July 15, 2010

A new Left today?

Published in Arena magazine, number 104,Feb-March 2010

Around the world the financial crisis and climate change have focused many minds on a revival of the Left. Some people point to the success of socialists in South America or the election of Barack of Obama, other point to the rise of a Left Party in Germany. Even Michael Moore's latest film, Capitalism, A Love Story, seems to be a straw in the wind. The fate of the Left was one of the topics at a conference of activists and thinkers at Deakin University recently and was discussed in an editorial of Arena (No. 102). The purpose of the conference was to rethink ideas from that broad political force known loosely as 'the Left'.

In opening the conference, I described the Left's weakness as 'the crisis of ideas and values which express alternatives'. Other might call it a crisis in the political vision, or in the theory or the social philosophy of the Left. Perhaps paradoxically I argued that we could draw a lesson from the rise of neo-liberalism during the 1980s. Whatever else it illustrated, the rise of the right showed that 'social change depends on political ideas embedded in an intellectual and moral framework.'

Putting it simply, the Left lacks such a framework. Instead of a framework, we have only issues and campaigns. Instead of projecting a vision, we are merely oppositionists and hyper-critics. All kinds of people are grouped under the rubric of the Left. Both militant coal miners from the CFMEU and coal critics from Greenpeace. There is an old Left, whose critique is based around the material deprivation and the need for redistribution; and a new Left -- if that's the right word -- whose critique is based around the unsustainability of the economy and the empty affluence it creates. Neither has the answer and the danger is that this division will become an even deeper fault line than it already is.

Is a perfect agreement between the various sectors of the Left waiting to be discovered? I don't think such a new unifying ideology is possible, or even desirable. (In Beyond Right and Left I argued that agreement will be found in a set of values, rather than a new ideology or all-explanatory world view.) But the diverse sectors of the Left can do better in co-ordinating a wider agreement than they have now.

The process of finding what these values might be and then building a political strategy on top of them is a difficult one partly because there isn't a recognition that there is indeed a problem in the first place.

For one part of the left a simplified Marxist-influenced theory of society and politics still forms a default position. It's also a sentimental option because there is a long and proud heritage of working class struggle. Such a theory assumes that all social evils arise from the economy and from economic deprivation. If capitalism is the cause of all injustices then clearly you need to stick to a theory which aims to abolish capitalism in its entirety.

But it is obvious that considerable oppression and injustice are not caused by capitalism. Patriarchy and women's oppression pre-date capitalism. As do racism and ethno-centrism. Unsustainability is aggravated by ruthless corporate power but if we have to abolish capitalism in order to achieve sustainability then we may be waiting a long while. Anti-capitalism is also flawed because 'non-capitalism' has proved such a disaster. The actual consequences of anti-capitalism has been a string of grotesque societies which are a travesty of any democratic or socialist values. This has been recognised for decades, but some on the left still haven't faced the fact that aspects of Marxist theory contributed to the disaster.

The problem which the Left exists to solve has also changed. Marx and Engels saw poverty as the main problem and assumed that capitalism could not harness the forces of production to satisfy human needs. Today the forces of production are in overdrive, generating an output threatens to drown humanity in a climate disaster.

Some parts of the Left realized these fatal weakness of Marxism many years ago. This cultural left, based largely among intellectuals, developed a more sophisticated analysis of power and culture. Basing themselves on the social movements of women, youth, gays and ethnic groups, they challenged the values and beliefs of dominant culture and ideology. This successful challenge made for a freer, more diverse society. But the trajectory of the cultural left has run into sand. Its central of ideas of freedom and diversity fitted the emerging consumer capitalism which dissolved much of its cutting edge for social change in a sea of affluence. As well, the cultural left has never developed a political strategy or identified a base for social change. Moreover, significant anti-scientific strains within its world view make it hard to identify with the other radical movement based around the environment.

What to do? In past articles in Arena I have argued that the main circumstances which requires attention from the Left is the dramatic and accelerating threat of global warming. This threat is moving to be the fulcrum of our political situation for decades. Here we find a further complication for any revival of progressive ideas. So much of politics today has been professionalized. The largest environment groups are elite organizations which conduct their politics through symbolic actions designed for media attention. Mass action is seen as an adjunct to a strategy based on media and on lobbying governments. No perspective exists to make mass participation a central feature of action for change. Yet historically we know that societies only change when large numbers of people take extended, demonstrative action.

The most pressing issue is the need to reinvent an inspiring, new kind of mass politics to struggle for sustainability and against the powerful coal, energy and electricity corporations. Perhaps with this urgent need in mind the fragments of the Left can begin to engage in a collective effort to provide a synthesis of ideas, values and theory. Then, maybe, we will see 'a new left forming' as Arena's editorial (No 102) suggested.

d.mcknight@unsw.edu.au

Posted by David at 9:22 PM

May 6, 2009

What is the progressive alternative to neo-liberalism?

A talk at a conference of Australian progressive think-tanks.
http://www.crunchtime.org.au/

If we look back in a year's time to our meeting today, I suspect we will say that we were (or are) living in a kind of phoney war period, a lull before a storm. We are on the brink of a profound economic crisis which will be historic in its implications. A large degree of unemployment at best, or at worst, global tensions leading to local wars. But even more profound than this crisis is the growing climate emergency, with events moving far faster than expected while the leadership of advanced industrial countries continues to avoid decisive action.

Whatever happens over the next few years, it is important to drive home our advantage. Free market fundamentalism has been discredited. The market for global finance proved not to be a self regulating and self-correcting mechanism, with frightening consequences. Nor are the strictures of the free market fundamentalists a reliable way of delivering the goods in terms of secure jobs and incomes.

So is this the death of neo-liberalism, the end of economic rationalism?

I don't think so.

Neo liberalism arose for reasons that still operate. First, it suits particular corporate interests and has delivered extraordinary growth in wealth to them. Second, it is deeply naturalised in Australian society. It is internalised, partly because ideas of freedom, competition, choice and self interest have an over-riding appeal to a significant number of people.

