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September 27, 2005

Laurie Aarons: 19 August 1917 - 7 February 2005

This obituary for Laurie Aarons, a leader of the Communist Party of Australia, appeared in The Age, 11 February 2005 under the heading 'Top comrade bucked heavy-handed Soviets'.

One of the first acts of rebellion by Laurie Aarons, who has died of cancer at Calvary Hospital in Sydney, aged 87, occurred during the 1930s when a conservative member of the NSW Parliament tried to pass a law enforcing "neck-to-knee" costumes at Bondi and other surfing beaches in Sydney.

Along with his comrades in the Young Communist League, Aarons wore bathing trunks and defied the planned law, which soon collapsed.

A short time earlier, at age 14, he had made his first political speech, this time opposing the New Guard, a quasi-fascist group that attacked communists and unemployed protests.

Aarons was born in the year of the Russian revolution and led a life full of commitment to the ideal of socialism as a member and leader of the Communist Party of Australia. Paradoxically, his greatest achievement was to have the moral courage to question the distortion of the socialist ideal in the USSR.

He represented a strand within the Jewish community epitomised by Marx that was internationalist, socialist, revolutionary and secular.

In the 1930s he became a boot repairer and threw himself into political activity and the trade union movement. Alarmed by the growth of fascism, and like many in the CPA, he initially supported World War II, only to soon criticise it as an "imperialist war" when the CPA dogmatically followed the Soviet position. This changed after the Nazi attack on the USSR in 1941, and Aarons tried to join the RAAF but was rejected. He later found out from security files that this was largely because his father had fought in Spain on the Republican side during the civil war. During World War II he worked with the services bureau of the CPA, which supported the 3000 to 4000 communists in the armed forces.

In 1944 he married Carole Arkinstall, after separating from his first wife, Della Nicholas. Thereafter, he shared his life with Arkinstall, until her death in 2003. They had three sons, Brian, Mark and John.

The CPA emerged in the post-war period as a strong force and Aarons worked as a party organiser, first in Adelaide, then Newcastle.

When the party faced banning in 1951, Aarons was poised to go "underground" with a secretly elected leadership group intended to replace the central committee, which would have been arrested.

Throughout the Cold War, as with all leading communists, he was under surveillance by secret intelligence organisations. ASIO accumulated at least 20 volumes of files on him, recording his movements, speeches and telephone conversations. In the 1980s he was able to read much of this with wry amusement at the National Archives.

His period as national secretary of the CPA from 1965 saw a period of renewal, as the party's internal workings were democratised and loosened.

The speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Stalin, and the Sino-Soviet split, caused Aarons to become sceptical of the Soviet claim to unquestioning respect.

In early 1968 he welcomed the development of "socialism with a human face" under Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia.

His denunciation of the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks set the CPA on a collision course with the Soviet Union; it resulted in the Soviet Communist Party attacking the CPA and sponsoring a pro-Soviet wing, which formed a breakaway rump in 1971. In the 1970s the CPA embraced the ideas of the emerging radical movements among women, students and environmentalists. Under Aarons' leadership, communist-led unions looked increasingly outwards to the community rather than inwards to the narrow issues of members' wages and conditions.

He was particularly heartened by the struggle of the NSW Builders Labourers' Federation, which saved historic buildings from demolition, while taking militancy on members' poor wages and conditions to new heights.

This renewal, plus the CPA's passionate participation in the anti-Vietnam War movement, led to a rejuvenation of the CPA that lasted into the 1980s. But by 1991, the CPA could not go on and the party dissolved.

Aarons retired as CPA national secretary in 1976 and, to the surprise of his comrades, took up work as a taxi driver.

In the 1980s he held great hopes for the program of perestroika and glasnost under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and was deeply disappointed when this collapsed.

In retirement he wrote a series of pamphlets attacking tax avoidance by the rich, ASIO, and the growing inequality in Australia. He also conducted many oral history interviews with veteran communists, and these are now in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

As a man, he was well loved for his modesty, integrity, optimism and passion for justice and fairness.

Aarons is survived by his brother Eric, half-brother Gerald, sons Brian, John and Mark, by four grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Posted by David at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)

Denis Freney 1936-1995: a rebel with many causes

This obituary of Denis Freney was published under the heading 'Dynamo of left led Timor protest' in The Australian, 11 September 1995.

Denis Freney lived a life full of adventure which sprang from his passionate commitment to a better world through the political Left. His recent death from cancer at 58 has shocked many people. He was best known in Australia for his key role in organising the Campaign for an Independent East Timor and his earlier organising in the Vietnam Moratorium and the protests against the 1971 Springbok football tour.

Over 20 years he became one of Australia’s most widely known and energetic left wing activists and journalists. He personified Gramsci's aphorism that to change society one need 'optimism of the will'. His life paralleled the profound changes in Australia from the Menzian era of the RSL, of short hair and conformity towards a more relaxed and liberal society.

His commitment to East Timor began well before the Indonesian invasion when he organised a trade union and community delegation to the newly liberated Portuguese colony. In this period and after the invasion he worked closely with Jose Ramos Horta and Abilio Araujo in keeping the world informed of the bruality of Indonesian rule and the Fretilin guerrilla struggle.

In the early years after the invasion he set up a much needed radio link with the Fretilin guerrillas and with the support of several Australian and East Timorese established a transmitter in a remote part of the Northern Territory. Though harassed by Australian intelligence, Telecom and police, this vital contact survived for more than 18 months.

Denis Freney’s attachment to the Left began when he was attracted as a teenager to the ALP in the early 1950s, but he soon joined the Communist Party of Australia at Sydney University. But after Kruschev’s secret speech on Stalin’s crimes and the subsequent invasion of Hungary he joined the trotskyist movement.

His commitment to the Fourth International, as it was known, was to be the beginning of eight years of sometimes dangerous travel to promote anti-colonial rebellion and socialism. He worked in Algeria in the wake of the FLN victory and undertook an organising mission to South Africa under apartheid, among other places.

In Johannesburg in 1961 in the wake of the lifting of a State of Emergency, he made contact with the Committee for National Liberation. This mainly white group planned and carried out sabotage and prepared for guerrilla warfare against the white regime. In one memorable incident he was in car with a white and two black members of the CNL when the police pulled them up. The Afrikaans-speaking white driver dealt with the policeman, remarking later that they were lucky he had not looked in the boot: it was full of stolen detonators being used to blow up electric pylons.

In 1963 Denis travelled to newly free Algeria to work with the Algerian Press Service and with Michel Pablo, an adviser to the new FLN government of Ben Bella. With Pablo he popularsied the notion of ‘self-management’ -- a form of grassroots control by peasants and workers which tried to avoid the centralism and bureaucracy of Soviet-style socialism. A little later he narrowly escaped being caught up in a coup in Algeria by the conservative forces in the FLN.

After 1968 Denis lived in Australia and became a dynamo on the Left, helping organise many demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and setting up a suburban shop called ‘Liberation’ on Sydney’s northern beaches. At this time Liberal state MP Peter Coleman denounced him as 'one of a handful of teachers committed to mobilising high school students for revolution'. As a teacher he kept his politics and job separate, except for unionism. He became the centre of a major industrial dispute when he was victimised by a compulsory transfer to another school. His position symbolised the frustration of many newly militant teachers with the bureaucracy and authoritarianism of the Education Department.

The massive campaign against the 1971 Springbok rugby tour which ended sporting contact with South Africa was in large part driven by his energy. At one point his home was raided by police who planted smokeflares under his bed and then arrested him. This was hardly necessary -- his car boot contained a dozen of the devices used to disrupt the football.

In 1970 Denis Freney rejoined the Communist Party of Australia, to the displeasure of the pro-Soviet minority. The CPA was evolving away from Stalinism and had condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He promoted its further evolution during whihc it embraced the new social movements of womens liberation, gay liberation and what we now call the green movement. Denis was part of a wave of new radicals who revitalised the staid Left and detonated a chain reaction of social change which is still being felt in Australian society.

While he was organising the Campaign for an Independent East Timor and in the 1980s, Denis worked as a journalist on the CPA paper Tribune. He had begun by changing a lot of the paper’s stuffiness born of the male dominated trade union world. Later he was to report on the flowering of Solidarity in the early 80s for Tribune. A decade earlier Denis wrote one of the first articles in Australia reporting the emergence of the militant Gay Liberation Movement in New York. A short time later he acknowledged his own homosexuality by coming out and becoming one of the early activists in the gay movement.

Yet for much of his life, Denis sacrified his personal life to broader goals, as he explained in his autobiography, A Map of Days (Heinemann). Yet he always had a circle of close friends with whom he shared communal houses or the hot curries for which he became famous.

