We’ve seen a very unedifying ‘debate’ on the RSPT over recent days, with silly accusations by Coalition figures about a paper from the NBER, Liberal MP Peter Lindsay’s claim that it would drive pie carts out of business, and absurd ascriptions of all manner of unrelated economic developments (the dollar, the fall in the stock market) to the tax.

Now, John Quiggin and a number of senior economists have released a statement decrying the misinformation surrounding the RSPT.

Meanwhile, in an otherwise extemely unedifying episode of Q&A, Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul had this to say:

But it’s pretty hard to find a moment in history when commodities industries were happy about any tax whatsoever at all and, secondly, it’s pretty hard to find examples of commodities industries helping in the redistribution of wealth to create a middle class to support a democracy. The history of commodities-dependent societies, with the exception pretty well of Canada and Australia, is one of dictatorships, right? And we’ve been smart. We’ve avoided that because we’ve actually controlled the commodities industries and made them do what they didn’t want to do and they’ve taken enough money away from them and put it into things like health and public education so they weren’t able to do what they did throughout Latin America, Central America, South East Asia and so on. So commodities industries, one has to be quite careful about. My guess is right now there are probably Canadian commodities industries threatening to come to Australia for some other reason, but I don’t know anything about this tax.

I’ll leave the logic and veracity of that claim for readers to ponder.

What is certain, though, is that the scare campaign has reached a truly hysterical and hyperbolic level, as this letter to Fortescue shareholders with its talk of socialism and nationalisation surely indicates.

Pollster Gary Morgan observed the other day that this election year might have parallels with 1949 – when a Labor government sought to take commercial banks into public ownership.

It’s interesting to ponder that statement as well.

Mining capital has a relationship to the state different from that of other industries. Resources can only be sold once, and are not owned by the companies, but rather by the people. Prices, in many instances, are not set through anything akin to a retail market, but through negotiated contracts with long time lines. Mining companies only exploit the resources, rather than create a product (particularly in Australia, where there is little value-adding).

So, it could well be argued that the industry, with its tendency to throw an enormous amount of political weight around, and whose investment decisions so greatly affect the economy, ought to be nationalised. The sticking point is the amount of capital needed.

But that’s very far from what we’re seeing proposed here, which is simply an attempt to ensure the owners of the resources, us, receive a fair return. That is the actual stake of that political game, and the attempt to assimilate the private interests of resources capital with the public interest is precisely what needs to be resisted.

While some of the discussion has focused on some of the more extreme scenarios about the misuse of people’s information, there’s no question that the routine use of Facebook has now become much more problematic for many. Jason Calacanis, as part of an impassioned post, provides some useful links to enable readers to understand the scope of the problem. Few might leave Facebook, but, conversely, the company’s approach to “radical transparency” has undoubtedly flayed a trust already fraying because of resistance to constant shifts in functionality.

Within the techie community, the response has been to call for “an open alternative”. Yet, here, problems of scale arise. Despite increasing attention to privacy issues from regulators, legislators and the media, Facebook’s trump card is its pervasiveness. As danah boyd comments, it’s become a “social utility”. As I’ve commented previously, Facebook is now just part of the communications landscape. While it’s certainly possible to envisage a mass of users migrating to another site, the precondition for such a ‘network effect’ in reverse would be a competing commercial entity able to raise enough capital to compete.

An open source alternative is unlikely to generate the scale necessary.

The claim from Facebook, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that the site is just reflecting shifts in contemporary understandings of privacy can be dismissed easily. Social norms against oversharing still exist, users modulate (or try to modulate) what content and information they want seen by various groups of others, and it’s simplistic and arrogant to claim that all would be just peachy if only dumb users could understand sophisticated privacy settings. The point, precisely, is that the company now affords users only limited choices about how open they wish to be. And Jeff Jarvis is right that Zuckerberg and co. confuse “public” with making a plurality of micro-publics.

Arguments about “a single identity” being a demonstration of “integrity” have been well skewered by Henry Farrell and Kieran Healy.

So what has gone wrong, and what can be done?

danah boyd is, again, spot on:

What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outing people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class.

