The meltdown that followed the end of the credit and housing bubbles was addressed by governments stimulating demand. All very Keynesian.

However, there was a second string to the response to the GFC that got forgotten as quickly as you could say “recovery” (and “Goodbye, Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown”!)… that was the whole “regulate international finance flows and markets and bankers and stuff” bit. Remember what the G20 was going to do?

So we now have the situation where ‘markets’ have demanded, and got, austerity economics. But that has led to continued economic gloom. And states who might wish to continue to stimulate demand would have to borrow further from… markets. So the aforesaid markets display their ‘animal spirits’ and jump off a cliff.

And so it goes.

Keynes’ whole point was that there were very large scale irrationalities at work in market behaviour, even if some of the time it operates within its own rationality. Hence, in his book, the need for states to temper their excesses. None of this, by the way, is or should be particularly radical.

Gordon Brown was actually right that stimulus should have been maintained for longer, and the overweening irrationality of markets addressed at the international level. It’s interesting, now, in some of what’s starting to come out in memoirs, that he faced a lot of opposition from Newer Labourish types in his own party, who wanted to jump onto the ‘cut debt now’ wagon in advance of the Tories.

Tony Blair’s (really weird) memoir Journey, by the way, ends with a call for even more markets.

One for the true believers.

In particular, no one wanted reminding that there had been such things as Blair-ites and Brown-ites, and that some of the history was deeply personal and unpleasant. Not when all four of the leading candidates for the Labour leadership, the Miliband brothers, Ed Balls, and Andy Burnham, had form in the sometimes very petty games of court politics, New Labour style. The contenders wanted to get on with the programme of reconnecting Labour to its voters, and of articulating a new or revived rationale for progressive politics, and not to address the unpleasant details of how the party had found itself in such an impasse.

As it turned out, Mandelson’s tome hit the bookshelves with more of a thud than an explosion. In another sign of the times of the publishing/media complex, the juicy bits had all been serialised prior to its release. The pre-eminent practitioner of the “dark arts” of politics had perhaps been revealed as a hollow shell. The threat of truth-telling proved more frightening than the tale told (which Mandelson is very concerned to warrant as nothing but the truth).

So, why would anyone want to read The Third Man?

Surveying the reviews, it might be because it’s a “good book”, which, actually, it is.

Or perhaps because of Mandelson’s curiously intriguing narrative voice, which triangulates oddly between Blairite condemnation of Brown and the paradoxical endorsement of Brown’s moment in the sun by both Blair and Mandelson. That’s both a political point and one that captures the strange slitheriness of the Baron’s authorial voice – reading Mandelson, one could imagine oneself reading Umberto Eco.

That paradox is revelatory, surely, of both Mandelson’s self-description as ‘The Third Man’ and of the Janus faced New Labour project, whose internal self-contradiction is both encapsulated by the rivalry at the centre of power and never resolved because its dimensions are much bigger than the personalities who seem to represent the two polarities of social justice and neo-liberal adaptation.

One reviewer, astutely, noticed that The Third Man is:

about four different books rolled into one. As noted in this blog earlier this week, it is a not very dramatic instant book about the last days of Labour in power. It is also a breathless account of the: “Tony complained to Peter that Gordon was out of control after he had shouted at Alastair for leaking that Charlie had briefed against him” sort of nonsense that consumed so much energy among people who were meant to be running the country.

But it is also a pretty devastating portrait of Mr Blair, a man Lord Mandelson admits took up a startling amount of space in his life (he ponders poignantly, at one point, how every single entry in his diary involves something to do with Mr Blair).

The book seeks to propose a justification of the New Labour project, which Mandelson rightly regards himself as central to, and a defence of its continuity with the “big beasts” of the future spin doctor’s youth – his grandfather Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee and other luminaries of “Old Labour”.

That’s where the contradictions are most obvious.

It’s not just that Mandelson is “a plotter, but a rather useless one”, or that his memoirs are strangely impersonal (Andrew Rawnsley observes that his dog, Bobby, is mentioned somewhat more often than his partner). Mandelson is in fact quite eloquent about his upbringing, and quite personal about his frustrations at forever being cast as a backroom operator. The substantial political career he says he wanted – one to rival his grandfather’s – always slips just out of his reach, as he’s pulled back into the co-dependent world of Blair’s sofa government and also pays the price for his public image as arch-manipulator.