He was not always an easy man to get close to and his single-mindedness occasionally drove his closest friends to distraction or laughter.

In recent years, like many today on the Left, he began to re-think the meaning of his lifelong commitment, though he never wavered from the egalitarian, humanist and secular values at the heart of his beliefs. He was a man who regretted nothing he had done and was proud of most of it. His life was a testament to the idea that committed individuals can make a big difference to the society in which they live.

Mary Alice Evatt described her late husband, Dr Evatt in a way that applies to Denis Freney. 'He would never hold himself back from things. Now the people who are not good in life or in politics or in art are those who won't give everything, hold themselves back from life, from pain and joy, both. No, he would always put all of himself into whatever he was doing. And it made life very interesting, it made it very difficult for him but still that was his nature.'

A commemoration for Denis Freney will be held at the Harold Park Hotel, Wigram Rd Glebe, on Saturday 16th September, 12.30pm.

Posted by David at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2005

Lindsay Tanner: Old labels don't reflect new values

The following is a speech by the ALP Shadow Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner at the launch of Beyond Right and Left at Gleebooks on 20 Sep 2005 at Gleebooks in Sydney.

VIRTUALLY every day I read stories in The Australian about a mysterious group called The Left. I rarely see any reference to The Right. Those opposed to The Left are clearly right-thinking people, way too discreet and civilised to warrant anything so impolite as a label.

As a member of the ALP Left I guess I must be part of The Left.

Strangely, though, many of the views and values attributed to The Left in The Australian don't really reflect mine. I don't really see myself as an elitist, pseudo-intellectual, self-hating, pretentious, protectionist, postmodernist. Unfortunately, like all good myths, this jaundiced view of people on the Left contains just enough truth to make it plausible.

Although it is a grotesque caricature in aggregate, enough individual examples can always be found to illustrate specific characterisations. We should be asking why. For those of us who are on the Left, the answers are pretty confronting. The Australian caricature cannot be taken too seriously, but its resonance does tell us something. People on the Left no longer share a common analysis and narrative. In the absence of a single clear and coherent message that defines its adherents, the Left does not really exist as a distinct entity. It consists of a diverse collection of groups and individuals who identify with different and sometimes even conflicting political traditions.

In David McKnight's Beyond Right and Left, the true challenge facing people on the Left is set out clearly and dispassionately. As McKnight points out, the Left-Right spectrum of ideas has collapsed, and many old ways of thinking are finished. Fundamental issues such as environmental sustainability, family life, economic inequality and cultural diversity are no longer readily reducible to a linear Left-Right analysis. When our leading left-wing intellectual is recent former Quadrant editor Robert Manne, and one of the most powerful proponents of left-wing causes is former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, something funny is happening. They might have changed a bit, but not that much.

The emerging fault lines in Australian politics involve issues such as environmental sustainability, material progress eroding relationships, entrenched poverty reflecting family breakdown and drug abuse, ethical issues about the human body, and globalisation. Although distinctly Left and Right-flavoured positions can be found on such issues, the overall political landscape is deeply confused. The old simplicities have disappeared.

As McKnight points out, the Right has largely absorbed the extraordinary changes of recent decades and thereby transformed itself. The Left has essentially failed to do so. In many respects the Right is now the main force for radical social change, whereas the Left is largely the defender of the status quo. Both are encumbered with inherently contradictory positioning. The Right is economically liberal and socially interventionist, while the Left is economically interventionist and socially liberal.

For most of the 20th century, Western politics revolved around a simple contest for material resources within nation states. It reflected the interminable battle between rewarding effort and equal sharing, the tension in most human activity between competition and co-operation.

Things are more complex now. The old materialist fault line in politics is gradually being overtaken by a new fault line, built around levels of education, and involvement in abstract or symbolic thinking. The Left increasingly reflects the interests and aspirations of the more educated, who tend to be the more affluent.

The traditional champions of the poor have fewer and fewer poor people among their numbers. Resolving this contradiction may be impossible. It could even be that the Left as it has been understood in post-war Western societies is in the process of disintegrating. We need to ask ourselves some pretty hard questions.

We might reject George W. Bush's violent crusade to spread democracy throughout the world, but what are we doing about it? What's our strategy? We may disdain Noel Pearson's blunt assessment of the need for change in indigenous communities, but what's our solution? More of the same? We're often critical of the family as a social institution, so why do we campaign for workers to be able to spend more time with their families? A huge amount of rethinking needs to occur among those of us who adhere to values traditionally associated with the Left of politics. McKnight's book is a timely reminder that we have been flying on autopilot for way too long.

Although some of its members might perhaps disagree, Labor is part of the Left. We have a profound responsibility to nurture the debate about the future of left-wing politics. We need to build a new guiding story which unites us in common belief and common aspiration. For me, that story needs to be international, environmental and relational. Our starting point should be our relationships with each other, the building blocks upon which all human activity is constructed and conducted.

The path to a new story will be winding, rocky and even treacherous at times. Relational analysis will provide us with the map to navigate that path. The social nature of human beings is at the heart of Left values. In a world where radical individualism is rampant, rebuilding the web of human relationships in which we all owe obligations to each other, is absolutely fundamental.

This article was also printed in The Australian on 20 September 2005.

Posted by David at 07:47 AM | Comments (1)

September 21, 2005

A world made by markets

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of "Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War" (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

We live in a world made by markets. The last 20 years has seen the triumph of a broad doctrine which goes by many names -- economic rationalism, neo-liberalism, neo-classical economics, supply-side economics -- which argues that all kinds of economic and social issues can be successfully dealt with by a combination of individualism, competition and free markets. At the same time, an older style of conservatism and social liberalism have waned and along with socialism in both its radical and reformist modes.

These changes and the end of the Cold War in 1989-91 have ushered in the era of the New Capitalism: more global, more efficient and more dynamic. The Old Capitalism of the post-war industrial world operated in a regulated economy relying for its profitability on industries based on food processing, white goods, cars and steel making. The New Capitalism is a deregulated economy increasingly relying on services and knowledge. It commercializes all aspects of culture and leisure. The New Capitalism deepens the commodification of things once done within the family economy: preparing meals, caring for children and caring for the elderly. Activities, once performed by government, have been commercialized or privatised in recent years: education, electricity generation, telecommunications, water and health. All of this economic activity is backed by sophisticated industries of marketing and advertising. Everything is a product and everyone is a customer.

New Capitalism is a libertarian capitalism and libertarianism has attractive elements. It is more open and flexible . Workers are more mobile and skilled workers, especially those with skills in demand have more autonomy in their working life and good material rewards. For most people daily life is less constrained by social conformism. Enjoyment is not constantly shadowed by moralistic guilt. Sexuality and sexual preference are hidden in the shadows and the expectations of women (and men) are less rigid.

Indeed the libertarian new capitalism has embraced the libertarian cultural revolution of the 1970s. Diverse lifestyles have been converted into market niches for an endless array of new consumer products. Above all, for many, material living standards are higher than at an time in history.

Under this dispensation a curious paradox has emerged. The threat of communism has collapsed and Western economies pour out a cornucopia of material goods, yet there is an uneasiness about all of this. There has been a popular revival of critiques of hyper consumption and hyper individualism. There is a yearning for ‘moral values’. A move back to religious belief – often fundamentalist -- has been observed, both in the wealthy West and in the less developed world.

The gap between the super rich and the poorest is growing. A larger middle class is growing. In a previous era the struggle over this unequal distribution of wealth was the underlying dynamic of politics in countries like Australia. Today resentment over the unequal distribution of wealth has lost its bite. But unease and resentment about something else is growing. It’s hard to put your finger on but it is about the way we live, the quality of our lives. It has something to do with that overused and slippery term, ‘stress’. It is about being unable to spend as much time with your children as you’d like. It’s insecurity about your job. It’s about the growth of social problems like gambling, drug abuse and mental illness. It’s a loss of trust in common institutions (and not just parliament). For ‘old Australians’ it is an unease over multiculturalism and an uncertainty over national identity.

It’s also about the penetration of commercial values into all parts of our lives. As we enter the 21st century our world is not only faster, busier and more stressful it is also suffused with the language and values of business.

It once seemed common sense that public goods such as water, telephone services, electricity, road building and so on would be organised with the public good uppermost in mind. Privatisation, marketisation, competition and deregulation have become the new common sense – and bring with them a new set of values. Universities were once institutions whose rationale was in the knowledge they produced and passed on. Today universities jealously guard their ‘brand’ in the competitive market for fee-paying overseas and local students.

