I’d thoroughly endorse some of the arguments made in that post about the narrow limits of the field of political contestation, and the way it’s skewed towards a neo-liberal consensus where many questions just don’t get on the agenda for what passes for public debate. Where I’d take issue with Dr_Tad is the claim that process isn’t political. It may well be the case that none of Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor have either a particularly coherent ideological position or an intention to fundamentally transform our politics. But that’s not quite the point – political shifts are very often unintended, and extend beyond the desires of political actors.

That’s potentially the case with the call for a “new politics”, I think.

It’s been interesting this week to see some serious debate about our participation in Afghanistan, questioning about why on shore processing of refugees is so verboten, and around issues to do with rural health and the decline of particular non-urban cultures and modes of economic sustainability. We don’t normally talk about these things – that is, the politico-media complex doesn’t open up a space where such questions can be politicised.

Obviously, I’d also like to see us talking about social mobility, distributional justice and a vision of social justice which transcends what I’ve called, in a piece for The Drumroll, Gillardism. I have some hope that The Greens can stimulate a real debate on such questions, as well as one on those issues which are totemic for the party. But, even in the absence of such a focus from Greens MPs and Senators, the shift of the centre of political discourse and the fracturing of its points of unanimity can only be positive for those wishing to move on those issues, and one hopes, might also bear fruit in something of a revival of social movements.

We’ll see. But I do think that any “rupture in the political fabric” presents new possibilities.

Guy Rundle put it very well indeed when he observed that “the economic question” has been taken off the table in recent decades, and “the political question” displaced onto culture wars. His article for Crikey yesterday discusses these issues more eloquently than I am doing, so I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in its entirety over the fold (with permission).

You can tell that something that resembles politics is happening in Australia now, by the chorus of derision that professional insiders are directing at the three rural independents, and any suggestion that this impasse of a result may be an opportunity for the country to stop and think about what sort of political institutions and processes it wants.

With the ‘doughty three’ (like that huh?), releasing their seven point letter to the PM, the establishment commentariat has gone into panicky overdrive in an attempt to head it off. It’s bad enough the Greens have snuck into the Lower House (for a second, not first time), now there’s three possibly, four independents.

And that godamn WA National won’t take the whip. You can see why they’re spitting. Imagine if you had to report politics on your front page, rather than writing a series of memos to party heavies, cunningly disguised as actual news.

Thus Michelle Grattan in The Age:

Rob Oakeshott sees safety in his bold model for consensus politics?—?but others will see naivety. Parliamentary reform is one thing, and much needed … But Oakeshott’s proposals go way beyond ordinary change.

What? Beyond change that can be absorbed back into the system? Noooooooooooo!!!!

This is a terrible election result for Australian foreign policy, Greg Sheets Sheridan wrote, mourning that the man of steel would not be succeeded by the age of Iron. The Greens are less fussed about Afghanistan than they were about Iraq…But they might make the difference in dissuading it from offering any increased help there, or undertaking any new security role either.

God, a prudent foreign policy with checks and balances on war? Nooooooooooo!!!!

None of this will be easy as demonstrated by the confused ramblings of Rob Oakeshott during the past 24 hours, Paul Polonius Kelly remarks. Forget the nonsense that party politics has taken a blow or is in retreat.

Not easy? No business as usual? Nooooooooo!!!!

Tim Soutphommasane, the Oz’s pet left philosopher, counselled against ‘educated despair’ by which he meant any meditating on whether things could be done other than through the existing party shells.

And Dennis Shanahan simply wants a new election to be held immediately, and to keep repeating it until we get it Right.

The 2010 election result has offered that rarest and most blessed of things, a rupture and a discontinuity in the process. It’s one that makes it impossible to sell the line that the parliamentary electoral system we are ruled by has some deep-seated pole of wisdom that somehow expresses rather than imposes a political form. What the result is making clear to people is the inherent arbitrariness of the system, its closed nature, and the way in which that is obscured when a party is elected with an unchallengeable majority.

The difficulty for the business as usual crowd, is that they spend so much time celebrating the virtues of the single member electorate system, that when it throws up a number of actual single members, they can’t damn it out of hand.

And when such members begin to suggest that the process by which they were chosen could be reflexively acted on by both MPs and the public, the business-as-usual crowd panic about stability. Weird, isn’t it? Post-election Iraq has been without a government for several months, with no working coalition in sight, and this is an example of democracy at work. Australia has a few days or weeks with no majority party but a process of rational and open negotiation, and it’s a disaster.

What has happened in Australia, in little more than the wink of an eye, is that the political question has been pushed into an entirely new dimension. Ever since the 1970s the economic question has lain moribund as a major political division, no matter what lip service is paid to the gulf separating etc etc, and the occasional flashpoint such as WorkChoices.

The political question who leads, how and through what institutions has barely been regarded as political at all, or cynically manipulated, as in Howard’s handling of the Republic debate.

The virtual stasis of both these questions is one reason why so much political energy flows into cultural questions and why culture wars become the dominant mode of struggle.

Once an interruption such as the 2010 election makes it impossible for that stasis to be maintained, the energy flows back into the political question, and real change can be imagined by all except those whose job depends on nothing changing ever, ie the mainstream commentariat.

Once that happens, the left/right divisions based overwhelmingly on the economic (and social-cultural) question cease to be of primary importance, and there is the possibility of new processes, and new flows which make provisional blocs in different ways. It’s the most imaginative solutions that become the most possible.

Thus, why should we not consider Rob Oakeshott’s idea of a multi-party cabinet? Why is Dennis Shanalamadingdong’s idea of a whole new election the ‘sensible’ idea, while Oakeshott’s idea that the people who actually have been elected form a government seen as the whacky one? The Constitution recognises parliament, the GG as head-of-state, and her/his appointed ministers as government. It has nothing to say about prime ministers or parties.

So Shanahan’s suggestion is that the system has failed because it worked.

What’s happened in this election is that the process of parliamentary electoral politics which is minimally democratic and the party-based politics of interests, which isn’t democratic in the slightest, have come into contradiction, in a situation where the system usually silently serves the interests. The profound cynicism and mild fear of the commentariat have caused them to back the interests against the system.

The process has left many people high and dry, desperate to catch up. Thus Paul Kelly, who disguises his cynical anti-democratic power elitism by sporadic attacks on cultural elites, is desperate for a cozy party system that can be nagged to impose a yet more neoliberal agenda, against the oft-expressed wishes of the mass of the Australian people.

The fetishisation of ‘stability’, as if the country was Bosnia-Herzegovina one heartbeat away from a shooting war, is a con. If we are so pusillanimous as to entirely subordinate our political process to the flickering of the global markets, then we may as well let Goldman Sachs choose the government.

Stability is the very achievement that allows a country the luxury of uncertainty, when isolated outbreaks of actual public will throw up an ensemble capable of creating a new situation. I’m under no illusion that the rural independents are about to put the whole constitution and political apparatus into play. But they don’t need to.

The mere process over the last three days has done more to make visible the invisible structures of power, and their potential (if not straightforward) transformability, than a hundred civics lessons. Other gains, such as an increased role for private members bills, would serve to bang the wedge a little further into the old tree dead.

