Among other things, I queried the practice of addressing a discourse about left politics to the presumed centres of power, describing those who do that sort of thing as “court philosophers”. I also suggested that labourism might be a better place to look for an explanation of how the left has shaped Australian society and politics than social democracy.

Guy Rundle has taken up the torch, reviewing the full series of articles in today’s Crikey, and going where none of the “left thinkers” dared to tread – propounding an “idea of what the left’s basic principles are or should be, and what sort of positive programme, rather than reactive policy, they should propose.”

Read his piece (reproduced with permission) over the fold.

Guy Rundle writes:

For the past week, The Australian has been running a series entitled ‘what’s left’, with people they nominate to be ‘key left thinkers’ articulating a left vision of politics and society.

Well that was the stated intent anyway. With The Oz you have to assume the purpose is other — and with all due respect to some of the people involved, it seems obvious that the real purpose is to make the left look rather bereft of ideas (not, it must be said, a tough call at this juncture).

The first and most essayistic was a large piece by Tim Soutphommasane, arguing that the left should reclaim patriotism, a piece of brand refashioning that David Goodhart has been arguing in the UK for years. Subsequent contributions (run in a strip down the Op-ed page, about as marginal as they could get without being pushed out entirely) were less inspiring — Julia Gillard’s was without interest of any sort, Dennis Glover’s piece talked of the “mystery of social democracy”, David McKnight had a piecemeal defence of the family, and CFMEU supremo John Sutton defended Marxism by saying it was about restraining corporate power, which suggests he has never understood Marxism.

What was missing from all of these contributions was any idea of what the left’s basic principles are or should be, and what sort of positive programme, rather than reactive policy, they should propose. Not surprising when all the people who could and do this were excluded from the series.

Off the top of my head one could have chosen from: Lindsay Tanner, Bob Brown, Peter Singer, Eva Cox, Mark Latham, Mark Davis (of Land of Plenty), Geoff Boucher, Germaine Greer, Boris Frankel, Mark Bahnisch, Geoff Sharp and others from Arena, Evan Thornley, J.K. Gibson-Graham, your ‘umble correspondent, Jeff Sparrow, and many others — many of whom I’d seriously disagree with, but all of whom have a greater ability to relate the “is” to the “ought” — to offer an analysis of how society is changing, and offer an alternative of how it might.

To be fair to David McKnight, probably the only one of that group capable of making such an account, the room provided — 700 words — was derisory.

However, while we’re on it, it’s worth saying a few things about what the left is or could be, such as didn’t make it into the series. What was common to all the contributions was that they saw their role not as outlining a view of how society worked, how it had changed, and what a better society could be — but outlining a series of micropolicy and strategy initiatives (support the family, reclaim patriotism etc,) which barely acknowledged the profound change in the idea of ‘the Left’ over the last generation (a point to which I’ll return in Part Two).

In Australia, articulating a Left vision which might have mass support is difficult because of one paradoxical fact — labourism (sometimes Left sometimes not) has won. Comprehensively. For a century it has seen off challenges to the arbitration system set up by the Harvester decision — and more importantly the principle behind it, that the public, as represented by the state, should tell the economy how to set its wages.

Whatever limits or transformations have been made to it, its core principles have survived — and, the 2007 result would suggest, been cemented into the culture, even as the industrial era that generated it passes away. To that has been added Medicare, public broadcasting, equal opportunity laws etc etc — all institutions the political right has had to accept in order to regain power. The left may look a bit ragged, but the single greatest failed movement in Australian political history is classical liberalism, if judged by results.

The problem for any greater transformation within a Left framework is that, as Marxist historians have noted, labourism freezes social relations in such a way that certain types of powerlessness and inequality are also cemented into place. Australia may congratulate itself on being the land of the “fair go”, but for groups outside of the mainstream, it is shockingly backward and unfair. Educational opportunity is some of the worst in the OECD, class mobility — especially from welfare-dependent groups — is terrible, daily life for those groups is one of perpetual poverty, pensions are derisory, services are over-priced, public healthcare is limited in application, and indigenous Australia suffers all of the above at once.

But labourism has been so successful at separating the fate and destiny of the mainstream from the marginal, that the latter have no political clout — and the former have no real feeling of common cause, beyond (politically insufficient) human compassion.

Thus one can see why so many of The Oz’s authorised “left” thinkers would take on, as Mark Bahnisch remarked, “the courtier role”, whispering in the ear of power, rather than talking to a broad audience. Suggesting a genuinely Left social democratic programme — transitioning large public utilities to part or total public control and/or ownership, schemes for social banking and finance which would make housing affordable, the use of super funds and other worker-derived capital for social reinvestment, public bond issues as an alternative means of infrastructure funding, defunding the elite private schools while increasing funding to community and smaller public-private schools, assisting the development of local economies and post-capitalist production systems in both urban and rural settings, and so on and so on — thus has the air of being futile.