In his defence of New Labour, Mandelson refers to a pamphlet the Labour MP, Giles Radice, authored in 1992, arguing that the party had to reflect the desires of voters in the marginal seats of London and England’s South. The same argument is being re-run at the moment between the two Milibands – with Ed, rightly, pointing to the fact that the very large number of voters Labour lost between 1997 and 2010 defected mainly to parties other than the Tories, or disappeared from the political process altogether, abstaining from voting. The psephological choice Labour faces is not one between its “heartland” and “middle England” – there are, in fact, more than enough votes to construct a majority through overturning that particular dichotomy.

That’s where New Labour always presented a somewhat schizoid face to the world – one of the oppositions ‘The Third Way’ couldn’t overcome was the one at its heart, for all the attempts to conjure up a fantasmatic representation of the median voter. So we had ‘Red Gordon’ being trundled out on occasion, and Mandelson expressing shock to find himself associated with a government which increased the top rate of income tax and surprise to find himself being begged by business for more state interventionism.

Seamus Milne:

In the end, it was only Blair’s departure and the economic maelstrom of 2008 that allowed Brown and Mandelson to bury their vendetta. In a redemptive twist, Mandelson saved Brown’s skin as they both backed a shift towards the kind of social democratic interventionism that would have been anathema in the high New Labour years – even if it was too little, too late to save a deeply damaged prime minister and government.

The risk now is that Mandelson’s memoirs will be used to claim New Labour only failed because of dysfunctional leaders. In reality, the ground was laid by the fateful choices of the mid-1990s, when both Blair and Brown embraced neoliberal economics, and 2001-02, when Blair hitched Britain to George Bush’s war chariot. The result was the desertion of four million voters in eight years and a hollowed-out party in the grip of a presidential clique: perfect conditions, in other words, for the fevered personality conflict Mandelson chronicles.

This is part of the passage Blair read:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Thirteen years later, Tony Blair is encapsulated by the honomymous phrase – “tinkling symbol”.

He’s shuffling off the stage now. Not with a whimper, but with a book. Guy Rundle, who’s on song lately, says it all for mine, in a piece for Crikey today, which I’m reproducing over the fold with permission.

An empty, hollow man who did so much wrong tries to sing his swansong.

“You know, I of course I feel sorrow for the people who have died, how could you not…” God, there it was again, that voice, pouring out of the radio at 6:30 in the morning, as one of the last sunny days began outside. Tony Blair back from the shadowlands of post-priministerial life, and right in the middle of it all again, to plug his long-awaited memoir, A Journey.

Though it is not being serialised, the doorstopper has become famous before anyone has had the chance to read it, and for reasons evocative of New Labour at its worst. For two weeks now the chatter has all been about the launch and signing Blair will be undertaking at Waterstone’s flagship bookstore on Piccadilly.

The event is being run as a major security operation, and the list of conditions (‘no cameras, no phones, no jackets, your book may not get signed, no talking to Mr Blair’) has turned it into some grim East European parody (‘Comrade Hoxha will be appearing at Borders Ballarat to sign Collected Speeches Vol 52.’), and a magnet for the Socialist Workers Party … sorry, Stop The War Coalition.

Before that there was the gazumping by Peter Mandelson, with his contribution The Third Man, a volume which to call disingenuous would be to, um, diss ingenues?—?‘I was very surprised to find that we were selling peerages for party donations’; ‘I was shocked to find that we had invaded Iraq’; ‘It was 2004 before I learnt of the Millennium Dome’?—?and last and least the change from the allegedly messianic The Journey to the apparently unobjectionably self-obsessed A Journey. Two words, two lies.

But no amount of foreshadowing can prepare you for the return of Mr Tony. The disastrous radioactive tan and pseudo-American accent are gone, thank God in the election, standing glowing at the podium in Sedgefield Labour Club he looked like a trophy he was awarding to himself. But there is still the smooth alien head, the eyes stretched back to the side of his head, the mouth a rictus grin.

And the cover photo is bizarre, a dead ringer for a B-movie serial killer promo, and all the more alarming when you realise that this, by definition, was the one that made him look the most engaging and inspiring. God knows what the discards looked like.

This is Blair’s farewell to British politics,and he means to do it proper?—?the book is everywhere. The absence of serialisation has sent journos scurrying for juicy, easily-digested tid-bits. So we’ve heard how Blair now thinks it was a mistake to ban fox-hunting, which permanently alienated a swathe of marginal country seats; how he can’t believe he was so stupid as to introduce a Freedom Of Information Act; that Brown threatened the nuclear option; calling an inquiry into the cash-for-peerages scandal from within government if Blair tried to reduce pensions; and that the relationship became so toxic that Mr Tony took to the bottle and “became worried about his own drinking”.