While she is absolutely on the money in contending that the desire to be “public”, in a certain sense, is one that isn’t open or chosen by all, and a desire that is differentially shaped by class, cultural capital and gender, she doesn’t quite put her finger on the basic issue. What we are seeing now is a result of the commodification of personality which, in late capitalism, creates value for corporates. We are all unpaid labourers in the social media industry, whose lives are fodder for the accumulation of capital. Facebook profits from our sociality.

The politics of this issue is, to large degree, shaped by the dialectical conflict between libertarian urges and their commercial capture, which is one way of reading the story of the web. But, because the root cause is that Facebook wants to monetise its ‘content’ (ie – us), a better lens with which to view the problem is a socialist or social democratic one. Facebook is a social utility, as boyd says; a communications medium, but also a public commons.

As such, we’re not in the realm of “good” and “evil” but in the realm of Capital – Zuckerberg has far less agency than he thinks he does, because his duty is to monetise endlessly. It’s not that Facebook is evil, but that it’s a private company providing a public purpose. So the inescapable conclusion is that it should either be heavily regulated, or a public entity should occupy its position. Just imagine the cries from the press if the ABC were to offer social networking as a public service, and you’ll know I’m right.

As obituaries for the 13 year reign of New Labour are already being written (and they’re not all entirely gloomy), Gordon Brown’s task is to rally the Labour faithful, and to sharpen the contrast with the Tories in 100 or so Tory-Labour marginals where the current electoral system would facilitate tactical voting by Liberal Democrat supporters. Brown’s mind might also be concentrated by the rumours that Peter Mandelson is orchestrating his replacement post haste after Thursday’s election. But it’s surely interesting that he articulates a good reason to vote Labour at the end of an era.

NB: Previous LP discussion of the UK election here.

Elsewhere: Jonathan Freedland.

The post, which appears below, was originally published here.

There are a range of good arguments against the Rudd government’s internet filter, some emphasised for persuasive or tactical reasons, some reflective of deeply held political and political positions. Among the latter, liberal and libertarian arguments tend to dominate. This is not necessarily to say that those advancing such arguments (which we might usefully summarise under the slogan ‘information wants to be free’) are liberals or libertarians in a consistently ideological sense, or on the political right. It’s more that the deep logic of the internet’s history produces an argument in terms of freedom, and that view seems natural to those who are passionate about the online world. In this article, I want to present a somewhat more sociological argument, and one that seeks to build on an alternative (though, in part, complementary) set of assumptions drawn from left and progressive thought and tradition.

In so doing, the target at which I want to aim is not the internet filter itself, or Stephen Conroy himself. To my mind, the personalisation of the debate has not been a helpful aspect of the campaign against the filter proposal. What I think is useful and important to understand is the underlying cause of the government’s move, which casts the argument around freedom in something of a different light.

What is at issue here is the desire to govern the private choices of individuals, a desire which has had its apogee in the communitarian aspects of New Labour governance in the United Kingdom. To adapt a judgement made by The Economist, thirteen years of New Labour government has seen the state grow, personal freedom greatly diminish, but the underlying social patterns of inequality little disturbed. The urge to shape and dictate private choices has been growing among Labor governments in Australia, with the long lived Bob Carr style state regimes leading the vanguard. Mark Latham tempered the communitarian rhetoric to a high flame during his leadership, and despite his repudiation by the ALP, the Rudd government has seemingly adopted a similar governing mentality, albeit at more of a simmer.

The causes of the desire to govern the soul are multiple, though interconnected and interwoven.

It’s no coincidence that an increasing drive to interfere with private decisions and choices accompanied the election of the first generation of centre-left governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the End of History. The ideological climate where social democrats lost any sense of the capacity to transform, and the desirability of transforming economic and social relations lent itself to a statism without long term purpose, a statism that manifests itself in interventions to transform private lives rather than to transform national and global society. Stripped of the power, and the will, to restructure economic life so as to negate deeply structural inequalities in a globalised world, purpose and the will to do good manifests itself into a micro-level of intervention; what Michel Foucault called ‘biopolitics’ – a politics of governing the individual body and soul.

Reflected through the prism of the constant campaign, the spectacle of the symbol in politics, and the 24/7 media cycle, ‘bite-sized’ policies have the capacity to substitute for social change over the long term and to feed the drumbeat of moral panic sounded on a repetitive and moment by moment time scale.

