Bernard Keane encapsulates Joyce’s strategy:

Alan Joyce’s logic is the elegant reasoning of a terrorist.

If the result of his massive disruption of the Australian transport system is the further shredding of the Qantas brand, which began under Geoff Dixon and which has accelerated rapidly under his Irish successor, and leads to further service cuts as Australians turns their back on the airline, that’s fine.

It will merely expedite his plans to offshore-by-stealth Qantas, wrecking the Australian-based operation while he sets about establishing lower-cost, more competitive foreign-based services.

To this end, a furious reaction against the airline for its act of malice toward Australian travellers is a price well worth paying; indeed, it may be part of the longer-term plan.

Joyce’s actions and motivations are almost a parody of the globalising logic that profits are all, workers, customers and any notion of public service or good nothing. And it’s in that quality of excess, in the gamble for high stakes, that his house of cards has the real potential to come tumbling down.

It shouldn’t escape notice that the Chair of the Qantas Board, Leigh Clifford, hails from Rio Tinto, a company long known for its overt deunionisation strategy. There is undoubtedly an element of union busting in all this, as well as a broader push from the more militant elements of the Australia corpocracy to smash the Fair Work Act. Peter Reith’s high profile interventions have to be seen in this context.

Hence, Qantas’ other play here, through keeping its cards close to its chest and failing to inform the government of the planned lockout (let alone passengers), was to force the government to bring the dispute before Fair Work Australia. Hence, too, Anthony Albanese’ fury.

But, as Bernard Keane also observes, there is real opportunity for the government.

There is no doubt that Qantas’ public relations offensive has failed. Essential Research found last week that 43% of respondents supported renationalisation of the airline, a large number blamed Qantas management rather than workers, and very large majorities opposed offshoring and thought Joyce’s remuneration too high.

The polling is not unambiguous, but there’s a plethora of pointers to how Joyce’s sneak attack has resonated, from a Facebook protest page which garnered almost 4000 likes in less than 24 hours, to the reaction on Twitter. The timing, coming on top of his huge pay rise on Friday, and the massive disruption and frustration caused to passengers on a Saturday afternoon, is so stupid as to beggar belief.

Joyce has exemplified the mindset of the 1% at a time when the Occupy X movement has successfully put systemic critique back on the agenda.

So, how does all this have the potential to backfire on Joyce?

First, it’s being discussed by many as the most spectacular example of management aggression since Patrick’s locked out its workers on the docks in 1998. Unlike the waterfront dispute, the impact on the public is much more palpable and much more direct.

Secondly, as Ben Schneiders correctly observes in the Sydney Morning Herald today, there is the potential for Fair Work Australia to arbitrate the dispute, a power now rarely used, and only available to the tribunal in the case of significant disruption to the national economy. The Minister, Chris Evans, could also make orders to both sides to cease industrial action, though that would be a last resort. The Fair Work Act emphasises bargaining in good faith, and it may well be that the tribunal will find that Qantas has not been. Then, there are legal questions over whether extending the lockout to employees who were not engaging in industrial action, and standing down others, is lawful.

Given that Qantas is seeking to put FWA on trial, and that the legislation is so closely identified with Julia Gillard, the arguments put by the Commonwealth will repay close watching. It would also be surprising if there were not pressure to tighten the provisions whereby management (unlike unions) does not have to give genuine notice of its intent to pursue industrial action. Qantas’ actions in grounding its fleet immediately, and alleging that the lockout would not begin on Monday, are specious in the extreme.

It’s crucial to remember that Joyce, far from pulling his fleet from the sky as a “response to union action”, has himself, according to the legal definition, taken industrial action.

More broadly, as Schneiders comments, there may be momentum for a broader use of the arbitration power, to protect the public interest.

Thirdly, Qantas faces some pointed questioning over its obligations under the Qantas Act which enabled privatisation. There are specific provisions, reflected in the airline’s own constitution, which require it to maintain its operations in Australia, and restrict it from flying internationally under another name. The unions have corresponded with Qantas about this, and the management line has been that subsidiaries are not bound. But Senate hearings have been examining legislation introduced by Nick Xenophon and Greens Leader Bob Brown which would close off this option. If such amendments were to be supported by the government, we would be in a very interesting place indeed.