But another important reason is that there is no immediately apparent alternative philosophy. Without a robust alterative, we may be here is ten years railing against some future hybrid of neo liberalism which will have failed even more spectacularly.

Today I want to make some comments on what such an alternative might be and how we might strive for it. But before I do so I want to describe what a successful set of ideas is not. It is not is long shopping list of nice things you'd like to achieve. It is not the sum total of the various causes of progressive groups. In the real world there are conflicts and choices to be made. The most difficult centre around the contradiction between material delights of seemingly endless growth and the unsustainability of this. More tangibly, this means a genuine commitment to renewable energy will conflict with those who refuse to change in the coal mining and coal fired electricity generation industries.

But let's talk about possible alternative philosophies to neo-liberalism. In fact we can actually learn a lot from the rise of neo-liberalism. After all, it has been remarkably successful. From a set of idea which were universally regarded as absurd and marginal, they developed into a kind of new 'common sense'. I am not suggesting we need an ideological world view similar to neo-liberalism -- a Theory of Everything -- rather we need a set of values, a political outlook and a degree of coherence which the progressive movement so far lacks.

The most obvious thing is to learn from its success is the power of ideas, the ability of a set of ideas embedded in an intellectual framework, to inspire people and to change society. This has been the case with both neo-liberalism and with the earlier powerful paradigm of ideas grouped around socialism. Without inspiration and the strength that comes from a set of ideas, few will develop the determination which is necessary to actually change anything.

Such ideas operate on many levels. They have values by which to analyse society, they set longer term goals, they make assumptions about human nature, they contain moral principles, they suggest a range of political strategies for change, and ultimately they suggest practical principles to create policies.

In the case of neo liberalism, a key assumption about human nature is that narrowly defined self-interest is the key driving force of humans and that the main yard stick of value is the growing output of material goods. A related assumption is the claim that outcomes of free markets are somehow ethically 'good'. The latter is a principle about morality, in this case a deeply flawed morality.

These deeply embedded assumptions explain the hysterical attacks on those who argue that endlessly rising living standards are unsustainable and who disagree that human well being must be based on a growing supply of consumer goods.

Finally on neo-liberalism, we need note that the problem is not the use of markets per se, it is the fundamentalist and utopian philosophy that markets must be used wherever possible and that market outcomes can substitute for ethical decisions.

So what would a new philosophy look like?

In my book Beyond Right and Left I attempt to sketch this out. I argue that we need a synthesis of principles drawn from some of the world's major philosophies. I believe we can forge a new kind of common sense, a new hegemony on this basis.

At the heart of an alterative is the recognition of the inter-connectedness between what we used to call the economy and the environment. Sustainability is a fundamental concept and measure. This is a concept that breaks not only with neo liberalism but also with the economic assumptions of traditional socialist ideas. It involves rejecting assumptions of endless material progress. It involves supporting the concept of 'enough' and 'sufficient', not 'more and more'.

So my first point is about the deprivation model versus the sustainability model. Recently the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that, over a 12 month period, due to a money shortage, 13% of Australians said that they had gone without meals or had been unable to heat their home.

As against that, on a longer time frame, real incomes in Australia have trebled in the last 50 years. Many, many working Australians enjoy a lifestyle undreamt of by their parents. Four wheel drives, home entertainment systems, overseas holidays. My point is not to brush poverty under the carpet but to ask: if our vision assumes that deprivation is central, then problems arise. The first is that the emphasis seems to be misplaced and does not accord with central facts. Second, in political terms, by emphasizing material deprivation, we are addressing the needs of a minority and risk say little to a much bigger group whose support is vital for social change.

This relates to my second main point which is about the need to assert the common good. For too long progressives have had a love affair with diversity. We valued the differences between people. We formed movements based on particular constituencies. Diversity is not bad principle at all, but taken on its own its application in practice has been negative. It fed the celebration of individualism. It meant that we didn't search for the commonalities, the common interests. In many ways it meant that progressive were simply a patchwork of special interest groups each pushing their own barrow and saying little about common interests.

Both the economic collapse and the climate crisis emphasise our actual common interests. There is hardly an individual solution to either. Neo liberalism assumes that choices and competition can be constructed -- but in the case of the environmental crisis, we have only one planet, we cannot choose another. We have only one atmosphere in which to breathe and one climate to sustain us. Given that growth will be constrained by the planet's limits we should talk about a more equal sharing of limited wealth, not endless expansion. In practice, a more equal sharing of wealth means vast improvements to the shared infrastructure of society, its common assets such as a health care, system, transport, education, energy and so on.

This relates to my third point, that we need to assert the goals of social equality. The economic crisis has spotlighted the grotesque wealth inequalities which exist in this society. Whether corporate bonuses of tens of millions of dollars are paid to competent or incompetent managers, the sums are immoral. But this is not the central point. The real reason we must have equality at the centre of our vision is that business will try to impose its own solutions to the economic crisis. It obviously wants to get back on track and its solutions will take little heed of social inequalities. In fact they will be predicated on them., More than this, in the years to come, as the climate emergency grows, corporate Australia will begin to act aggressively to solve it, because ultimately it wants to survive too. The solutions which it will promote, as so often in the past, will entrench inequality. The key social consequence of the climate crisis is that energy will cost far, far more than it ever has in the past. This means the costs of all goods and services will rise, in some cases radically. Ordinary people will bear a disproportionate cost unless social equality is at the heart of a climate response.

Finally, we need a new kind of movement based on this set of progressive values.