God knows what problem drinking is for a man like Blair; a second half-glass of white wine, given his government’s definition of binge drinking, but it has the same half-truth of much else of what he’s saying. Blair never had much chance of avoiding that one; the Labour leadership always hated the hunting ban, but the party was largely in favour of it, and it came up through a private members bill. The FOI bill was a manifesto promise, and the effects that Blair describes that makes it impossible to have both open-debate and proper documentation within government as a “huge shock” could both be expected, to a degree, and are highly exaggerated. Drinking, thinking and hunting?—?not hugely important in themselves but indicative of the way in which Blair manages to avoid inventing reality, but succeeds in bending it to the shape he wants.

That tendency comes out perforce in the two big topics: Iraq, and that man Brown. Ever since his oleaginous performance at the Chilcot Inquiry, in which he wriggled around the word ‘regret’ while giving an account of a war unpurposed and out of control from the start, and his subsequent consultancies, including that for a Korean oil concession in Iraq, has produced something amounting to disgust with him from many people, including those who had supported the war.

Blair has attempted to assuage that despite by the no-strings-attached donation of his book advance (4.6 million pounds, $A9.5 million) to facilities for injured soldiers, but it’s indicative of his lack of understanding that none of the money went to any bloody Iraqis. To do so would be to admit some guilt.

A Journey continues Blair’s long career of obfuscation over the blatantly deceitful, amoral and chaotic lead up to the war, with Blair refining the idea that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program that could be restarted quite rapidly as a casus belli. That was not the case that was presented, of course?—?we were told that Iraq had WMDs ready for use within 45 minutes of attack.

Despite the fact the British intelligence ‘dodgy’ dossier contained, inter alia, a masters degree taken off the internet and presented as intelligence, or that former inspectors such as Scott Ritter had set out the clear proof that Iraq did not have WMDs, it is clear that war had been on the agenda since 2002 and possibly since before 9/11. In his major publicity piece, an hour-long BBC interview with Andrew Marr, mention of the ‘45 second claim’ was the closest Blair got to losing his ability to dissemble or even speak at all. Unsurprisingly, because it was a barefaced lie.

For the rest of it, it’s the vaguely mad circularity whereby Blair restates the need for the West to reshape the Middle East, and then warns the struggle may become more bitter and wider, because the Middle East seems to be so full of people who unaccountably hate the West.

But of course, the Iraq years were for Blair about the struggle with a malign tyrant of ceaseless energy and cunning. Apparently it was only in the final years the relationship with Brown fell apart. For Blair, what gave the rationale to welch on his deal to hand over to Brown within two terms, was his suspicion that Brown would not follow through on the ‘new Labour’ agenda. This apparently was not futile wars, but public service reform in terms of choice, service delivery, etc.

But even here Blair seems to be seeing the whole debate in the rear-view mirror. His passion was for various forms of quasi-private schools academies even though (like charter schools in the US) they have underperformed state schools on a pound for pound basis. He claims at one point that the NHS wasn’t an issue in 2010 because “Labour had basically solved it”, which will be news to anyone who has had to wait four days for a GP appointment in a 1948-era front-end system that genuinely was in need of reform, and didn’t get it. About 70% of people wanted the privatised oligopoly of the railway renationalised?—?hardly possible but giving a license to shake them up. And on and on.

Indeed what Blair appears to have meant by public service reform is cutting back welfare in a neo-Thatcherite manner, something which Brown prevented him from doing, thus making him, in Blair’s eyes, unfit to govern. Whether public service reform was ever the vote winner Blair thinks it was, arguing that lack of it cost the 2010 election remains to be seen after the ‘08 crash. Blair would have been dumped too. But Brown’s refusal to let Labour start the cutting may well have given some bulwark to the poorest against the Lib-Con condominium. Blair’s verdict was that Brown was unfit to be PM because of this and because he had “an emotional intelligence of nil. Strange guy.”

Strange guy indeed. Brown himself moved pretty far to the Right, with his enthusiasm for finance-led ‘endogenous growth’ and neo-Victorian moralists like Gertrude Himmelfarb, but Blair simply became a global imperialist, for whom domestic concerns in a shitty little island loomed ever less interesting with each new invasion. He helped sow hate and chaos in the whole geographical middle of the world, and he offers more of the same as a response to what he had created.

He sacrificed a genuinely modernised Britain on the char-blackened altar of a naivete about the West that can only come as the product of being a deeply shallow person. Blair’s new Labour did improve the lives of the poor, but it never got around to attacking inequality of opportunity, before the martial drums began to sound. Had he not committed to that slaughter, and those to come, we could assess him as a middling successful social market reformer?—?and one who might still be in power, accepting the thanks of a grateful nation for avoiding the Bush-era quagmire.