And finally, as Bernard Keane writes:

Voters, it seems, just want their old Qantas back. In the view of Joyce and the Qantas board, they can’t get it back in the airline’s current form, not given continuing strong competition from government-subsidised foreign airlines and the high dollar. The only way to get the old Qantas back may indeed be to nationalise it and subsidise it, or to return to the days when competition from foreign airlines was even more tightly restricted than it is now.

And no one in federal politics is pushing those options. Well, not yet.

In a climate when the recklessness and contempt of corporate power reveals its naked face, the government would have little to lose, and much to gain, from reining it in. We shall see.

Alan Joyce is being crazy brave. So, too, should Julia Gillard be.

NB: To keep comments focused, please leave your response on Helen’s open thread. Comments on this post are closed.

Update: Laura Tingle.

A first point to make might be that presumes government has no impact on aggregated demand (and investment is premised on the expectation of future demand).

But, before you pile on Hockey, note that Julia Gillard’s stated reason for the whole “return the budget to surplus in 2012-2013″ thing also accepts the same logic.

Now, we might also like to question whether it’s the quantum of investment that’s the most important thing, or where the investment is going. That’s one thing that concerned Keynes. (Obviously, there has to be a certain quantum of investment, and I’m not saying otherwise.)

Here it’s worth understanding the difference between Gross National Product (the sum of all goods and services produced) and Gross National Income (how much of that value stays in the country). In Australia, there’s a pretty sizeable gap between GDP and GNI, which goes some way to explaining why there is limited “trickle down” from the resources boom. The other issue (or rather, one of them) with a surfeit of investment in resources is the effect it has on the exchange rate, which has obvious negative impacts on the rest of the joint, particular other export industries.

Note also that the self-interest of the mining industry is far from identical to the interests of the economy and Australia. Though they’ve done a very good job of convincing a lot of people otherwise.

Monetary policy is of very limited use in rebalancing things for a number of reasons, including the relationship between interest rates and the dollar.

So, you would think fiscal policy might help. It might be that something like…. a Resources Rent Tax would be a good idea. Or government spending to stimulate the rest of the joint.

But, of course, that, we’re told would be bad. Crowding out, etc.

Here we need to have a look at the rest of the equation – not just investment, but also demand and the anticipation of future demand and thus profit.

Fortunately, Philip Pilkington has written an excellent post on just this topic at Naked Capitalism.

I particularly like this:

Now, I can already hear the inevitable Austrian chime in. “Arg! You lying Keynesian totalitarian scum! The government didn’t need to invest to employ those five workers; another capitalist could have done so. You’re just a crypto-communist who wants the government to control our lives and tell us what to do! You hate freedom and liberty, ahhh! <3 Ayn Rand 4eva!”.

Now, I think you should read the whole thing (and not just the funny bit), but here’s the conclusion:

As we can see, profits actually come from some fairly unusual sources. Government spending up to the point of full employment actually increases profits, while workers’ savings diminishes them. This ties into the MMT argument that government should offset workers’ desired savings. As we can clearly see from the contemporary situation, this happens in an almost automatic manner; as the private sector saves and pays down debt in the current uncertain environment, the government goes into deficit in order to float profitability.

We should also note that capitalist economies are not perpetual motion machines. Many people seem to have a vague inclination that capitalist economies are somehow ‘self-generating’ and, for example, that government spending or private debt-financing are exogenous or external factors. This is clearly not the case. Money enters the economy through either government spending or private sector indebtedness. These then wash through the economy and eventually turn up as profits. These facts need to be front and centre when public policy is considered.

One of the big conundrums of social democracy is that measures to increase profit are also (up to a point) in the interests of workers, precisely because we live in capitalist economies. One of the ways to deal with, if not dissolve away, that conundrum is to pay attention to the distributional question of the balance between return on capital and return to labour, and the effects of fiscal policy on the business cycle. That’s not really happening now.

It should be though, because the joint is looking pretty stuffed.

Nostrums about debt and deficit need to be crowded out by some actual fact about how capitalist economies work.

