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June 25, 2007

Ideas and strategy in progressive politics

(This short paper was circulated to the Progressive Ideas Network, a group of trade unions, think tanks and community organizations which has met several times in Sydney in the last 12 months.)

I believe the progressive movement is at a critical moment. On a global level the Right has foundered. The debacle in Iraq speaks for itself; the refusal by the advanced industrial countries to deal with climate change is frightening; the war on terror increasingly results in the demonisation of all Muslims and the revival of religious and race based hatred. On many of these issues the instincts and values of the progressive movement have been proven more reliable and more humane than those of the Right.

Yet the paradox is that the Right remains dominant and will do so in the immediate future, regardless of who holds office in advanced industrial countries. Even if the Bush administration was replaced by a Democrat one in 2008, little would change on basic issues. One of the reasons for the Right’s dominance is that there does not appear to be a coherent and plausible alternative. There is a lot of opposition to the Right, but opposition does not add up to an alternative. Too often the legitimate criticisms of the progressives amount to a series of unconnected fragments. Moreover the progressive movement has been in decline for a number of years in large part due to the disorientation and collapse of ideas following the end of the cold war in 1989-91.

But this has not been a uniform decline. Clearly the various parts of the Left which were based in the framework of the ‘cold war’ have declined. The ideas of radical socialism which inspired people for over 100 years are now largely the property of small eccentric sects. The central movement on which socialist ideas were based – the trade union movement – has shrunk. Hopefully it has reached a floor below which it will not sink further. But other movements which did not depend on socialist ideas and the cold war (most obviously around environment issues) have continued to grow. Yet both sectors could benefit and learn from each other. Indeed the gulf between the traditional and the new parts of the progressive movement is one of the most pressing strategic issues for the progressive movement.

The idea of the economy and economic issues

Ideas are the foundation to any political movement but their importance is not always obvious since day to day issues and campaigns continually thrust themselves into prominence and crowd out problems at a deeper level.

The best example of this concerns ideas around economic improvement and ideas around the environment. Campaign around both these things make sense but at a deeper level there are contradictions which need to be addressed.

The classical Left view of the world revolves around the economy and around the workplace relationship between worker and employers. In this view the battle was over the distribution of the economic product between capitalist and worker. Originally, this vision responded to the material deprivation of the working class. Progress was therefore defined as ever increasing living standards and material affluence. The question is: is the framework still central? Are increasing material living standards compatible with a vision of ‘the good life’. Are increasing living standards compatible with controlling climate change? We need to think hard about how to resolve these issues because in a short time, these questions will be urgent practical ones, not theoretical ones.

The world view of progressive thought based around the public economy and workplace is not wrong, just inadequate. The problem is that the 'economy' has changed radically but our ideas about it have not changed. They are still rooted in the middle of the twentieth century. There are two profound ways in which this is so.

First, since the entry of women into the workforce in greater numbers it is impossible to separate paid work and what we used to call 'the economy' from the family and social life. In classical socialist terms, it is no longer possible to separate the production of goods from the reproduction of the society.
This is because today changes in the economy, such as the lengthening of working hours and inflexibility of working hours, have a direct impact on the family in a way that they did not when the sole breadwinner was male. This is not an argument for a return to the days of the male breadwinner (which is impossible anyway) . Rather it calls for new thinking on how the progressive movement deals with issues like working hours. A good example of this has been the ACTU’s creative campaign against the Workchoice laws which emphasises family time. This is not just smart PR but reflects a different progressive vision of society and the economy.

Second, much of traditional Left thinking on the economy is inadequate for another reason. It acknowledges the environment but does not integrate it into its definition of ‘the economy’. Increasingly as global warming hits, the old definition of the economy is becoming demonstrably inadequate. It is no longer be possible to separate a notion of the economy from the natural world. An economic vision must include the idea of sustainability which means seeing oxygen, carbon, water and minerals as elements of an economy as well as inflation, employment and investment.