Stability is not the issue, nor is it the danger. The danger is a politics so deadened that only the most demented and monomaniacal, the Feeneys, Shortens, and Bitars, can stand it, and everyone else retires to their private lives. The more the commentariat shriek in fear, the more interesting the ride.

The independents and minor parties should push this process until the rivets are popping.

A hung parliament and a new Senate in which the Greens will have the balance of power and, most likely, a presence of which few of their number would have dared dream.

The mainstream media have been curiously reticent to say it, but the electorate lurched sharply to the Left yesterday. Labor bled just more than 5% of its vote, but most of it — 3.6% — went to the Greens. The Coalition picked up the scraps.

That’s why Labor is still jockeying for government today and hasn’t been obliterated, and why the Greens will have nine senators next year.

He draws on data from a survey conducted by Sydney University political science PhD student Stewart Jackson presented at the 2009 Australian Political Studies Association conference, and on an analysis of AES data by Macquarie University sociologist Ben Spies-Butcher. “Labor-Greens swingers” include many who were strong Labor identifiers and they have views on economic questions further to the left of existing Greens voters. Conversely, Tietze argues that Jackson’s survey, which contrasted attitudes between Greens members who’d joined prior to and after 2000, suggests a shift to a more party centred rather than social movement picture of the tasks of The Greens. I was surprised to see that Jackson found that 14% of the latter identified as ‘right wing’. 52% of the recent members disagreed with a proposition that their party should move leftwards.

Tietze is clearly one of those Greens activists who would agree with that statement.

What he’s unsure about is whether The Greens in toto are in fact a social democratic party, and his use of the data suggests that party members are less to the left than many of its supporters. He also sees a gap in the party’s ideology:

In their book The Greens, the most complete statement of Australian Greens ideology to date, Bob Brown and Peter Singer develop a compelling description of ecological and social crisis. These crises are caused, they argue, by a flawed value system – so, for example, out-of-control consumption and waste needs to be tackled by a new ‘Green ethics’. Despite radical language that attacks many aspects of neoliberalism, Brown and Singer make no recourse to systemic structural analysis. Even the greed of the rich is painted as individually irrational and shaped largely by incorrect ideas.

The conceptual absence of class or social constestation beyond descriptions of injustice and irrationality results in a curious silence about issues of power. Because Brown and Singer see Green ethics as universally applicable, they implicitly expect that the state will implement the radical reforms they propose. The corruption of past radicals in the ALP is portrayed as a matter of individuals being bought off, professionalised and shielded from accountability and not as a result of the inherently conservatising nature of engagement with the capitalist state and parliamentary system.

I’d note that I’m just summarising rather than necessarily endorsing Tietze’s critique, but I’d be very interested indeed in hearing from Greens members and supporters on it.

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.

The long struggle of left and centre-left parties to maintain their relevance in the face of the resurgent market liberalism of the late 20th century gradually eroded any belief in the possibility of a fundamental transformation of capitalism, to the point where such ideas no longer receive even lip-service, let alone serious and sustained attention. Instead, these parties have found themselves lumbered with the task of managing the mixture of social democratic and market institutions that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century, tweaking them sometimes with market-oriented reforms and sometimes with marginal new interventions. This is broadly consistent with the ‘end of ideology’ story.

[Incidentally, I think there's an interesting story to be told about the right's turn to the manufacture of ignorance, and its new-found populism - having to do with, among other things, profound social changes - but that's a tale for another time.]

I recently read Donald Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism. Sassoon tracks the history of the European left, and while there’s much to take away from his discussion, one conclusion to be drawn is that the project of social democracy lost its transformative edge because of its reluctance to make institutional changes – both in governance and in the broad field of political economy. Where such changes were made, and where there was a hegemonic cultural space for social democracy, as in some of the Nordic democracies, social democracy, even at the height of neo-liberal reaction, retained a strategic capacity to think long term about the shift to a different form of society.

It’s sometimes argued that the left won on the terrain of culture, and lost on the terrain of economics. There’s some truth to this, but not much comfort can be taken from it, because the social shifts towards a greater liberty to choose one’s style of life largely bubbled up from below, rather than being intended by left parties (in which there’s always been an authoritarian stream matching that of conservatives). And the post-materialist politics of liberation has shown a remarkable capacity for co-optation into consumerist capitalism, mistaking civic for collective action, as Nina Power has recently remarked.

It’s also somewhat questionable that Australian Labor has ever really had a strategic and transformative dimension. There’s good reason for the ideological distinction between labourism and social democracy.

Quiggin concludes his post:

But, in the meantime, their abandonment of reality-based politics has left managerialists like Rudd and Obama wrong-footed. Their whole approach to politics assumes that the other side shares a broadly consistent view of reality. But in John Cole’s acid metaphor, dealing with the agnotological right is like going on a dinner date where you suggest Italian and your date prefers a meal of tire rims and anthrax.

The big political problem is that while competent management commands widespread approval it does not mobilise much enthusiasm. What is needed here is a return to ideology, and a project to move beyond day-to-day management and offer the ‘light on the hill’ of a positive social transformation, based on justice and equality.

I couldn’t agree more.

It’s actually possible to construct a transformational narrative (albeit in minor key) around some of the initiatives of the ALP. But it’s not done. Too much of what Labor has done in office is represented as being about ‘restoring balance’, and tends to default back to the defensive posture characteristic of centre-left parties in the face of neo-liberalism.

For myself, I’d also diagnose the failures of the social democratic project as resulting from a too heavy dose of statism and a lack of concentration on the possibilities of autonomy and mutualism, but that’s perhaps a story for another post.

But the experience of UK Labour is instructive.

A government at the end of its life needs to contain the seeds of renewal within it. While there is some talk of a progressive revival through shifts to the voting system and coalescence with elements of the Liberal Democrats, and there’s no lack of interesting thinking about the relations between state and civil society, values and the economy, in the Labour Party itself, all passion is spent.

That’s the inevitable result of a process which hollowed out the party and tacked towards an illusory centre of gravity, with the best that could be achieved being minor adjustments to the prevailing policy consensus.

It may very well be possible to lay the foundations for a lengthy-ish period of government by prudent electoralism. But, in the absence of a broader strategic and ideological vision, it may also be futile in the medium term. Quiggin’s call for a return to ideology deserves much discussion.

And there’s another one in an article Soutphommasane published in The Australian the other day.

While I would agree, on aesthetic grounds, that Movember is a bit worrying, I’m not at all sure that it’s some sort of sign of ‘conspicuous compassion’ (something I remember all the crusty old columnists loudly denouncing about five years ago – these things, like facial hair, must go in cycles):

At first glance it all seems commendable enough: people are doing their part for a worthy charity while having a bit of fun. Yet I suspect I am not alone in feeling some fatigue and distaste about public awareness campaigns. It seems that every day, week and month of the calendar is dedicated to raising awareness about some social concern.

Support women’s health? Sport a pink ribbon. Support action on climate change? Turn off your lights at home for an hour. Support recycling? You were in luck last week, which just happened to be National Recycling Week.