In terms of a movement, we need more coherence and co-operation across NGOs, trade unions, environment, welfare and church groups. But we need more than simple organisational efficiency. We need to work towards the inspiration of a new grass roots movement of people that goes beyond these lobby groups and their interests. In my lifetime, many activist causes have been transformed into institutionalised groups whose faces are turned to the government, not to the public at large. This development was largely inevitable but now the circumstances and the possibilities are changing. Rather than seeing mass action and public pressure as a small part of a wider lobbying effort, the progressive movements need a new orientation which sees building a mass movement as a real priority. In recent times the closest we have come to this is Your Rights at Work campaign. Unions had no chance of winning through lobbying so they began to organise both in an old familiar way and in new ways. Among the climate groups, a similar thing will hopefully occur. I may be old fashioned but a key thing for any movement to make an impact is its ability to mobilise in the community, and come into the streets in large numbers.

The key to this movement is a new set of shared values which are already present in embryo, are based on:
-- sustainability and conservation
- social equality;
- a common good;

These values sound easy to adopt but in practice, differences and disagreements will surface within and between the progressive movements themselves. The phrase one hears more frequently these days is about the fault line between greens and browns. Developing a vision that can inspire both activists and a wider circle of supporters will not be easy but it will help to resolve the fault line issues. The sooner we begin this process the better.

Posted by David at 10:48 PM

February 15, 2009

The crisis of neo-liberalism and the renewal of progressive ideas

[This article appeared in Arena,a magazine of left political, social and cultural commentary, published in Melbourne, Dec-January 2008-09]

There are have been many delicious moments in the last few months as the banks on Wall Street tumbled like an unstoppable sequence of falling dominos. Having the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan admit that he had misplaced his faith in deregulated free markets was one. Another was the sight of the British and American governments nationalizing banks as their losses forced them to the wall.

Another was US Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson's comment in an interview with Fortune magazine: 'Raw capitalism is a dead end. I've seen it.' Or as Nicholas Sarkozy said succinctly: 'Laissez faire, c'est fini'.

By contrast, the columnists and commentators of the free market Right continue to blame governments. They argue that the reason for the sub-prime crisis is that the Clinton administration forced banks to lend to poor people. The logic of this is, of course, that in this crisis we need freer markets and more deregulation, not less. Above all, say the Right, we must not draw moral lessons from the crash. Any talk about the grotesque bonuses to bankers and screen jockeys is far too crude. Mentioning greed as a factor causing the crisis is so simplistic.

This hasn't been the response of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who damned 'extreme capitalism' and a 'culture of greed' as the cause. Rudd is often accused of being an Antipodean Tony Blair, but the economic crisis is revealing that Rudd is quite different. Rudd's recent attack on 'free market ideologues' was a speech that neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown - or certainly not Paul Keating -- would have made.

After explaining Labor's response to the crisis to the Federal Labor Business Forum in Sydney in October, he characterized the crisis as a 'fundamental failure of values'. The fact is, he said, that much of the root cause of the sub prime crisis came down to our financial markets rewarding people for taking extravagant risks.

'Executives earned massive bonuses. Their rewards were skewed to short term “success” rather than long term creation of asset value. They literally laughed all the way to the bank … These were the most obvious manifestations of the culture of greed and short-termism which pervaded large parts of the American financial sector. This culture was never challenged by a political and economic ideology of extreme capitalism.'

His particular target was 'extreme free market ideologues' who, he said, 'have a naïve belief that unrestrained markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve optimum outcomes. Ideologues who believe that any regulation of private business is fundamentally wrong. Ideologues who have resisted the regulation of financial markets and the supervision of a wide range of financial institutions. Ideologues who lectured the developing countries caught up in the Asian Financial Crisis a decade ago about the need for transparency and disclosure, but did little to reform their own financial systems. Ideologues who believe that government is always the problem, never the solution.

'Except of course when there is a crash - then, the self-same ideologues argue, having privatised their profits, [say] we should socialize their losses. And by the way, having demanded lower and lower taxes all the way through.'

Rudd's attack drew a predictable reaction. The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman denounced him. Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian' said that the banks were not to blame at all. It was “do-gooders peddling universal home ownership”. The Melbourne Herald-Sun's Andrew Bolt chimed in on cue and said: 'The "greed" that started it was that of poor people in the US who wanted a house and took out home mortgages they had little hope of repaying.' A few weeks later Albrechtsen returned to the theme, arguing that Rudd's speeches were merely a 'dog whistle' to the Left. If that is all they were, you might wonder, why is she so upset?

But these justifications don't cut much ice. The reason is plain for all to see. Today, it is only government which can save society from the consequences of decisions made by the banking sector and its poor lending practices. It was always going to be that way - but this was an unfashionable thing to argue when the economy boomed and neo-liberalism held sway. This economic ideology of the free market has been most deeply applied in the banking and finance sector. And for quite a while, it seemed justified. In the old days, it is true, home loans were given only to the most cashed up borrowers. You had to go to the banks on bended knees to get a home loan. Deregulation seemed to make sense.

But the level of home ownership has not changed very much over the decades and deregulation meant high interest rates at times and a housing bubble. The availability of easy credit has meant the creation of a wider debt bubble. That is why the coming recession will hit many people very hard. Those who lose their jobs or businesses will have large personal debts still to pay off, and these debts will be larger than in previous recessions, because Australians have been encouraged to borrow freely for many years.

Whether the Rudd government will do anything to change this is a moot point. Its watchword so far has been excessive caution, disappointing many supporters. Rudd has decided that a key part of winning the next election is to fulfil the letter of election promises, neither more nor less. Hence his unwillingness to introduce reforms that genuinely roll back the workplace laws which Howard introduced. But a global economic crisis changes the terrain on which politics is played and some caution needs to be set aside. Already his government is using traditional spending measures to stimulate the economy and it has said that it will go into temporary deficit if necessary. Re-regulation and deficit spending mark small but important changes to the neo-liberal wisdom.

But the erosion of neo-liberal dominance can and will open up real possibilities for change - if only progressives can grasp them. Free market ideology has been mortally wounded on its strongest point: that it is the only economically sustainable choice worth taking. Now it has been shown to be economically unsustainable and potentially the cause of a great deal of misery depending on how deep the recession dives.

