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.

One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.

If you look at things over the long term, there are a range of secular trends common to most developed states (and part of the problem with less developed states and the process of post-colonial state formation is that there’s a sort of recipe for what a state does that might be very difficult to replicate in the absence of the conditions of its possibility). The British liberal state of the 19th century managed to govern with a tiny civil service – departments of state such as the Exchequer used to employ only around 20 or 30 people as recently as the 1860s. The vast amount of state employees were in the military, with the post office a distant second. Government – to the degree that there was government – was devolved to largely amateur institutions, and government didn’t do very much. Historically, European states spent almost all their revenue on war and defence. From the late 19th century onwards, there has been a constant trend upwards – and outwards into civil society – but even the “advanced liberalism” of Lloyd George in his guise as a reforming Chancellor only had a footprint, if you like, of around 15% of GDP. It’s also important to underline the fact that much of the increase in state expenditure was driven from below – from a more active and more enfranchised citizenry.

The significance of the “crisis of governability” of the 1970s was the conclusion drawn that the public sector had reached its limits. At around the same time, democratic socialists in Britain – and Australia though we didn’t really have the debate here in the same terms – began to lose their sense of forward momentum and any sense of socialism as transformative. Thatcher, as I’ve suggested, in many instances strengthened the reach and power of the state – “big state conservatism” or liberalism is no new thing. It didn’t spring into being with Bush or Howard, as an examination of the records of Reagan and Fraser would indicate.

But nevertheless it does make sense to talk about neoliberalism. If it’s true that there are strong secular forces shaping the size and the state in a certain direction, it’s also true that attempts to reorient the scope and direction of the state’s activity are important, even if they don’t actually practice the anti-statism they preach. After all the construction of a market economy – embodying the precepts of possessive individualism – was not just a victory of certain social formations and their ruling ideas over others but also a project which required a massive expansion of the reach if not initially the size of the state – in order to overturn notions of a moral economy and to facilitate the transformation of both work in the direction of free labour and of factors of production as tradeable, among other things. It’s what Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation”. Much of the trend from the mid 19th century onwards was to further expand the state’s reach and scope through transferring activities in the economy from private to public governance. The last few decades have been about turning that around – in a way. But this has also required both a further expansion in the reach of the state and a self-imposed restraint which has proceeded under the sign of globalisation.

Incidentally, my argument elsewhere has been that globalisation is horribly confused as a social scientific concept – it tends to conflate far too many processes, suggest a unilinear direction where things are a lot more complex, and mistake effects for causes. But the mistaking of effects for causes – a characteristic of neoliberal globalisation talk (“there is no alternative”) – is itself deeply ideological. What is clustered under the name of globalisation does, and is intended by at least some actors, to do work in the world. In short, it’s an ideological rather than an analytical concept, and its force is such that it attains facticity.

It’s wrong to think of any political ideology either as a “coherent system of ideas” (the polsci 101 definition) or as only oriented towards the size of the state or the degree to which the state dominates “the commanding heights of the economy” or seeks to set market forces free. That’s partly because political ideas are often parasitic on and subsequent to forms of rule and techniques of governing, as it were, and partly because, sociologically, I don’t think you can make a meaningful distinction between the ideas and the institutions and individuals who are their “carriers” – as Max Weber would say.

Just as the state is better understood as an assemblage of institutions embedded within society and reflecting many of the conflicts and tensions within the social body than as some sort of monolith confronting “civil society”, so too ideologies are woven from a whole variety of cloths for a whole range of reasons. They’re as much about weird and misguided shadow boxing in the op/ed pages over the fetish of Hayek as about any abstract theoretical wonkery. There’s no “essence” of liberalism, or of socialism for that matter. Some ideologies have a closer articulation to reason – because they’re understood in terms of reason not necessarily because they are reasonable – than others. The search for a coherent doctrine of fascism or of conservatism always fails because these movements are basically ones of affect and emotion which are hostile to reason. But it’s as unreasonable to compare “Soviet Marxism” to some ethereally pure and ideal Marx, whose texts are incredibly complex and often contradictory. But let’s be fair here – there’s no “classical liberalism” either which is entirely amenable to rational redaction.

In many instances, what we’re doing when we talk about ideologies is textual analysis. Modern political philosophy is far more akin to textual criticism and hermeneutics than it sometimes thinks. It’s a technique of ordering texts – confused, complex and intriguing texts – and giving them a shape and a coherence they lack. It’s also an atemporal and ahistorical enterprise – acting as if liberalism is The Two Treatises on Civil Government or communism is Capital or the Grundrisse. In actuality, these texts are inseparable from their contexts, both historical and in terms of the work they are made to do as lodestars or fetishes of subsequent or concurrent practices. An ideology is an imaginary formation, which cannot in fact close the field it seeks to delimit or circumscribe. It’s a set of dispositions and practices and norms which has only a relative and contingent relation to its supposed textual embodiments.

Ideologies, in short, are what ideologies do.

Ideology is also the will to govern, and how that will seeks to embody itself in steering the ship of state. It embodies a particular (ideal) relation between state and citizens.

It can be useful to use some of the ideas about and from ideologies and the arguments for political analysis, but only if we remember that at best what we’re talking about are ideal types. The world of politics is far far messier than any ideological prescription. As is policy.

Where we can reasonably argue that there is meaning in what we say is where we can identify a general orientation – and which forces have a sense of movement and momentum behind them. The big problem social democracy has is that it’s lost any sense that there is a coherent project. It’s lost any sense of working on the world to transform it.

Neoliberalism has both.

But neither has the coherence that their adherents – or many analysts – might think.

But what matters is that people think they do – it’s a truth effect in Foucault’s terms or a social fact in Durkheim’s. And there are still meaningful distinctions to be made – but they’re often to be found in the nature of the rhetoric and the framing of problems and the underlying assumptions rather than false propositions such as “if a state is bigger than x% of the economy it’s social democratic”. Most important are the effects ideologies create on thought and action, and people’s material circumstances, and in what they enable and what they constrain. All of those are somewhat artificial distinctions analytically, but they’re useful. What we should be looking at is how they frame that object called “society” and what principles they use to manipulate it and how they divide it up, how they create friends and enemies. It’s this sense in which concepts like “aspirationalism” and “social justice” – or “transparent information” – become imbued with both meaning and the capacity to be mobilised to do stuff.

And their ethical commitments are vital.

Elsewhere: Another segue from Jacques Chester at Troppo.