It certainly appears to be well beyond the imagination of the figures that The Australian chose.

Such a programme would be one whose proposed changes are not piecemeal, but are based around a common principle — that economic power and control has to be transferred to social and public control (in forms better developed than old processes of nationalisation), as an expression of right (not rights, right). That is, these institutions — from Telstra to the universities, to mineral resources and the finance sector — are social and commonly owned by their very nature, that their management should be put to social ends.

That may involve managing them within the market, and gearing them towards returning a certain rate of profit/surplus — but that would be the means to an end, of social return, not private shareholder return as an end in itself. That is the basis for a genuine Left, that sees itself as something more than putting limits on the Right.

The thinkers that the Australian chose for its left series weren’t leftists, they were labourists – submitting their intellectual abilities to the pre-ordained goal of selling a stunningly unambitious political programme, and thus reduced to a mixture of PR spruiking (“try new Left patriotism!”), personal anecdotes, waffling about the ‘mystery of social democracy’, sucking up to social conservatism (“defend the family”!) or presenting a defensive and reactive unionism (“limit corporate power”!) as a positive programme.

On Monday, in Part Two of this piece, I’ll suggest why the world is about to take us far beyond the anodyne prescriptions of The Oz’s authorised left — and even beyond the more robust programme I’ve sketched out above.

The Oz meanwhile, will feature a series on the Right, and one can safely assume that more impressive theoretical guns will be wheeled out, with more space — thus giving the impression that the Right has more intellectual firepower, which was the purpose of the exercise all along. Silly, and irritating, of no great import — and very, very, The Australian.

Update: Rundle writes a sequel.

Update: Quadrant piles on.

It’s always been the case that rural or farmers’ parties have had a chance of survival in modern Western polities precisely because there are cultural differences which are much more deep seated than often grasped between rural and urban dwellers. In many ways, to live rurally is still to partake in the legacies of a culture which literally goes back to a time immemorial – one closely tied to the rhythms of time, nature and the fruits of the land. There’s a different time sense, and a different set of values, based not just on a different core factor of production, but on a culture where nature is not so distinct.

For us, in the cities, and in Australia that’s most of us, we really do live in a quite distinct world where things like our food supply are far more abstract and thus far less prominent concerns (that is, they’re naturalised in a different sense of the term – backgrounded, rendered relatively invisible and subject to a routinisation which doesn’t prompt reflection).

Hence the sort of validity – though sometimes the motives are suspect – of identification claims made by farmers with Indigenous custodianship (and the very closeness of some cultural motifs leads to an unreasonable and exaggerated fear of the Other).

Rundle’s argument is that the Nats can get serious by taking their constituents’ interweaving with the environment seriously. But he also suggests that the Greens’ ties to a heap of social stands aren’t necessary, nor necessarily fruitful for them. I’m not sure if Rundle knows that there are some Greens in Queensland who certainly don’t perceive themselves as on the left. I myself have never been convinced that there’s a logical link between ecological and left wing politics, speaking as an advocate of left wing politics.

An excerpt from Rundle’s piece:

The Nationals have a road back from extinction, and it’s to leave the Coalition and offer the Liberals looser support in a government scenario based on a range of tougher conditions that emphasise the distinctive conditions and challenges of rural Australia — an agenda which demands a mix of free market politics, protectionism, social democracy and some hard Green thinking.

They should then challenge Libs in rural/regional seats precisely on those differences — and/or persuade Libs such as Bill Heffernan to join them. Heffernan’s eye-popping interview on Lateline the other night made clear that the fissure in right politics doesn’t run through the parties, it runs through the individual pollies — someone like Heffernan sounds identical to Bob Brown when he gets onto topics he knows something about, like water supply and global agriculture.

The Nationals could then explore policy-by-policy links with the Greens, since their respective platforms on a whole range of issues sound increasingly similar anyway. Years ago the canny hook up between the late Rick Farley at the NFF and Philip Toyne at the ACF created a category busting alliance that prompted a giant leap in Australian environmental policy and practice in a dozen different fields.

It’s time for that to happen again, but if the Greens want it they have to change too, and wind up the whole watermelon party routine — green outside, red in. Their championing of human rights and being the only party early and often to talk back to China is admirable, but that and their whole left liberal baggage of euthanasia, abortion policy etc, is the mirror of the Nats’ dilemma — a take it or leave it inner urban new left package delivered late from the 80s.