While some of the discussion has focused on some of the more extreme scenarios about the misuse of people’s information, there’s no question that the routine use of Facebook has now become much more problematic for many. Jason Calacanis, as part of an impassioned post, provides some useful links to enable readers to understand the scope of the problem. Few might leave Facebook, but, conversely, the company’s approach to “radical transparency” has undoubtedly flayed a trust already fraying because of resistance to constant shifts in functionality.

Within the techie community, the response has been to call for “an open alternative”. Yet, here, problems of scale arise. Despite increasing attention to privacy issues from regulators, legislators and the media, Facebook’s trump card is its pervasiveness. As danah boyd comments, it’s become a “social utility”. As I’ve commented previously, Facebook is now just part of the communications landscape. While it’s certainly possible to envisage a mass of users migrating to another site, the precondition for such a ‘network effect’ in reverse would be a competing commercial entity able to raise enough capital to compete.

An open source alternative is unlikely to generate the scale necessary.

The claim from Facebook, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that the site is just reflecting shifts in contemporary understandings of privacy can be dismissed easily. Social norms against oversharing still exist, users modulate (or try to modulate) what content and information they want seen by various groups of others, and it’s simplistic and arrogant to claim that all would be just peachy if only dumb users could understand sophisticated privacy settings. The point, precisely, is that the company now affords users only limited choices about how open they wish to be. And Jeff Jarvis is right that Zuckerberg and co. confuse “public” with making a plurality of micro-publics.

Arguments about “a single identity” being a demonstration of “integrity” have been well skewered by Henry Farrell and Kieran Healy.

So what has gone wrong, and what can be done?

danah boyd is, again, spot on:

What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outing people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class.

While she is absolutely on the money in contending that the desire to be “public”, in a certain sense, is one that isn’t open or chosen by all, and a desire that is differentially shaped by class, cultural capital and gender, she doesn’t quite put her finger on the basic issue. What we are seeing now is a result of the commodification of personality which, in late capitalism, creates value for corporates. We are all unpaid labourers in the social media industry, whose lives are fodder for the accumulation of capital. Facebook profits from our sociality.

The politics of this issue is, to large degree, shaped by the dialectical conflict between libertarian urges and their commercial capture, which is one way of reading the story of the web. But, because the root cause is that Facebook wants to monetise its ‘content’ (ie – us), a better lens with which to view the problem is a socialist or social democratic one. Facebook is a social utility, as boyd says; a communications medium, but also a public commons.

As such, we’re not in the realm of “good” and “evil” but in the realm of Capital – Zuckerberg has far less agency than he thinks he does, because his duty is to monetise endlessly. It’s not that Facebook is evil, but that it’s a private company providing a public purpose. So the inescapable conclusion is that it should either be heavily regulated, or a public entity should occupy its position. Just imagine the cries from the press if the ABC were to offer social networking as a public service, and you’ll know I’m right.

MINING giant Rio Tinto has shelved plans to spend $11 billion expanding its massive iron ore operations in Western Australia because of the wave of uncertainty sparked by the Rudd government’s proposed tax on super profits.

As Kevin Rudd faced down industry executives in Perth for a second day yesterday, it also emerged that fellow miner BHP Billiton was reassessing the viability of its iron ore and coal projects in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.

THE mining industry is considering a major campaign against Labor’s tax on ”super-profits” in the lead-up to the federal election, after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday rejected pleas for a review of the proposal.

Senior mining executives were discussing a formal ad campaign last night after Mr Rudd refused to shift his position on the proposed 40 per cent tax during two meetings in Perth.

Writing in Business Spectator, Robert Gottliebsen lets the cat out of the bag:

At this stage it’s just private words to selected journalists and few decisions have been made, but Australia is on the brink of the greatest capital strike in its history and one of the largest ever seen in the world.

In the vicinity of $100 billion of resource projects that were almost certain to go ahead are now headed for mothballing until the resources tax is either abandoned or severely modified. If the private words to me and other journalists are converted to action and a new mining project capital strike is launched, then almost certainly Kevin Rudd will not win the next election. The economies of Queensland, WA and South Australia would be decimated.

Paul Keating believed that investment had been deliberately held back in the lead up to the 1993 election, as capital went on strike to try to engineer the election of a Liberal government by prolonging the sluggish economy. Let’s make no mistake about his; if Gottliebsen is right, and this talk isn’t just bluster, what we’re seeing is the limits capital places on democracy. If the equation that resources capital’s interests are equivalent to the national interest is rejected, then what we get from mining companies is the ugly face of capital’s self interest.

