I hadn’t had a holiday for a year, so after having finished a big research project at the end of June, I eagerly seized a friend’s invitation to go to Sydney for a few days. On our itinerary was seeing Hairspray, a musical my friend is extremely fond of in all its incarnations, but one I hadn’t previously heard much of.

So, on a cold and windswept Saturday night, we ventured out to Star City. And had our hearts well and truly warmed!

My purpose isn’t to write a review of the show. Suffice it to say that it’s wonderful, and you should see it if you have the chance.

What interests me in this post is the cultural politics of Hairspray.

One of its marketing themes, and points of identification, is with 60s nostalgia. That nostalgia (as with all such imaginary clusters of memories) is by necessity a collective re-imagining of what the 60s ‘meant’, whether or not we were around to form our own judgements.

Hairspray, though, is set – deliberately – at a point of change. The scene in Baltimore in June 1962 is one of transformation: of the evolution, or better the revolution, through which the 50s melt into the 60s, with the civil rights struggle as the crucible.

Tracey Turnblad’s teenage desire to dance, and to audition for the Corny Collins show, sets in motion a series of events which sees a slice of the pop cultural scene integrated, accompanied by the full panoply of corrupt politicians, corporate machinations, arrests, protests and conflict.

It’s clever stuff, and immensely enjoyable. It’s also spot on in honing in on how change is driven by an upheaval in everyday life, and social and cultural relations – the quotidian as well as the world-historical. As Emma Goldman famously said, “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”.

Part of the nostalgia, no doubt, is for an era when social change seemed both straightforward and possible.

The stakes on the Hairspray stage are simple: justice figured as equality. And revolution as pushing open a door that’s already ajar.

What’s intriguing about the transposition of the Hairspray story to the Australian context is the way the show appears; the way the colour lines are written on the Antipodean actors’ bodies.

In American productions, one presumes, Little Inez, Motormouth Maybelle, Seaweed J. Stubbs and the aspiring dancers are black – African-American. Just as in Baltimore 1962, it’s a binary racial politics, resolving itself into a fantasy of unity at the end. No doubt, in its American setting, all sorts of images of reconciliation, the intent to recover purpose and clarity in dealing with racial politics, anticipations of Obama’s rhetoric, and much much more could be read into the phantasmatic politics of the Hairspray world.

In Australia, the black characters are played by actors variously of Latin American, Pacific Islander, Indian and African heritage. While the white power structure still presents itself as a unity, the other side of the racial dichotomy is in fact a multiplicity. And it’s a multiplicity (and this, for me, was one source of joy) that looks like what we see on the streets of our CBDs, a visual (and all singing and dancing!) representation of how our country actually increasingly *is*, one that’s all too rare.

But, of course, that raises the thornier issue of how to meld all into one, or whether that is at all desirable.

If it’s better to see globalisation and the post-colonial world as producers of a dichotomy between homogenisation and hybridity than as a one way ‘Westernisation’ (and even if you don’t like seeing it that way, it’s a fact), then you have to also confront the forces which mesh everything together. In Theodor Adorno‘s terms, the processes of societalisation, the means by which the plural and the contingent start to become one.

Like many other things, that can either be a positive or a negative. Hairspray represents its final moment of celebration as mediated by love (Amor Vincit Omnia!) on one hand, and commerce on the other. Harriman F. Spritzer, Corny Collins’ sponsor, comes to realise that integration is good for business.

So what we have is a very liberal narrative of racial politics – with its antecedents stretching back at least as far as Adam Smith and other Enlightenment figures’ celebration of the civilising and pacifying power of truck, trade, and interchange. It’s pretty much how Paul Keating used to justify multiculturalism, and in the clipped coin of today’s debate, how the big business side of the ‘immigration debate’ does its thing.

On the other hand, we might be seeing something like Gudrun Axeli-Knapp’s perception of societalisation – “the increasingly irrational dominance of the general over the particular”. That is to say, a homogenisation of love and the dollar mediating equality, and incorporating difference ever more cleverly and insidiously into one cultural and social field. The culture of capitalism demands that everything be the same, even if the colour palette becomes more diverse.

There is no doubt that in addition to the projection of political power, globalisation entails a mixing of populations, driven both by the redistribution of labour around the world and by a partial equalisation of hierarchy, where traditional and nationally bound attributes of status give way to the liquid equality of wealth.

Social relations are just as important, we must remember. In negotiating the everyday, in forming and sustaining intimate unions, in sharing joy and hope, we become the subjects of our own stories, not just the ones commerce and cultural appropriation write us into.

