Archive for the 'History' Category

One day that shook the world

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by
Paul Norton
1 week, 4 days ago
in Europe, History, International and Politics
. 57 Comments

Twenty-five years ago today, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by a unanimous vote of the CPSU Politburo. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive chronicle and analysis of Gorbachev’s time as leader, reformer and unintentional dissolver of the Soviet Union, I’d like to take this occasion to offer some reflections on the remarkable period in history which began on 11 March 1985.

One of the things which made this period so remarkable is that when Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary, nobody could have foreseen the sequence of events over the subsequent six and a half years which ended the Cold War and saw the Soviet Union reformed out of existence. Of course, the question of how a totalitarian Stalinist regime such as that of the USSR might be transformed, and what it might be transformed into, had occupied many of the best minds across the political spectrum for decades. Some, such as the East German dissident and subsequent Green Party activist Rudolph Bahro, anticipated the possibility of the Soviet Union experiencing a process of reform similar to the Prague Spring of 1968, with the difference that such a Soviet Spring would not be cut short by the tanks and guns of a much bigger neighbour before it could usher in a democratic socialist “third way” between capitalism and communism. The Trotskyist Left put their hopes in some kind of “workers political revolution aganst the bureaucracy” to bring about socialist democracy. Communist regimes in different countries experimented with limited political and intellectual liberalisation, economic reforms including limited restoration of market elements and enterprise autonomy, workers’ participation in enterprise decision-making, campaigns against corrupt and incompetent officialdom and poor work discipline, and other minor reforms.

The fact remained, however, that in the Soviet Union and all countries where what historian Robert Service calls the “Soviet compound” had been established, neither agitation from below nor reform from above had fundamentally challenged its basic ingredients – in Service’s words, “a one-party state, dictatorship, administrative hyper-centralism, a state-dominated economy, restricted national self-expression, legal nihilism and a monopolistic ideology.” The Prague Spring, for all its undoubted promise, was not allowed to transcend the limits of the compound before the Warsaw Pact tanks arrived. Poland’s Solidarnosc movement had been repressed by the regime in December 1981 and, when Gorbachev took office, survived as an underground movement. In the Soviet Union itself, the complete crushing of civil society by Stalin and the grip retained on political life by his successors meant that nothing resembling Solidarnosc could have existed in 1985.
Continue reading ‘One day that shook the world’

The reception and implementation of the National History Curriculum

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Culture, Education, History, Howardia and Politics
. 26 Comments

A while back, Kevin Rudd proclaimed the history wars over. He may have been right, at least insofar as the combatants left on the field are looking decidely ghostly; witness the non-event of the launch of Keith Windschuttle’s latest tome. Yesterday’s grapeshot over the history curriculum will, likely, not be followed up by another offensive – the Coalition, and the usual suspects, will move on to criticising the government’s health announcements.

Yet the influence of the Howard-era battles remains – and its most significant legacy might be the fact that history is embedded in the national curriculum at all. This is a major shift from its folding into SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) at P-10 levels in many states.

In an interesting piece for Crikey today, Tony Taylor looks at the reception and implementation of the history curriculum: Continue reading ‘The reception and implementation of the National History Curriculum’

John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 3 days ago
in Activism, Culture, Feminism, History, International, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 30 Comments

There’s been a bit of word play on another thread about John Quiggin’s discussion of the coinage of the term ‘Agnatology’ to describe “the study of the manufacture of ignorance”. There are resonances between his diagnosis of the political right and Geoffrey Barker’s take on “bogan politics”, discussed on LP early in the week. What hasn’t attracted so much comment is Quiggin’s view on ideology.

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: Continue reading ‘John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology’

What if they gave a culture war and no one came?

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in History, Indigenous, Politics and Race
. 62 Comments

Naomi Parry reviews the reception (and content) of Keith Windschuttle’s new book at New Matilda:

Late last year Keith Windschuttle released another book questioning the existence of the stolen generations. But this time, nobody cared.

Very few people would be aware that Keith Windschuttle released volume three of his series The Fabrication of Aboriginal History in December last year. As Robert Manne observed in his review of the book in The Monthly, it arrived to only the most “strangely muffled fanfare from his friends”.