The post, which appears below, was originally published here.

There are a range of good arguments against the Rudd government’s internet filter, some emphasised for persuasive or tactical reasons, some reflective of deeply held political and political positions. Among the latter, liberal and libertarian arguments tend to dominate. This is not necessarily to say that those advancing such arguments (which we might usefully summarise under the slogan ‘information wants to be free’) are liberals or libertarians in a consistently ideological sense, or on the political right. It’s more that the deep logic of the internet’s history produces an argument in terms of freedom, and that view seems natural to those who are passionate about the online world. In this article, I want to present a somewhat more sociological argument, and one that seeks to build on an alternative (though, in part, complementary) set of assumptions drawn from left and progressive thought and tradition.

In so doing, the target at which I want to aim is not the internet filter itself, or Stephen Conroy himself. To my mind, the personalisation of the debate has not been a helpful aspect of the campaign against the filter proposal. What I think is useful and important to understand is the underlying cause of the government’s move, which casts the argument around freedom in something of a different light.

What is at issue here is the desire to govern the private choices of individuals, a desire which has had its apogee in the communitarian aspects of New Labour governance in the United Kingdom. To adapt a judgement made by The Economist, thirteen years of New Labour government has seen the state grow, personal freedom greatly diminish, but the underlying social patterns of inequality little disturbed. The urge to shape and dictate private choices has been growing among Labor governments in Australia, with the long lived Bob Carr style state regimes leading the vanguard. Mark Latham tempered the communitarian rhetoric to a high flame during his leadership, and despite his repudiation by the ALP, the Rudd government has seemingly adopted a similar governing mentality, albeit at more of a simmer.

The causes of the desire to govern the soul are multiple, though interconnected and interwoven.

It’s no coincidence that an increasing drive to interfere with private decisions and choices accompanied the election of the first generation of centre-left governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the End of History. The ideological climate where social democrats lost any sense of the capacity to transform, and the desirability of transforming economic and social relations lent itself to a statism without long term purpose, a statism that manifests itself in interventions to transform private lives rather than to transform national and global society. Stripped of the power, and the will, to restructure economic life so as to negate deeply structural inequalities in a globalised world, purpose and the will to do good manifests itself into a micro-level of intervention; what Michel Foucault called ‘biopolitics’ – a politics of governing the individual body and soul.

Reflected through the prism of the constant campaign, the spectacle of the symbol in politics, and the 24/7 media cycle, ‘bite-sized’ policies have the capacity to substitute for social change over the long term and to feed the drumbeat of moral panic sounded on a repetitive and moment by moment time scale.

Secondly, in a risk society, individuals are less trusted to make choices for themselves, governed by their desires, their use of private reason, and their consciences. The sub-politics of risk, to invoke the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, concerns itself with the downside of modernity and complexity – the costs of the aggregation of private decisions to public finances and purposes. In areas like health, child development, and many others, the costs of perceived negative choices are transferred to a public purse unable to deal with them, and in a neo-liberal culture, the production of a docile and compliant workforce is key both to the legitimation of governance in a chaotic environment and to the reproduction of late capitalist patterns of work, consumption and distribution.

Thirdly, the micro-government of the individual is a key point of contestation at the site where democratisation and authority clash. An increasing climate of openness from the 1960s onwards, and the democratisation of culture among whose effects is a resistance to assertions of authority, later supplemented by the growth of populisms both right and left combined to render the notion that policy is an effect of expertise shaky. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is something of a backlash. With politics denuded of big picture ideological conflicts, the void is filled with hordes of experts, who with the best will in the world, think that they know what’s good for us. Labor governments, stripped of any real transformational purpose, obsessed with symbolic campaigning and feeding the media beast, and concerned about the governance of risk, seize upon (and cherry pick) crumbs from the table of thinktank, private and public research expertise.

So, then, the internet filter is part of a bigger picture. It’s one more item, among the alcopops tax, the national testing regime in schools, and many others, of a form of governmental mentality which seeks to shape, or to dictate, choices to citizens, who are presumed to be unable to discern their own best interests. Evidence, research and policy step in, and electoral advantage is sought through the intertwined machine of political communication and media dissemination.