There is a tendency already evident that for some people to see the economic crisis in very traditional terms. They point to all those articles suggesting that Karl Marx will rise from Highgate Cemetery and be vindicated at last. But neo-liberalism was much more complicated and far-reaching than an economic phenomena. And neo-liberalism's social and environmental effects are still with us. They have had a permanent impact on social institutions and have not been eliminated. The logic of neo-liberalism is still threatens the climate. That's why its fatal wounds still call for a new politics.

We have to deal with the fact that neo-liberalism has created social practices that are unsustainable. For example, it has eroded the social and cultural framework in which certain things were not done, no matter how profitable they might be and certain areas where no go areas . Neo-liberal policies have meant the massive spread of gambling. All over Australia gamblers and especially gambling addicts provide massive revenue for state treasuries. Similarly with the sale and consumption of alcohol. Free trade in gambling and alcohol sales is economically rational. So we now have a choice—that wonderfully deceptive word - about buying vodka at midnight and playing the pokies til 6am. We are therefore in a freer society.

But both gambling and alcohol consumption have downsides, in some cases terrible social effects. And the more they are liberalized, the worse the effects become. My point is that it was once only the religious right who opposed their spread. Today I think there is a good case for the left to combat these policies and to link up with anybody on the right who sincerely wants to roll back the libertarian policies. This doesn't entail closing all pubs and banning gambling - but significant changes less than that.

Neo liberalism also slowly and relentlessly creates a culture in which widely held social values are skewed towards individualism, self-interest, and competition. It creates a society in which we are obsessed with paid work and with the material goods which work brings. Without going into it more deeply, all this process of commodification is antithetical to the kind of personalities and instincts we have as creatures shapes by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. In human values lies part of the resistance to neo liberalism.

Another consequence of the encouragement of individualism, self interest is the loss of social cohesion. Often this is clothed in the language of diversity, choice and flexibility. The lack of social cohesion expresses itself in the increasing need for private provision for heath and education and the degrading of public provision. In a different kind of way, social cohesion is put under strain by the changes in the work forces such as outsourcing. We are now in the process of creating a layer of working poor in our society. When the unions and their supporters challenged Work Choices this was movement for greater regulation ad for greater social cohesion. Some saw it as a sign of revival of an old movement and I suppose it was that - but the resonance it struck in a wider society was about resistance to the disorder and decreasing social cohesion which neo-liberalism entails.

All of this is about what I've called a libertarian capitalism or what Anne Manne and others call the New Capitalism. It may seem quite natural and normal for people under 30, but it is something which is quite new, it is constructed, and it can change. Indeed it must change because a society of individuals pursuing self interest has a lot of trouble acting in collective ways. Yet the kinds of challenges which we will face in coming decades are ones which need a collective solution.

The most obvious instance of unsustainability is climate change, although it is not the only one. The British economist Nicholas Stern regards the climate crisis as an example of 'market failure'. He said:

'Markets do not automatically provide the right type and quantity of public goods, because in the absence of the right kind of public policy, there are limited or no returns to private investors for doing so…Thus climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods …. All in all it must be regarded as a market failure on the greatest scale the world has ever seen.'

The most recent research indicates that its effects are coming faster than anticipated. A report from Sweden I saw recently seems to indicate that parts of the permafrost in the northern hemisphere are warming, releasing methane gas. And thanks to David Spratt and Phillip Sutton's book Climate Code Red we know that the decay of the polar icecaps is proceeding far more quickly than scientists predicted.

That means that some of the problems that flow from this will arrive relatively soon. This means, for example, large scale refugee movements from flooded areas, such as Bangla Desh and from some Pacific Islands. Droughts may trigger wars and conflict over drinking water in south east Asia.

Within Australia we can predict an increase in social tension between the disadvantaged and the comfortable. To decrease fossil fuels use and change to renewables, the price of energy must rise radically and this will undermine some of the lifestyle we enjoy. The political problem is that no one wants to tell people this unpleasant truth. Certainly not a government or an opposition which wants to be elected.

On this basis, I believe that mitigating it and adapting to it will dominate politics for the foreseeable future. That is, it will be the pivot or the axis on which alternative and progressive politics will be built. A whole of lot of other concerns for progressives - racism and inequality for example - will find their sharpest expression in the response to climate change.

Theory and practice

I've spent some time sketching out these problems. I do this for a number of reasons - if you want a critique you must begin with problems, if you are interested social change must sketch those problems on large scale. If you want social change, you must be interested in connecting theory with practice - which means among other things, you must be able to make a connection between the problems which will affect ordinary people and the wider social vision you aim at.

Every successful movement for social change has invariably had one major advantage over bigger and more powerful forces. That advantage is the ability to see problems emerging from beyond the horizon and to prepare for them with a new social vision.

Why is that? Certain forces have a logic of their own. They impose themselves on events regardless. Things are forced to change - and if you are in tune with that change , if you understand something like climate change in all its shocking implications, then you can seize an opportunity when it arises. Because when things begin to change, those who have a vested interest in the present state of affairs don't want to recognise the new reality, they want to tinker with it, they hope for the best.

Those who do not have a stake in the present, but who have a vision of the future which is both principled and pragmatic can have an enormous influence.

Because you never know what is over the horizon. Let's say in the next year there was a return to a fierce drought. Let's say the water supply of Melbourne and Sydney dips below 30 %, down to 20% or less. This frightening example of climate change - would also be the kind of event which forces the whole society to consider new possibilities in public policy and politics. Being able to explain these events gives you have a tremendous advantage in being able to suggest a course of action.

The challenge

In his lucid study of the pioneers of neo-liberalism Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, Simon Marginson notes a crucial element of the challenge presented by these thinkers.

'What has been impressive about this group - it is a lesson its opponents would do well to learn - is the long term nature of their project. They realized that this meant a major change not only in government policies but in the economic and political culture in which those policies were implemented … [This was] decades in the making.'