Robert Manne’s review is here.

We’ve come a long way since the Howard era furore over Stolen Generations denialism. That’s a good thing.

Working class heroes

Published
by
Paul Norton
2 months, 1 week ago
in History, Industrial Relations, Music and Technology
. 3 Comments

Without the mass production of iron and steel from the late C18 onward, there probably would not have been an Industrial Revolution. In turn, the massive expansion of iron and steel production in this period was made possible by a production process known as puddling. And puddling had to be done by puddlers – human beings working in one of the most arduous and dangerous occupations that capitalism has ever devised for the worker.

The puddlers and their conditions of work are honoured by the great Stan Rogers in The Puddler’s Tale. Stan’s son Nathan has recorded his own version of the song. Lyrics can be found here. Note that in Nathan Rogers’ version the table referred to in the last verse is creaking, rather than breaking.

Update: The song was apparently written with Stan Rogers’ father, a steelworker, in mind, which possibly explains the homely focus of the last couple of verses.

The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Authoritarianism, Climate change, Disasters, Economics, Energy, Environment, History, International, Politics, Religion, Sociology and Technology
. 146 Comments

One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ’skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.

Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.

There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.

Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:

We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.

Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:

A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.

Continue reading ‘The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary’

It was twenty years ago today…

Published
by
Paul Norton
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in History and Politics
. 48 Comments

…that the 29th National Congress of the Communist Party of Australia decided that the CPA should cease functioning as a political party. This event occurred in the midst of the regime changes which were sweeping Eastern Europe at the time, ranging from the orderly reforming of communism out of existence in Hungary and Slovenia to the forcible overthrow of the ultra-Stalinist Ceaucescu dictatorship in Romania. Writing in Australian Left Review about the CPA’s historic decision, Mike Ticher noted that:

It might seem more than a little presumptuous to compare the events of the Twentieth (sic – it was the Twenty-Ninth) Congress of the Communist Party of Australia last December with some of the earth-shattering decisions taken by ruling parties in Eastern Europe over the past six months… Nevertheless, the recent cataclysms of Czechoslovakia and East Germany hung heavily over the proceedings in Sydney… However, the atmosphere was, perhaps surprisingly, less one of a wake for the CP than one of rejuvenation and even relief

The convening of the CPA’s 29th Congress against the backdrop of the Fall of the Wall was at one level an accident, but an elegant one, since at a deeper level the events were of course part of the same historical process.
Continue reading ‘It was twenty years ago today…’

More spill thread with added smokey goodness

Published
by
Phil
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Climate change, Ethics, History, Howardia, Markets, Policy, Politics, Relationships and Science
. 387 Comments

The spill is on, Tony Abbott is in, Joe Hockey looks to be taking inspiration from Peter Costello in wanting the leadership without getting blood on his hands, Kevin Andrews has ruled himself out and George Brandis has now shown his hand and come out in support of Malcolm Turnbull.

As for Turnbull, well he’s not going down without a fight.

Meanwhile in news that makes complete sense, the Oz reports that Nick Minchin was a tobacco skeptic.

Senator Minchin wishes to record his dissent from the committee’s statements that it believes cigarettes are addictive and that passive smoking causes a number of adverse health effects for non-smokers,” the committee’s minority report says. “Senator Minchin believes these claims (the harmful effects of passive smoking) are not yet conclusively proved. . . there is insufficient evidence to link passive smoking with a range of adverse health effects.

To support his claims, Senator Minchin drew on a study commissioned by the Tobacco Institute of Australia that “concluded the data did not support a causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and lung cancer or heart disease in adults.

Place your bets, and bon mots below.

Update: Tony Abbott wins the final ballot by one vote 42-41 over Malcolm Turnbull with Joe Hockey surprisingly eliminated in the first round.

Update [RM]: Details at The Age. Key piece of information – somebody voted informal.

Update [RM]: Possum points out that Fran Bailey, should she have been able to vote, would probably have voted for Turnbull. So would Kelly O’Dwyer and Paul Fletcher.