Instead we have a man who reduced hospital waiting queues in one country, while filling the morgues of another?—?and then argued that each act inhered in the other. No wonder his face has the perennial tension of a man who is forever trying to stop his skull from breaking through his skin. No wonder he is loathed, even by his colleagues, supporters and friends. Farewell to him, as he wanders between the winds of ‘interfaith dialogue’ and speeches for Exxon, in perpetual self-justification and fear of a warrant.

All I hope is that there are no more mornings when I wake again to his voice on the airwaves, Narcissus triumphant, all echo and no psyche.

At one level, this film is something of a “bromance”; the relationship of Clinton and Blair is a mix of genuine affection and political calculation, on both sides. But, at least to me, the film is really about Blair, and an attempt to hint at an answer to the great mystery of his time in office: why did a center-left progressive British politician drag his country – and the world – into a disastrous war initiated by a bunch of lunatics from the American hard right? Why did Blair go bad?

There are, as is almost inevitable in such a film, a few clunky attempts to simplify the narrative to squeeze into a reasonable running time. Australian viewers might be particularly amused to learn, for instance, that Blair’s centrist political style emerged immediately after a study trip to the United States in 1992, for instance. But in its depiction of Blair’s relationship with a good president, the film offers some great pointers to how things might have gone so wrong with George W. Bush. And the conclusion features some of the most effective use of archive footage in a feature film since Good Night, and Good Luck.

But (if you’ll pardon the geek analogy) I couldn’t help feeling a little of the same frustration I felt watching Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Not to compare, for a moment, the script, performances, and direction of the two – Sheen is again good as Blair, as is Quaid as Bill Clinton; perhaps the most noticeable turn, however, is Hope Davis as a very convincing Hillary Clinton. However, in that both stories are primarily about well-intentioned leaders who end up joining the dark side, both films have a “mid-point” feel to them – hints of how things might go wrong are all very well, but the real guts of the story is still to come.

All that said, it was an entertaining evening out for a political junkie – immensely better than Hawke, for instance – and we can only hope that Morgan will revisit his favourite character one more time.

It was hardly the first time a Coalition had been formed to implement an austerity agenda. The National Government of the Depression years is one exemplar.

Labour sits on the sidelines, with some doubt that its party processes will enable a left alternative to be considered in its leadership election, and its ability to present a viable opposition somewhat diminished by the wholesale adoption of New Labour themes by Cameron’s Red Tory-ism, to the degree that communitarian project has any substance.

In Australia, too, we have the spectre of public disillusion with the two major parties, but an electoral system which will minimise any expression of a desire for a third alternative, with The Greens effectively relegated to Upper House redoubts.

One of the most interesting reflections on the state of Labour in the UK, in the light of the 2010 poll, is from Jeremy Gilbert, writing in Open Democracy.

Gilbert argues that Labour avoided a wipe out because it showed surprising resilience in constituencies where an activist campaigning base persisted, and in regions where local or regional governments had been able to demonstrate the meaningfulness of social democratic initiatives to everyday lives.

In politics, Gilbert argues, content follows form:

Probably the best term ever coined to describe that strategy was Anthony Barnett’s phrase ‘corporate populism’. New Labour was based on the idea that a new kind of popular politics had to imitate the organisational and communications techniques of corporations, while pursuing a political programme which tried to align the interests of voters with those of actual corporations. When reflecting on this history, it’s striking to consider that New Labour’s full embrace of market liberalism came some time after its adoption of this approach as its own basic organisational mode.

Long before it became clear that New Labour wouldn’t break in any serious way with Thatcherite economics, while Blair still tantalised his supporters with references to Christian Socialism, ethical communitarianism, and the ‘stakeholder society’, the organisational form of New Labour prefigured the models and the value that it would later try to impose on the state, the public sector, and the country at large.

The basic organisational idea of New Labour was that the party membership were the problem and not the solution.

He further argues that the modern culture of expert messaging, organisational centralisation and Spin is broken.

New Labour only ever understood one part of the story about the decline of old political forms. While they may have been right that the 19th / 20th century model of mass political campaigning was reaching its end, they failed to notice the extent to which the coming era would present new opportunities for community-building and for democratic action, and new problems for any attempt to stifle democracy and debate. The success and growing political importance of the blogosphere and of sites like this one is just one sign of this!