That's what we must do - plan to set a new political agenda over the next decade of two . It is what I set out to do in my book Beyond Right and Left. What the book is actually about is the development of a new social critique, a new critical project, a new set of ideas and values on which a new political force could be built. This seems to me vital - if only for the reason that no other movement for social change has ever existed which did not have some sort of coherent social critique.

I say this while also saying you don't have to agree with me on details. I am not saying progressives need a coherent set of ideas and they have to be my ideas. But we do need to reshape and renew out vision - for many reasons, including the challenges thrown up by neo liberalism and climate change.

But a set of ideas is not enough. The other vital ingredients for really significant social change - is mass support. And the need for some sort of mass support affects how you develop and emphases the ideas. To win mass support such ideas must be relevant to the perceived problems of a large section of society - they have to have an immediate applicability as well as some longer term depth. They must touch people's hearts and heads.

No social change has ever happened without mass support - by which I mean not 50% support - that is impossible from a standing start -- but of a critical mass, a thoughtful, determined minority which aims to speak to a majority and whose ideas are projected as a long term vision affecting the whole society.

That's what occurred over the great 150 year struggle of the labour and trade union movement. There was rank and file support for the early socialist and anarchists because of the very obvious deprivation and injustice which workers faced every day,. But there was also a long term vision to remake society - and that actually occurred, though often in unforeseen ways.

Similarly, and in a much short time frame, the emergence of feminism and environmentalism developed a set of ideas which addressed both the immediate situation and projected a longer term vision.

But these is another element in all of this which we must address. All of these visions - labour movement, of women and of the environment - are partial visions. Part of what we need to strive for is a vision which connects and makes coherent certain elements which touch on all these areas. Not a totalising and all-explanatory theory but rather a set of values that informs a looser kind of social analysis.

To analyse the multi-sided nature of the emerging crisis in our society we need to build an intellectual movement that can begin to think through some of the dilemmas all this poses - and this is not a short term project, but in terms of ideas, it is the only thing worth concentrating on at the moment.

Posted by David at 8:32 PM

November 19, 2008

Rupert Murdoch - man of ideas

Rupert Murdoch's critics often make the mistake of caricaturing him as just another businessman, interested more in money than ideology. His support for Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, it is argued, secured him a lucrative TV network and protected him from regulatory measures. These claims underestimate Murdoch's powerful contribution to the shaping of political ideas in Britain, the US and Australia in the past 25 years.

Most businessmen avoid discussing politics publicly and media owners all the more so, since their businesses are the vehicles for the national conversation about politics. Not so Rupert. Murdoch and his media outlets have been at the forefront of the philosophical and political revolution constituted by free-market thinking.

Murdoch obliquely referred to this in his first Boyer lecture as "the great transformation we've seen in the past few decades", but otherwise his praise for free-market thinking was muted, perhaps because people blame finance deregulation for the economic crisis. But last year, to support its bid for The Wall Street Journal, News Corporation began advertising itself on the theme "Free people. Free markets. Free thinking."

In support of such a position, Murdoch maintains loss-making newspapers such as the New York Post and the London Times. The Australian lost millions for 20 years until the mid-1980s. Murdoch's preparedness to take losses year after year testifies to the fact that he often puts ideas and influence before profit.

In a 1994 address to the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney free-market think tank, Murdoch argued ideas in society were more important than short-term profit. He quoted John Maynard Keynes's argument that political and philosophical ideas are often very significant to men who regard themselves as supremely practical. In the media business, "we are all ruled by ideas", Murdoch added.

An important example of this is his support for the Washington publication The Weekly Standard, an influential and elite magazine regarded as the journal of American neo-conservatives. Murdoch began it with $3 million in 1995 and, for a number of years, it was a determined opponent of the Clinton presidency. In 2003 The New York Times described it as the "prime voice" of Republican neo-conservatives and one of Washington's more influential publications.

Like Murdoch, the magazine strongly supported the invasion of Iraq and most Bush Administration positions. The annual subsidy to The Weekly Standard is thought to be at least $1 million, though this is small change amid corporation revenue of $US32 billion. Murdoch's speechwriter, Bill McGurn, was Bush's chief speechwriter.

That corporate culture at News is deeply political is evidenced by the regular global retreats of editors and other senior staff - not because corporate retreats are unusual (they are not) but because News's so closely identify with politics. The early retreats expressed a clear preference for the Republican Party and its neo-conservative wing.

The first of these was in 1988 at the ski resort of Aspen, Colorado. According to the the Murdoch biographer William Shawcross, the star attraction was Richard Nixon. The other speakers representing "different aspects of Murdoch's view of the world" included Norman Podhoretz, an early neo-con and father of a founding editor of The Weekly Standard.

In 1992, at the second of these powwows, one discussion panel included Stephen Chao, the president of Fox television; Lynne Cheney, the morals campaigner and wife of Dick; John O'Sullivan, the editor of a major conservative journal; and another neo-con intellectual, Irving Kristol, whose son, William, now edits The Weekly Standard.

A male stripper disrobed as Chao spoke and Chao, who was trying to make a point about sex in the media, was sacked by Murdoch. The seminar's title? "The Threat To Democratic Capitalism Posed By Modern Culture" - a regular theme of neo-cons, who argued profit imperative destroyed moral barriers. Another high-flown concept pioneered by News in Australian political life is that of "culture wars", a notion derived from American think tanks to describe the conflict over such things as the interpretation of history, values and skills in public education and the welfare state. Some of these themes will feature in the Boyer lectures and have been the subject of campaigns by The Australian for some years.

The Australian's existence is an example of Murdoch's commitment to quality journalism. But the newspaper's stance draws deeply from intellectuals in American think tanks and it finds itself at odds with many Australian thinkers unconvinced by neo-conservatism.