But, and this is one of the things I liked about thinking about the cultural politics of Hairspray, the actuality of the dancing subjects on the stage suggests something real that subverts the narrative, and maybe, just maybe, acts as a harbinger of a *different* form of *equality*.

In a very real way, that form of equality in difference may have already appeared on the historical horizon.

One thing, though, is for certain: it’s not as simple as the re-imagined 60s might suggest. On the other hand, we might be blind to think that change hasn’t already happened. It’s awaiting its moment for someone to dance the new tune into existence. And that change may surface in our imaginations through dancing rather than through marching in the streets.

However, that does leave open the question of whether we’re witnessing an ideological conjunction between Labor and Liberal.

To some degree, ideology is in the eye of the beholder.

For instance, some Greens supporters will agree with some libertarians that there’s little difference between the two major parties, though for ostensibly different reasons. For the Greens, they’re stuck in the same paradigm and for the libertarians, they’re both irredeemably statist.

Similarly, some Labor lefties will agree with small l liberals that immigration is a good thing, and the rhetoric about a ‘Sustainable Australia’ damaging. There are nuances here, but the same argument is being made by those who like the idea of cosmopolitanism for cultural and political reasons, and those who have an attachment to freedom of movement and think economic growth is best served by population growth.

Most of these folks are looking at the parties from a similar social and class location – professionally educated, often eschewing religious belief, and working in relatively comfortably paid jobs in the public or private sector, depending on political and cultural orientation.

If you’re working with the homeless, or the unemployed, or you are yourself homeless or unemployed, you’re likely to have quite a different take on what the social outcomes of a Labor or a Coalition government would be.

I remember reflecting, when I was a university student in 1993, that the election of a Hewson government would be in the self interest of people like me – the white male middle class. For me, with my politics, that was a reason to resist the pull.

But it’s easier to make political decisions based on self interest when your circumstances are reasonably comfortable or your prospects promising.

So, while we all like to think that we think for ourselves, a confluence of factors to do with our geographical location, our occupation, our gender, our education, and a host of other stuff is likely to give us a powerful predisposition to vote one way or another, or conceive of the purpose of politics one way or another.

That implies we should be wary of the condescending sneers at swinging voters in marginal seats whose vote is purportedly driven only by what the government can do for them personally.

What we can conclude is that the actual conduct of this election, and the campaigning style which has shaped its conduct, appeals to the lowest common denominator in terms of both recognising the real choices at stake and framing the issues.

That’s a great pity.

Where are the leaders in all this?

I have no doubt that Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Bob Brown are all actuated by genuine convictions, among other motivations.

And while a leitmotif of early commentary about Gillard’s leadership was that it was difficult to discern the nature of those convictions, that’s not the case.

The Prime Minister’s speech on July 15 to the National Press Club, ‘overshadowed’ by Laurie Oakes’ leak, actually repays careful reading. The transcript can be found here.

Gillard’s political beliefs are a form of social liberalism – perhaps more in the Deakinite Liberal tradition than might be thought – the emphasis on nation building, on the horizontal value of care and concern for others, and her strong belief in equality of opportunity are all hallmarks of this style of thought.

‘Market design’ and agnosticism as between the state and the private sector as vehicles for service delivery are themes which resonate strongly with New Labour practice in Britain. There’s a tendency in Gillard’s practice towards a species of social neo-liberalism.

Of course, ideological consistency is not something that exists outside the philosophy books, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the pull of perhaps misguided electoral pragmatism overpowers what are probably Gillard’s instincts on social policy such as same sex marriage.

But it would be quite wrong to say of Julia Gillard that she stands for nothing.

What’s more telling is that what she stands for is not really the same thing as traditional Labor social democracy – the emphasis is more on equalising opportunity than remedying inequality.

Tony Abbott, on the other hand, is less easy to place.

He seems to waver between statist instincts – more akin to those of the conservative advocates of the welfare state in continental Europe’s Christian Democracies than what we normally see in Australia – and a skepticism about the efficacy of state action which is more conservative than liberal.

There’s an internal tension in his thought between activism and the time-honoured conservative style of governance where keeping the ship of state afloat is much more important than what direction it’s pointed in.

There is also no doubt whatsoever that his instincts are socially conservative, and that’s demonstrable in this campaign through the sotto voce appeal to the ‘traditional family’.

But it’s more than possible for Abbott to be a conviction politician and not have a strong sense of how he would like to transform Australia – John Howard was at his least conservative when he succumbed to the vision of the largely former leftists among the culture warriors commentariat.