It is a worrying sign of our declining civic life that public engagement has become reduced to hollow symbolism. Civic virtue has become synonymous with ethical one-upmanship: it’s all about winning plaudits for altruism or moral goodness.

Well, no, it’s not all about that.

Later in the piece, Soutphommasane invokes Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, a now deceased crusty old sociologist, worried about the rise of the “narcissistic personality” (and the concept has some similar methodological problems as its predecessor, the Frankfurt School’s “authoritarian personality“). We’re all self-absorbed, etc, etc. (Follow the link for the longer version, and the book is actually better than it might have been.) One might think, observing American culture, that Lasch was onto something. But one might then reflect that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is actually a thesis constructed on a very doubtful reading of the stats, and that America continues to display a culture of voluntarism and free association much more robust than a diagnosis of narcissism might predict.

What Soutphommasane doesn’t seem to realise is that his imagined community – presumably another one of those past Golden Ages – of civic virtue, was not – in its actuality – without its element of status claims. I’m completely unclear from reading his op/ed what would exactly be entailed by a real civic virtue, right now and not in an imagined past (and all Soutphommasane has done is to posit something unspecified against what he disses, not a particularly good analytical move, even if a common rhetorical one). But, in the age when the bourgeois patriarchs of the world joined civic associations for good community causes, or whatever, what they were up to – among other things – was reinforcing a very rigid status hierarchy. The sexual division of labour which saw women, and particularly unmarried women, voluntarily taking up the frontline of working with the objects of all this concern was also part of a cultural hierarchy which resolutely reduced those who were deserving of civic aid to the status of object, and maintained class and gender divisions. It wasn’t all about doing good by stealth, or not letting the left hand know, etc. It was about social distinction, among other things.

It seems to me that the identification with causes demonstrated by wearing a ribbon, growing a mo, or whatever, is actually a democratisation of care and concern. Sure, it comes along with a bit of display, but so what? That also has the positive social effect of publicising the action. It’s too simple to see it just as narcissistic, or as symbolic rather than ‘real’ (“good citizenship”) – whatever that distinction might mean in this context.

So, now onto patriotism. I think I might actually just reproduce Rundle’s piece below the fold (with the kind permission of Crikey). I think Rundle is right that there’s an affectual dimension to patriotism (which, ironically, is the sort of dimension Soutphommasane doesn’t like about moustaches and ribbons), and that arid civics lessons won’t do too much to foster a left version. There’s also a context to the sorts of work which underlie Soutphommasane’s thought – such as Habermas’ notion of ‘constitutional cosmopolitan patriotism’, whose German and European origins in a set of particular historical and cultural concerns are much less universalisable than our philosophers may think. And therein lies the rub; as with the public meeting that replaces Movember, it’s unclear why anyone would get very excited about Soutphommasane’s progressive patriotism. You can’t, as Rundle says, legislate for it. And it doesn’t represent a viable political strategy for the left, for a whole range of reasons, including the basic failure whereby a project which transforms the social and the cultural cannot be substituted for by a fairly empty civics. At the end of the day, as Rundle implies, any strong nationalism will be a double edged sword – difficult to disarticulate from white nativism and lacking affectual power if it’s some sort of pub trivia recitation of what the Eureka stockade was all about, and who the first Labor Prime Minister was, or whatever. On the left, we would do much better to spend more time thinking about a transformed future than trying to retrospectively invent social democracy in one country.

Rundle’s Friday book review: Reclaiming Patriotism

When I was a kid we used to holiday down the Mornington Peninsula, a habit that many Victorians will have memories of from their own childhood. Childhood flows like eternity for several reasons, one of which is that new things disclose themselves to you for the first time, in all their transcendent, unrepresentable being. The first time you plunge into the water on a surf beach, the first game of French cricket, later the first time surfing alone, the first drink, first night out at a pub, the sharp taste of VB, Chisel on the juke box, girls in Rip Curl tops.

Those memories are the form by which my love of country, of place, presents itself — universal experiences in a unique and particular form to be harked back to and relived, as necessary to country love as is the host to the sacrament.

For Tim Soutphommasane they’re something else — “sentimental mush”, along with barbeques and the beach, etc, naive attachments which distract us from the real task of building a new form of patriotism in postmodern Australia — one entirely evacuated of nationalism, and sentiment, in favour of an abstract attachment to a set of ideas.

This strange book — an exile’s idea of attachment, by turns idealistic, cynical and envious in its proposals for a progressive patriotism — has met with great support and interest from several left-liberal intellectuals, many of whom should know better. Soutphommasane has done a PhD at Oxford, and worked briefly in Kevin Rudd’s office. A Laotian-Chinese by birth, he spent some of his childhood in France, before his family came to Australia. Growing up in a rural area and attending an agricultural high school, he thus finds himself in a strange situation — part of a large refugee movement, yet growing up apart from the neighbourhoods they established, while finding himself among a bunch of people whose national feeling would have a fair deal of white nativism about it.

For Soutphommasane, that naive form of nationalism has caused a total rejection of patriotism as a value by a loose group of writers, activists and commentators lumped together as “progressives” is a political and philosophical error. In the Howard era, such people identified patriotism with the worst aspects of Australian Anglo-Celtic chauvinism and rejected it utterly. Our apparent identification of much of Howard’s policy and statements on refugees, multiculturalism etc, as “dog whistle politics”, using coded language to pay lip-service to universal values while secretly communicating a message of racist chauvinism and xenophobia. Infected with a cosmopolitanism developed since the 1960s, progressives have entirely cut themselves off from local loyalties, and fallen into alienation and despair.

Patriotism is something they should develop not because it is a good in itself, but to rejoin the national conversation:

“to be politically active, to be successive advocates for change and reform, you have to engage the minds of other citizens … to deny patriotism is a sure path to political impotence … In the face of rapid and far-reaching economic change … the nation remains the last remaining source of stability and security,” he writes.

Though Soutphommasane occasionally gestures to an absolute value to patriotism — “it is no different to other forms of loyalty or love, and a necessary condition of collective self-improvement” — the understanding of it is overwhelmingly instrumental. A sense of patriotism is what holds a multicultural society together, and the global pressures towards dispersion must be countered by a “liberal patriotism” manufactured by state and cultural apparatuses — explicit talk of “Australian values”, a cultural literacy curriculum, an explicit yoking of infrastructure development to the task of building a “stronger nation”, a compulsory “citizenship knowledge” test as a prerequisite to the right to vote, an explicit spruiking of “ecstatic myths” such as Gallipoli, and a ban on dual citizenship, among others. If an abstract “liberal patriotism” is not engineered, the reservoir of national feeling will flow into Cronulla-style riots, or into said VB/barbie/FJ Holden “mush”.

There is some truth to the charge that Australian activists sometimes single out Australia as having a uniquely maligned history, an over-reaction to the self-congratulatory kitsch of the past decade — and a false analysis of what is just one settler-capitalist society amongst a number. But Soutphommasane’s analysis of the actual politics of the Howard period strikes me as quite wrong.