Yet, there is another left tradition.

That is the tradition embodied in movements for popular education from the 19th century onwards, in the habits of auto-didacticism of early trade unionists and activists, of the respect for reason and informed conscience and judgement imparted to English speaking socialisms and Labourism from the dissent of chapel and the world of workplace dispute and argument. This tradition is one of the cultivation of the capacities of all citizens to apply reason to human affairs, to make conscientiously good decisions in their private lives through collective learning and civic conversation, for opportunity to be opened up rather than to be circumscribed.

This fundamentally progressive attitude and set of dispositions seeks to expand the capabilities of ordinary folk and to enable and facilitate citizens’ desires for autonomy, self-government and collective government of communal and state institutions.

It’s part of a sweeping movement of democratisation, which popped up in another context at the height of the administered society in the 1950s and 1960s, in a desire for participatory decision-making and for individuals together to question the force of ingrained social norms. It’s part of an activist culture manifested in social movements such as feminism and other liberatory and transformational currents. At its heart, it represents a fundamental optimism, a philosophical anthropology foundational to left politics (and to liberalism, too) which holds that humans are thinking beings able to be trusted with choice, and whose choices deserve a basic level of respect.

The internet, as I alluded to at the outset, is part of that secular movement towards the democratisation of social relations; and of knowledge. It’s precisely because the internet affords so much promise for those who wish to decide their destinies in common, to learn, to form an informed judgement and habit of thought that its freedom from state interference is so important at the level of principle. I’m not so interested in the particulars of the reasons advanced by the Rudd government for this latest instance of the desire to micro-manage individual choices. I’m much more interested in opposing, in principle, anything that partakes in the disrespect for the capacities of individual citizens to decide severally and collectively how best to regulate their own lives. That’s a principle, in my view, that from a left and progressive position, is well worth fighting for.

If, as we discussed on the previous thread, it is the case that students or recent immigrants working in servos, 24 hour convenience stores, cleaning jobs, taxi driving and so forth are more at risk of assault and abuse, then it follows that working conditions in the night time economy are part of the problem. It’s well accepted, for instance, that highly skilled shift workers such as nurses can obtain, through the industrial system, protections from dangerous journeys to and from work; for instance, well lit and surveilled routes to car parks, security, cab fares home. Similarly, workers in occupations where abuse and threats of or actual violence are likely to be a frequent risk, such as in emergency rooms and Centrelink, also have established protocols and risk management measures (including quick access to police) in place to safeguard their right to work in an environment free of danger and harrassment. Such protections are at the cost of the employer.

There seems no reason, in justice or fairness, why less skilled workers should not be entitled to the same protections.

A range of decisions and modes of social organisation have come together to create an underclass in the night time service industry; immigration and visa regulations which have the effect of facilitating cash in hand and illegal work, the promise of permanent residency after courses in areas where there are perceived skills shortages (retail, hospitality…) and dodgy requirements for ‘work experience’, threats by unscrupulous employers leveraging visa status, and more.

At the same time, as myriad suggested, there may well be a focus of resentment in low socio-economic areas towards those who have access to education and work at a time of high youth unemployment, whose manifestation is racist attacks and victimisation.

Nurses and public servants achieved safer working conditions through unionism. But there appears to be an ideological belief in Australia that running a small business is some sort of sacred right, and that any attempt to ensure better conditions for workers is a dastardly impost, if not evil socialism.

The consequences of a globalising capitalism are among the factors which create workplace ghettos for international students.

We need to recognise that, and deal with it.

Related thread: Guest post by Glen Fuller on student labour.

Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson:

I am continually surprised by the attempts of both the politicians in Canberra and Victoria and the police in Australia to downplay the racism in Melbourne’s western suburbs that is expressed in the violent attacks against Indian students. All sorts of convolutions are involved, including pointing to the finger to Indian media, in the attempt to avoid the obvious—the curry bashing.

The obvious is that racism in Australia is pervasive, part of the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render it invisible, and make it one of the strongest forms of structural violence. This is what is being denied by the Brumby Government in Victoria, with its talk about random violence and opportunistic crimes, and its unwillingness to set up an agency that is responsible for international student safety.