Sustainability is a nice word which we throw about but making a truly sustainable economy has radical implications for the old Left view of the economy. A key aspect of a sustainable economy involves radically lowering the use of oil and coal-derived energy. This clearly has radical implications for the workers employed in those industries. But even more confronting is that the most effective way to lower fossil fuel use is by raising its price. Pleas for people to reduce usage are not enough, nor are hopes in energy efficient technology. Real reductions in coal and oil usage can only come about by sending a strong pricing signal to industry and to individuals. And because coal- and oil-derived energy is used in everything (food, transport, manufacturing etc) it means that most goods will cost more.

This has obvious implications for issues of economic inequality. It will mean a change and a decline in what we now regard as living standards.

A progressive vision is not a simple arithmetical ‘adding up’ of a list of progressive causes. We need a new syntheses based on the family and the environment as well economic inequality.

We need a new vision for the Left and progressive movement. At this stage , the most urgent thing is to air ideas and debate issues about how we challenge some of these problems and how we link the fragmented progressive movement.

In this light one goal to aim for would be national and state based conferences where progressive people can thrash out some of these issues.

David McKnight

Posted by David at 09:24 PM

June 20, 2007

The utopia of economic liberalism

A talk to a forum on the government’s ‘Workchoices’ law in Newcastle,
26 May 2007.

Ideas are the foundation stones in politics. And as with a house or building, the foundations are often hidden. Being aware of the foundations and examining their weaknesses and strengths is crucial to understand the more visible political superstructure.

So the organisers of today’s talk are to be commended for putting a discussion of Mr Howard’s ideas at the start of the agenda for today’s discussion on the Workchoices laws.

The ideas behind Mr Howard and his Workchoice laws are fairly simple.

They are ideas which have become increasingly popular for the last 20 years – they are ideas based on the free market, or to put it more technically, they are the ideas of economic liberalism. Economic liberalism first emerged at least 200 years ago when the early merchants and traders want to throw off restrictions on commercial freedom.

These were ideas which first emerged on the recent world scene with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. They are ideas associated with what was called ‘the new Right’. These ideas have been so successful that today no one uses the phrase ‘New Right’ anymore – because the ideas of free market and economic liberalism ARE the Right. They dominate the Right. As I say in my book Beyond Right and Left, this transformation of the Right by the single ideology of the free market actually opens up weaknesses for them. Certainly, the rejection of this by parts of the Old Right, such as former Prime Mnister Malcolm Fraser, is a significant indicator of this historic change.

Until recently Mr Howard’s ideas on the free market have not really had a decent chance to show what they mean in practice. Until recently he did not have control of the Senate. So it is only now we are only just beginning to see what a true Howard government actually looks like.

What does it look like – when his ideas are put into practice?

To put it simply we are being pushed towards a free market in labour where labour is treated as any other commodity in a marketplace -- which means it will be bought and sold at whatever price it can get. Labour is on the road to deregulation, like the finance industry and banking sector.

But labour – human labour, otherwise known as our working lives – is not like other commodities. It is not like petrol, or eggs, or coal or iron ore.

Human labour is special because it is attached to a human being. The price of labour -- whether it goes up or down – affects the lives and potential of human beings. Once upon a time it affected whether people live or died. Today, a free market in labour will affect not only the lives of particular people, it will also shape and fashion the kind of society we live in the future.

Perhaps the most dramatic effect will be the creation of large, low paid underclass – something similar to what you see in the US – because those with least bargaining power, least education, least skill, will increasingly be at the mercy of those who want to buy labour as cheaply as possible. We can see this already happening before our eyes in the dozens of stories about people being given no choice but to sign AWAs which take away penalty rates, paid public holidays etc. The cumulative effect of this will be to create this impoverished underclass, and that in turn will affect everything and everyone else.

My point is that Howard’s ideas, expressed in Workchoices, give us a foretaste of a different kind of future Australia, a different kind of society.

But what is happening to labour is a symbol of what is already happening more generally in our society. For a long while we have been moving towards a society in which the most supreme values are those of self interest and commercial freedom.

One of the things which happens in a society based on economic liberalism and the market is that things begin to lose what was once considered their intrinsic value. Their value is reduced to their commercial value -- a price at which something can be bought and sold.

It used to be thought that education and learning – and wisdom – had an intrinsic value. That is, that there was a general common good which was served by the increase in education – and if we were lucky an increase in wisdom. Universities used to be the place where this was meant to occur --But as those who work in universities know, universities are on the road to becoming a new kind of factory – producing commodities which are bought and sold in the market. Today universities are big earners of export income, they have a ‘corporate brand’.