The market revolution

Humanity did not always live in such excessively market-driven economies. In pre-market agrarian societies life was regulated by custom and not markets, every action by an individual was moralised, invested with a sense of right and wrong which was determined by whatever religious or spiritual beliefs prevailed. Money was not the sole measure of value. Every action was measured against the weight of tradition, and every action occurred within a web of obligation towards family and tribe. Such societies were stable and slow paced. Lest we romanticise them, they were (and are) societies of material scarcity and sometimes people starved to death. Obligation was enforced by ostracism or violence. They were deeply conservative -- marriages are arranged and women obey men sometimes on pain of death.

The point of the comparison, as I said, is not to romanticize these societies, but to say this: our modern day instincts and minds were shaped by a million years of hunter-gather society then by agriculture-based societies for the last 10,000 years. Our human nature evolved in conditions which are utterly different from modern society. We always had the capacity for individual aspiration and self-interest but this was held in check by low material level which forced communal lifestyles for most of human history. Today as the material wealth of society soars to new heights, these instincts are less restrained. As well, a growing gap is emerging between these instincts and the more communal human instincts.

The market grew out of occasional exchanges on the periphery of human communities. In the earliest times, salt was traded over long distances, in later ones fruit, vegetables, animals and were bought and sold on a cycle of ‘market days’. Today the market is the central totem of our society, active around the clock, producing commodities, demanding our time and defining our lives. In this kind of society social relations are under constant pressure of being reduced to their commercial and instrumental purpose.

Once a robust sphere of non-commercial life existed alongside the world of the market. Today this non-commercial sphere, from the level of public institutions down to family life is shrinking and is itself being commodified, its elements being produced or packaged and sold on commercial terms. Old fashioned notions like the public good blur and the quality of life changes in so many ways. We live rushed lives, jamming work, fast food and leisure into the constricted space of our lives. One response is the popular radical movement in Italy today called the ‘slow food movement’ which stands for a different way of living, not just of eating.

This is the era of the New Capitalism whose outlines first emerged during the long boom which ended in the mid-1970s. Its flourishing only fully emerged after the impact of the Thatcher and Reagan eras made themselves clear. It is a turbo-capitalism, a lean and mean capitalism, a capitalism with no competitors.

Family values and the New Capitalism

The effect of the new commercial values is most keenly felt when it affects our most intimate places, our immediate circle, our family and close friends.

Families, friendships and other non-market bonds are a problem for economic liberalism and the commercial culture which it promotes. Relations between families, friends and similar communities tend not to be motivated by self-interest but by care for others and altruism. Parents raise their children because they love them, not for reward. They may receive a reward, such as the reciprocal love of their child but it is not because of this calculation that they spend time and money and less tangible things in caring. Nor is this solely because children are uniquely vulnerable. Among adults, friends help each other without a thought of monetary reward.

And this happens in communities as well. While writing this book I happened to visit the war memorial in the town of Goulburn in southern New South Wales. I was struck by an inscription honouring the dead soldiers. It read: ‘Service Before Self’. The society which chose these noble but quaint words might as well have been from antiquity rather than one within living memory. An ethic of service still exists in communities but more than ever today it works against the grain.

Care for others, altruism, non-market relations – such feelings, such motives and the actions which flow from them do not make sense for most economic theorists. They do not easily fit the model of rational, self-interested behaviour. The place where they flourish most of all is in families. One person who has done much to pinpoint the contradiction between market values and family values is the feminist economist, Nancy Folbre in her book The Invisible Heart. This American academic chose the title of her book as a play on words of the best remembered phrase in Adam Smith’s 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations. Smith saw the ‘invisible hand’ of the market – composed of a multitude of self-interested actions – resulting in a common good. Smith, often credited as the intellectual founder of neo-liberalism (it’s actually more complicated than that) pointed to the beneficial role of self-interest in the economy. In another memorable phrase he argues that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest.’

But Folbre points out that even though Smith was speaking figuratively his example is very misleading. The sale of meat by the butcher does not actually provide us with dinner at all. He provides the meat for dinner but the preparation of dinner (like many similar acts) is usually done by a wife or mother who does not act out of self interest. In fact, a vast, parallel political economy based on the ‘invisible heart’ continually lubricates and reproduces society.

The invisible hand represents the forces of supply and demand in competitive markets. The invisible heart represents family values of love, obligation and reciprocity. The invisible hand is about acheivement. The invisible heart is about care for others. The hand and heart are interdependent but they are also in conflict. The only way to balance them successfully is to find fair ways of rewarding those who care for other people. This is not a problem that economists – or business people – have taken seriously. They have generally assumed that God, nature, the family and ‘Super Mom’ – or some combination thereof – would automatically provide whatever care was needed.

Nancy Folbre points out that the book which launched Adam Smith’s career was not The Wealth of Nations but The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In it Smith showed he was perfectly aware of the existence of the kind of altruistic labour which Folbre writes. He assumed that some kind of strong moral and altruistic underpinning of society would continue indefinitely and not be fundamentally damaged by the operation of competition and markets. But the spreading and entrenchment of markets, and especially of the values they promote, is doing just that.

Since the days of Adam Smith the functions of the family have progressively been whittled away by the rise of industrial capitalism. From the introduction of widespread wage labour, the manufacture of food and clothing, to the provision of education and health, the family has been reducing continually. Not that this has been a uniformly bad thing. The traditional family depended almost totally on the unstinting and unpaid work of wives and mothers whose choices about their own desires and needs depended on the goodwill of their husbands. The market and the process of commodification, as we shall see later, are by no means entirely bad things. Folbre argues that capitalism weakened the family in some ways that were good in other ways that were bad. Wage employment was important for women giving them some alternatives to immediate marriage and motherhood. Some degree of financial independence became possible. ‘Most of us agree that the growth of individualism expanded personal freedom in some very healthy ways.‘

In the era of neo-liberalism these tendencies have rapidly intensified and are now having an opposite effect from expanding freedom. Today the final remaining functions of the family are being squeezed as the care of young children and the provision of food are increasingly provided by the market and the pressures of work constrict the time of parents. But the question is not just how much further we can go in this commodification. The question is whether we are already experiencing the costs of the crushing of our most intimate groupings and the devaluing of care.

Markets and the environment

One of the best known areas on which market values clash with other values is the environment. This is obvious in basic ways, such as the desires of property developers and construction companies to tear down heritage buildings or for logging or mining companies to despoil the natural environment. But this is a microcosm of what is happening globally.

Markets can harness self interest to produce massive economic growth. In the past century world economic output has increased twentyfold. This has brought enormous benefits in standards of living but it has been purchased at enormous cost to the environment and to our future. Between one third to a half of the world’s forests are gone and about half the mangroves and other wetlands. About three quarters of marine fisheries are over-fished. There is a crisis in the loss of biodiversity, with large numbers of species of birds, mammals reptiles and fish facing extinction or already extinct. The use of oil and coal plus deforestation has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The result is human-made climate change, with the melting of icecaps, erratic storms and desertification. The scale of it all and its implications are too difficult to contemplate for most people.

In her speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS president, ecologist Jane Lubchenco said:

The conclusions … are inescapable: during the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature. We are modifying physical, chemical, and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates and over large spatial scales than ever recorded on Earth. Humans have unwittingly embarked on a grand experiment with out planet. The outcome of this experiment is unknown, but has profound implications for all life on Earth.

Another analysis of the global ecological crisis is aimed at the increasingly obvious glaring holes in neo-liberal theory. The economist and environmentalist David Korten argues that one of the key weaknesses of free market economics is that corporations can ‘externalize’ their costs. That is, they mostly don’t have to pay for, or face the consequences of the true cost of their operations. It is basic to market theory that the producer must bear all the costs of production and that these be included in the selling price of a commodity. In fact, corporations constantly try to externalize their costs. They try to ‘free ride’:

‘Externalized costs don’t go away – they are simply ignored by those who benefit from making the decisions that result in others incurring the costs. For example when a forest products corporations obtains rights to clear-cut Forest Service land at giveaway prices and leaves behind a devastated habitat, the company reaps the immediate profit and the society bears the long term costs. When logging companies are contracted by the Mitsubishi Corporation to cut the forests of the Penan tribespeople of Sarawak, the corporation bears no cost for devastating native culture and ways of life.’