Yeah , I know. Canberra is battling to reassure New Delhi that Australians aren’t racist, fearful the outcry over violent assaults may harm relations and stop the flow of lucrative education dollars. The real concern is to keep the dollars flowing in from the international students not the racist undercurrents of Australian nationalism.

The constant appeals to Australian multiculturalism (a tolerant and fair society) is an important policy image in attracting international students. Racism and multiculturalism are two sides of the same coin.

Update: Guest post by Tim Watts.

He didn’t explicitly refer to a Tobin Tax, but I suspect that’s what he had in mind, and it’s something that has popped up higher on the agenda over 2008 and 2009. So it’s worthwhile to point to a comprehensive article by John Langmore in Inside Story on just that measure.

From my point of view, one key advantage of a tax on cross border financial transactions would be its contribution to transparency and thus the ability of states (and others) more easily to grasp what’s occurring in the ‘shadow banking’ sector. Whether or not future bank bailouts are politically feasible is another question entirely. I suspect that might be political suicide in the USA, no matter how dire another financial shock.

And, incidentally, when the Democrats inevitably lose Senate seats in November, it will become more or less impossible for anything of any size to pass the US Congress.

It seems pretty clear that these developments are related to the global financial crisis and related events. The adoption as a badge of pride by Forbes magazine and others of the previously pejorative term “capitalism” was one of the most extreme manifestations of market liberal triumphalism in the 1990s. But, in the wake of the crisis, “capitalism” is a much more problematic term. It works well enough as a generic term covering all advanced economies in which private capital plays a leading role, but one that is, as we have seen, ultimately dependent on government action for sustainability. We can then say that the relatively unregulated, finance-dominated form of capitalism that has held sway for the last 30 years is being supplanted by a different form in which the role of government as ultimate risk manager is more direct and obvious. But this has little rhetorical value for market liberals.

Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.

There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.

Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:

We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.

Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:

A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is exemplary here. Throughout the fifth century, the distinction between Romans and barbarians is sharpened, the ideology of Roma Aeterna hyperbolised, even as the Empire’s military power begins to depend more and more on Ostrogothic armies to play off against other militarised populations in movement. The seat of power is the site not of stability, but of vicious contestation. Then, one day, Odoacer topples the house of cards, and takes power himself, without bothering to erect the screen of another puppet Emperor. Suddenly, the illusion is shattered, and the situation can be seen – in retrospect – in its true light. The Real reveals itself. (An apocalypse, properly understood, is a mode of veiling and unveiling a truth.)

Historians identify a number of points where action could have been taken – as late as the 460s – which may have prevented this. History, after all, is contingent, and events only appear necessary in retrospect. But what was blocking such action was precisely the inability to see and conceptualise the processes occurring as anything other than contingent and passing.

At the same time, particularly after the sack of Rome in 410, apocalyptic predictions were in the air.

For Žižek, transformations are at work which call forth such a doubled effect:

If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times. It is easy to see how each of the three processes… refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives… At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; “the end of times is near”.

So there is no surprise that such profound tendencies towards paradigmatic change in the conditions of being human in the world call forth the twin ideological effects of blinkered conservatism and apocalyptic endism. In Žižek’s mind, there are four types of the latter: Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism and secular ecologism.

Note that Žižek is not employing the concept of apocalypticism pejoratively. The apocalyptic is a mode of experiencing time, and it may be, that confronted with a genuine prospect of catastrophic transformation, it is the most germane, while the linear mode of continued progress and development is illusory. As with other political phenomena, apocalypticism in itself is a form rather than a content; an empty signifier which can attract to itself a variety of beliefs and imperatives.

To dismiss something as apocalyptic, then, is in itself a mode of disavowal.

What is certain is that a conservative stance (the Romanitas of the current aeon) is an impossibility. There is nothing to conserve. Global capitalism relies on constant change and upheaval, and the drive towards accumulation brings destruction in its path. It is the nature of the beast. So, a stance of denial towards climate change is – in its effects – a death drive, an imperative to maintain an illusion long past its necessary confrontation with the spectre of the Real. Think Peak Oil, think the colonisation of the biological and the Commons by commerce, think the destruction of forests and species. All this is real, and it may well be that limits to growth are fast approaching. The end of non-renewable resources, a phenomenon whose timing is the only issue over the next century or so, is a fact. To proclaim, metaphorically, “let’s party like it’s 1999″, is not an answer.