Update [RM]: Bob Brown said at his press conference that the Greens would not support referring the CPRS to a Senate committee and won’t be supporting the CPRS in its current form. The Liberals have now said that if the bill is not sent to a committee, they’ll vote it down. The upshot – unless there are a lot of Liberals crossing the floor, the CPRS will be defeated a second time in the Senate, and a DD trigger will be explicitly on the table (at least as I understand it).

Update [MB]: New post – CPRS defeated.

Rudd and Queenslandism

Published
by
Mark
4 months ago
in Culture, Economics, Federal Elections, History, Markets, Media, Politics and Queensland
. 27 Comments

I’ve commented before on the tendency to anticipate the anniversary of events, and everyone in the Oz media has been doing just that ahead of the milestone of two years since the election of the Rudd government, which falls on Tuesday.

Of particular interest is a long piece by Shaun Carney in The Age. Carney himself refers to skepticism that Rudd is “a right wing free trader leading a left wing party”. I think that’s wrong. I’m increasingly convinced that Kevin Rudd should be taken at his word on his perspective on economics. The fact that his famous article on neo-liberalism was also incredibly politically useful for him doesn’t prove insincerity.

Carney makes an interesting argument that Rudd’s governing style is one forged in the history of Queensland political culture. It would be possible to complicate and trouble this in various ways (including observing a different approach to governance in our state bureaucracy), but I think the core of his thesis is right:

Several of Rudd’s colleagues who believe they understand him politically point to the peculiar nature of Queensland’s politics as a policy guide. Queenslanders, both the politicians and the voters, often view themselves as a breed apart. And their conception of government, historically a battle between two types of state paternalism – Labor and National – does not necessarily match the ideas of elites in the Canberra-Sydney-Melbourne triangle.

On Movember, Tim Soutphommasane and civics

Published
by
Mark
4 months ago
in Australiana, Culture, History, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 61 Comments

A while back I wrote – in rather skeptical vein – about Tim Soutphommasane’s claim that progressives should be reclaiming patriotism. Guy Rundle has now reviewed Soutphommasane’s book, Reclaiming Patriotism: nation building for Australian progressives, for Crikey (of which more later). I’m largely in agreement with Rundle’s thoughts, and I think he adds another piece to the puzzle of what’s missing in this sort of ‘progressive’ discourse.

And there’s another one in an article Soutphommasane published in The Australian the other day.

While I would agree, on aesthetic grounds, that Movember is a bit worrying, I’m not at all sure that it’s some sort of sign of ‘conspicuous compassion’ (something I remember all the crusty old columnists loudly denouncing about five years ago – these things, like facial hair, must go in cycles):

At first glance it all seems commendable enough: people are doing their part for a worthy charity while having a bit of fun. Yet I suspect I am not alone in feeling some fatigue and distaste about public awareness campaigns. It seems that every day, week and month of the calendar is dedicated to raising awareness about some social concern.

Support women’s health? Sport a pink ribbon. Support action on climate change? Turn off your lights at home for an hour. Support recycling? You were in luck last week, which just happened to be National Recycling Week.

It is a worrying sign of our declining civic life that public engagement has become reduced to hollow symbolism. Civic virtue has become synonymous with ethical one-upmanship: it’s all about winning plaudits for altruism or moral goodness.

Well, no, it’s not all about that.

Later in the piece, Soutphommasane invokes Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, a now deceased crusty old sociologist, worried about the rise of the “narcissistic personality” (and the concept has some similar methodological problems as its predecessor, the Frankfurt School’s “authoritarian personality“). We’re all self-absorbed, etc, etc. (Follow the link for the longer version, and the book is actually better than it might have been.) One might think, observing American culture, that Lasch was onto something. But one might then reflect that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is actually a thesis constructed on a very doubtful reading of the stats, and that America continues to display a culture of voluntarism and free association much more robust than a diagnosis of narcissism might predict.

What Soutphommasane doesn’t seem to realise is that his imagined community – presumably another one of those past Golden Ages – of civic virtue, was not – in its actuality – without its element of status claims. I’m completely unclear from reading his op/ed what would exactly be entailed by a real civic virtue, right now and not in an imagined past (and all Soutphommasane has done is to posit something unspecified against what he disses, not a particularly good analytical move, even if a common rhetorical one). But, in the age when the bourgeois patriarchs of the world joined civic associations for good community causes, or whatever, what they were up to – among other things – was reinforcing a very rigid status hierarchy. The sexual division of labour which saw women, and particularly unmarried women, voluntarily taking up the frontline of working with the objects of all this concern was also part of a cultural hierarchy which resolutely reduced those who were deserving of civic aid to the status of object, and maintained class and gender divisions. It wasn’t all about doing good by stealth, or not letting the left hand know, etc. It was about social distinction, among other things.