So, aside from real social and economic differences in outcome which can be anticipated from the result of this campaign, whichever way the choice goes, the ideological heritage and instincts of the two leaders will make a significant difference to the way the nation is governed over the next three years.

The big problem with this campaign is not an absence of differentiation, but the wrong sort of differentiation. In other words, the softly softly approach of electoral strategy has obscured what’s at stake, and will leave neither major party with a strong mandate to do what, in other circumstances, they might be inclined to do.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.

Joyce is said to have expertise in this area, not because he’s an accountant this time, but because he’s got a thing about Chinese investment, one supposes.

Whether or not Joyce remains in Finance, it appears unlikely that the Liberals are going to be able to demonstrate any great facility in identifying savings to offset promises. Despite the attempts to shoehorn the schools stimulus spending into the ‘waste!!!’ box, depriving schools of facilities and throwing construction workers out of work is surely the ingredient for a big scare campaign. And the National Broadband Network is, well, popular.

I can’t find it online, but Christopher Pearson let the cat out of the bag on the weekend in The Australian about the opposition’s fiscal figuring. One of the reasons for the decision to impose a tax on business to fund parental leave was the fact that the Henry Tax Review has not yet been released. He implied that the mooted resources rent tax would, in the eyes of the Coalition, provide the rivers of revenue that would enable Abbott to promise big picture stuff.

Support for a resources rent tax to do nation building would seem to be a natural fit for a social democratic view of things. It sits somewhat uneasily with the claim, articulated by Abbott in the Great Health Debate, that his party stands for “small government, lower taxes and greater freedom”. It would also further negate the opposition’s ability to run a tax scare campaign. But it would enable Abbott to satisfy both his statist instincts and his ego, and to implement just about the only electoral strategy he can seem to conceive – tossing money around with abandon, Howard style.

What, then, of the opposition’s economic cred?

Speaking of which, has anyone heard anything from them on the economy lately? And where’s Joe Hockey been? Keeping his head down so he can emerge as leader after the trainwreck?

Update: Barnaby’s gone from Finance.

I was in Canberra last week and had the opportunity to ask Opposition Leader Tony Abbott whether a government under his direction would continue with the Rudd government’s goal of halving homelessness by 2020. His answer was no.

In justifying his stance, Abbott quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: ”The poor will always be with us,” he said, and referred to the fact there is little a government can do for people who choose to be homeless.

Perusco, the Chief Executive of Melbourne’s Sacred Heart Mission, goes on to refute Abbott’s claim that homelessness is a choice, and to underline how vital action in this area is.

It’s instructive to compare Abbott’s remarks, which he presumably didn’t think would end up in The Age, with this piece of puffery from Senator George Brandis in The Australian:

To a greater extent than most Liberal leaders have been, Abbott is a communitarian. He does not believe in an atomistic society of isolated individuals in incessant, ruthless competition. The remark attributed to Margaret Thatcher — “There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals” — would be utterly alien to him. He believes in a settled, rooted society of families and citizens living in stable communities bound together by the gossamer threads of voluntary association.

Presumably there are limits to who constitutes Abbott’s imagined communities.

Indeed, though it’s unclear how much Brandis knows about the history and political philosophy of communitarianism, one point of criticism has always been that there’s a heavy dose of authoritarianism and conformism inherent in its construction of community – it’s premised as much on social exclusion as on inclusion. That’s very apparent in many aspects of Third Way politics – from Blair’s Britain to Latham’s vision for Australia. So, too, many of the debates in Anglophone political theory in the 1990s revolved around perceived frictions between its premise of consensual values and norms on one hand and both individual liberty and multiculturalism on the other hand.

Brandis, who celebrates Rhodes Scholar Abbott as both “intensely intellectual” and “the antithesis of the cloistered academic” may, of course, have a different meaning of ‘communitarian’ in mind when thinking of his leader. But as an erstwhile apostle of Malcolm Turnbull as a moderniser, and of the value of the liberal tradition in Liberal-ism, he might also care to consider that there might be as Brutopian a streak in communitarian conservatism as anything to be found in Kevin Rudd’s portrait of neo-liberalism.

I also linked to the thoughts of Christopher Joye of Business Spectator. This paragraph is particularly interesting:

Perhaps following this fracas the big fella will throw caution to the wind and found his own political party…I am thinking of the Australian Republican Party with an unconditional commitment to combating climate change and reinvigorating the dormant republican movement. Now that would be sure to split the Liberal Party vote.

While we shouldn’t get carried away and underestimate the barriers any new party faces in the Australian political system (or the powerful forces of inertia and ambition which work against individual MPs and Senators splitting from the Libs), this prospect is being taken seriously, I’m informed by a number of sources this morning.