Secondly, in a risk society, individuals are less trusted to make choices for themselves, governed by their desires, their use of private reason, and their consciences. The sub-politics of risk, to invoke the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, concerns itself with the downside of modernity and complexity – the costs of the aggregation of private decisions to public finances and purposes. In areas like health, child development, and many others, the costs of perceived negative choices are transferred to a public purse unable to deal with them, and in a neo-liberal culture, the production of a docile and compliant workforce is key both to the legitimation of governance in a chaotic environment and to the reproduction of late capitalist patterns of work, consumption and distribution.

Thirdly, the micro-government of the individual is a key point of contestation at the site where democratisation and authority clash. An increasing climate of openness from the 1960s onwards, and the democratisation of culture among whose effects is a resistance to assertions of authority, later supplemented by the growth of populisms both right and left combined to render the notion that policy is an effect of expertise shaky. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is something of a backlash. With politics denuded of big picture ideological conflicts, the void is filled with hordes of experts, who with the best will in the world, think that they know what’s good for us. Labor governments, stripped of any real transformational purpose, obsessed with symbolic campaigning and feeding the media beast, and concerned about the governance of risk, seize upon (and cherry pick) crumbs from the table of thinktank, private and public research expertise.

So, then, the internet filter is part of a bigger picture. It’s one more item, among the alcopops tax, the national testing regime in schools, and many others, of a form of governmental mentality which seeks to shape, or to dictate, choices to citizens, who are presumed to be unable to discern their own best interests. Evidence, research and policy step in, and electoral advantage is sought through the intertwined machine of political communication and media dissemination.

Yet, there is another left tradition.

That is the tradition embodied in movements for popular education from the 19th century onwards, in the habits of auto-didacticism of early trade unionists and activists, of the respect for reason and informed conscience and judgement imparted to English speaking socialisms and Labourism from the dissent of chapel and the world of workplace dispute and argument. This tradition is one of the cultivation of the capacities of all citizens to apply reason to human affairs, to make conscientiously good decisions in their private lives through collective learning and civic conversation, for opportunity to be opened up rather than to be circumscribed.

This fundamentally progressive attitude and set of dispositions seeks to expand the capabilities of ordinary folk and to enable and facilitate citizens’ desires for autonomy, self-government and collective government of communal and state institutions.

It’s part of a sweeping movement of democratisation, which popped up in another context at the height of the administered society in the 1950s and 1960s, in a desire for participatory decision-making and for individuals together to question the force of ingrained social norms. It’s part of an activist culture manifested in social movements such as feminism and other liberatory and transformational currents. At its heart, it represents a fundamental optimism, a philosophical anthropology foundational to left politics (and to liberalism, too) which holds that humans are thinking beings able to be trusted with choice, and whose choices deserve a basic level of respect.

The internet, as I alluded to at the outset, is part of that secular movement towards the democratisation of social relations; and of knowledge. It’s precisely because the internet affords so much promise for those who wish to decide their destinies in common, to learn, to form an informed judgement and habit of thought that its freedom from state interference is so important at the level of principle. I’m not so interested in the particulars of the reasons advanced by the Rudd government for this latest instance of the desire to micro-manage individual choices. I’m much more interested in opposing, in principle, anything that partakes in the disrespect for the capacities of individual citizens to decide severally and collectively how best to regulate their own lives. That’s a principle, in my view, that from a left and progressive position, is well worth fighting for.

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

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

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

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

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

Quiggin concludes his post:

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

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

I couldn’t agree more.

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

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

But the experience of UK Labour is instructive.

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

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

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

Yesterday, we had a ‘fighting speech’ described as ‘Churchillian’. Winston must be turning over in his grave, or at least reaching for another scotch.

Today, we’ve got an op/ed from John Howard’s chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos, which certainly fits the description of excitable. Abbott isn’t Churchill today, he’s Spartacus. Make of that what you will. It’s effortlessly deconstructed by Andrew Elder.

This mad boosterism about Tony Abbott’s pugilistic style has one purpose, and one purpose only. (Fantasies about armies of tradies who know all too well the Rudd stimulus has kept them in work adopting Abbott as the new messiah are just that; there’s no sensible electoral calculus in the Liberals’ current positioning.)