Thus the concrete expressions of national life — the taste of a local beer, the shared interest in a seasonal sport — are rejected as “mush”, while great attention is given to arid experiments in building a patriotism based on celebrations, either of moments in progressive history, of little interest to many people — Australia’s alleged role as the world’s first universally franchised democratic nation (a role that would have comes as news to the Aborigines, or “fauna”), for example — or more sinisterly, to a conscious surrender by intellectuals to the “ecstatic myth” of Gallipoli, followed by its propagation among the wider populace, as a progressive patriotic moment.

This is curious — like many progressive patriots, Soutphommasane quotes Orwell on the nefariousness of the left, yet does not take Orwell’s point that a genuine love of country is expressed through concrete experiences, girls walking in clogs over the cobbles, warm bitter, the Guardian etc etc. In the Australian context, he seems simply unaware of many of the progressive left traditions that did attempt to ground a universalist politics in local expression. “There was a decline in progressive nationalism from the 1960s on” he argues. In fact, the 1960s and 1970s saw its greatest efflorescence when the localist themes of the radical left — the revival of the bush ballads, connection with Aboriginal Australia, the self-publishing of local serious novels etc — fed a general wave of radical and critical nationalism, from the new theatre, local music to the Australian independence movement, a genuine republican movement, in contrast to the top-down ARM of the 1990s.

Whether Soutphommasane is even aware of this movement or not is unknowable, but it certainly does not fit his account of nation-building, which is a process of state and market bringing a “liberal patriotism” into being as its cultural adjunct (“nations follow states” says Gellner, erroneously, quoted here approvingly). The Australian Independence Movement could sometimes be silly in its attempts to elevate bush culture (The Bushwhackers, the Kalkadoon bookshop etc), but their sense of place was at least concrete, and created a democratic political-cultural program that yielded results.

Soutphommasane has his own complex history, which suggests various reason why such a curiously contentless and lifeless alternative to real countrylove and social solidarity might appeal to him — the aspiring dreamer amid the dreaming spires of Oxford has simply reprised the act of Petrarch and the first nationalists — the Renaissance thinkers who invented nationalism from their student clubs (“the nations”) and then projected them back onto the regions they came from.

People on the left know this, so why have they gone gaga for this new, rather bloodless attempt, to manufacture consensus in a postmodern patriotism? One answer is that most intellectuals, academics, etc, who do not reflect on their own process — do not think about how their ideas come to be — will always tend to come up with elitist schemes that they represent as the bodying forth a greater truth. In Australia recently 2020 has been an expression of this, and Soutphommasane’s elitist manufactured patriotism dovetails with that conference — and its obsession with social control — quite exactly.

Patriotism if you want it — and I would prefer to talk about separate things like countrylove, a sense of place, social solidarity — can’t be built off the plans. You have to work with what you have. That is a problem not only for intellectuals, who live in the inherently cosmopolitan global world of travel and ideas, but also for the born exile, whose existential challenge is simply that they are thrown into situations where they may find themselves unaccepted, excluded, defined against.

My memories of growing up, the beach, cricket, taste of a Sunnyboy, etc, are what make me Australian, but by that definition they exclude Tim, his childhood carried on the winds of war. That’s tough, but pretending you can legislate against the complex network of chauvinism and cultural privilege that makes up much of patriotism, through generally applied improving schemes is foolish indeed. Most importantly, the political formula is wrong. Progressives didn’t lose — we won. Not everything we want, but the refugee issue is framed differently, the question of foreign war, trade union rights, etc. Ultimately who was more “patriotic” — the Oxford exile, or the Brunswick Trot, wearily grabbing a placard and going to another demonstration of behalf of David Hicks, an Australian abandoned by his government? Thanks, but I’ll take the latter. Your shout. Someone put Khe Sanh on.

Update: The debate between Rundle and Soutphommasane continues.

I’ll post the whole piece over the fold (with permission), but I want to zero in on this point and add a few of my own thoughts:

Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions…

Read that together with another observation:

Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. These things pre-date capitalism and will continue after it. Capitalism is the system and the era when these things dominate not only the way we produce our lives, but also the way in which we think about ourselves and our world.

It’s precisely, I think, because a certain blockage to thought has now fractured with the Global Financial Crisis’ destruction of the legitimacy of ideological capital (and Slavoj Žižek may be right that this is the second ‘end of history’; the first being the implosion of Soviet Marxism), that we can begin to think a future outside the “no alternatives” terrain of both neo-liberalism and its anodyne Third way echoes. The term “social democracy”, in and of itself, doesn’t imply an economistic orientation, and it should not. What we’re actually seeing, I would argue (and more on this later), is a return of suppressed conceptions of value and values in the popular mind, which create the building blocks on which a vision of the future can be scaffolded, even if the foundation must rest on shards.

In short, and this was a theme of my doctoral thesis, what we need to do – collectively – is to revive our ability to imagine life otherwise. That works better if we allow critique its place – to render what appears natural strange – but also if we ground our thoughts of the future in what we can see around us, and orient our presents to a future hope. A certain utopian sensibility is required – but one which is open to the invention of utopias in a plural and a minor key.

Guy Rundle writes:

Okay for those who may have got bogged down in the thousand words or so about the Maoist-Eurocommunist struggle in the BLF in the 1970s in yesterday’s article on the left, a very brief recap of the last part:

1. Though a unified left has disintegrated, the challenges it spoke of – the structural contradictions of capitalism, ecological collapse from overconsumption, and the nihilistic effects of a civilisation subsumed under the rule of the commodity – have largely come to pass and are visible to billions of people.
2. In the East, capitalist development will not and cannot simply repeat that of Western capitalism, and enormous class struggles are in the offing.
3. In the West, an increasingly educated population, and a society where large sections have become implicitly self-managing has made a socialist framework immanent in everyday life. To look around and see an absence of political alternatives because of the absence of old style rank-and-file politics is to make an error of assessment. Post-capitalism is evolving within the increasingly ramshackle apparatus of capitalism.

That’s the “is”. But what about the “ought”? Why a society based on some other principle? And why haven’t we spoken of it before?

Those of us on the left are wary of expounding abstract alternative schema in the absence of movements wherein they would be actively discussed. That varies in time and place. In Latin America today, there is an enormous amount going on. Though the public face of it is the frequently irritating antics of Hugo Chavez, in every country save the corrupt redoubt of Colombia, new modes of distribution, co-operative production, intersection between intellectual life and everyday existence are being developed.

Drawing as much from Catholic traditions of “subsidiarity” as Marxist notions of anti-imperialism, the continent is leaping ahead of everywhere else in finding ways of doing things that promote equality without penalising initiative. There, different types of alternatives can be actively and concretely debated.

And in the West, from the 1880s to the 1970s, such debates could transfix an audience. In the 40s, pamphlets by either the Communist Party or the forerunner of the NCC (expounding Santamaria’s loopy Pol-Pot idea to evacuate the cities and create rural communes run by bishops) could sell 50-100,000 copies. In the 20s, people queued round the block for hours to get tickets to hear GK Chesterton and Bernard Shaw debate public control of central banking — presenting alternative schema that would seem identical to us today.

