Utopia, has, of course, had a bit of a bad rap.

In the history of political theory, it can be contrasted on one hand with rationalistic argument (Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan being an early and classic instance) and on the other with various normative political theories which seek to examine, elaborate or deconstruct a particular aspect of desirable political life.

(Sticking with the seventeenth century, this is in effect what John Locke does in his Two Treatises On Civil Government. Locke makes a normative argument derived from property rights for a particular form of sovereignty. Where he differs from Hobbes, I think, is that he starts with ‘ought’ and finds an ‘is’ to ground his ideal commonwealth on, while Hobbes, at least by his own lights, claims to rigorously derive his ideal state from allegedly universal propositions.)

Utopia posits an end state, which may be wildly in conflict with political and social reality. It’s all ‘ought’ and no ‘is’. Or so it’s argued.

In fact, the best utopias are immanent critiques. That is, they emphasise the negative aspects of our current social and political arrangements through a striking contrast the reader is intended to make between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. The missing third term is normally how to get from here to there, and that’s what I’ll come back to when I talk about utopia and social change.

But a good utopia holds up a mirror to our present, and demands that we measure it against a possible future.

There are some obvious objections to this manner of proceeding, some of which I’ve already alluded to, and which I’ll discuss in more detail in later posts. Generally, though, utopia has a bad name because it’s been subject to severe attack by both Marxists and liberals. The irony, of course, is that the liberals turn the anti-utopian critique against Marxists. The other irony is that the liberals are themselves utopians.

More of that shortly.

The Marxist critique tended to be directed against ‘utopian socialism’, whether apparent flights of fancy like Charles Fourier’s Phalanxes, or what would now be called ‘intentional communities’, little social or anarchist commonwealths withdrawn from the wider social fabric. Marx’ polemic, and it was a furious polemic, targeted the supposed idealism of such thought, and honed in on the absence of any theory or practice of social and historical change leading to the universalisation of socialism.

Twentieth century neo-liberal thinkers, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper being the most prominent, argued in turn that utopian politics carried totalitarianism in its wake. The violent struggle to create the new human, they suggested, was a necessary consequence of conceiving politics as end or goal oriented. Far better to eschew transformative ambition, and … well, you know the rest; it has to do with the fabulousness of markets.

Marx, of course, did have his own utopia, but in reaction to the Enlightenment tendency to be madly rule-bound, he wisely kept it rather unspecific. In part, that was because he believed that the end state of communism would emerge from what came before. There probably is an argument to be had about the state, political violence and revolution, but it should more properly be an argument with Lenin (and, I’d suggest, it’s not actually an argument about utopia, because I’m arguing that utopias are necessary conditions for any politics).

Similarly, there are some reasonably serious issues having to do with the balance between freedom and collective goals, which are worth discussing in their own right (and that’s something I plan to come back to as well, in a review of Raymond Plant’s The Neo-Liberal State). Unfortunately, they get short shrift in the usual debate about Hayek and Popper, which very quickly descends into sloganeering.

There’s also the irony I mentioned earlier – that the neo-liberal project is itself utopian. The libertarian utopia is rather archly encapsulated in this YouTube, which perhaps now has more poignancy given the current plight of Somalians. The fantasy world of free markets and the minimal or absent state, though, is a necessary precondition for the success of the enormous political and ideological energy that has gone into the neo-liberal project in the decades since people like Hayek warned of the Road to Serfdom.

Neo-liberals make a conservative argument, similar in form to those of Burke and De Maistre in the wake of the French Revolution, about the purported evils of any attempts at systemic change. But they ignore the fact that the construction of the free market society they champion is itself a result of massive ‘social engineering’. It’s only afterwards that it appears ‘natural’.

In truth, every politics needs an imaginary dimension, a picture of its desired state. Even conservatism – with the difference that its desired state is located in the past.

It’s this social imaginary that I’d call a realistic utopia, if it’s understood that the end is never reached but must always be kept in sight. Even the most quotidian of managerial politics (Max Weber’s ‘administration of things’) has some unspoken premises about the perfect society. And what those premises are matters.