There are other obvious examples, like sport which is now a global billion dollar industry and whose intrinsic values of health, community participation and recreation are being eroded. And at the other end of the spectrum there is the value of the family friends and civil society which has an intrinsic value which cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

This process of increasing commercialisation is the latest development of our economic system which some have called the New Capitalism. It is a form of capitalism which is dynamic and productive and in which individuals must be mobile and flexible. It is a world in which all of us are simultaneously products and in which we are all consumers. It is what some have called a libertarian capitalism .

But today on two counts these ideas are failing and offer no long term solution, in fact they represent a threat.

First, as the governing logic of society, economic liberalism has a problem with purpose. What is the ultimate purpose of all this deregulation, of all this struggle to break down restrictions on commercial freedom? If you ask the theorists of economic liberalism , it boils down to the following: it is to create more products, to build higher growth and to develop freer trade and generally to infinitely expand commodity production. This, the assume, will satisfy human needs.

This is an extraordinarily narrow view of human beings. It is spiritually empty and it is amoral, meaning it is bereft of any moral purpose. But more importantly, apart from the fact that humans do not live by bread alone, it makes the fatal assumption that the planet can accommodate infinite expansion.

Second, the ideas of economic liberalism make a false assumption about the economy. These ideas developed in a world where the economy was defined as being wholly about raw materials, labour, money, capital, trade and so on.

But of late we have come to realise that the economy is much more that. The economy is a subset of the global environment. This is what provides not only the raw materials but the conditions which make life biologically possible.

An economy and a society both require an atmosphere which provides the right amount of warmth but not an excessive amount. An atmosphere is not a commodity. It cannot be bought and sold or replaced like another commodity. It has an intrinsic value because it sustains human life. Similarly for the oceans, land mass etc.

Such problems do not make sense in an ideology based on markets where the supreme value is commercial freedom.

Finally, to return to the start. Ideas are foundational in politics. The ideas which lie beneath Mr Hoard’s deregulation of labour are part of a dominant set of ideas that have triumphed for the last two decades.

They are part of a right wing utopian vision which believes in a paradise of free markets. But like so many utopias this is a fundamentalist vision that will ultimately create its opposite. It could even help destroy the world as we know it.

Posted by David at 10:27 PM

June 02, 2007

What happened to the Left?

(This article appeared in the April-May issue of Arena, ‘the Australian magazine of left political, social and cultural commentary’. Arena can be found at http://www.arena.org.au/ )

Though battered and bruised, the Left in Australia has good reason to be optimistic, or at least feel vindicated. The invasion of Iraq, as predicted, has turned into a murderous folly. Instead of being the seedbed of democracy, Iraq has sprouted toxic forms of inter-Islamic terrorism. Global warming, which the Left warned about more than 20 years ago, is now accepted as a major threat confronting humanity.

Governments and corporations now grudgingly plan an economy less reliant on fossil fuel. The triumphalism associated with neo-liberal economics has passed as many now perceive its cost: longer working hours, damage to civil society, rising inequality.

At the level of national politics, things look brighter. Many ordinary Australians are now realizing the new industrial relations laws will mean lower wages, and insecure jobs. Labor looks like it might just win the next federal election, introducing an element of desperation into the Howard Government.

Yet paradoxically, none of this marks a revival of the Left, however you define this shorthand term. There is no sense in which the tide has turned in a progressive direction.

The problem is that in spite of telling criticisms, and even defeat on particular issues, the Right still holds an intellectual ascendancy in the world of politics and ideas. Essentially this is based on the Right’s intellectual revolution of the 1980s which revived a form of liberalism, particularly economic liberalism. At the level of everyday politics this philosophy of choice and individualism combines with a consumerism which is deeply appealing to many people. Analyzing this was one of the reasons that I wrote ‘Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War which Geoff Sharp discussed on the last issues of Arena.