If money follows the polls then the Liberals are buggered. If you were on a corporate board you’d have Mr Abbott to lunch as a matter of courtesy, and listen to him describe cutlery as namby-pamby and elitist. Then, you’d send a donation to the ALP to keep in sweet with Senator Arbib.

Both Abbott’s speech and Sinodinos’ piece are really just fundraising letters. The Liberals are broke, deserted by big business. The policy suggestions, such as they are, are also premised on a fantasy – that Labor really is a socialist wolf in sheep’s clothing, with mad skills in disguising its intent to tax everything in the cause of redistribution.

Kicking the union can again is also significant.

Abbott does have an ideological position, one akin to Barnaby Joyce’s. He’s the voice of the petit bourgeois mentality, the populist appeal to those who feel themselves under siege in a fast moving world. It’s Pauline Hanson politics without the racism. Irrational, driven by affect, and projection. It’s the pure cry of the aptly named ‘anti-Labor forces’, and has no resonance or point of connection with the reality most of the electorate see.

It’s capable of attracting all sorts of folks driven by ressentiment, though, so it might bring in a buck or two. Here’s a tip, though: polls to stay around 56/44 in Labor’s favour.

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.

However, it appears that not much has actually changed. What is more likely to be occurring is another iteration of the regular updating of the techno-utopian rhetoric to suit what its evangelists see as being the signs of the times. For those interested, and despite its intellectual vacuity, there is an importance in this sort of discourse, there’s an excellent post on Kelly’s latest musings by SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog.

As I was saying in another context the other day, what we need in the study of the effect of online interaction on the social world is fewer impressionistic pronouncements of grand theory, and more careful empirical work on how the web actually does interact with politics, culture and the social. More ethnography, if you like, and less polemic.

Genuine powers, the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances of most of our contemporaries, have evaporated from the nation state into the global space, where they float free from political control: politics has remained as local as before and therefore is no longer able to reach them, let alone to constrain. One of the effects of globalisation is the divorce between power (the capacity to have things done) and politics. We have now power freed from politics in the global space, and politics deprived of power in the local space.

How can we combat this ultimate insult to democracy – the removal of power itself from the arena of national politics? I’m interested in hearing what people think. It seems to me to be a devilish problem – “global civil society” – usually assimilated to NGOs has its own problems of legitimacy, and enormous energy needs to go into electoral contests at the national level to defend what can be salvaged from a political horizon seemingly endlessly moving rightward. At the same time, and this is an issue feminism as a social movement has grappled with, there are huge problems of coordination and respect for different lived experience in orchestrating action and translating thought across borders.

What is to be done?

Elsewhere: SocProf offers her thoughts at The Global Sociology Blog.

The GOP might also be a tad influenced by Alan Greenspan’s concession that his ideological predispositions led him into errors which contributed to the global financial crisis, which John Quiggin argues illustrates the bankruptcy of the “efficient markets hypothesis” and demonstrates that financial markets have a tendency towards creating instability, rather than the other way around.

So, I think there’s a bit of projection going on – amidst the ruins of their ideological landscape, the GOP are trying to cast the Democrats in the role of the enemies of market freedoms, whose benefits (in the form in which they existed) are looking quite illusory. This is consistent with what I have been arguing throughout the global financial crisis – that ideology plays much more of a political than a descriptive or analytical role, and that is most plain when it is shipwrecked on the shoal of facts. Still being ignored, though, by the powers that be (or the powers that have 85 days left in office at any rate) is the geopolitical dimension, which SocProf discussses at The Global Sociology Blog:

There is no doubt that China and the European Union are getting closer, while no one really pays attention to what Bush says anymore. If China and the EU push for stricter global financial regulation, there is little that the US can do to stop them. And Bush’s claims that “Free markets are TEH AWESUM” ring hollow to everyone else.

It also means that whoever becomes president in 2009 will not make much of a difference since the US is financially considerably weakened and Obama has not shown any real global economic leadership here either. So, the stage is set for China and the EU to take a more prominent role. In addition, if peripheral countries manage to increase their voting shares at multilateral institutions (as with the IMF, for instance), then the Us might find itself quite isolated.