A “command-and-control communications strategy” should not drive out political energies, Gilbert contends:

a complete overhaul and reinvention of the Labour Party for the 21st century is the only thing that could achieve this end. In the era of ‘we-think’ and network culture, the collective intelligence of the membership – including the 12,000 who have rushed to join now that the age of New Labour looks likely to have ended – is the greatest possible resource that the otherwise-impoverished party has at its disposal.

In our part of the world, we’ve seen the nexus between the Labor party’s aging and diminished membership and its commanding heights much fractured over recent decades. The Greens, by contrast, have demonstrated what’s possible with an activist and democratised base. But there are limits to the possible success of The Greens, under our antiquated electoral and party systems, and I think every progressive should welcome a democratisation of Australian Labor. It may not occur until the party goes back into opposition, which I hope is a long way away. But it’s a vital precondition for a revival of responsiveness and hope in our democracy, and not just for those on the left.

In the age of Facebook and Twitter, which enable millions of citizens to share ideas, to build campaigns and to communicate across great distances, the idea that a handful of professional politicians touring the TV studios of central London can be an adequate substitute for democratic politics looks clunky and forlorn.

‘Why,’ asked a Labour friend of mine this week, ‘is Britain still run by people from Oxford and Cambridge? When is it going to stop?’

Social mobility in Great Britain is bad, and getting worse. The Economist itself has linked this to a highly differentiated education system. While there is an established negative relationship between social mobility and income inequality, it’s also interesting to look at historical and cultural explanations.

Only 7% of British students attend private schools, and those at the top of the political and social ladders are overwhelmingly drawn from an even smaller set of elite schools and a tiny number of ‘ancient’ universities. Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge, and all that.

Marxisant claims about the 1688 Glorious Revolution and the Civil Wars aside, England has never really experienced a political upheaval which has implied an overturning of established status traditions. As such, it differs greatly from both societies such as France with its culture of the republican equality of citizens, and somewhat similar cultural modes influenced by the American revolution, and its Antipodean settler offshoots – Australia and New Zealand. Early attempts to establish both a Church and to entrench pseudo-aristocratic status in New South Wales had collapsed as long ago as the 1830s. White Australia, if you like, was born modern.

So, in English culture, we see a more collectivist sociality riven by many fine distinctions of status – manifested by locality, accent, mannerisms, disposition and so much more. The English are a much more tribal people than some other English speaking cultures. The House of Lords may no longer be dominated by hereditary peers, but the sort of social formation which saw them survive long past their use by date endures.

A number of historians, including Martin Wiener, have pointed to an elitism of mediocrity, an overweening concern with status and social distinction as a contributor to British decline. To large degree, the Labour party’s projects of comprehensive education, Wilsonian technocratic modernism and Blairite modernisation were all responses to this.

But, how far do you go with meritocratic education? Educational opportunities for all, though very important for life chances and social mobility are only one piece of the puzzle. It’s the reproduction of status that itself needs to be attacked. In Australia, for instance, a genuine meritocracy would probably imply no private schools at all, no Churchies and Girls Grammars with their blazers and direct routes into the sandstone universities and the professions. Perhaps the failure of both liberal and social democratic efforts to ensure equality through education in Britain was a failure of not going far enough. What’s needed is a separation of educational excellence from social status and its symbols and networks. What’s needed is a distinction between educational excellence and social elites.

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.

A good starting point for discussion is the Guardian‘s comprehensive coverage.

Writing in The Guardian, Seamus Milne has an interesting piece on the failed coup attempt against Gordon Brown last week. Theatrics aside, he sees it as a contest for the future of the party, with the Blairite forces trying to enforce the New Labour line through a proxy contest over personalities and electoral tactics:

But by exploiting the coup attempt to demand a change of direction, and making the prime minister’s closest ally, Ed Balls, their fall guy, the cabinet’s anti-Brown majority has unmistakably called time on the Keynesian-inspired and progressive tax measures that have won public support but caused such alarm in the City, Treasury and media.

Milne goes on to argue that the (now) Brownite position makes more economic and political sense.

There’s a big irony here, given that New Labour’s success derived from an argument that the Labour party had sacrificed electoral success on the altar of ideological purity.

There’s also an Australian parallel, as the Coalition appear determined to avoid competing for the centre at any costs, all in the name of ‘defending the legacy’ and ‘differentiation’. So, it seems that the tendency for parties to curl up in an ideological ball in the face of defeat afflicts those of the right, as well as those of the left.

*In theory, Rudd doesn’t have to go to the polls til April 2011.

Elsewhere: Ben Eltham on the year ahead in politics.

Update: Quadrant piles on.

Guy Rundle writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is, in that respect, no ‘Left’.

So why is this man smiling?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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