It seems to me that the identification with causes demonstrated by wearing a ribbon, growing a mo, or whatever, is actually a democratisation of care and concern. Sure, it comes along with a bit of display, but so what? That also has the positive social effect of publicising the action. It’s too simple to see it just as narcissistic, or as symbolic rather than ‘real’ (“good citizenship”) – whatever that distinction might mean in this context.

So, now onto patriotism. I think I might actually just reproduce Rundle’s piece below the fold (with the kind permission of Crikey). I think Rundle is right that there’s an affectual dimension to patriotism (which, ironically, is the sort of dimension Soutphommasane doesn’t like about moustaches and ribbons), and that arid civics lessons won’t do too much to foster a left version. There’s also a context to the sorts of work which underlie Soutphommasane’s thought – such as Habermas’ notion of ‘constitutional cosmopolitan patriotism’, whose German and European origins in a set of particular historical and cultural concerns are much less universalisable than our philosophers may think. And therein lies the rub; as with the public meeting that replaces Movember, it’s unclear why anyone would get very excited about Soutphommasane’s progressive patriotism. You can’t, as Rundle says, legislate for it. And it doesn’t represent a viable political strategy for the left, for a whole range of reasons, including the basic failure whereby a project which transforms the social and the cultural cannot be substituted for by a fairly empty civics. At the end of the day, as Rundle implies, any strong nationalism will be a double edged sword – difficult to disarticulate from white nativism and lacking affectual power if it’s some sort of pub trivia recitation of what the Eureka stockade was all about, and who the first Labor Prime Minister was, or whatever. On the left, we would do much better to spend more time thinking about a transformed future than trying to retrospectively invent social democracy in one country.

Continue reading ‘On Movember, Tim Soutphommasane and civics’

On Paul Kelly and political history

Published
by
Mark
4 months ago
in Australiana, History, Howardia, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 41 Comments

I referred in an earlier post to Paul Kelly’s style of commentary – a mix of oracular pronouncement and portentous ponderings about the primacy of narrative. I actually read his March of Patriots a while back, and planned to review it. But one hardly knows where to start. Almost everyone – bar the in house cheer squad – referred at the time of its release to the stretch involved in equating Paul Keating and John Howard’s visions as if they formed some unified patriotic project. Obliged, obviously, to deal with their animosity, Kelly sought to square the circle by implicitly positing some sort of distinction between surface events and historical forces, which of course then falls in a heap because his analysis can’t get much beyond the personal and quotidian. The claim that Howard and Keating were some sort of generational throwbacks – exemplars of ‘authenticity’ – contains something of insight, but a dash more of the forcing of categories of which Kelly is so fond.

I could go on, but instead, I’ll refer the interested reader to Guy Rundle’s comprehensive review, which is well worth a read.

Aside from his deft skewering of the position of the Insider Kelly loves to adopt, Rundle is spot on about the almost complete absence of any social and cultural context for the events and decisions Kelly narrates. It’s as if ‘the people’ – that abstraction par excellence – only shuffle onto the stage by proxy; as figures in the ubiquitous Newspoll.

Kelly is trying to write something a little more profound than the ‘first draft of history’ traditionally assigned to the journalist’s pen. There’s more than a tip of the hat to John Howard’s nationalistic view of history’s uses. But he ends up writing solely about politicians, and not all that much about Australia at all. That’s a symptom of a broader disease in the political class, which is also a sort of provincialism. In this, Kelly really is an exemplar.

Another apology

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 months ago
in Crime, History, Parenting and Politics
. 28 Comments

Both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull were unreserved, and eloquent, in their apology to the “Forgotten Australians”.

The Forgotten Australians are the child migrants who were shipped out to various church-run institutions, deprived of connection with their extended families, and in many cases subjected to physical and sexual abuse.