Globalization and human values

The area of commercialisation and marketisation which has caused some of the greatest political controversies is not on the home turf of advanced industrial countries but concerns the less developed world. The social and moral crisis which is implicit in advanced countries is explicit in the under-developed world. In the latter the crises exacerbated by the global neo-liberal economy, can be a matter of life and death. For example, it can mean the denial of life-saving drugs to the dying due to intellectual property rules tightened at the insistence of pharmaceutical companies; it can mean the stripping of jungle mountains and plains of their natural cover by logging companies; it can mean the dumping of toxic waste from mining in rivers which are the life blood of local communities.

Or it can mean something less dramatic such as the refusal by wealthy ‘free trade’ nations to open their borders to the agricultural products of poorer nations. As a result, they pay $300 billion annually in farm subsidies which distort trade and lower world prices to the detriment of poor countries. About 25,000 American cotton farmers, for example, are paid US$1.5 billion annually as subsidies while they control 40% of global cotton exports.

The main moral defence of neo-liberal globalization is that it is necessary to assist people in less developed countries to gain some of those benefits of a higher living standard – clean water, affordable food, shelter, a health and education system. It is telling then that one of the most powerful rebuttals of this comes not from a radical in the anti-globalization movement but from the Nobel prize winner for economics, Joseph Stiglitz.

Explaining why he wrote his book Globalization and its Discontents, Stiglitz said his views on globalization were changed by serving in the World Bank where ‘I saw first hand the devastating effect that globalization can have on developing countries and especially the poor within those countries.’ Stiglitz argues that globalization has the potential to enrich the poor but must be ‘radically rethought’. What made Stiglitz critical of his own generation of neo-liberal economists is that he had a broader notion of human values which made him skeptical of ideologically-driven policy.

Posted by David at 06:01 AM | Comments (12)

September 11, 2005

Beyond Right and Left: Introduction

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of my book, "Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War" (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

Do the terms Right and Left mean anything anymore in politics today? Political pundits use the terms Right and Left but like any words repeated over and over, the meaning starts to disappear. So many people are skeptical. We routinely describe the John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition government as Right. Logically, then, Labor, is Left. But is this accurate or even helpful? The meaning of these terms, like the ideas of those parties, has been transformed in recent times. When Kim Beazley was elected leader of the Labor Party for the second time in 2005, the former Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser commented that there was not a single issue on which Kim Beazley ‘is on the Left of me’. Then there is Iraq. George W. Bush (on the Right) made war and was joined by Britain’s Labour Government (on the Left). Meanwhile, the French Government (Right) and the German government (Left) opposed the UK-USA war.

What’s going on?

The Right is defined as conservative and the Left as radical in their attitudes to social change. But the radical economic changes in Australia over the last two decades have been driven by both major parties. When John Howard and Peter Costello took government in 1996, the modified but did not basically change the direction of economic policy from that of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Yet voices on the Right and Left have protested this overall direction on which the mainstream parties agree.

The Right-Left model assumes that all the big questions of the day can be fitted on this spectrum. But is this true? Where do concerns about the environment fit? Is alarm about climate change and loss of biodiversity a ‘left wing’ response? Is it ‘right wing’ to be worried about the family? Moreover there is a widespread expectation that people must choose either Right or Left, as if all the wisdom lies on one side or the other. We often feel frustrated that policies and ideas are put in one box or the other rather than being judged in their own terms.

In this book I argue that the Right-Left confusion is a symptoms of a broader historic shift in cultural, social and economic ideas. This shift offers new opportunities for breaking out of the Right-Left bind and creating new ways of seeing the world. Quite unprecedented problems, above all in the global environment but also in the family, require this. Untangling the Right-Left knot is the key to understanding the direction of new ideas, which take from both Right and Left.

In this book I want to challenge a number of complacent beliefs of the Right and Left. This is vital because these beliefs are the hidden underpinnings of decisions that affect our daily lives and will affect the lives of our children and their descendants. These ideas define the meaning of key terms such as the common good, individualism, care for others and freedom. The names for these sets of philosophical ideas are liberalism, socialism and conservatism. These ideas are little discussed although they motivate policies and stances of governments and parties. They have a new relevance today with the rise of debates around ‘values’ in politics. They have also been joined by historically very new ideas such as environmentalism, feminism and multiculturalism whose meaning and application is the subject of intense conflict.

The new ideas and old ideas are still trapped within a linear political spectrum of Right and Left. I believe that shaking up and breaking up this Right-Left spectrum is the key to advancing issues such as the environment, the family, economic inequality, cultural diversity and even deeper issues about purpose and meaning in our lives. Many people instinctively feel, as I do, that the established spectrum of Right and Left is inadequate and this book will explore where this might take us. In the next chapter I begin this journey by examining the most powerful – yet little understood -- set of ideas of recent times which are those of the Right.

Originally, the idea of Right and Left stemmed from the seating arrangement of the National Assembly after the French Revolution of 1789. The deputies on the left of the chamber wanted to carry through the goals of the revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – through to their logical and radical conclusion. The Right of the chamber was opposed to this. It was wary of radical experiments which implemented abstract ideas such as equality and it tended to value traditions. In nineteenth century Europe the Left became more clearly defined as a socialist force, wanting to redistribute the wealth of the newly industrializing nations to the working class. The Right became the description of those who thought the existing order worked well and was divinely ordained and who benefited from it. This period set the tone where the Right was defined as conservative and the Left as radical.

In the twentieth century, the Left and Right came to be defined more by those supporting a greater role for governments, either in its social democratic or Marxist form, and those who opposed it. In the cold war the Right and Left were defined by attitudes to communism and anti-communism.

The Right-Left model originated in Europe and although it did not translate in a simple and direct way into Australia enough of these ideas and traditions permeated to Australia to make the Right-Left way of thinking part of a generally accepted discourse. For many reasons, among them the globalising economy and the collapse of the cold war, this basic way of thinking about politics is now being transformed. Today however the Right-Left spectrum is increasingly useless as a way of talking about many issues. And while the Right-Left binary remains in popular use, what is actually meant by Right and Left has changed dramatically. The content of the ideas of Right and Left has changed greatly in recent decades.

At the level of major political parties in Australia, the Right-Left distinction was once very pronounced on economic policy. Today this distinction has narrowed dramatically and there is now wide acceptance of what can be loosely called free market economic theories. Since economic theories also express an attitude to wider social and philosophical ideas including the role of government, there is a significant degree of convergence between the major parties. Debates on economic policy today are about identifying the best managers and not about the most convincing planners for change or the social goals of economic policy. This convergence has been accompanied by a certain reversal of roles. Where once Labor was the party of ideology, vision and conviction, today the policies of the Liberals and even the Nationals often have a more distinct ideological tinge. Where once Labor was influenced by the various theories of socialist ideology, today the most significant ideological input in Australian politics comes from the intellectual circles of the Right, especially from its policy ‘think tanks’ and Labor prides itself on its pragmatism. Pollsters have detected a public desire for what they call ‘conviction politics’ but this now tends to translate into support for the Right rather than to the former partisans of principle on the Left.

The social classes that once underpinned the Right-Left spectrum have also changed. The industrial working class, once the heartland for Labor, has shrunk and Labor can no longer take its allegiance for granted. Today workers are noted for their social conservatism not their radicalism. The middle class, once the conservative heartland for the Liberal Party, has grown in size and part of it now consistently supports Labor and a small number are drawn to the Greens.

In the wider political debate outside the major parties, the meaning of Right and Left is becoming harder to define simply. The rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, for example, bluntly expressed cultural fears about immigration and indigenous Australians. It was therefore on the Right. Yet its economic policies, driven by rural bank closures and the human casualties of economic rationalization, shared concerns with those of the socialist component of the Left.

On cultural issues, the division between Right and Left is longer a useful descriptive tool. Is it ‘left wing’ to support a women’s right to abortion? Apparently not, since many members of Liberal Party also support the right for women to control their fertility. The Right once opposed policies favouring multiculturalism and cultural diversity, but today these continue under a conservative government. Moreover during the Hanson outbreak, prominent members of the Liberal Party such as Malcolm Fraser, John Hewson and Jeff Kennett took a sincere stance against racism.

The meaning of Right and Left has destablised over the last two decades by a growing number of issues which cannot be understood or analysed in traditional Right-Left terms. To put this another way: political ideas and philosophies are meant to help us understand and solve problems, yet increasingly the ideas of Right and Left offer us no ready answers. The new emerging faultlines are about issues such as the following:

• Problems of the environment, especially those with a global dimension are historically unprecedented issues for humanity. The political ideas of Right and Left arose to deal with the conflict between powerful social groups or conflict over moral issues. But environmental challenges represent a conflict or tension between the natural world and the whole of humanity and this is a conflict which no political theory has been designed to explain. Is it ‘left wing’ to be concerned about global warming? Why then are an increasing number of businesses and conservative governments beginning to imagine how a sustainable of economy might work?