These debates will emerge again, when there is no choice but to have them. At that point, consciousness will change remarkably fast. The acuteness, intelligence and reflectiveness that people apply to running a sports club, a parenting group, the quasi-theological manner in which they discuss the pros and cons of a video umpire for a grand final, will be transferred to the management of the parts of their lives that are now held out of bounds, as “the economy”, once the bankers have budded and burst the next few bubbles, and f-cked everything up beyond the recuperable abilities of the current system.

That transformation can probably be called socialism when it starts happening — because by that time, the dour images of the last time around — Brezhnev and British Leyland — will have faded from memory. For the moment one can talk more about the ethical principles that underlie it.

Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. These things pre-date capitalism and will continue after it. Capitalism is the system and the era when these things dominate not only the way we produce our lives, but also the way in which we think about ourselves and our world.

A post-capitalist system reverses the current relationship between culture/society and market/economy so that the former determines the latter and not, as currently happens, economy dictating to society and culture.

As a rough schema that implies:

1) Social ownership of essential organisations. Anything that’s “too big to fail” — major banks, telecoms, utilities etc — should be majority-owned by the community. The share is held in trust, and represented by a “social board” parallel to, or mixed-in with the commercial board. The social board is elected, not appointed by the state.

Thus for example, the recent splitting of Telstra — a mild move to the left–– would see the wholesale arm of it acquire a social board, and pass into social ownership. The commercial arm could continue in the marketplace.

2) Relocalisation and decommodification — the current culture economy web of capitalism is based on an implicit social contract, that no-one ever signed up to. Under this contract you work longer and harder, while the price of essentials — especially home ownership — are ramped up into lifelong servitude to payment to institutions. The pay-off? Cheap consumer durables and entertainment services.

Forget the civilisational critique of this for a moment — on its own terms, it pitches the whole society into trembling economic fragility in which a whole way of life is based on Xmas sales, and shopping becomes an essential patriotic activity.

Of course this can’t continue — but the expectations it has raised in people cannot be assuaged by any shift to a harsher economy. A half-century ago, you could get people to work 48 hours a week for a weatherboard, a radiogram, a pub counter meal once a week and three course meal when their daughter got married. Any breach of the current contract — 50 hours in the office partition for $12 cocktails and DVD box sets — ain’t gonna fly.

Protestant capitalism cannot be re-established after consumer capitalism. And consumer capitalism cannot continue to sustain the Western economy. An economic-cultural crisis is in the works.

Such a crunch will necessitate a process of uncoupling notions of social progress from GDP growth, and a separation of the notion of freedom from consumer choice. As a social movement, the re-establishment of decommodified spheres of life, in everything from food production and house building to intellectual and cultural production. To facilitate this, the state will need to innovate and change tax scales and exemptions, land ownership systems, intellectual property laws — all to make more flexible and multiply-expressed forms of life possible.

The push for these things will occur en masse once the jerry-built, sellotaped-together and manifestly inefficient structures of global capitalism do not so much collapse as rust to a halt. Once that occurs, the culture itself will start to shift and change, to a more expansive idea of the human.

Just as the rise of liberalism and capitalism liberated a dimension of the human – our protean and promethean capacity — that feudalism had had to suppress in order to maintain itself, so a post-capitalist order will liberate what capitalism has to suppress, our capacity to shape our own lives through collective and communal dialogue about priorities and values (kidney machines versus jet skis, free time versus flat-screens).

Will that future be anything like the communism envisaged in the early Marx, or Lenin’s utopian State and Revolution? Emphatically not. Money, pricing, markets, wages will continue to exist — they simply won’t dominate existence. Social control of public institutions won’t end corruption, inefficiency, etc, but they will create a place where social debate and conflict over the running of society can be had in a genuinely democratic fashion. And it may not happen at all — or there may be rough times before it becomes possible.

Lethal global wars over resources, possibly encompassing a new generalised racism, coupled with violently repressive capitalist dictatorships, and a generalised victory of nihilism — such that we lose the capacity, for example, to see the moral horror of a free market in live organ transplants – may be the other result (anyone scoffing at this apocalyptic scenario should imagine they are reading it in 1909, in, say, Warsaw, by way of comparison). In that case, by the end of the century, the planet may be a giant charnel house. There is either going to be a victory of a genuinely democratic and human system, or a barbarism.

In that respect, a left vision grounds itself ethically on the notion — promulgated in the great religions, secularised by Kant – that humans should treated each other as ends, not means.

At a social level that decisively rejects any sort of classical liberal or neoliberal approach which is indifferent to economic relationships and equality in their conception of freedom. It subordinates property, etc to a wider conception of freedom. That someone can open a flower shop if they want to is an expression of freedom. That a bank owns our airports is an expression of its opposite.

At a cultural level, that implies that one has to stand up for a permanently decommodified areas of society — institutions such as childcare, crime and punishment, education (that does not rule out non-government education however) and so on. It implies not a defensive reaction to commodification, but a positive insistence that some things need to be outside of the market for there to be a culture, for the market to sit within the polis, and not vice-versa.

Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions – if the anodyne and idealess series of articles in the Oz over the past week is anything to go by.

As I noted, the choice appears to be deliberate — or maybe it is simply that the editors are as unimaginative and timid as the contributors they chose. Whatever the case, it’s clear that some of us are going to have to be more vocal and explicit about possible futures.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the now compulsory comparisons of Julia Gillard et al with the North Korean regime are wheeled out once more, coupled with crazed elisions of a bunch of rather mild social democrats with Stalin and Mao, and paeans to the millions of dead, etc, etc. There’s a certain irony in one of the contributors accusing critics of writing conspiracy theory. Not to mention the argument, if that’s the word for it, that concern with narratives is evidence of postmodernism (evil!) sitting uneasily next to attacks on social democrats for not having a narrative. Anyone remember when the teaching of narrative history was supposed to be a touchstone of John Howard era approved political correctness? Contradiction piled on contradiction…

There’s lots more. Should you not wish to read all of the series, Gary Sauer-Thompson has devoted some time to analysing the introductory piece by Mervyn Bendle. Bendle contributes another article, damning Julia Gillard among others, complete with another clever pun in the title. I thought that was the sort of Derridean wordplay he despised. But anyway…

Related LP posts: Here, here and here.

Elsewhere: Catallaxy.

Update: Skepticlawyer.

Update: Quadrant piles on.

Guy Rundle writes:

Years ago, I remember seeing a Hinze cartoon in the study of a friend, a Left Labor activist. It showed an inner city 90s teenager?—?opshop clothes, funny haircut?—?with a placard “no third runway” about to go off to a demo. “Coming to the airport protest Dad?” she said to an aging figure hunched over a chunky 90s computer. “No thanks, I’ve got to write another article on the death of the left,” said the harried, bearded figure.

It was clear that Hinze’s sympathies were with the kid, but it was also possible to read it another way. The idea that the left had come to be represented by this most pissant of campaigns, simply to stop something, not even a whole airport, just a runway. The father may have been despairing, repetitive, and quietistic, but he was thinking. He had passed up the blandishments of reflex activism for the harder yards. Faced with the temptation of losing himself in reflex opposition, at least he was doing nothing.