Both Rudd and Turnbull expressed a commitment to ensure that children in state care are never again subject to such abuses. That’s the hard part, of course. The Herald Sun has recently run a series of articles (strangely not online) claiming that Victoria’s youth training centers are “dysfunctional”. The solutions proposed are straight out of the tabloid “tough love” textbook, of course, but if there’s any substance to the claims in the stories we’re still a very long way from adequately protecting all children in the care of the state.

CORRECTION: The apology was to all of those in state care of the era, not just the child migrants.

Remembering total war

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 months, 1 week ago
in Europe, Foreign policy, History and War
. 38 Comments

On this Remembrance Day, Armagny chooses to remember the horror of total war:

Behind such particular, smaller scale, analogies and partisan arguments, played out in nations largely benefitting from a sustained pax, there is the big thing that happened in the two World Wars. There is total war. Slaughter of millions. Loss of entire generations. Loss of cultures, great historical buildings and artifacts, loss of humanity.

I don’t think we remember that, not really, and I don’t think it’s an issue of left or right. My greatest fear is not World War II, the model of the rampant dictator who can’t be placated, but of the Great War, the combination of belligerent (if not quite Hitler-esque) leaderships, appalling diplomatic blunders, and the suction created by a set of interwoven alliances that draws nations that have no real gripe with each other into an unending slaughter.

Personally, I don’t fear a repeat of lengthy total wars between major powers. We may again slaughter each other by the millions, but if we do so it will be all over in hours, not years. And, so far, that realization has prevented (by a hair’s breadth, on at least one occasion) world leaders from giving it a try.

But the knowledge that we could compress the misery of the world wars into just a few short hours certainly gives me pause on this Remembrance Day.

“Electric Dreams” are not just in the home.

Published
by
Robert Merkel
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Fashion, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Parenting, Sociology, Technology and The Web
. 10 Comments

While the format of Electric Dreams is now thoroughly familiar – a modern-day family is placed in a facsimile of some past historical era, and their reactions to it recorded for the camera, this BBC reality show (screening early on Sunday evenings on Channel Ten for the next two weeks) is somewhat unusual in its choice of historical eras to recreate. Rather than settler households, or the travails of Victorian-era aristocracy, this show recreates the recent past and concentrates on the progression of domestic technology. Each episode concentrates on a decade, with the first episode (screening last night) setting the participating family up in a “1970s house”. Each day, the “clock” was advanced one year, and new gadgets were delivered to the house, roughly corresponding to the median British household of the year.

At one level, this show, both for the (adult) participants and for much of the audience, is an exercise in geeky nostalgia, with the theme tune from Pot Black, Pong, and a beautifully-restored but still awful to drive Ford Cortina making appearances. But, to give the producers credit, they’ve very much tried to place the technology in its social context as much as possible. There’s a power outage, caused by “a miners’ strike”. Contrary to popular belief, the children actually spend less time interacting with their parents in the “1970s”, particularly as their mother battles the lack of kitchen facilities. And it rapidly becomes clear just how limited home entertainment options were in this relatively recent era – particularly in a drab English winter.

But, entertaining as the show was – and as a child of the 1980s I can’t wait to see the next episode – the format has inherent limitations. The impacts of domestic technology – the gadgets and gizmos we personally interact with – are very real. But invisible technology makes a great deal of difference too; not least of which because it made us materially better-off over that period (in Britain and Australia, if not the United States). The effect of incomes can’t really be dealt with particularly well here – by the end of the show’s timeline, the middle-class family depicted would have reduced their cooking efforts even more; not through any particular piece of technology, but because they could afford to eat out a lot more often.

But it is what it is, and, amongst other questions, it will be interesting to see if the participants identify any particular technology as having the most impact over the eras depicted on the show. The mobile phone, perhaps?

Vale Marek Edelman

Published
by
Paul Norton
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Europe, History, International and Politics
. 20 Comments

Lord Acton once wrote that “great men are almost always bad men”. Marek Edelman, who has just passed away aged either 87 or 90, was an unquestionably great human being who was also a very, very good human being, and a fine example of what the democratic left, at its best, should be about.

Catallaxy also marks Edelman’s passing under a most appropriate heading.