Given the difficulties that the Liberals have had in unifying their disparate bases (and as I’ve commented previously, the problems Labor might potentially have as well with its soft liberal constituency), such a development, if seriously pursued, would have the potential to be something of a game changer. And Malcolm Turnbull could certainly fund a social and economically liberal party out of his own resources, at least for one election campaign.

I’m told there may be more coming out on this later in the week. And today’s Crikey email might be worth a look.

Update: Bernard Keane in today’s Crikey:

What will Malcolm Turnbull do if he loses tomorrow, as seems likely?

The conventional wisdom is he’d pull the pin, resigning from Parliament and exiting politics. The ensuing by-election would be extremely difficult for a divided and disrupted Liberal Party to win. Wentworth voters would see the Liberals as the climate denialists who forced their bloke out.

You can bet Labor would definitely stand a candidate this time.

But not so fast.

Yesterday Christopher Joye offered an intriguing take on the Turnbull leadership and his problems. This morning, Joye floated a fascinating thought bubble on what Turnbull might do: establish his own political party, freed from the encumbrance and historic problems of the Liberal Party.

The idea has apparently occurred to others. David Speers tweeted this morning that the idea of Turnbull establishing a new party was being discussed amongst Liberal MPs. It is not coming from Turnbull or his camp. You can bet Turnbull is focused entirely on the challenge of defeating Nick Minchin and whatever candidate the conservatives throw at him.

New parties have not had a great track record in Australia of late. Putting aside the death of the Democrats, One Nation, Meg Lees’s Australian Progressive Alliance and Family First are (with apologies to our friends at the Australian S-x Party) the most significant new parties in the last decade. One National flamed out, Meg Lees’s cranky reaction to being turfed from the Democrat leadership never got off the ground, and Steve Fielding, who regularly shames the Senate with his asinine and offensive comments, is only there because of Stephen Conroy’s lunatic preference deals.

But Turnbull has several things going for him that others don’t have. He has a huge profile, he has the financial resources to start things rolling, and a capacity to tap into the business sector for financial support.

A Turnbull party – possibly the Australian Republican Party – would be committed to action on climate change, an Australian republic, a low-tax, small-government economic philosophy and a progressive social policy. “Warm and dry”, to use Nick Greiner’s classic self-description.

The target would clearly be the moderate wing of the Liberal Party. The first task would be to retain Wentworth next year. His main opponent there would be Labor, not his Liberal successor, but he would pick up preferences from both and if he outpolled the Liberal candidate would have a strong chance of getting over the line on preferences, keeping the seat he spent so much treasure on snatching from Peter King six years ago.

Labor might even run dead to keep him in Parliament, making life difficult for the Liberals.

The next challenge would be to build a membership base. The goal would be to lure moderate Liberal members, hostile to the Minchin-led party’s climate change denialism and Tony Abbott’s monarchism – wealthy and leafy suburban seats.

The biggest problem would be perceptions that the party was entirely a vehicle for Turnbull’s ego and fury at his former party. He would need to recruit substantial figures to provide a counterweight to the image of it being all about Malcolm. The business community would be first port of call. With Joe Hockey as Nick Minchin’s puppet leading the Liberal Party, business might not be as enthusiastic about donating to the Liberals as they are under Turnbull.

Turnbull is not a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, although he married into the Hughes clan. He flirted with joining Labor. In truth, he does not entirely belong in either party. And while we know Turnbull is politically-motivated by his own ego, he is also genuinely committed to public life, and passionately wants to change and improve his country. His record on the republic demonstrates that. Setting up a new party, without the baggage and conservative deadweight of the Liberals, could yet allow him to make a major contribution.

Becoming Prime Minister is the highest achievement in Australian politics. But successfully establishing a new party? Who has really done that since Robert Menzies? That’s a challenge big enough to intrigue Turnbull.

Update 3:50pm: In his just completed doorstop presser where he looked anything but beaten, Turnbull has stated that presumed challenger Joe Hockey will not vote for a spill and that he (Turnbull) will stand if there is one. More to come no doubt.

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.

Writing in Crikey yesterday, Bernard Keane observed:

I’ve been watching or listening to Parliament since the early Hawke years and I can never recall Question Time not being made a mockery of.

Speaking as a recovering question time tragic, I’m not sure I agree with that. It’s true if the ritual is compared to some sort of Platonic eidos – as if its essence (dignified accountability and/or razor or rapier sharp wit) must incarnate itself in the chamber on a daily basis. In truth, a lot of the mysticism about parliamentary discourse – and accountability – is just that. If some sort of conception of parliament as a pure space, an agora if you like, for the exchange of ideas and reasoning was a large part of the mythos of nineteenth century liberalism, that doesn’t mean that we should expect that it would have a lot to do with the pragmatics of twenty-first century Australian politics, though its traces remain.