The Greens should simply dump their social policy per se, take it off the books, and proclaim that on a whole range of issues these are simply conscience votes. It should be possible to imagine in the near future, a Greens senator who is, reasonably and constructively, anti-euthanasia, opposed to drug decriminalisation and anti-abortion.

If the Greens truly believe that the whole ecosystem is under imminent threat then they should redefine these other issues as outside their programmatic politics.

On that basis, a new and more creative politics is possible — one where people can acknowledge their differences while working on solid common ground, outside of zombie categories. But it will take real leadership from both parties to achieve it.

I’m confident the Greens have it if they want to. Can the Nats produce something other than carnival acts and invisible men?

From my small air conditioned bubble in a sweltering Melbourne the abstract economic gloom of stock shocks and far away corporate collapses is getting less and less abstract with each passing day. Anecdotal reports of jobs drying up, businesses closing, incomes evaporating and people fast becoming un or underemployed are mounting around me.

It is probably a good time to remind myself just how much of the culture that I find interesting is the product not of the big budget top end of town but of the unique possibilities of the down side of the economic cycle. It seems obvious to me that in cultural policy – as with almost everything else – changing times call for changing approaches.

Yet the impending new realities have not gained much traction in our cultural debates. Over the last few months, I’ve been travelling up and down the east coast and dealing with arts agencies and organisations at various levels. I’ve been a little surprised at how little recognition there is that cultural policy – like most forms of government policy – can and must adapt and respond to economic conditions.

Each phase in the economic cycle creates a different set of cultural possibilites and problems.

Booms – like the one that we have experienced for a decade or more – have their obvious upsides. They are great for sponsorship and advertising, they create thriving commercial markets for visual arts, they improve ticket sales, they boost government revenues and potentially spending. At their best they allow creators to create and to more readily access people with money to buy and support their creations.

Yet all the money that sloshes around in boom times comes with its own problems. Valuable things become far more expensive – volunteer and paid labour is much more competitive to come by, space is at a premium, the demand commercially for creative talent can crowd out cultural initiative and low budget DIY creative activity becomes increasingly rare. Frankly, when it is too easy to make money or too much money is simply chasing too few opportunities in the “high status” world of creative cachet the reality is that a lot of diabolical shit from websites, to film and TV to any number of sponsored indulgences gets made and sold.

On the flip side, busts and recessions have their own set of perils and possibilities. The downsides are dire and self evident – dwindling arts budgets pale beside the damaged wrought in lives destroyed and certanties upended. Yet recessions can be great times for low budget cultural initiatives. Space – the almost impossible to find holy grail of artists in the boom times – becomes relatively cheap and available. Higher levels of unemployment means that talent has more time to experiment and innovate and less temptation (or opportunity) to chase big bucks elsewhere. Large scale cultural production – with its expensive overheads and high costs – becomes relatively more difficult. Small scale production – which works best when there is a very high ratio of initiative and labour to expenses and overheads – benefits immensely from the rapidly falling costs.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of the low budget at the small scale. It is reflected in almost everything that I have ever been involved with and is undoubtedly a bias from my formative experiences. It is a product of coming of age in Newcastle in times of 40 percent youth unemployment and finding some sense of purpose not in an imported static professional culture that came from above me but from a dynamic, evolving, often ramshackle and at times hard culture that was around me. Different times and different economic conditions create different cultures and different people. I would never have ended up stumbling upon this path if employment opportunities in those years had been more plentiful.

Looking at a post boom Melbourne it is easy to forget how much of what I love about this city is the product of the last great recession of the early 90s. Its laneway bars, its smart graffiti, its living CBD, its distinctive inner suburbs of eclectic shops and retail strips, its creative community are not the product of arts agencies or central planning but of the fertile ground, cheap space, and hard working initiative of a decade ago. The city is a rich ecology not created through central planning but grown in economic detritus and forged in the harsh and searing furnace of hard times.

Assuming that dire predictions of recession and stagnation prove true, then we are heading towards a similar point in the cycle again. Perhaps it’s time we started to ask ourselves what will this legacy will be?

Image of the State Library of Victoria from avlxyz at flickr reproduced under a creative commons licence.

One thing I used to notice when I used to buy newspapers was that around this time of year “culture” steps out of the weekend review pages and takes pride of place as “holiday reading”. Short stories are serialised, the state of art forms and cultural genres worried about, and reviews abound. And not just on Saturday and Sunday.