One of my conclusions as Geoff Sharp rightly notes, is that there is at the heart of neo-liberalism an ethical void. The market mechanism takes little account of values which cannot be quantified or priced. Market logic is remaking the ‘life world’ of family and community. It is also mindlessly short termist and is therefore driving an ecological disaster. These weaknesses of neo-liberalism lay the basis for a broad based movement of opposition but one that has not happened yet. How it might happen was another pre-occupation of ‘Beyond Right and Left’.

I concluded that whatever particular criticisms we make of neo-liberalism, its greatest strength is that it is not challenged by any coherent alternative. Neo-liberal policies come under effective and sustained attack but opposition, even well based opposition, does not constitute an alternative.

The post-cold war Left has opinions, ideas, criticism, values and a string of causes but these cannot all be arithmetically ‘added up’; to form an alternative. Much of what we might call progressive politics relies on a predictable shopping list of views but no confident agenda-setting social vision lies behind it in the way it had, say, in the 1970s and earlier periods in history.

Constructing an alternative to neo-liberalism is difficult because different parts of progressive politics today actually pull in opposite directions – think of militant trade unionists in coal-mining and logging industries on the one hand, and environmentalists on the other. In the same vein, think of a related problem: the struggle to achieve higher living standards was once a central goal of the Left. But is it still a central part of the vision of progressive politics? Or are increasing living standards part of the problem?

Nor are these issues merely confined to the margins of political life in this country. The Australian Labor Party – like progressive politics – has been undergoing a crisis of belief and ideas for quite some time now. What exactly does it stand for? Is it still a party of representing workers? What does the concept of ‘representing workers’ mean today? Labor once had a rough and ready vision based on this notion. This has largely collapsed and today Labor represents a patchwork of constituencies with no unifying vision. This may be the reason that Kevin Rudd was attracted to my book.

In truth the Left, as such, no longer exists. There are at least two Lefts in Australia. One is an economic Left and the other a cultural left. Each has a vision of sorts, but neither singly nor together do their visions form a coherent and plausible alternative to the Right. Understanding the reason for this is the first step, in my view, to framing a new paradigm for social change.

The economic left’s vision

The vision of the economic left has its roots in a cluster of political theories around socialism and Marxism. These give a central role to the workplace and to paid work. Thus the trade union movement is the political sun around which other planets orbit. In turn this is a reflection of the theory that ‘class’ is the determining reality in societies like ours. Central to the socialist vision was the struggle against material deprivation and for material equality. Material deprivation certainly exists in Australia society yet real incomes in Australia have trebled in the last 50 years. Many, many working Australians enjoy a lifestyle undreamed of by their parents. Four wheel drives, home entertainment systems, overseas holidays etc. Theories which rely on redressing actual; material deprivation at best address the needs of a minority and are thus partial and narrow. At worst they provide a justification for ever increasing economic growth regardless of environmental consequences. Moreover, using class analysis to ‘explain’ things like racism and a host of other cultural phenomena is simply mindless reductionism.

Apart from explanatory defects, the politics of radical socialism has never produced a society which was not some sort of repressive dictatorship combined with an economy unable to deliver as well as capitalism. There are still valuable insights in theories of socialism and Marxism but the continued adherence to its vision of social change by some leftists is a tribute to intellectual inertia and wishful thinking.

The movements invigorated by these theories – trade unions, anti-colonial struggles – historically embodied some of the noblest human aspirations for justice. But a key problem with its vision of emancipation has been the apocalyptic element, particularly of Marxism, which argues that the laws of history will see capitalism transcended and a completely new society introduced. Many realize that this is a quasi-religious belief and that now the choice facing the Left is varieties of capitalism, not some wholly non-capitalist society with no market and no private property. Perhaps this is making my peace ‘with the inevitability of capitalism’ as Geoff Sharp suggests but it is the result of a long reflection and was not a conclusion which I would have predicted at the start. Like many people whose outlook derives from the Marxist left I would suggest that the greatest triumph of socialism was that it tamed and civilized capitalism. But the intellectual framework of socialism, no matter how updated, is inadequate to deal with the momentous challenges we face today.

The other part of the left, the cultural left, recognized long ago the inadequacies of the old Marxist left’s intellectual framework with its narrow focus on class and its belief in the ‘laws’ of history. It rightly focused on things like cultural identity as central to human experience and it argued that racism and gender inequalities could not all be explained by the capital–labour contradiction. It also recognized the inadequacies of social and political theories based Enlightenment rationalism and simplistic notions of progress defined in technical and material terms.. But the central ideas of the cultural left are also limited and flawed.