The global Left looked at its lowest ebb in the 1990s. In fact it a globally unified Left had died in the 1970s, the victim of failure on every front. The USSR had failed to liberalise and develop after Khruschev, and was a stagnant and seemingly permanent monolith. By the later 70s, Mao’s cultural revolution had come to be seen as less a triumph of proletarian culture than a process of chaos and destruction. The Western experiments in counterculture had largely collapsed, into heroin and hippie entrepreneurship. Finally, the social democratic parties in the West had retreated from such plans as they had to extend the transformation of the market economy.

The most significant of these was the Meidner Plan, originating from Sweden. Under this scheme the government and trade unions would gradually buy up controlling shares in the stock market, making in the end a net transfer of the major parts of the economy to the public sector?—?which would continue to be run as market entities for the most part. Small business and most retail would continue to be private, but the core of the economy would be set by social institutions. The plan, in various versions was part of the thinking of various governments, including Whitlam’s and Harold Wilson’s in the UK. Political defeat and the global ‘stagflation’ recession put paid to it, and the late 70s vacuum of cultural and political defeat served as a prelude to the Thatcher-Reagan era.

Up to the 1970s, whatever their manifest differences, a government as mainstream as the UK Wilson government could feel that it was part of a global left in dialogue with Cuba, Yugoslav market socialism, new left activist groups, western communist parties, democratic socialist parties, Nimbin communes, radical trade unions and so on and on. Variations around social issues?—?free love and drugs versus communist puritanism?—?were incidental to the core of a Left vision which was that the economy, the process by which society materially reproduces itself, should be controlled by other than private property.

By the mid 1980s, that phenomenon was sundered utterly. There was no Left. Social democratic and Labour parties had abandoned any notion of a counterpoint to the market, and had accepted instead what was known as ‘social market’ politics?—?let the market run things, regulate it to a degree, and supplement what it cannot do. The USSR was no model for anyone except dinosaurs, China was on the capitalist road, the failure of other third world models?—?from moral catastrophes such as Pol Pot’s Cambodia, to mere failures such as Nyerere’s Tanzanian ‘African’ socialism?—?had created a drought of alternatives, radical trade unions were transforming themselves into tech-progressive organisations (‘microchips with everything’ as the Communist Party Oz left review editor David Burchell titled Laurie Carmichael’s article on how unions should ram-rod the information revolution).

In the West, the left intelligensia were detaching themselves from Marxism as well. The works of Foucault and Baudrillard were making their way into the western academy, arguing that Marx’s materialist arguments were merely part of a 19th century framework of ideas, that there was no simply expressed ‘truth’. Ian Steedman’s key work Marx After Sraffa, a study of the Italian economist Piero Sraffa demonstrated that Marxist crisis theory?—?that capitalism was doomed by its internal processes?—?could not be sustained. By the account of Australian pomo theorybot McKenzie Wark (I’m sorry, but that’s his name) this was the exit point for many young theoretical things.*

Thus in the 80s and 90s, things took off in many different directions. The ‘Labor Left’ was no longer a left?—?it was a centre-right party supporting capitalism. The remnant ‘Marxist revolutionary left’ lost many of its sprightliest people, and became a set of ossified Troskyist cults, a cryogenic movement freezing itself until the revolution happened. The emergent ‘green left’ took up the remnants of the counterculture and the radical ‘new left’ critique of a system based on growth and consumerism, and the ‘cultural left’ based in a rising ‘new’ class of culture/knowledge producers, became focused on socio-cultural identity and rights.

Through the 80s and the 90s, the neconservative right?—?neoliberal in economics, socially conservative?—?was in ascendancy (in Australia, Labor fought its tide to a compromise position), while the cultural left dominated the world of left ideas and possibilities. On the collapse of the USSR, the term ‘capitalism’ disappeared in the west altogether for most of the decade. The 1994 ascension of Tony Blair to head the British Labour Party, Paul Keating’s combination of privatisation and radical nationalism, issues of gay rights and identity, etc etc – the economic question simply disappeared.

It returned to the west in the late 90s, with the global ‘anti-capitalist’ movement, largely kicked off by the European solidarity wing of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which had started the resistance to NAFTA by taking over several towns in Chiapas in 1994.

Nevertheless, a unified Left has never returned. The mainstream Labour and social democratic parties manage and mitigate capitalism. The green and social movement left campaign for a range of global social justice issues, but not for a positive substantial alternative. The remnant Marxist parties have no connection with the dwindling industrial working class they purport to represent. The cultural left, having achieved practically all of their aims, can be stirred only to an occasional defensive measure, in issues like the Bill Henson photos case. A very small ‘theoretical left’ attempts to think beyond both eternal capitalism and the rigid categories of Marxism.

The anti-capitalist movement waxed and waned. Whether its rise and fall was due to its absence of a unifying positive message, or the impact of 9/11 and a set of changed global relations can be debated endlessly.

By the mid-2000s, the neoconservative movement that had captivated the last thirty years, had thoroughly exhausted itself. The victories of Rudd, Barack Obama, even the replacement of Blair by Brown, suggested a shift. Paradoxically, the victory of the European right?—?Reinhardt in Sweden, Sarkozy, Merkel?—?also strengthened this, since they changed almost nothing in their countries’ social market/social democratic base, their political victories thus consolidating that tradition, and putting a genuinely neoliberal European right even further out of reach (which, given that the growing alternative is a reactionary, chauvinist populist Right is not necessarily a good thing).

The ‘Left’ that has emerged as victorious is that ‘social market’ movement, its ambitions defined and delimited by the political culture of capitalism?—?market dominance of both the economy and the culture, of how people are shaped and their relationships structured, and an open-ended process of economic growth measured through the purely quantitive assessment of GDP.

That ‘social market’ politics is often mislabelled ‘social democracy’, most recently in Robert Manne’s long piece in the Oz’s ‘left’ series on Saturday. But social democracy was a movement still concerned with changing the very nature of society, by changing the basis on which it worked?—?from one dominated by property and profit, to one dominated by abilities and needs, and a qualitative assessment of better and worse – that a shortage of dialysis machines needs to be addressed by turning over some of the capacity for producing stretch limos, and the slightly crazed mantra (‘we can do it all!’) is no answer.

Today, there are all sorts of meetings or proposals for reviving ‘the Left’?—?all of which sound like a giant corporation trying to find a new brand to get behind, now that the spats industry has gone into decline. They are of little use, because they work on the assumption that society has not changed in fundamental ways that make the old idea of a Left obsolete.

What was the Left? It was the organised labour movement plus a number of leaders, intellectuals and activists, drawn both from its ranks, the liberal middle class, sections of the religious community etc. At its core was not only a class, but the assumption of a substantial rank-and-file?—?a sort of head-and-body form of organisation which mirrored the industrial world of the factory from which it sprang. Leadership, marching in lock-step, a focus on taking economic power were seen as ‘natural’ and the ‘way of left politics’, because they mimicked the form of life.

That left split with the birth of the ‘New Left’ in the 60s, which explicitly rejected that form and those priorities?—?and drew instead on its own life experience, largely that of student and bohemian life, to suggest a diffused and individualistic model of organisation, and an idea of imminently utopian change (‘sous les paves, la plage’ ? —?‘beneath the paving stones, the beach’ – meaning, in Paris 68, that in pulling them up and chucking them at people, you were also digging down to the natural, playful world).