• Unending material progress is seen by Left and Right as one of the main ways to ensure a good life. The struggle for better living standards underpins the labour movement and the rationale for free market economics is economic growth. But as many now reach a materially comfortable lifestyle, this is increasingly questioned, not only on the grounds of its ecological sustainability but also on whether it truly satisfies human needs. For a growing number the problem is not a lack of money but a lack of meaning.

• Poverty was once seen as the result of low wages, and unemployment which were the result of the cyclical nature of capitalism. Today the causes of poverty seem more complex and include family breakdown and drug abuse. Financial support for the poor is necessary but not enough. Welfare dependency is now a recognised problem. Such issues cannot be simply understood in Right-Left terms.

• With both parents in paid work, a crisis has emerged about balancing work and family life. Jobs require longer hours of work than before and make no allowances for the needs of children. Over 40 per cent of marriages break down. While the Right has much to say about family values and while feminists on the Left defend the gains of women, no coherent program to deal with this crisis has emerged.

• A new set of ethical issues about health and the body around euthanasia, genetic engineering, human biotechnology have emerged which do not ‘fit’ established paradigms. Is it left wing to support euthanasia and right wing to oppose it? Yet supporters of Left and Right can be found on both sides. Conservatives like Francis Fukuyama warn of the dangers of human biotechnology and so do many Greens.

• Globalisation and economic liberalisation have made our lives less secure and communities less cohesive yet we revel in the individual choice and diversity which has accompanied these. Traditions no longer limit our choices yet increasingly some people yearn for the security of tradition. The Right supports economic globalisation and is wary of cultural globalisation. The Left stands for the reverse. Yet there is also a great deal of cross over between individuals on the Right and Left on these issues.

• Increasingly politics is discussed in terms of values. But Right and Left are both inconsistent on key values. The Right is economically liberal and the Left is socially liberal. The Right wants moral regulation, the Left wants economic regulation. Yet opposites also attract. The liberal Right and liberal Left sometimes agree (opposing censorship) and the Old Right and the Old Left sometimes agree (opposing deregulation).

The trouble with the self-contained boxes of Right and Left is that we often want a bit of both. We need a society in which members support and care for each other and we need an economy which is competitive and productive. Governments are seen as the guarantors of the former and markets the guarantor of the latter. Getting the balance right is hard. Market forces can undermine the institutions of civil society such as the family and community. Governments can also undermine civil society by providing services and income with little or no obligation. Also out of balance is our relationship to the natural world. We live in high energy society which is living off the earth’s capital and not just its interest. The lifestyle of advanced industrial countries like Australia cannot be generalized to the rest of the planet’s inhabitants and will not be enjoyed in the future by our own descendants and coming generations of Australians. We need a new balance, a new sustainability. This requires that our current philosophies go beyond Right and Left.

The right rethinks

The problems in the Right-Left dichotomy in politics are not new. But something else needs to be said. In the 1980s and 1990s the terrain on which Right and Left were in conflict changed. In the 1980s a new intellectual leadership emerged on the Right. Armed with new ideas generated by think-tanks often inspired by the Thatcher and Reagan governments, the Right took bold steps. It developed a new aggressive confidence. This was surprising. The Right are usually depicted as hidebound conservatives, fearful of change. This rethinking on the Right was an era of profound internal debate for conservatives which is still barely understood by its opponents on the Left.

This ideological revolution of the Right had a remarkable result. It gave it the ascendancy in the battle of ideas and values in Australia and elsewhere. Even where it did not directly succeed in taking government, the Right succeeded in dominating the political agenda and promoting its values and world view. The price of this renewal was the destruction of the older kind of Right and the creation of a new and radical Right. The old Right had always been an alliance of at least three forces. There was social conservatism, based on family and nation, a progressive kind of social liberalism (the ‘wets’) and a strand of economic liberalism. This revolution on the Right saw the triumph of the minority strand of economic liberalism, the defeat of the social liberals and the reformulation of social conservatism. The point is – and it has been hard for many commentators to grasp – the conservatives are no longer afraid of radical change. In fact they embrace it.

In Australia this occurred in the 1980s with the rise of the think tanks and the displacement, within the Liberal Party of ‘wet’ MPs. Today more people are referring to the contemporary Right as ‘neo-liberal’ or as ‘radical conservatives’. The other factor which disentangled the old Right was the dissolution of the glue of anti-communism which occurred when the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed. This too accelerated a rethinking of the Right’s purposes and goals. These changes occurred worldwide and their most successful local beneficiary was the Liberal and National parties under John Howard. I explore these crucial (and often misunderstood) changes in the ideas of the Right in Chapters 3 and 4.

Any process of ideological rethinking requires vision and daring, risk-taking and radicalism. The last element, radicalism, proved to be the unexpected quality of the revolution on the Right. The Right ceased to be a conservative force in any straightforward sense when it adopted the free market economics and philosophy of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek (see Chapter 3). Setting in place market mechanisms both in the economy and well beyond it leads to a society being constantly transformed. In Australia this transformation has meant the rise of commercial values in place of older social and moral values. The slow permeation of commercial values into areas far removed from the economy may turn out to be the most insidious and radical consequences of all as I discuss in Chapter 2.

Today the radicals are those who want to drive economic liberalism even further, while conservatives want to slow it down. The radicals want the full privatization of Telstra along with the deregulation on the labour market. The Left, once a radical force for social change, opposes this. It has scaled down its goals to more modest and conservative tasks such as defending social welfare and trade union rights against an aggressive Right. In this sense the market radicals of the Right have reversed the previous meaning of Right and Left as Conservative and Radical.

It would be tempting to claim that the ideological rethinking on the Right has been paralleled by a similar rethinking on the Left side of Australian politics but this has not occurred. Within the Labor Party a fitful and unproducitve debate about Labor’s beliefs and purpose has gone on for many years. The most public (and damaging) expression of this is the conflict between the ‘traditional heartland‘ and the ‘middle class progressives’. This conflict about long term beliefs and purposes underlies clashes such as those between Tasmanian forestry workers and those opposed to logging. It exists on other social and economic issues in less dramatic form. This lack of a clear and agreed vision within Labor and the Left is one of the reasons for the hegemony of the Right.

The new, re-formed political Right, while economically liberal and radical, also draws a great deal of its strength from the kind of conservatism associated with the promotion of ‘conservative values’. The short lived leader of the Labor Party, Mark Latham, put this succinctly: ‘For century or more, Labor parties won the votes of working people on the basis of economic issues. Now we are losing them in the values debate.’ The values debate is not some artifact of conservatism but arises from real economic and cultural changes in Australia the last 25 years. Social researcher Michael Pusey, for example, studied ‘middle Australia’ in 1996-2000 and described in great detail their ‘moral anxiety’ about damage to the ‘values ecology’ of communities, families and work.

This cultural instability and moral anxiety is what lay behind the rise of ‘One Nation’, the name itself expressing a desire for a common unifying values and a strong national identity. The Hanson upsurge began a political sea change for Australia through which we are still living. Since its high tide John Howard and the Right have continued to address the moral anxiety and cultural losses felt by many Australians. They have largely recaptured the One Nation vote for the mainstream Right and they done this through a ‘culture war’ over values. Phrases like ‘family values’ and ‘moral values’ along with ‘border protection’ and ‘national security’ which capture the spirit of popular anxiety and the desire for something stable and secure. Too often, the Left dismisses these slogans without addressing the genuine fears behind them. It can sympathise with economic insecurity but finds it harder to do the same with cultural insecurities.

The culture war over values

One effective weapon in the culture war widely used by the ideologues of the Right in parliament and the press is the characterization of opponents as an ‘elite’. Left-wing elites are said to be deaf to the needs of ordinary people while they lecture them on political values and cultural etiquette. These are the elites who sip lattes in inner-city cafes and drink Chardonnay while they busily undermine the values of ordinary Australians, the ‘battlers’. Just before the 2001 election John Howard commented proudly that he was ‘scorned by the elites and held in such disdain’. Playing on suspicion of elites is an enormously powerful device in a country like Australia with a long standing and popular streak of egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism. It is used to great effect by populist journalists such as Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt as well as Liberal Ministers such as Tony Abbott. This is the political rhetoric which commentator Robert Manne describes as ‘conservative populism.’