Back in a more Aristotelian world, I think we can discard the Bagehot for a bit, and make some observations about precisely when and why parliamentary tempers boil over.

Paul Keating’s famous comment to John Hewson – “Mate, because I want to do you slowly” – was made in the thick of an incredible campaign by the opposition. When not indulging in silly stunts (which would have made the makers of small Australian flags very prosperous), the Coalition deliberately tried to goad Keating to lose his temper, betting that PJK in full flight on the nightly news would be a turnoff.

I’m not old enough to remember, but I’m sure that when Edward Gough Whitlam deigned to descend from his Olympian heights (and to pop into Australia in between inspecting the Elgin marbles), he didn’t land in the midst of dignified behaviour. In fact, Whitlam’s over-ruling of the Speaker, Jim Cope, effectively forcing his resignation, fleshes out Michelle Grattan’s retrospective picture of the House as characterised by “chaos and impetuousness”.

A lot of this kerfuffle and piffle, to adapt a PJK-ism, has one simple cause – the inability of the serried and suited ranks of those who see themselves as the country’s natural rulers to accept the verdict of the electorate as anything other than a temporary aberration. In the case of “Rudd rage”, that rancour is heightened by their complete failure to disrupt or shift the image the electorate has formed of Kevin Rudd.

And one of the reasons for that failure is the increasing irrelevance of question time, and parliament itself, to the actuality as opposed to the putative essence of Westminster democracy, 2009 Antipodean style.

The latest issue of the Centre for Policy Development‘s online mag, Insight, is out, and ‘Taxation for Our Times’ focuses on the Henry Review. I make no claims to any expertise in the technical aspects of taxation policy, but I was chuffed to be asked to write something from the point of view of cultural and political sociology. I think it is important that major aspects of our governance – and our relation as citizens to each other and to the state – are scrutinised in a frame that transcends some of the immediate implications and interests at stake. You can read my piece – ‘Death and Taxes’ – here, and I’d encourage you to have a look at the other articles too!

Firstly -

Barack Obama does represent change from the era of the Bush administration. He is the limited change that’s possible within the logic of the current system.

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/spectrum.jpg"

Image source here.

Secondly – Arianna Huffington:

Judging by where the media are focusing their attention, you’d think the Blago/Burris/Reid and Kennedy/Paterson/Cuomo soap operas are the biggest issues facing the nation — and that little thing about the potential collapse of the world’s largest economy is just a sideshow.

Why have the media shown such relatively little interest in the utter lack of transparency about the bailout?

So I was happy to find this point rather elegantly made by the Canadian academic Leo Panitch:

First, let’s be clear about capitalism – and with it the character of the state under capitalism. There is a conventional assumption, a leftover of the cold war perhaps, that somehow capitalism is essentially about the market and socialism is essentially about the state. In fact, a central historical feature of the state in capitalist societies is the role it plays as guarantor of private property and, most importantly for the smooth running of the financial markets, that it will always honour its bonds – that is, its borrowing from the private banks.

Because of this guarantee – the promise to pay others back from taxation revenue in the future – government bonds, whether issued to finance war or to finance welfare, constitute the least risky form of lending. As such, it forms the foundation of financial markets’ role in sustaining the ability of capitalists generally to accumulate – to continue to invest and make profits. This centrality of the state for capitalist accumulation is most notable with respect to those dominant states, like the USA, whose bonds are the foundation on which all calculations of value in global capitalism are based; states that host and support the main centres of international financial markets, such as New York and the City of London.

Understanding the role of the state in a capitalist society helps us to see why, when a government bails them out with public money, the bankers do not see this as the start of socialism. On the contrary, they see it as the government fulfilling its duty to the financial markets – whose smooth running it both depends on and sustains, by providing the basis of confidence in the credibility of the banking system.

So it is misleading to see government involvement in the banks – whether it be the pure bailout of the original Paulson program in the US, or the subsequent non-controlling equities taken by the US, British and other governments – as per se a move away even from neoliberalism. (It is also misleading to see neoliberalism as being about the withdrawal of the state from the markets – and therefore this current involvement of the state as a defeat of neoliberalism. The state under neoliberalism has been very active in promoting the vast expansion of financial markets and facilitating their volatile growth; and, as this volatility inevitably led to repeated financial crises, in keeping the financial system going from moments of chaos to moments of chaos.)