From that movement sprang one that would prove more durable?—?the green left, emphasising for the first time that the Left should not be about more, but about less: less consumption, less waste, less destruction. In the ensuing decades, the political form the Green Left has taken is parliamentary and social democratic?—?its program is overwhelmingly one of restraint and regulation of economic processes, rather than of a change in their character.

More importantly, the rise of the green left also put two ‘lefts’ fundamentally in opposition to each other. The old Marxist/social democratic left had been interested in increasing society’s productive base, and running it in a different way. The new green left took the old ‘new left’ critique of industrial civilisation as alienated etc and twinned it with the growing evidence of biosphere destruction by business-as-usual. However the more parliamentary the movement has become, the more it has departed from suggesting an alternative basis to life, one radically buying out of the dominance of industrial civilisation, to one regulating it.

The ‘promethean’ left and the green left clashed as early as the 1970s, in Australia with the tussle over the Green Bans movement in Sydney. The leadership of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation?—?Mundey, Owens and Pringle – had sparked a mass social movement which not only saved much of heritage Sydney, but extended the idea of what unions should do (as Pat Fiske’s great doco ‘Rocking the Foundations’ shows, one of the final strikes was against a Sydney Uni college, to force it to change its policy of expelling homosexuals.) The NSW BLF’s point was that workers making a qualitative assessment of what they did and didnt build was a massive political shift, and movement forward.

The NSW BLF campaign was knocked on the head by Norm Gallagher and the federal leadership, Maoist-oriented, who were partly concerned (reasonably enough it might be said) that the increasingly wild worker-student-anarchist campaign would expose the union to an attack it could not win – but also that the business of Marxists was not to be preserving the old, but creating the new, and eventually taking control of it.

Today, a lot of those Maoists and Prometheans?—?Chris Pearson, Keith Windschuttle, Piers Akerman?—?have turned up on the right rather than the left, from whence they reserve their greatest fury for the Greens. But it is effectively a restaging of an earlier intra-left dispute. (You can also see this in the substantial anti-Green campaigns by the UK Spiked group, the successors to the small-but-influential Revolutionary Communist Party).

Thus we have the strange spectacle today of a Labor ‘left’ which is really a centre-right regulatory outfit, a ‘green left’ which is really a social democratic-left regulatory outfit, and a ‘cultural left’ which has no real interest in the economic base at all. The genuine Marxist left is a small, ossified remnant, whose capacity for discipline and focused work can still generate impressive change (despite the high profile cultural leftists, 90% of the grunt for the anti-mandatory detention movement was Trots, in the end) is useful, but whose broader message sounds like something from the 3rd century church fathers.

There is, in that respect, no ‘Left’.

So why is this man smiling?

The answer is firstly that the contradictions of the global system (yes, yes, The Holy Grail) are now so obvious, apparent, and in motion that not merely the prospect but the necessity of real cultural-political change in the future is now evident – though it is harder to see from Australia than just about everywhere else.

The second is that those who look for old-style parties and lock-step organisations for signs of political life are looking in all the wrong places. Without rethinking it, they have taken up the old metaphor of the road, and the journey as the image of left political struggle, seen that we’re not very far along it, and concluded that things are dire. But society has changed so that that metaphor no longer applies, and causes you to miss what is immanent (though not imminent) in global society.

Take the contradictions first. The global financial economy is based on a model that has barely lasted a decade without shuddering in a near-collapse. It involves the western economies turning themselves over to consumption, service sales and rents (on IP mainly) as their core activities, supplied by China, India etc, who are turning themselves into giant factories to supply them.

This arrangement has allowed the global economy to cook the books on the main problem that capitalist development always faces – that of overproduction (keep wages low, and you deprive yourself of consumers. Raise wages and you lower profits). China’s enormous supply of labour has made it possible to operate as one giant factory, with the consumers elsewhere (ie in the West). How do you keep this going? You lend the West the money to consume beyond any possible return of its own withered productive base.

Whatever patches have been put on patches since September last year, one thing is obvious – the West is broke. It has been broke for five years, if not longer. Australia is an exception, due to resources, Sweden due to retaining a high-end industrial base. But the big guys?—?the US, the UK, continental Europe?—?are in deep trouble.

But so too are the developing nations, for a declining ability to sell to the West means the necessity of developing their own consumers?—?at which case the roaring growth rates begin to slow. This is primarily a political problem for at that point, China gets ‘stuck’. Its current social contract between city and country is that city people will get very rich, and offer country people the chance to make better money than back-breaking subsistence farming, with the prospect of intergenerational betterment. Once that slows, the

Ditto in India, which hasn’t really begun to modernise. The short expression of all this is that global capitalist development is not a replay of western capitalist development?—?for the simple reason that western capitalist development depended on imperialism and third world underdevelopment to keep firing. The idea that these billion+ societies are going to turn into western countries, with 1% directly involved in agriculture, is fantastical. The levels of industrial overproduction would be so monumental that we would have to find people on Jupiter to sell shit to.

Long before most people realise that things simply cannot happen that way, the gears will have crunched. What will animate the world in this century will be conflict between country and city (and country-within-the-city, ie the global slums) in a way that makes the Chinese Revolution of 1949 disclose its true character as mere curtain-raiser. Once it becomes clear to the global country that the flow of wealth has diminished to sub-trickle.

Of course this conflict intersects with another contradiction?—?that of biosphere impact. Quite aside from climate change, it is obvious that levels of consumption, and the management of production, is so chaotic that radical change?—?involving a shift in the idea of property?—?will become necessary. Two matters in particular cannot not have an effect?—?the collapse of global fish stocks, and a resultant collapse in the food chain, and global demands on ground water due to commercial agriculture, and resultant regional eco-catastrophes. Both of these conditions threaten within a generation, both are beyond our current ability, and possibly any conceivable ability, to create a techno-fix. They will become motive forces in history, because they will intersect with the above raw deal between the city and the country. It is not western Greens who will be driving this, but hundreds of millions of peasants, whose only two choices are struggle or death.

The third contradiction is in the West, and it is the deforming effects that the political-economic system has on our culture. Uniquely in history, the contemporary west has made the cultural system subject to the economy, made it its market, raw material and dumping ground. For a century or more this process was held in check by conservative institutions, and, when these collapsed, attacked by the counterculture, which provided an alternative. When that collapsed, the commodity and the commodified image moved to the centre of social life. Since the commodity is essentially nihilistic – a commodity is simply something whose value is expressed in terms of every other value – its effect, initially liberating from inherited authority (the church, etc) is ultimately nihilistic too.

Socially, the effects of this are to create increasingly atomised societies, in which it is increasingly impossible to imagine solidarity or close connection beyond the immediate family – and then to offer as a substitute either a cynical and masochistic celebration of atomisation (ie most reality TV shows) or literal-minded religiosity, essentially channelled from the middle ages, ie from the last pre-capitalist period.