Utopia, then, is constitutive of politics (though only one dimension of it). It provides its horizon, and structures what it proposes as taken for granted. So the hegemonic power of any politics derives in large part from its imaginary.

I don’t want to be read as arguing against a materialist conception of politics (though I’d suggest that a purely materialist conception is impossible, and itself an ideological demand). I do want to argue that the imaginary dimension of political practice is both one of the most important elements of the political, and one of the least examined.

At the moment, I shall argue, we can see our social and political lines of division as a reflection of the clash of the neo-liberal utopia and the crisis of the social democratic utopia. And that’s for next time…

…look at inequality, as far as economic efficiency is concerned, as cholesterol: There is “good” and “bad” inequality, just as there is good and bad cholesterol. “Good” inequality is needed to create incentives for people to study, work hard, or start risky entrepreneurial projects. None of that can be done without providing some inequality in returns…

But “bad” inequality starts at a point – one not easy to define – where, rather than providing the motivation to excel, inequality provides the means to preserve acquired positions. This happens when inequality in wealth or income is used to forestall an economically positive change for the society… or to allow only the rich to get education, or to ensure that the rich keep the best jobs.

That’s a fairly neat summation of a genuinely liberal position, and it’s those sort of sentiments that made liberalism a revolutionary force in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s early John Stuart Mill, if you like, before he became a lot more collectivist in his later writing on political economy.

What’s interesting about the debate on inequality today is that in many ways it’s regressed. I’ll cite just two:

1. Neo-liberalism, following Hayek in particular, reduces equality to an almost contentless notion. Neo-liberalism really just posits legal equality (highly distorted in practice through the doctrine of corporate personality) and refuses to accept any form of substantive or effectively even formal equality. So, by implication, inequality comes to be represented as a positive good, because of the allegedly pernicious effects of anything but legal equality.

This stuff is so pervasive today, it’s very difficult to shake.

2. Because of the hegemonic nature of that view of equality and inequality, liberal advocates of equality of opportunity (such as those who support what I have called Gillardism) completely blind themselves to the social, collective and structural dimensions of inequality. What passes for left liberalism these days really represents just an advance towards formal equality from Hayekian legal equality. So that’s a retreat, actually.

The first task for social democrats has to be to reverse both those assumptions.

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.

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.

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”.

Even when development and enlightenment stare them in the face, their instinct is to destroy them pretending to safeguard their honor, the mechanics of which supersede all else including a happy life of fulfillment and accomplishments.

Ostensibly, the writer, Farid Ghatry, is accusing Hamas and Hizbollah of being ruled by “instinct”, but it doesn’t take him long to elide those organisations with “Arabs” collectively:

Their poisonous rhetoric of violence feeding a frenzied mass of ignorant Arabs leaning on their extreme religion to honor their incapacity to compete with the West is destroying future generations of hopeful saviors of our culture and traditions.

I don’t want to discuss the specifics of this conflict in this post – this thread is still open for those wishing to do so. I do want to observe that peace appears to have few champions at the moment. Endless dissections of history and propaganda claims and counter-claims seem to leave debate stuck in the same morass – of friends and enemies, and the only logic of that cycle – on both sides – is a drive to extermination. It seems to me that since the Cold War ended, the peace movement has more or less disappeared from view – at least in this country – and there are very few voices prepared to prioritise humanitarianism and conflict resolution over picking sides.

There’s a huge irony here – in an age where humanitarian war and “the responsibility to protect” are both lodestones of political discourse – both options, of course, involving the application of violence. It would appear that the easiest thing to do for many is to demonise those who are seen as “unlike us” – and one of the many cards the cheerleaders for the Israeli state play is to invoke the claim that Israel is “the only advanced democracy in the region”. In fact, Israel is not a secular state (not that it’s a religious state either… but that’s part of the problem). And it’s rarely mentioned that it’s the only nuclear power in the region. But clearly one of the rhetorical effects such a claim has is to increase the identification we are supposed to have with one side of the conflict – or more properly, with the government, political class and military/intelligence apparatus of one side of the conflict, because there is certainly still a peace movement within Israel itself.

