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?

It would seem that I’m not the only person facilitating such conversations in a university context. Melissa Gregg, from Sydney Uni, wrote a really ace post the other day about some issues which had arisen in tutorials she convened about Facebook and employers’ demands for profiles as part of the recruitment and selection process. She writes about this at home cooked theory:

…for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.

Her remarks sparked some interesting comments, and prompted a post on the legal issues surrounding this sort of demand by Legal Eagle at Skepticlawyer. Legal Eagle’s post, as usual assured in its comprehensiveness and insight, correctly notes that the law has not kept up with technology in this domain, as in many others.

There’s another set of issues arising here about the increasing blurring of professional and personal identity. A lot has been written about emotional labour, and the breakdown of boundaries between work and personal life. There’s another angle – following Norbert Elias’ sociological thought – about informalisation as a secular process in modernity. But it would be very interesting indeed if there were to be some more research and discussion focused on the impact of social media on these broader trends, and concomitantly, on their impact on social media, privacy and subjectivity (and indeed on how human or workplace rights are affected by the distribution of personality throughout webspaces). Social media reveals the distributed nature of subjectivity and cognition and undermines the unity of the individual subject of legal rights. It strikes me that social networking is a key node accelerating, or perhaps accentuating, cultural shifts which have been on the boil for some time.

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.