Psychologically, the effects are to create increasingly ungrounded people. If the society you grow up in is atomised, then an identity never ‘sets’. The liberation that offers is the freedom to determine your own identity. What it removes is the capacity for any identity to be meaningful.

The effect is that a vague depressive sense of nothingness becomes the psychological common cold of hypermodernity. It is then addressed as a disease, and treated with medications (anti-depressants) which stimulate the brain chemicals (such as serotonin) which used to be replenished by meaningful social life. Push this sort of culture for another generation, build a world where ever larger numbers of people live in this world of shadows, and eventually that deep-seated and often unvocalised sense of deep futility will become a historical force in its own right.

Really, I think most people, reflecting on the world as it is, have some intimation of the triple crisis as I’ve sketched it out above. What does not appeal is the idea that socialism is any sort of answer – associated as it is with state-heavy systems, either torpid or lethal or both. Nor does any sort of party or organised political activity suggest itself as even comprehensible to people who live within an atomised world.

What does make radical change possible, sudden and likely however is that processes of self-management are immanent, there beneath the surface, within hypermodernity, in a way they haven’t been previously, to a sufficient degree. That’s a result of better education, intellectual labour – but also about the fact that we all spend so much time thinking about how systems work.

Imagine for example, that the next global capitalist crisis – 2010, 2017?, December? – caused the holding corporation that owned our power utilities to collapse, in a way that was beyond the government to refloat with a bailout (because the government itself was now all bailed out out). Would we simply persist in darkness? Or would, after some disruption and confusion, the engineers and managers who had been running the thing anyway, simply continue to run it. Would they and others be able to use the networks already existing to keep power supply intersected with other areas of the economy, using a mixture of money and free exchange, but without the notion that this was simply being done to return dividends to shareholders? Would they appoint an interim board of control, preserve managerial and scientific hierarchies etc.

Would it then become clear, from practice, not from theory, that a power station is a social institution, not a private one, and that a whole set of arrangements that are neither private ownership nor state control can be made in running our lives?

Does that not only seem a morally better alternative, but the more likely outcome of the century than the continuation of existing arrangements? And a reason why it was better, in that Hinze cartoon, to do a bit more hunching over a laptop, and a little less reactive protesting?

The question of course is whether all that I’ve suggested can be argued as a moral rather than simply necessary development?—?which will have to wait for part three of this two part series.

*Piero Sraffa could lay claim to be the zelig of the 20TH century. Settling at Cambridge University in the 1920s, he is cited in the prefaces to both Keynes’s General Theory and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a key contributor and essential inerlocutor. He edited the 14-volume collected works of Ricardo, though, as JK Galbraith remarked, this sometimes involved no more than a few minutes work a day. His sole book, a 1960 work, a 62-page work Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities took him 32 years to write (or get around to writing), and provides a logical demolition of both Marxian labour value economics and neclassical economics. Those interested in his proof that neoclaissical economics is logically incoherent voodoo should see Steve Keen’s Economics, the Naked Emperor.

Posing the question of “what’s left” begs the question of who the left are. Soutphommasane’s piece today appears to equate the left with Kevin Rudd, which is, to me, quite bizarre. There’s a broader question in his writing which goes quite unanswered – that of agency and constituency.

In an op/ed for The Age, he wrote:

Preferring the comfortable terrain of moral righteousness, the Australian left surrendered national values to reactionaries and racists in the culture wars.

I don’t know quite what “moral righteousness” means in this context, though I could hazard a guess. But let’s leave that aside. I’m more concerned, for the moment, about who this “Australian left” actually comprises.

We take our attachment to egalitarianism, mateship and the fair go seriously. Most of us have a warm affection for our country and its qualities.

No doubt we do, but what are those “qualities”? And who’s that “we”? And why should such an identification be central to political identity, or indeed constitutive of such an identity?

Egalitarianism has a sociological and cultural history, but it’s also one marked by exclusions – as is “mateship”. If Soutphommasane’s argument is that the Australian Labor Party needed to counter John Howard’s embrace of so-called national values for electoral reasons, no doubt he has a point. Governing parties are by necessity oriented to the state, and since we have nation states, must necessarily articulate some sort of discourse of the nation. But the ALP and electoral politics are not co-extensive with the left. I haven’t read his book, but in the newspaper commentary he’s authored, it doesn’t seem to me that the very good reasons why left wing movements have been suspicious of nationalist particularisms and in favour of cosmopolitanism and internationalism have been addressed.

Similarly, the argument about Kevin Rudd and social democracy makes two elisions. The first is the unjustified claim that Rudd himself is “the left”, and that – in the manner of New Labour – he needs some sort of array of philosopher kings (thinktankers and op/edders and other ideologists) to articulate and/or interpret an ideological narrative – of the left – for him. Well, maybe. Perhaps Rudd does feel that every PM should have some sort of ideological narrative. I’m not so sure he’d be all that happy to see himself as ‘the left’. In any case, whatever Paul Kelly might think, whether or not he has an ideological narrative (or indeed a coherent one) is probably electorally irrelevant.

Soutphommasane is probably right that a sort of generalised statism is the substance of what Rudd actually believes in. But I’m not at all sure that he needs to foster a debate on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach or whatever. Such a debate may well be useful, and interesting, but most of this stuff is just court theorising, as it were, and won’t make all that much difference to the Rudd government’s actual practice – composed of an amalgam of managerialism, “tough love” social policy combined with vague dicta about “social inclusion”, regulatory urges existing in an uneasy partnership with deregulatory ones, dreams of nation building, and so on. It’s too much to expect that all this will form a coherent ideational whole, though it can be woven together to form a political narrative that is electorally useful; and useful as an ideological justification.

As I’ve argued tons of times before, ideology is often just what politicians do – that is a social practice of governing – not the fantasy of a neat little Enlightenment style encyclopedia, or a mythical universal. It can be more or less coherent, dependent on the degree to which it represents a genuinely transformational project. And there’s little of that about Australian Labor.

That’s the second elision – between the political-theoretic fantasy of a master narrative and the pragmatics of politics.

Another elision, which is what produces the blind spots in Soutphommasane’s thought, is his own speaking position. I think, and this is not intended to be a personal criticism, it’s effectively that of the court philosopher. Demos style. That’s fine as far as it goes, though it would be helfpul, I think, if he were to clarify in what sense, and to what degree, he actually sees himself as speaking on behalf of ‘social democracy’ or ‘the left’. Where I find his thinking problematic is that it’s relatively disconnected from any actually existing social movement, or indeed social base. That’s a huge part of what’s wrong with most Anglo-American style political philosophy. To the degree that it has an effect – a political effect, that is, rather than the hermeneutic exegesis of books written by dead white men – it’s addressed to power, and it speaks the murmurings of dusty books and canonical texts.

If there’s a left left, we might do better to criticise the Rudd government’s actual practice in the realm of social justice, rather than engage in an abstract debate about how Kevin Rudd should understand social justice. Ruthless criticism of all that exists, and all that.

Incidentally, if anyone is serious about eliciting exactly what the Rudd ideology is, I’d suggest looking at the now seemingly unfashionable concept of labourism, and reflecting on the phrase “socialism without doctrines”.