For a start, it made a fetish of cultural identity. It celebrates the variety of cultures, tended to romanticize all ‘oppositional’ cultures to the dominant culture. One consequence of this has been a deep alienation of much of the cultural Left from the mainstream culture — not surprisingly, since this is the oppressive norm—and the cultivation of marginality. In turn, this has meant that much of the cultural Left not only finds it hard to communicate with the bulk of people (especially those of Anglo-Celtic-origin) in Australia, but sees no role for such people in shaping the kind of cultural transformation it would like to see occur. The cultural left’s preoccupation with diversity has meant that it often finds it hard to talk about politics in terms of an overall vision or a common good.

One consequence of this is that theories of postmodernism are now largely remote from any kind of political struggle. Their relativism sidelines legitimate notions of truth and objectivity, yet these are vital in real world of politics and life. Did Saddam plan to build nuclear weapons? Is climate change caused by fossil fuel burning? Having an intellectual framework in which facts and truth make sense both at the level of theory and politics (without referring to them as “facts” and “truth”) is vital .

My conclusion in Beyond Right and Left was that a new vision for social change must be grounded in values rather than in a new, totalizing ideology like Marxism (or neo-liberalism). I call this outlook a ‘new humanism’.

In his assessment of this, I think Geoff Sharp misunderstands my position. He says “there is a basic problem with his [my] approach. He maintains a recognition of a religiously sourced ethic and combines that with what he terms ‘a new humanism’.” If I understand him correctly he seems to be suggesting that I propose a new social vision ultimately reliant on religious beliefs. Geoff Sharp may think that Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd’s praise for some of my ideas gives weight to this view, given Rudd’s own Christian beliefs. It is also true that I refer to Max Weber’s view that capitalism gave rise to an inexorable process of rationalization which is replacing the non-rational, non instrumental side of life. And I agree with Weber that religion was the source of non-rational values and ethics.

But while I have rethought my views on religion, I certainly do not regard it as the basis for a new social vision. I am simply making the point that historically, humans developed an ethical framework in and around religion. Just as Weber made the point about early capitalism ‘disenchanting’ the world by confining the scope of religion, so the New Capitalism is deepening the commodification and rationalization of all areas of life which had a transcendent element and this includes not only religion, custom, the family but also activities such as education, sport, the arts etc.

Religious belief arises from the kind of creatures which humans are. All societies have some form of religion and these beliefs, including a desire for ethical framework, is a human characteristic. I discuss other human characteristics as part of a re-thinking of progressive views on human nature. This part of the book attempts to do what Geoff Sharp suggests i.e. to ground the vision in analysis.

This is too detailed to outline now but suffice it to say that I think human needs and characteristics set limits to social arrangements and ultimately cause some to fail. For example, humans have a capacity for autonomy and self interest, but they also have a need for community and solidarity. Neo-liberalism caters for the first, Marxism for the second, but societies built solely on either principle are in some sense, dehumanizing.

Sharp has argued that in societies like ours we are headed on a dangerous road. He sees the fusion of practical intellect to science resulting in a variety of technologies (genetics, nano-technology) which threatens to ‘reconstruct our species type’. I don’t wish to minimize the dangers that may lie in such technologies. But it seems, to me that the main danger comes from other quarters, in particular from climate change.

Apart from its obvious threat, climate change poses a unique challenge to many of the comfortable assumptions of progressive politics,. The classical political theories of liberalism and socialism share belief in unlimited material expansion. Ironically, the only theory which does not is conservatism which has a critique of rationalist-based progress. And no political theory or social analysis until recently has tried to integrate the notion that humanity are a species of animals which is as dependent on its habit at as any other.

These questions of theory are vital because in order to combat the threat to our species a political force is needed, in the same way that the civilizing of capitalism required the emergence of a trade union and socialist movement. And no political force has ever come into the stage of history without a new theory and vision. In its own modest way the underlying purpose of Beyond Right and Left was to try to sketch out what such a new vision and theory might be.

Posted by David at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)