The Right’s dismissal of critics as ‘elites’ who are out of touch with ‘the battlers’ is, as journalist Geoffrey Barker says, ‘an extraordinary charge coming from neo-liberal fundamentalists whose privileged lives rarely bring them close to anyone who has had to ‘battle” for anything’. But while it is true that the Right’s charges of elitism are grossly hypocritical, such rebuttals cut little ice. The discourse damning cultural elites is powerful because it connects with a real weakness of the Left. The Left’s world view was based on class which had a strong populist element. Until relatively recently it was the Left which spoke the language of ‘elites’ in the name of the People. This class ideology, originating in socialism, identified elites on the basis of their wealth and political power. Today class has much less resonance and the Right has constructed an ideology around the perceived power of an elite with cultural influence.

One of the reasons for this decline is that class ideology was based on what economist Clive Hamilton calls the ‘paradigm of material deprivation’. This paradigm means that the main political task is the fight against material inequalities and for redistribution of wealth. In its most common form it supported government regulation and intervention and in its most extreme form, it involved the abolition of capitalism. This ideology had a powerful resonance for a long time because of widespread problems of deprivation. While Labor was never socialist, its ideas were grounded in this paradigm of material deprivation. It captured an essential part of the reality of much of 20th century Australia and inspired a great deal of Labor’s idealism. But this world view has been under siege for a long time. For many decades capitalism has proved to be more dynamic and innovative than most imagined. One result has been the achievement of higher living standards and a degree of everyday affluence unimaginable even by trade unionists and leftists in the 1950s.

Other related changes have long been recognised. The world view of class and deprivation grew out of a largely male working class which performed physically hard jobs and had a more or less unified collectivist ‘battlers’ outlook. Each of these assumptions was slowly eroded as more women joined the workforce, white collar work grew and workers developed a more individualist identity based on consumer choices offered by affluence. Their sense of collectivism, the ethos of battlers, is now more likely to be expressed as a cultural phenomenon, defending, for example, a traditional notion of Australian cultural identity, rather than an economic class identity. While modern industrial societies still have gross material inequalities and an underclass of poor, the paradigm of deprivation is no longer adequate as the foundation stone for a world view. (These and other issues are explored in the second half of this book.)

The Right’s charge of Left elitism also relates to issues around gender and ethnicity. These were part of a slow cultural revolution which made Australia a better place. But this cultural revolution brought losses as well as gains. Family life changed and marriage became less secure. Stable identities and expectations of mother, father, , wife, husband and children changed. What it meant to be ‘Australian’ became less clear; assumptions based on an Anglo-Celtic population with shared values could no longer be made. Combined with the waning of the old-class-based Labor paradigm, the vision of Labor and the Left became even more complicated. Above all, among the old and new supporters of Labor there is a lack of a common vision (These ideas are further developed in Chapters 6,7 and 8.).

One consequence of this lack of an agreed common vision is a vulnerability to ‘wedge politics’ in which the Right has successfully identified issues on which differences exist within the Left and exploited this division. The most obvious has been ‘border security’ on which the middle class Labor supporters tend to differ from Labor’s blue-collar constituency. Others have been gay marriage and the teaching of values and literacy in public schools. A culture war and wedge politics are now a permanent features of modern politics because the Left side of the spectrum is now a coalition of social forces. It lacks a unifying set of ideas which was once provided by class-based ideology. This is most apparent in the Labor Party but it reflects the situation in broader progressive thought. While the Right has reconfigured its ideas, this has not occurred on the Left yet is vital.

Rethinking Left values

Although this book involved a great deal of traditional research and is written by someone in a university it is not intended as an academic study of some interesting political processes. Its intended audience are those members of the public who are interested in ideas and in politics and the connection between them. It is an extended argument with two premises. First, it argues that the problems of the Left reside at the level of ideas and philosophy. Tinkering with policies, presentation and leadership is not enough. Second, it argues that it is only by confronting certain flaws in cherished ideas that the Left can rebuild its intellectual and values framework in the wider Australian society. By ‘Left’ I use the term in its broadest sense of the members and supporters of the Labor, Democrat and Green parties, in the unions and community groups, and unaffiliated progressive opinion which includes current and erstwhile supporters of the Liberal and National parties.

Such a rethinking in progressive politics in Australia is long overdue and will take time. Yet it is urgently necessary. The ascendancy of the Right has meant that the Left finds itself now in a defensive position, holding grimly to familiar ideas, worried that a shift will open up new vulnerabilities and new defeats. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor for the Left is that it is standing on a sandbank which is slowly eroding from under its feet. Buffeted by the surf, it manages to hold its position. But survival lies not in immobility but in striking out in new and scary directions. These new directions mean rethinking the Left’s intellectual framework and methods, while retaining its basic values.

One positive response to the inadequacy of past Left ideas has been the emergence of the Australian Greens. The Greens not only exist in local, state and national governments but also in the activist movements so vital for progressive change. Significantly, the Greens see themselves as ‘neither Right nor Left but in front’. In basing themselves around the idea of a sustainable society and economy, they have grasped a vital truth which no other party has done. The presence and success of the Greens is a welcome sign in the ability of progressive politics to renew itself and to grasp new ideas. Another sign of hope comes from the Right. A number of people on the Right have taken a public stance against the aggressive reborn Right of John Howard. People such as Robert Manne, former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal MP Petro Georgiou have taken principled stands opposed to Howard’s agenda. They represent a strand of ’social liberalism’ that was once on the Right but now is hard to classify.

Another sign of hope comes from within the embattled Labor Party. Often, the first step toward wisdom is recognising the problem and asking the right questions. One of Labor’s more thoughtful spokespeople, Julia Gillard, argues that Labor needs a new vision a ‘new animating force’. In the face of the conservative onslaught, she argues ‘Labor and the Australian Left have not been able to articulate an answering guiding philosophy.’ Progressives need to define a new ‘transformative ideal’ and vision. The issues which appeal to Labor’s tertiary educated supporters ‘need to be sited within a broader vision of Australia, which is inclusive of those who rightly worry about jobs, health, education, roads, border security and the like.’ Similar views have come from fellow MP Lindsay Tanner.

Developing a new vision will not be easy. It is not a simple arithmetical ‘adding up’ of a list of progressive causes and demands. Rather it involves far more complex syntheses of ideas and policies. For example, it involves a synthesis between the world of paid work, class and material equality with the world of family, home and gender. Paid work and family life are intimately connected in modern societies in ways they were not before. Economic policy deeply affects family life, as I explore in Chapters 2 and 7. In similar fashion a synthesis is needed based on both the ideals of cultural diversity and the virtues of social cohesion and common values (see Chapter 8). Another issue concerns the widely held support for ever-increasing progress in living standards. The welfare of humans has to be reconciled to the need for a sustainable economy and this may be the challenge of the coming century.

At a less abstract level, all these syntheses which form part of a common vision must be translated into policies and practical stances. These must respond to issues as they arise and strike a resonance with ordinary Australians. This book is not the last word on all of this. In many ways it is ‘first words’. But it will, I hope, provoke and stimulate the kind of debate needed to develop this common vision.

Posted by David at 12:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Friedrich Hayek: prophet of the free market

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Three of David McKnight, ‘Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War’, (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

The full chapter outlines the ideas of Hayek and discusses their influence on advanced industrial countries.

Any understanding of neo-liberalism must grapple with the complex ideas of the Friedrich Hayek, because they are foundational to the revival of neo-liberal ideas which have swept the world. It is Hayek’s vast intellectual output and theoretical system which gave the revival its resilience and depth. His vision and ideas helped give the sustaining confidence needed by the small radical liberal movement in its years before triumph. What follows in this chapter is a description and discussion of Hayek’s key ideas.

Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899 and took degrees in law and politics. But economic theory dominated his early work and in the 1930s, while he taught at the London School of Economics, he clashed with John Maynard Keynes, at that stage making little impact. The disagreement was over the correct analysis of the Great Depression and prescriptions for avoiding such calamities in future. In 1950 he moved to the University of Chicago, the intellectual centre for the development of neo-liberal economic and social theories and where a colleague was Milton Friedman.

Hayek was not just an economist but an evangelist who was prepared to swim against the tide. To most people World War Two had demonstrated the enormous advantages of the state in co-ordinating workers and industrialists in a single victorious focus. By 1944 planning for post-war reconstruction assumed large state sponsored projects of education, health, national development. At precisely this most unlikely of times Hayek wrote his best known polemic in favour of liberty and against the state and all its works. The Road to Serfdom compared state socialism, economic planning, Nazism, communism, social liberalism and concluded that they were all very similar under the skin because they shared an opposition to the free market order. It was dedicated ‘To the socialists of all parties’.

A remarkable quality of The Road to Serfdom is its absolutism. Not only is central control and planning an absolute evil but there is a rapid and slippery slope between government planning of any form and total central control. He was also blithely unaware of (or dismissive of) the realities faced by many ordinary people.