One of the difficulties humanitarian impulses have is the gap between abstraction and concrete situations. It’s actually inherent in the whole notion of humanitarian universalism because there’s always going to be a tension between a particular and a universal, and this is where philosophy itself stops being a parlour game or a learned discipline, and shows us something about the very messy world of political violence and making distinctions and judgements. One can rightly be sceptical about violence in the name of humanitarianism, and in fact we ought to be, because it can never be divorced from all the other calculations, strategies and investments which accompany any exercise of political power – and the use of force is the ultimate political decision.

But we can resist the dehumanisation of civilians caught up in conflict zones, or in zones which are subjected to cruel and inhumane blockadesm, or civilians targeted by rockets. They might not all be “like us”, but we need to recognise that humanity itself has ethical claims to make – on all of us. What we need to do is to give up the habit of accepting far too blithely the dehumanisation and thus alienation of others, and begin to look above the parapets of a tragic history and the particulars of political advantage being sought on both sides and refocus our efforts – and our imagination – on the one goal that should be truly paramount – peace itself.

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.)

The ALP under Rudd is in fact far more moralistic and authoritarian than the Liberals ever were.

I think that’s far too broad a statement, and could be contradicted with evidence from other policy domains. And needless to say, there were enough Howard Ministers – Tony Abbott being one who immediately comes to mind – who could trump almost anyone when it comes to sanctimonious authoritarianism. It’s more accurate to say, in my view, that the arguments of “communitarians” provide useful cover for left ALP ministers (for instance, Gillard, Tanner and Macklin) to sign on to an agenda which actually derives straight from the Catholic right, and which has more than a little political calculation behind it – both in terms of Senate numbers (and the cohesiveness of the ALP Senate caucus itself) and also in terms of skimming some votes from churchgoing socially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.

A very similar dynamic is observable with regard to the arguments of the Noel Pearsons and Warren Mundines of this world – in that they provide cover for authoritarian interventions in Indigenous affairs (and increasingly in social policy more generally). The basic mindset is the same – worrying about the breakdown of norms and the absence of community. The communitarian stream of political philosophy – which largely developed in the 1990s and has strong affinities with “Third Way” politics – generally bemoans the alleged fracturing of moral values and shared ethics and places the duty on the state of recreating community in its absence. Very often, the practical and political application of such views has more than a tinge of racism about it. The goals set can never be achieved (which is useful politically for the more canny operators), and a lot of the concern is misplaced and wrongly framed, but a lot of damage can be done along the way by state intervention. Also writing in Spiked, Guy Rundle is much more sensitive to the real political dynamics of moralistic social democracy than Miller.

Probably the best way of understanding what’s going on is in terms of the clash between post-materialist and materialist politics. Labor governments need their own discourse to recapture those who “should” vote for the centre-left on economic grounds, and moralism and campaigning about the dire effects of pr0n and binge drinking or whatever provides the missing piece of the puzzle. But it is very much the case that such attitudes – or at any rate similar attitudes – cross the political spectrum, and that’s why it’s far too simple to judge one government as more authoritarian than another. There is a reason why Miller is partially right in suggesting that the left’s response has been “anemic” but again I think she’s too predisposed by her political dispositions to be an objective analyst in this instance. That reason has to do with – yep, you guessed it – the same legacy of 60s libertarianism Hamilton rails against, but it’s a big issue, and one I’ll return to shortly in another post.

The level of controversy that still surrounds not just the UDHR (and right wingers just love to cast stones at the UN) but also the universality and indeed nature of human rights shows that they are inherently political and not grounded in any natural, philosophical or theological foundation. The key thing is that they have to be fought for, and their universality comes from the recognition afforded to others. Some times that recognition is granted by the state, and embodied in law. Australia now has a government which appreciates the need for a framework of human rights jurisprudence which goes beyond rights granted or afforded by particular legislation or in the common law. So Professor Frank Brennan SJ has been commissioned to report to the Rudd government by July 2009. You can read about it here at Andrew Bartlett’s place.

There’s no doubt that part of the reason for the defeat of the Howard government was the desire for human rights to be better respected. But that fight isn’t over now that Labor in power. While the conditions for the recognition of rights are now more favourable, they will always be forged in struggle.