Both are related.

Significant shifts in Australian politics have manifested themselves in this result, many of which are not strongly related to the surface political events of the campaign. For journalists to swallow the claim that all would have been well for the Labor campaign had it not been for leaks is to abdicate judicious reasoning. There was a time when skepticism would rightly have been applied to the efforts of a campaign director – such as Karl Bitar in this instance – to absolve himself of blame.

Nothing has been less illuminating than the spectre of partisan-bots like Andrew Robb and Bill Shorten rehearsing their lines, yet again, on Insiders, except perhaps the spectacle of yet another ABC News 24 “special” with a balanced panel of “formers” – ex-Labor and Liberal staffers of whom no one has heard, and who have nothing of interest to say.

The impatience, and haste, to resolve the result into a partisan frame is twinned with risible claims about the necessity of appeasing “markets” who are said to abhor “uncertainty”.

The dim drumbeat of campaign rhetoric and commentary beats its repetitious way on, for want of the anticipated end to the narrative.

As a nation, we should seize the chance to cast aside some tired dichotomies, including those which seek to oppose some parts of the country to others, as if Australia’s soul exclusively resided in one mythical region.

It’s appropriate, then, that we resist the huge amount of pressure that will fall upon the independent MPs to make a hasty decision, whether it comes from the media or from the spurious arguments of triumphalist Liberals.

Fortunately, having watched Tony Windsor, Bob Katter and Rob Oakeshott on the 7.30 Report (where the full video is now available online), I’m confident that no rush to decision is in prospect. We have the chance to sort out many of the dysfunctions of our national politics through this moment, and it’s worth taking time to do that properly.

Elsewhere: Grog’s Gamut on the difference between what we think, what we know, and what we can prove. Salutary reading on the election outcome, and its aftermath.

The Daily Mail has gone feral, the Murdoch tabloids have gone into overdrive, the spectre of a national government of unity has been raised, and dire warnings are being sounded about IMF intervention and how “the markets” will go into meltdown.

Britain could be forced to appeal to the International Monetary Fund for help if voters elect a hung parliament, former chancellor Kenneth Clarke warned today.

As the Tories try to puncture the Nick Clegg bubble ahead of the second leaders’ television debate tomorrow, Clarke said that the City would be spooked by an unclear election result.

“Bond markets won’t wait,” the shadow business secretary said of the likely City reaction to post-election backroom deals at Westminster. “Sterling will wobble. We have seen even minor flickers in the opinion polls causing problems with interest rates in the recent past.

“If the British don’t decide to put in a government with a working majority, and the markets think that we can’t tackle our debt and deficit problems, then the IMF will have to do it for us.”

Meanwhile, the latest poll has the Lib Dems even with the Tories in first place:

A poll by Ipsos/Mori gave the Tories and Lib Dems 32% each with Labour on 28%. If translated into seats on a uniform swing that would mean Labour remained the largest party with 268 seats, the Conservatives would have 233 and the Lib Dems 118.

So, in advance of the second leaders’ debate, is the election shaping up as the people vs. the markets? There can be no starker illustration than the rhetoric flying around at the moment that capitalism and democracy are uneasy bedfellows.

Interesting times.

Update: I’m going away for a few days this afternoon, so if anyone wants to add links and commentary to the thread about the second debate, please feel free.

I think what we’re seeing now, with Tony Abbott, is that fig leaf being discarded.

We’re back to old fashioned paternalism – faith, country, and trust in your betters. And in the economic sphere, Abbott, who knows nothing much of economics, is happy for the state to sit down and carve up the pie in consultation with his preferred interest groups. All this is really classic National Party stuff.

What’s perhaps astonishing on the surface, at least, is how little we’re hearing from the so-called libertarians and classical liberals about Abbott’s lack of faith in the market. Could it be that they’re mostly more interested in anti-Labor partisanship than their own ostensible creed?

James Bianco at The Big Picture has all the details, and there’s also coverage at Naked Capitalism.

What’s the big picture here?

On the short term political front, Scott Brown’s win in Massachussetts exemplifies the frustration felt by many with politics as usual. Whether it’s expressed as concern over deficits (and that’s a much more salient touch point with Indendent voters on health care than the rhetoric of the wingnuts), or just as disgust with the jobless recovery’s disjunction with business as usual on Wall Street, there’s no doubt that an election year is starting to focus minds on the politics of financial decision making.

… and that brings us to the bigger picture. The whole entrenchment of the reign of ‘the markets’ and the institutions which serve to reproduce financialised global capital (such as the US Federal Reserve) could not have taken place without the depoliticisation of discussion of decisions about its governance. In Australia, and in the UK, we saw the independence of central banks proclaimed as a touchstone of orthodoxy, while politics in the EU was and still is under the long shadow of first the Bundesbank, and lately the European Central Bank. This depoliticisation is a much more accurate signifier of what neo-liberalism actually is than any concern about the size of the state (which has often increased under right wing governments). In America, Alan Greenspan became something of a fetish for markets.