In a competitive society it is no slight to a person, no offence to his dignity, to be told by any particular firm that it has no need for his services, or that it cannot offer him a better job. It is true that in a period of prolonged mass unemployment the effect on many may be similar. But there are other and better methods to prevent that scourge than central direction.¹

At first glance Hayek’s book was a polemic against socialism and fitted the rapidly growing anti-communism that dominated the Cold War. But as his dedication made clear, Hayek was highly critical of anti-Communists who believed in a strong state. He was far from an ivory-tower dwelling academic. As an intellectual engaged in combat, he not only helped found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, but also the Institute for Economic Affairs in Britain in 1957 which helped fashion what the world came to know as Thatcherism.

As the years went by it became clearer that he represented a strand within the Right which was quite different from simple anti-communism and mainstream conservatism (which had merged with social liberalism). His aim was to revive a minority strand within liberalism which he believed had been largely taken over by a rationalistic, Continental liberalism which aimed to guarantee a liberal society more through governments than markets.² Hayek’s liberalism, which drew on Adam Smith and philosopher David Hume, was grounded in a view which argued that liberal institutions (such as the market) evolved slowly and spontaneously and were justified by their success, not by government. In Hayek’s version of liberalism there was little room for government modification of market forces in the name of social cohesion. In his speech accepting the Nobel prize for economics in 1974, Hayek congratulated the selection committee for their willingness to award the prize to someone ‘whose views are as unfashionable as mine are’.³

Hayek believed fashions changed through the central role of ideas and intellectuals and this had long been part of his crusade. In 1960, which many thought was the high noon of triumphant and prosperous capitalism, Hayek worried that ‘the propertied class, now almost exclusively a business group, lacks intellectual leadership and even a coherent and defensible philosophy of life’.⁴

Hayek’s self-appointed task was to provide this intellectual leadership and a coherent and defensible philosophy of life. He did this by conceiving an intellectual system covering economics, law, politics, social evolution and morality. This system was developed from first principles, in this case Hayek’s particular concept of liberty. This gives his ideas the attractive element of coherence but like so many ideological thinkers, including many Marxists, a foundation of simple first principles also opened the way to fundamentalism. Hayek, however, had a number of genuine insights which it would be unwise to ignore. In any case, those repelled by the market fundamentalism of his followers need to understand the intellectual challenge he threw down to his fellow liberals, to conservatives and to socialists.

Footnotes

1 F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge and Kegan Paul London, 1962, p. 79.
2 . See Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, chapter 4.
3 Tomlinson, p. 13. Hayek shared the prize with social democratic economist, Gunnar Myrdal.
4 F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1960 (1976), p. 128.

Posted by David at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

The culture war and moral politics

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Five of David McKnight, ‘Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War’, (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

[Apart from the Iraq war]‘there is another war of values, and it is the culture war being fought within the West. This is the war between those who feel that on the whole our values and traditions are sound, and those among the intellectuals who argue that they are simply a cloak for racism and brute power.
- Editorial, The Australian, 12 April 2003

At its heart Howardism is about the culture war. Howard knows that Australia must change and he has long championed economic liberalism and deregulation. But Howard sees no need for cultural reinvention driven by the urban intellectual elites.
- Paul Kelly, The Australian, 27 October 2001

In early 2004, the Prime Minister, John Howard, sparked a brief but intense national debate about the values taught in public and private schools. Parents were increasingly sending their children to private schools because, he said, ‘they feel that government schools have become too politically correct and too values-neutral’. The acting Education Minister, Peter McGauran joined in, adding that too many government schools were ‘hostile or apathetic to Australian heritage and values’. Treasurer Peter Costello backed his leader. Parents turned to private schools, he said, because they delivered hard work, achievement by effort, respect for other people and strong academic standards.

At first glance these comments seem oddly misplaced. The public-private divide in education was perceived as a weak point for John Howard’s coalition. In 2004 his government had given $4.7 billion to private schools, including some of the nation’s most elite, doubling the $1.9 billion it gave when first elected in 1996. Moreover, school education is largely a responsibility of the states, not the federal government.

Why then was he intervening? His remarks made sense on two levels and they give an insight into how a new dimension has entered Australian politics. In the short term, the values-in-education issue was good politics. Said one commentator: ‘[Howard] wanted Labor to respond by engaging him on that issue because by doing so he would turn the debate on education (on which he is weak) into a debate about political correctness (on which he is strong). The unions and others bit hard….[Mark Latham] refused to engage the debate on Howard’s terms. He knows that most people in his electorate agree with Howard.’¹

In the longer term, the values issue was part of a broader strategy. A perceptive editorial in The Age commented that it was difficult to discern any real difference between and state and private schools. It added, ‘This is all about Mr Howard’s view that there is an ongoing culture war. It is not that schools are values neutral but rather that he does not like the values taught in schools – public and private.’ ²

In the short term, the culture war is about shaping and mobilising certain values in the community in order to win elections. In particular it is about dividing your opponents on the basis of issues about values. A revealing indication of this came after Labor’s defeat at the 2001 election, Paul Kelly of The Australian had predicted that Howard ‘is going to focus on social policy this term and set out to smash the post-Whitlam political alliance between the working class and the tertiary educated Left that defines modern Labor … [Howard] senses that the 30 year alliance of the Australian Left is collapsing because of its fundamental contradictions’.³ Kelly rejected the idea that this strategy was merely about ‘wedge politics’ to win elections. Instead it was about carving out a new policy direction on social issues which had been the preserve of the Left for many years. No doubt both statements are true.

But the culture war is also about giving the Liberal government a moral legitimacy. Just a couple of days after Howard’s comments about values and education one of the most ideological members in the government, Tony Abbott, attacked the ‘chattering classes’ and the ‘politically correct establishment’ at a conference of Young Liberals. To most of its critics ‘the Howard Government is not just mistaken but morally illegitimate,’ he said.⁴ This taint of moral illegitimacy worried Abbott, particularly in an election year. He responded that ‘moral courage is doing what’s right when people who should know better declare you’re wrong’. The Howard government had demonstrated such courage on tax reform, East Timor, work for the dole and stopping refugee boats and joining the war on Iraq. On Iraq he noted that the government ‘sent Australian forces into action in the teeth of public opinion’ because it was the right thing to do. Abbott conclude his moral defence of the Howard Government by arguing that ‘it’s the Government’s participation in the ‘culture wars’ which has most put out its habitual critics. Especially in an election year, the moral case for the Howard Government ought to be made … because the best government since Bob Menzies deserves a fair trial.’

It’s true that government sometimes get public respect when they are perceived to be doing what’s right, rather than what’s advantageous. There is a new hunger what is called ‘conviction politics’. But this situation marks a change in the way governments and oppositions conduct political discourse. It’s rare for politicians to openly debate their success in terms of morality. Most politicians conceive of government in terms of the material benefits, resources and policies it produces, rather than the shaping of culture and values.

Footnotes

1. Michael Costello, The Australian, 30 January 2004.
2. The Age, 22 Jan 2004
3. The Australian, 7 August 2002.
4. Tony Abbott, ‘The Moral Case for the Howard Government’, Speech to the Young Liberals issued by the Minister for Health and Ageing, 23 January 2004. (Extract also published in SMH 23 Jan 2004).

Posted by David at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A hybrid vision of humanism

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Five of David McKnight, ‘Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War’, (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

Why humanism?

Humanism emphasises a commitment to the interests and needs of human beings. Placing human needs at the centre of this world view means establishing a concrete reference point for measuring well being, rather than an abstract principle, whether it is liberty or equality. It also means acknowledging an inevitable complexity. The good society must satisfy needs which pull in opposite directions – for diversity and autonomy as well as for solidarity and community. The good society is thus a balance between state, markets and civil society. Human needs are both physical and psychological and arise from our status as evolved creatures. Making our needs foundational not only means aspiring to fulfill them at the personal and social level. It also means rejecting the social theories that suggest that human beings are completely malleable and therefore perfectible. This is because our needs are an expression of our evolved nature which has limits and is not completely plastic.

Humanism expresses a moral idea of the preciousness of all humans. It is statement that the value of humans derives from worldly circumstances and not from divine origin nor the possession of a soul. Humanism asserts the equal worth of all humans. It expresses a belief that human reasoning is a better guide to knowledge that relying on custom or religious belief. It is a claim that in determining the truth no one has a special claim by virtue of their authority. It favours equality of people and autonomy of individuals.
Humanism emphasises the fundamental similarities between people and emphasises that whatever nationality or culture in which we grow up, we are members of a common humanity. It is a planetary vision. It favours tolerance because it recognises diversity and difference without ignoring commonalties. As a set of ideas humanism is the possession of neither the Right nor the Left.