For example, just before the defeat of the Howard government, The Australian Literary Review ran a cover story on Australia's "second-rate" intellectuals who refused to recognise Australia's great political leadership. An editorial noted: "Australia continues to be a lucky country thanks to a generation of first-rate national leaders but has been let down by second-rate public intellectuals." It named several, and continued: "Their contempt for our political leadership is matched only by their disparagement of ordinary people." Accusing left-liberal opponents of being powerful elites who hold ordinary people in contempt, News replicates another tradition of American neo-conservatism.

One key target over the years has been La Trobe University's Robert Manne, who was attacked by The Australian in a 2001 article of an unprecedented 7000 words, mainly for Manne's defence of the Bringing Them Home report on the stolen generations of indigenous children. Manne had said there was an organised campaign of historical denial in which writers and columnists at News Corporation newspapers had taken a prominent part.

Rupert Murdoch's ideas are said to have mellowed.

In 2006 in California, he was persuaded by Tony Blair, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore to abandon climate scepticism and to accept the scientific evidence of climate change. Shortly afterwards Murdoch warned of climate change's "catastrophic" threat.

While a change of heart, the statement confirmed the Murdoch commitment to ideas was unchanged. It reaffirmed his media's unified corporate position on major political issues. Previously and predictably, his media promoted climate scepticism; now that the orthodoxy changed, they turned in a new direction, like an army on the march.

Profit remains important to Murdoch; of course it does. But it is also balanced, in part at least, by a commitment to ideas.

Posted by David at 9:48 PM

October 16, 2008

Kevin Rudd, free markets and the greed culture

The Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd is often accused of being similar to Tony Blair and his mealy-mouthed 'Third Way'. But the economic crisis is revealing that Rudd is quite different from Blair. Rudd's recent attack on 'free market ideologues' was a speech that neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown - or certainly not Paul Keating -- would have made.

His unashamed attack on free market ideology came in a remarkable speech to the Federal Labor Business Forum in Sydney in October. After explaining Labor's response to the crisis, he then went on to discuss 'the fundamental failure of values' revealed by the crisis.

Referring to the 1987 stock market crash, the movie 'Wall Street' and its leading character, the unscrupulous Gordon Gekko - Mr. Rudd said: 'The fact is that Gordon Gekko wasn't tamed in 1987 - he was simply ignored. The fact is that much of the root cause of the sub prime crisis came down to our financial markets rewarding people for taking extravagant risks.

'Executives earned massive bonuses. Their rewards were skewed to short term “success” rather than long term creation of asset value. They literally laughed all the way to the bank.'

A little later the Prime Minister accused 'predatory financiers' of exploiting working class Australians 'with hidden fees, ratchet interest rates, and confusing repayment terms.

'These were the most obvious manifestations of the culture of greed and short-termism which pervaded large parts of the American financial sector. This culture was never challenged by a political and economic ideology of extreme capitalism.

His particular target was 'extreme free market ideologues who influence much of the neo-liberal economic elite.'

'Free market ideologues who have a naïve belief that unrestrained markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve optimum outcomes.

'Ideologues who believe that any regulation of private business is fundamentally wrong. Ideologues who have resisted the regulation of financial markets and the supervision of a wide range of financial institutions.

'Ideologues who lectured the developing countries caught up in the Asian Financial Crisis a decade ago about the need for transparency and disclosure, but did little to reform their own financial systems. Ideologues who believe that government is always the problem, never the solution.

'Except of course when there is a crash - then, the self-same ideologues argue, having privatised their profits, [say] we should socialize their losses. And by the way, having demanded lower and lower taxes all the way through.

The most important part of Mr. Rudd's speech came with his words on the future. 'When we are through the current crisis it will be time therefore to take stock. Not to overreact - but rather, for the world to calmly take stock of what went wrong, as we pursue the reforms necessary to restore long-term confidence and stability to global financial markets.'

Rudd's attack drew a predictable reaction. Piers Akerman denounced him. Janet Albrechtsen in 'The Australian' said that the banks were not to blame at all. No, she said. It was “do-gooders peddling universal home ownership”. According to Albrechtsen, the big bad socialist government of the USA forced the poor old banks to lend to people who had no hope of re-paying.

But these justifications don't cut much ice with anyone. The reason for this is plain for all to see. Today, it is only government which can save the banking sector from its poor lending practices. It was always going to be that way - but for a long time a kind of religion prevailed that worshipped markets. The was the ideology of economic rationalism.

This economic ideology of the free market has been most deeply applied in the banking and finance sector - that is, the institutions which take deposits and lend to business and to homeowners. For a long time it was argued that in banking and finance the government should “get out of the way”. Banking and finance was “deregulated”. And for quite a while, it seemed justified.

In the old days, it is true, home loans were given only to the best possible borrowers. You had to go to the banks on bended knees to get a home loan. Deregulation seemed to make sense.

But deregulation has not done so much good, True, there is more money available but the level of home ownership has not changed very much over the decades. In fact deregulation has meant high interest rates at times - and it has contributed to ballooning home prices in Australia over the last 25 years.

I mention this because changes in government policy such as deregulation are meant to make things better. In the case of home ownership you would hope that deregulation would have allowed more people to buy homes - but this has not occurred.

Something else occurred. The availability of easy credit has meant the creation of a huge debt bubble for many people. That is why the coming recession will hit many people very hard. Those who lose their jobs or businesses will probably have large personal debts that they still have to pay off, and these debts will be larger than in previous recessions, because Australians have been encouraged to borrow like mad for many years. We've all had experience of being offered credit cards through the mail, with a credit limit of thousands of dollars.

To understand what all this means, you have to look at the bigger picture.

I want to begin by arguing a proposition: that the really big changes in societies only comes after the dominant old ideas have been overthrown. The really big changes made by Labor government in history - in World War Two and after - and then by Whitlam in the 70s - and then by Hawke and Keating - these changes happened because, in different ways, the thinking of public at large changed .

