-Spain) of the major populous, wealthy and powerful Euro nation states that have swung to the Right over the noughties. With a commensurate swing to the Right at the Euro-federal level.
And lets not get started with the astonishing rise of the Euro Far-Right. Hitler’s may have dominated Europe but still Mosley failed to win a seat in the Commons. Yet a generation of Brit multiculturalism has given us the BNP in Brussels.
So, Nostradamus, can you point to a period in the early noughties where “you and half the world” predicted this momentous Right-ward shift? I have been predicting the “Decline of the Wets” (Left-liberals) at home and abroad for most of the past decade.
More significantly over the past few years we have witnessed the momentous failure of the Right’s hallmark policies in national security and economic prosperity areas. Iraq quagmire and the Global Financial Crisis. Plus the emerging climate change crisis presented the Left with a huge opportunity for political growth.
This opened up, what Quiggin has called, a “hole in the political landscape” which should have been filled by parties of the Centre-Left and even Far-Left. Instead we have seen in Europe, the heart-land of the Left, a swing to the Centre-Right and even Far-Right. Mainly on issues relating to cultural identity.
This tells me that Left-liberals, such as Guy Rundle, are missing something about the underlying preferences of the citizenry.
Guy Rundle says:
The Cultural Left is painfully ambivalent about “oppos[ing] such things”, which is why they come in for some well-deserved wedging by the Cultural Right at every opportunity.
The post-modern Left-liberal consensus has been to celebrate multicultural diversity and tolerate sub-cultural perversity. That inclusive program covers the “warts and all” barbarisms that go with those territories. Such as cousin marriages, polygamy and terrorism amongst some of the multi-culturals. And bare-backing, drug abuse and “degenerate art” amongst many of the sub-culturals.
The aggregation and composition of immigration is a particular sore point amongst we “reactionaries and chauvinists” . The current rate is at least double what the country’s economic and ecologic long term carrying capacity can take. SES-adjusted crime and social pathology rates for some categories of NESB’s are well above the ESB rate. Call me old-fashioned but I have reservations about seeing our major metro areas turned over to slum-lords, sweat-shops and degree-mills.
Po-mo Left-liberals will continue to suffer electoral frustration and ideological alienation so long as they fail to take care of the family side of “working family” equation. The “silent majority” who are trying to raise one point six trophy children in a “relaxed and comfortable” manner behind their un-affordable “white picket fences” dont really appreciate the street hassle from “noisy minorities”. White flight is already a fact of life on the fringes of most metro areas.
Jaunty essays about the “future of the Left” have a surreal air whilst all this is going on in front of your nose. You are going to need more than God’s help to push through a Left agenda with all that baggage in trail.
Heck.
So far we’ve had:
Rundle on Bahnish
Bahnish on Rundle
Rundle on Bahnish
Bahnish on Rundle, and
Rundle on Bahnish
Does anyone have a bucket of ice water handy?
I am very surprised that you’ve not linked Robert Manne’s magisterial contribution to the Australian’s otherwise lacklustre series. He correctly describes Zizek’s praise of Stalinism as “morally disgusting” and along the way notes that the European left’s failure to come to terms with the reality of Soviet totalitarianism robbed it of credibility.
Manne is equally critical of the extreme right.
This leaves us with radical democracy as a more than adequate left project which project can only be pursued under the umbrella of a general social democratic government. Most of the social and political agenda of socialism can be accounted for within a radical democratic agenda. State ownership of the means of production, however, along with the nastiness of actually existing socialism’s dictatorship over needs, cannot and should no longer be countenanced.
This issue breaks down a lot more simply than many are allowing for. About 45 per cent of Australians broadly identify with “the left”, about 45 per cent broadly identify with “the right”, and the other 10 per cent decide who governs.
Of the 45 per cent “broad left”, about 10 per cent find the ALP to be not left enough, and debate the Rundle-esque solutions to its left. Bob Brown’s effectiveness as Greens leader arises from his capacity to steer about 8 per cent of this to The Greens – his limitation as a leader arise from his inability to get The Greens’ vote above that, as most ALP voters don’t want a more left-wing government.
It is notable in these debates how often an external force is raise as a deux ex machina – environment, collapse of finance capital etc. – to steer this mass towards a more left-wing alternative. There is very little evidence in Australia’s 108 years since Federation to suggest they will gravitate towards a more left-wing government than Rudd, Gillard, Swan etc. are offering.