2008 saw, in my view, a number of tipping points in the mediascape (and I’ll have more to say about this in a later post). For instance, according to the Pew Centre, the net overtook papers for the first time in the United States as a source of news. The current counter to the “death of the newspaper” narrative from some of the editorial and journo crew is a claim that everyone suffers if folks don’t have a comprehensive perspective on what’s going on, limiting themselves to following fields of niche interest. Margaret Simons has something to say about this theme at Content Makers, riffing off a piece by Sally Young at Inside Story. Now, I strongly doubt that there were ever people who read the paper cover to cover as a matter of civic duty. [Young doesn't make that claim, but it's implied in some of the less nuanced arguments from folks in the news biz.] Indeed, the division of newspapers into sections, and the usual relegation of matters cultural to the weekend in itself exemplifies the fact that judgements – highly normative (and often gendered) ones – are being made about what people should read. We’re to assume that serious stuff – politics and crime – occupies the minds of serious people, until they get to take a Christmas/New Year timeout. I’m actually not sure these people exist, and the ideal type of the reader imagined in the mind of the all knowing editor and publisher is one of the big problems with print media.

Anyway, all this is a bit of an introduction to a feature that New Matilda has been running over the last little while – a focus on Australian culture. There’s all sorts of interesting reading – Jason Wilson and Melissa Gregg on why we can thank John Howard for Underbelly, Judith White on museums and galleries, Robert Miller on the state of the film industry, Sue Turnbull on the state of Australian television, David Musgrave on Australian’s relationship to poets and poetry, John Hunter on small presses and independent publishers and Lynden Barber with the obligatory Baz Luhrmann review. All are well worth a read.

Returning to my theme, though, as part of the “State of the Cultural Nation” series, Barry Saunders writes on new media and a “surge” in democracy and citizen journalism:

There’s lots of stuff to play with. Lots of people to talk to on twitter. Cheap publishing platforms. Access to public data. Opportunities to use your knowledge to better Australia. Places to publicise your work and your ideas, to show them directly to the PM, the Leader of the Opposition, the Government and the public. Get among it.

Maybe it’s because my professional hat as a sociologist has a certain sceptical bent, but I’m not quite so optimistic. It strikes me that what’s missing from Saunders’ piece is any assessment of the actual influence and impact of the developments he celebrates. No doubt many are worth celebrating, but some are problematic, and some are still at the baby steps stage. One half of one the entrenched dichotomies I think we need to transcend which continues to haunt most discussion of new media in the political sphere is the view that the new must supplant the old, and that this is an unalloyed good. Things, I dare say, are a bit more complex than this.

Of course, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and it will be interesting to look back on 1 January 2010 to see what’s actually been achieved through e-democracy and social media in the world of politics. But at this stage, my strong feeling, and it’s been a continuing theme in all my writing on this stuff, is that the most important impact has been cultural – in the sense of fostering a more participatory and engaged culture. But, to return to the beginning, I don’t think anyone in this country has figured out how to make that culture more than a very small niche interest and set of practices.

Sally Young argues that some awareness of politics filtered through as readers skimmed the paper on their way to the sports section or wherever. Maybe they threw the front bit out, but in any case, there are two problems glossed over in this narrative – the fact that most political reportage and commentary is of very poor quality and the fact that most Australians aren’t interested in most of it. There’s probably a relationship there! Expanding the circle of political interest through interactivity and conversations online – that’s the big challenge for 2009.

One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world – would it deserve to exist?

In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state – a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy – in quite different ways – want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship – while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.

Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Partly, it’s as Davis says, a different time sense where one lives in “the eternal present of the market”, seeing the future as something amenable to both unpredictability and calculation. Partly it’s a belief that meaning is an individual affair, and that progress is the result of the aggregation of individual decisions through the mechanism of the market. Liberals are often highly suspicious of the idea that politics is about meanings, seeing this as the first step on the road to serfdom.

In actually existing Australian politics, of course, we’ve been beset by culture wars for a decade or more, where those taking up the sword in the “battle of ideas” have – despite some protestations to the contrary – been far more conservative than liberal. But, and here’s the rub for conservatism, with the decay of institutional authority and moral certainties of all kinds, all this results more and more in an articulation of a narrow sense of national belonging with the individual. Secular ceremonies such as Anzac Day aside, we’re supposed to be patriots only in the privacy of our own castle, as it were. Not too dissimilar to George W. Bush’s “beat the terrorists through spending money” thing.

So all the sound and fury of the “battle of ideas” aside, what’s left of the sense that “being Australian is an ethical project”? Our cultural history, Davis argues, is replete with a particular privilege given to fairness and egalitarianism (at least among those within the symbolic pale of Australianness), and what really is a social as much as a political democracy – a set of habits and attitudes as much as the institutional and policy architecture which sustained and gave voice to them. Is much left of this tradition? Should we be looking to ourselves rather than to the state or the Labor party or whoever to sustain them? These are questions if not raised then implied by his book which I think are well worth posing.