My point is that, in the long term, ideas matter. Ideas matter to political change. Let me explain.

For the past 25 years we have lived in the Age of the Free Market. That age is now over. But before we bury it, we need to look at the Age of the Free Market. The age of the Free Market was NOT about whether a country like Australia has a market system. We have had that for 100 years.

The Age of the Free Market was about something different. It was about the domination of a belief system or ideology that says bluntly markets are right, governments are wrong. That says governments should get out of the way - that governments should shrink.

This ideology talks about the ability of market to 'self correct' and suggests we should leave a whole lot of policy outcomes to the market'. It's linked to the mantra of 'private good, public bad. ' It was a kind of fundamentalism, just like a religion. The way you tell fundamentalists is that, whatever question you ask, the answer is always the same. A religious fundamentalist always answers every question by saying that his or her extreme definition of religion is the one true faith. Free market fundamentalists always answer that whatever the social or economic problems - markets are always the answer.

You'd be familiar with this kind of talk. It has been used to justify extreme salaries to top business executives, supposedly because of 'market demands' - so we have Sol Trujillo of Telstra getting an obscene $13 million last year. Because, the argument ran, this was an internationally competitive rate. It was a market rate. Funnily enough, international competition in salaries - unlike other things -- never cuts the price, it always raises it.

In all sorts of ways -- This sort of thinking has dominated government and all political parties for more than 20 years.

But markets have a number of downsides. Here's just three:

* They reward bigger players, cashed up players. They magnify social disadvantage. They increase inequalities.

* In an economy they can be destabilising force - and we have a living example now.

* They encourage a culture and values of selfishness and greed. They encourage individualism.

I am not saying let's get rid of them altogether - they have positives, but for a long while we have only heard the positives and not the negatives. The high priests have held sway.

But now circumstances have changed - and it is important, even vital, to press home to Australians that we need a new way of seeing the world and we need new answers.

So in terms of the future of Labor we are passing through a historic change. We have a Prime Minster whom, I believe, is genuinely committed to changing the deeper values and policies away from the market.

I think we need to build on that. To take him at his word.

There are lots of areas where the rule of the dollar needs to be challenged - issues big and small. Let me give some examples.

* We have a lot of children who are obese - these children are targets for advertising by those who make junk food. Let's end the free market in advertising and ban junk food ads in children's TV viewing time.

* We have a society in which alcohol licensing laws are now so liberal they are becoming a real social problem. The free market says alcohol should be sold around the clock - let's support restrictions on this madness. Let's do it in name of progress and to oppose free trade in alcohol.

* We have universities which the market says should be run like a business and make profits and not rely on government support. That should be changed - it has all kinds of bad effects on academic standards.

The free marketeers says we should have a small government sector and low tax. But many problems can only be addressed by a strong well-funded government. That means Labor not giving in to the calls for tax bribes at election time.

But the two big places to fight for new kind of values which are not slaves to the market are -- first, in the workplace, and second, on the issue of climate and the environment.

The free market dictates that workers and employees are just commodities, just factors of production, At bottom this was what Howard's industrial relations laws were about. We need therefore to push further back on these issues and get federal Labor to find the ways to make such a roll back of WorkChoices acceptable to voters. More than that we need to make sure maternity leave and support for mothers and families is forthcoming, both from government and from workplaces.

Second, on the climate. The warming of the planet is a very special kind of problem. It is a problem that affects everybody - no matter what country, no matter what class. It is a universal problem. This means that there are no individual solutions. Ultimately, rich people cannot buy their way out of the problem, though no doubt they will try. Climate is a problem that emphasises the connectedness of all humans on the planet, our common interest.

But the Age of the Market has encouraged people to see solutions to problems in terms of personal choice, and individualism. For the climate and other environmental problems - this is no personal solution. So part of the change in values in the New Age must be a new collectivism, a preparedness to recognise that we are all in the same boat and we have to help each other.

So finally, we need a new set of values beyond the market, and the Prime Minister is right, let's try and turn away from the Age of the Free Markets. Let's create a New Age of collective values and of caring. And let's make it stick.

Posted by David at 10:30 AM

July 27, 2008

'I pry with my little spy'

This article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, May 31 2008

May 1970 was the high point in protests against conscription and the Vietnam war. That month the Vietnam Moratorium drew 100,000 people onto the streets in Melbourne and 30,000 in Sydney. The Liberal-Country Party government, which had denounced the protests as communist-inspired, was alarmed at the strength of the demonstrations.

A month after the protests, the NSW secretary of the Liberal Party, John Carrick, approached the federal Attorney General Tom Hughes for help. He asked for ASIO briefing papers on the student protest movement which had done so much to turn the tide against the government.

According to ASIO archives, Hughes authorized this request and ASIO provided Carrick with three ASIO background papers, among them, 'Student revolutionary activism: its implication for the promotion of insurrectionary warfare in Australia'.

The release of such information to a private individual was not unusual. Hughes was doing what many of his predecessors had done. Indeed ASIO research papers were regularly sent to rightwing journalists and to anti-Communist organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and to B.A. Santamaria's National Civic Council.

So when Justice Robert Hope began investigating the Australian Security Intelligence Organization in 1974, he found an organisation that was routinely used for party political purposes by the Liberal Party. But he decided that none of this dirty washing would be released in his official reports. His role, he said, was to 'make recommendations for the future rather than to seek to track down the truth or otherwise of past errors or alleged past errors.'

Nevertheless the details of ASIO's politicization scandalized him and his small staff who were the first independent investigators into the shadowy organization. Many of the details which Hope found but chose not reveal for strategic reasons emerged during my research over the last four years into ASIO's archives.

Perhaps the most bizarre instruction given to ASIO came from the Foreign Minister, Nigel Bowen in May 1972 who asked ASIO chief Peter Barbour to investigate the 'subversive affiliations' of the Australia Party. The Australia Party, a precursor to the Democrats, had been formed by dissident Liberals. ASIO reported that the party had links with the anti-Vietnam protests but was not strictly speaking 'subversive'.