In the longer term, the fact that the personnel and the policies of the US Federal Reserve are now open to political challenge (at the same time as bankers become a political football in the UK) is undoubtedly the most central ideological and political result of the Global Financial Crisis.

Unions aren’t happy. Writing in The Australian today, the CFMEU’s John Sutton sees:

Kevin Rudd’s grand treatise on the failures of capitalism a few months into the global financial crisis ending with a whimper rather than a roar.

Sutton questions whether measures discussed in response to the GFC (over and above questions of executive pay and bonuses) amounted to very much. It’s an eminently reasonable question to pose.

I suspect that the economic situation in Australia has allowed Labor politicians to retreat from their previous rhetoric. In Britain, where things are still much more dire, Gordon Brown’s government has responded with limitations on bankers’ bonuses, in the lead up to this year’s election, which Labour is expected to lose. In the US, Barack Obama has continued with the big bail out of everything Wall Street, handing the Republicans a useful weapon for the 2010 midterms.

It’s an intriguing contrast.

It’s also intriguing to note that discussion of all the ‘toxic debt’ unaccounted for has gone completely missing, unless I’m missing something.

Update: The Tobin Tax and the GFC.

As Jason Wilson observed yesterday in New Matilda, Murdoch’s previous business plays were built on positioning himself for oligopolistic market shares in emerging media. This strategy doesn’t work in the world of online content, so Murdoch is trying to reshape that world to suit his modus operandi. Cutting public broadcasters out of the equation would be an essential component of such a strategy, but despite the fact that he’s leveraged political influence in the past for his own private interests, Murdoch finds himself isolated. Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd are hardly likely to do him any favours, and the very fragmentation of audiences and platforms he’s seeking to counter has reduced any potential for his implicit political threats to have teeth.

Public broadcasters, in other words, have a unique role to play in preserving the openess and competitiveness of new media ecologies.

There’s been lots of commentary on Scott’s speech. Margaret Simons writes at Content Makers, Gary Sauer-Thompson chimes in at Public Opinion, while Ethical Martini and Trevor Cook both put somewhat different and interesting perspectives to work in analysing Scott’s lecture.

Update: Guy Rundle.

Update: Sophie Cunningham.

Update: More from Margaret Simons in today’s Crikey.

Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda:

As I watched Scott’s speech and the ensuing questions, I began to get a sense of how clueless many media executives really are. I’m fairly certain Scott knows more about this stuff than, for example, Roger Corbett does. In fact, Scott pointed this out later in his speech, arguing that old thinking and internal barriers to reform are the biggest problems for media organisations. “We have seen the enemy, and it is us.”

If Scott is among the savviest — and he may well be — then the path ahead for big media organisations in this country will be rocky indeed.

In the land of the blind, the man with a print-out of a Clay Shirky blog is king.

She’s the first woman to win the prize and (much more controversial for some) a political scientist. The best way to understand the impact of Ostrom’s work is to look at what it displaced. In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a highly influential article in Science called “The Tragedy of the Commons”.

Hardin started with the story of how the medieval commons in England had collapsed under the pressure of overgrazing, and used this as a metaphor for modern environmental problems. The solution he argued was “enclosure”, that is, the conversion of the commons into private property. Hardin’s work was influenced by, and encouraged the further development of, the “property rights” school of economic thought, which saw the expansion of private property rights as the central engine of economic progress.

Hardin took his analysis to its logical conclusion in his Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor, which suggested that having seized enough property rights to support themselves, the rich should (metaphorically) throw the poor overboard.

Decades of careful empirical work on actual common property institutions, in which Ostrom has played the leading role has shown that Hardin’s description of the commons was totally inaccurate, and that the policy prescriptions he derived were likely to be counterproductive. That said, Ostrom is not romantic about common property institutions, and observes that they need not be egalitarian and may be rendered ineffective by changing circumstances.

The message from Williamson and Ostrom that a mixed economy can involve not just private and public ownership but a range of other possible institutional structures, interacting through markets, contracts, regulations and direct collective management. Ostrom shows how the historical example common property in resource management may be applied modern problems involving externalities, local public goods and pollution.

There’s a lot more coverage around the traps; notably in the New York Times, Scientific American and org.theory.net.

Update: Paul Romer:

Cheers to the Nobel committee for recognizing work on one of the deepest issues in economics. Bravo to the political scientist who showed that she was a better economist than the economic imperialists who can’t tell the difference between assuming and understanding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

You’d assume that the free marketeers would be better off supporting something meaningful… if there was anything in the “rational actor” thing.

Image courtesy of No Right Turn.