But why new humanism?

Traditional humanism of the Enlightenment is not enough and certain interpretations of humanism can be wrongheaded or even dangerous. There are at least four ways in which this has occurred. First, focussing on human needs exclusively can reinforce the attitude that humans should and can conquer the natural world with impunity. A narrow, short term human-centred worldview can lead to the disregard of the ecological interdependence of all life forms. This approach to humanism, for example, has little to say on cruelty to animals. We need a planet fit for humans and this means that human needs must be moderated to fit in with the requirements of the planet. Among other things, creating a sustainable society based on human values will necessitate stopping the growth of human population and accepting limits on human material desires.

Second, like many other sets of ideas, humanism can be ethnocentric, expressing a view, for example, in which ‘humans’ are defined as living in European and Christian societies and others are less than fully human. The ideal of a common humanity which is the common ground of the planet’s people regardless of the enormously diverse cultures in which they live is vital here.

Similarly and thirdly, a pseudo-humanism has existed for a long time which assumed humans were males. Masculine qualities and tendencies were accepted as the norm against which women were judged different and inferior. The autonomous individual with calculating self-interest conforms to a masculine model whereas the person enmeshed in webs of relationships who feels obligations of care conforms to a feminine model. These opposite tendencies need to be re-balanced in favour of the feminine so that we can reach a humanist world view which is a hybrid of both. Reason and rationality are not enough to explain the world or to give humans a moral sense. Emotions and instincts are real and central to the human experience

Fourth, by damning religious dogma, humanism also tends to reject any spiritual dimension to human life although this is a core characteristic of humans and their societies. This spiritual dimension is most obviously expressed in religion but it also appears elsewhere. Creativity and an aesthetic sense are often expressions of this. So too is a sense of transcendence and interdependence with the natural world. The belief in a higher ethical good is often tied to the various senses of a spiritual dimension to life.

In proposing the ideas of new humanism I have identified valuable aspects of liberalism, socialism and conservatism. These are important in fleshing out new humanist values. I now want signal two new sources of ideas from which a new humanism can be enriched. These sources are, first, caring values, sometimes expressed as an ‘ethic of care’; second, conservation values associated with ecological sustainability and humans’ interdependence with other living things on the planet.

Caring values

I touched on the idea of an ethic of care and caring values in Chapter 7. The idea developed out of a particular strand of feminism which supported a wider role for women, but also saw great value in the caring and nurturing traditionally performed by women. Such feminists argued that a central problem of patriarchal societies is that this caring activity is under valued and denigrated both at the level of the family and the society.

Caring is important because it names a human activity with a deep moral dimension which is often invisible in daily life and which is ignored in much political and social theory.

A focus on caring values is vital in any new philosophy beyond right and left. It enriches the more traditional notions of equality and justice as well as adding a new concept to the idea of a good society involving emotion as well as reason. Some have argued that it provides a new dimension to social and political theory and to philosophy in general. Caring is a deeply human practice, more basic than production, exchange or contracting and such a recognition can be ‘a painful, worrying and ultimately humbling fact’.

While caring values have not yet been integrated into a political philosophy, some forms of social caring have been with us for a while. I would argue that it underlay a variety of social reforms around the welfare state, for which both the traditional left and the social liberals fought.. Some early founders of the welfare state consciously argued that the ‘maternal’ values of care and compassion from the family should be extended to the state while the ‘masculine’ values of autonomy and equality were extended into the family. The idea of caring values has a wider applicability than the family, the caring professions and the welfare state. The ethos of caring can be applied to the relationship between humans and nature, embracing the need to care for the complex biological systems which sustain life on the planet. This kind of caring values is an important new element in an outlook like new humanism. It involves a far broader notion than existing notions of caring which often insist that women must always prefer to perform caring labour before considering their own individual needs.

In an outlook like new humanism the philosophic ideal of caring would become as frequent and as important as the philosophic ideal of equality. And like the vexed notion of equality there will always be a continual debate about what it means in given circumstances.

Conservation values

Conserving the biological bases of life is not a problem which any traditional political philosophy has ever had to deal with until recently. For a series of obvious reasons any new philosophy beyond Right and Left must deal with this difficult problem. At its most profound level this involves thinking about humans’ relationship to nature. Or rather, human’s position as part of nature, since the ecological crises reminds us that we are a species of animals and as inescapably dependent on clean air, drinkable water and productive soil as all other animals. We live on the skin of a planet within a biosphere consisting of the lands, seas, atmosphere, rivers, forests and all the living organisms they support and within which we survive. All these interact to produce oxygen, to nurture life and recycle wastes (such as carbon dioxide). In both an evolutionary sense and a practical sense they are central to defining who we are as a species. They are a heritage par excellence.

Conservation values emphasise that the current inhabitants of the planet are stewards of the biosphere which is part of a heritage for succeeding generations of humans. This is actually a very old idea, expressed in conservative philosophy most famously by Edmund Burke’s view that society was a contract ‘not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those to be born.’ This is the opposite to the short term view of neo-liberalism which discards traditions of all kinds, including that of our environmental heritage.

Conservation values are those which deem as right actions which tend to protect and sustain the biosphere. They deem as wrong those actions which permanently damage the biosphere. They emphasize the holistic and interconnected nature of the biological heritage of which we are part. Conservation values entail being guided by the intrinsic logic of these natural processes, for instance in designing an economy, rather than solely relying on imposed rationalistic measures. Conservation values promote empathy with the natural world and see it as having intrinsic value. Conservation values may actually have some basis in the human psyche. Some speculate that humans need to relate to nature for reasons other than physical sustenance and that this innate need encompasses ‘the human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction’.

The conservation or ‘green’ values which will enrich a new humanist approach are found in neither liberalism nor socialism which have a shared view of endless progress and which assume no limits should be placed on the economy or on humans’ needs. By contrast conservation values involve a recognition of limits and the concept of ‘enough’. Conservatives prefer the ‘sufficient to the superabundant’, as Oakeshott said. The concept of ‘enough’ is an important assertion in the face of the radicalism of neo-liberal economics and their growth fetish. The intersection of conservation and ‘green’ values with aspects of conservative philosophy is paradoxical yet it is a sign of the new times we live in. Conservatism of a ‘green’ kind and conservation values are opposed to ‘the ever more invasive intrusions of a world system that can afford to leave nothing alone, but that must open new pathways to profit deep in the still unexploited fastnesses of the heart, the secret depths of the psyche,…to be radical now is to say that we have had enough of the industrialisation of humanity.’ To be radical now is to be conservative, in some sense.

The new humanism is a broad philosophical view of the world. For it to be relevant to politics and contemporary society it needs to be expressed in a more concrete, less abstract form which has an application to politics. In my view this is best described as a new moral framework as a basis for political action.

Posted by David at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2005

Welcome to Beyond Right and Left

I have established this site to connect with people interested in my book, 'Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture war'.

In the coming weeks I will publish extracts from the book on this site, as well as other articles. I'd love to hear your comments and engage in a conversation with you about the ideas in my book.

The book is the result of several years of wondering about the reasons that the Right has so completely come to dominate the political agenda. In researching the book, I found very early that while a lot of people complain about the Right, not many have grappled the ideas and arguments. It's a mirror image of people who used to complain about the Left, in the days when it was setting the political agenda.

But the book is more than this. It tries to grapple with some of the ideas of the Left which need to be revitalised, re-thought and discarded. In the book I focus on political ideas because at bottom that is where the strength of any movement lies. This is the case with the contemporary Right and it was the case with the Left (in all its multiple forms)

My own background is from the Left. I first worked as a journalist on Tribune, the now defunct weekly newspaper of the Communist Party. I was deeply influenced by feminism, by struggles against racism and for radical social change. I still hold to most of the ideals but I argue that they need to be re-thought. In terms of my working life, after Tribune, I did a period of freelancing, then I worked on the Sydney Morning Herald, and later on ABC TV's Four Corners. Along the way I have written two books on the history of the Cold War. And in terms of my personal life, I am an avid bushwalker and canyoner. I became a father 20 years ago (I talk about this unexpected transformation in Chapter 7 of the book).

My growing passion is the environment - I was always a bit of a greenie, but as each day passes, the global environment looks like the issue of the century, with the potential for changing our lives in disturbing and unexpected ways.

So read the extracts, read the book and make contact!

Warm regards,
David McKnight

Posted by David at 03:19 AM | Comments (11)