So, in a way, the psychology of conservative skepticism is “Après moi, le déluge”. And, of course, for Louis XIV, or rather for the mode of being that he embodied, the deluge arrived a few decades afterwards.

It will become increasingly clear, over the next few decades, that business as usual with a few tweaks is an impossibility. The current noise of ‘climate change skepticism’ will not survive confrontation with the Real; it’s a symptom of a fractured utopia.

Because the actual utopians in this picture are those for whom history has ended; the liberal ideologues whose complacency has already been disturbed, whose only response to transformational change is to deny it, because we already live in the best of all possible worlds. The conditions of possibility for such an attitude are already collapsing.

So, what is to be done?

It’s here that the role of the imaginary is crucial.

There is no necessity or certainty to the course of human affairs. It is eminently possible that the impacts of climate change, politically, might be a future of violent conflicts over resources, an increasing abrogation of human freedoms, uncontrolled population movements, and the continued reduction of politics to a corporate game.

In fact, that may well be the track we’re on.

But it’s not necessarily so.

As I alluded to above, events only appear necessary in retrospect. The necessity of the present moment is driven by a failure of imagination, or more properly, a refusal to imagine and a blockage of the imaginative faculty. If politics is the contest of the delineation of the contours of the social, economic and cultural; that is to say, the establishment of the conditions for how we shall live, then we don’t have much of it at the moment. We have the ‘administration of things’, and the best that we can manage is elite-driven technocratic tinkering.

We need to revive our faculties of imagination, in a future anterior mode. That is to say, we need to conceive of the end state we want to see – a juster, fairer and sustainable world order which can accommodate itself to the exigencies of climate change – and work backwards from there. In order to avert the apocalypse. That is a political task, and let there be no mistake about what we’re engaged in. So, in fact, secular ecologists need to work against the ‘end of days’; and to do so with an eye to the long term, not the short term noise of rabid denialism. “Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect” isn’t a bad slogan, still. We need to be realistic to confront the effects of the Real.

There are some juicy quotes from Hayek in Shaviro’s piece. The market, Hayek wrote, subjects “man” [sic] to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups.” We are “force[d] to be free”, according to Hayek.

Shaviro’s is the sort of critique of neo-liberalism Kevin Rudd would never write.

It makes clear the deep continuity between the project of neo-liberals such as Hayek and the Enlightenment urge to control and discipline – to remake new humans who are ‘rational’, and thus ‘free’. It would be interesting to compare the sorts of dispositions and attitudes which underlie this logic of governmentality with those of Soviet Marxism.

The real question here is the one of our relation, as individuals, to the economy as a whole — or to the so-called “free market.” We are told that the market is made of individuals just like us. We are told that it consists in nothing more, and nothing less, than the summation of billions of decisions made by billions of autonomous individuals, each of us making choices for ourselves. And yet, we actually experience the market as a vast, ineluctable force. It feels like something entirely alien to us, over which we have no power, and from which there can be no appeal. This is why economic catastrophe is something invisible, impalpable: it affects every aspect of our lives, yet we are unable to “see” it in itself, to discern it as an actual force, behind its all-too-evident effects.

We bitch at the government all the time, because we can more or less see how it works, and because it gives us specific people to blame when something goes wrong. That is why so many Americans agreed with Ronald Reagan when he said that government was the problem — despite the fact that Reagan himself was the government. The market, in contrast, seems to be something that’s just there — like the weather, perhaps, or like an earthquake. We complain about the economy all the time, of course — but only in the way that we complain about a rainy day. Anything further would be a waste of breath — since we know that we cannot do anything about it. Americans get mad about having to pay taxes; but, even if they grumble, they basically accept the fatality of outrageously high interest rates on their credit cards. This is why there are no riots, and no street protests, in the United States today.

Indeed, the very purpose of the “free market” is to instill this kind of fatalism in people. The market is largely an instrument of discipline and control.