More serious were ASIO reports that were used to damn the Opposition Labor Party and its MPs. One briefing paper in particular analysed the political motivations of Dr Jim Cairns, a senior Labor MP who was a leader of the Vietnam Moratorium movement. The paper argued that Cairns' activities could ultimately lead to the destruction of parliamentary democracy. The anti-Labor bias continued as the government prepared for the 1972 election. At one point, the Attorney General, Nigel Bowen, and Minister for Labour, Phillip Lynch, asked for ASIO's assessment of proposals put forward by Labor's shadow Minster for Labour, Clyde Cameron and ACTU president, Bob Hawke, on reforming the industrial arbitration system.

While Ivor Greenwood was Attorney General (1971-72), frequently sought security information which he could use to attack the Labor Party. On one occasion ASIO informed him of behind the scenes moves to get a communist trade union leader John Halfpenny, to leave the CPA and join the Labor Party.

Greenwood also liked reading raw intelligence, unusual even for Liberal Attorneys General. In October 1971 he asked to read the transcript of a telephone intercept on Darce Cassidy, a leftwing employee of the ABC. He also asked for security details on a number of left-wing trade union officials, including George Crawford, a leading figure in the Victorian branch of the Labor Party. In the case of feminist and trade union activist in the Melbourne Mail Exchange, Zelda D'Aprano, he suggested to ASIO an unusual strategy. 'He thought she should be got rid of, even by promotion (!) [sic] to some minor Post Office,' reported an ASIO officer.

Just before Christmas 1971 two senior ASIO officers briefed Greenwood on the 'the Aboriginal problem', covering the influence of the Communist Party, marxist intellectuals, the US Black Power movement and the influence of the World Council of Churches. Greenwood saw threats where even ASIO did not. According to one ASIO officer, Greenwood 'was emphatic' that major violent incidents were likely to occur and that 'he was not satisfied with some [ASIO] assessments, [which argued] that no major acts of violence were likely to occur'. Greenwood suggested more telephone intercepts might be required and said he was happy to approve them.

Justice Hope was especially concerned with the practice of back bench MPs asking for information from ASIO for political purposes. One example occurred in 1967, during bitter political conflict in the NSW South Coast electorate of Liberal MP, Jeff Bate. Bate asked then Attorney General Nigel Bowen to inquire of ASIO whether local shire councillor, John Hatton, was a member of the Communist Party. ASIO said they had no information that Hatton was a Communist Party member. But it then gave helpful details about one of Hatton's associates who actually was a CPA member. Later an anonymous smear pamphlet which purported to describe the 'security record' of Hatton and his supporters was spread in the area. Years later Hatton later became a distinguished Independent MP in the NSW parliament.

Perhaps because of such blatant requests, the new ASIO chief after 1970, Peter Barbour, refused to grant some requests for political ammunition. In April 1970, just before the huge Vietnam protests erupted, Prime Minister John Gorton's secretary asked ASIO for published references to 'any brushes by Dr. J. F. Cairns with the law'. She said that the Prime Minister recalled that Cairns was involved in an incident in 1956. She also stipulated the Prime Minister wanted this information 'to be provided solely from within ASIO resources and no reference was to be made to the Victoria Police without the approval of the Prime Minister'. After some considerable delay Barbour responded that he 'regretted being unable to provide the information requested as it had not been considered of security interest'. The wording of this response, carefully recorded in a 'Note for File', is deceptive because ASIO did have the information. Barbour refused to hand it over. Shortly after his deputy, Jack Behm, suggested to the Attorney General 'that perhaps the Liberal Party research group could provide the service which members sought.'

But resistance to politicized requests was patchy. In April 1970 the South Australian Liberal MP, John McLeay, asked ASIO for information on the Rev Eric Nicholls who had taken part in anti-Vietnam groups in which communists had been active. Barbour reported that that he 'does not propose to accede to Mr McLeay's request' apparently because nothing adverse was recorded on Rev. Nicholls. But 12 months later ASIO assisted with corrections to the manuscript of an anti-Communist pamphlet written by McLeay. Needless to say such services were not offered to Labor members of parliament.

Shortly before the 1972 election, perhaps having in mind the possible change of government, Barbour told Greenwood, that he declined to provide information on communist trade unions to a backbencher. 'I explained that ASIO was not geared for researching newspapers and other public sources... I said we liked to think that Members of Parliament would turn to the Parliamentary Library or to their party secretariat for such material.' Barbour repeated his statement in writing to Greenwood the following day and pointedly noted that '[t]his sort of requirement seems to me to raise questions about the use of a security service'.

Many of these incidents were uncovered by Justice Hope's first Royal Commission. Hope chose not to dwell on them publicly but noted in an acid aside that it was 'improper for an MP to ask such questions for remission to ASIO, improper for a minister to transmit them to ASIO in the expectation of a reply and improper for the Director General to communicate information on persons by way of reply to the MP's inquiries'.

But ASIO's critics got things wrong. They imagined that ASIO was 'out of control' and running its own agenda. They thought it needed to be brought under democratic control and be accountable. But the problem was that ASIO was already under too much 'democratic control' and it was too 'accountable', at least to its minister. Hope realised that if Australia was to have a security agency it needed autonomy from direct government control. It needed to be accountable to the government but it also needed to have the legal framework to reject politicized requests.

Hope's findings are relevant to a post-911 world. In the cold war much righteous anger was directed at communists against whom any tactic was justified. In those days ASIO cast a wide net around anyone they regarded as sympathetic to communism. They believed they faced an infinitely evil and infinitely cunning enemy.

Today Islamic fundamentalists are the target of much righteous anger. They are seen as infinitely evil and cunning. Today exaggerated threats from terrorism can form a handy tool for governments to mobilize a frightened public. But thanks to Justice Hope today there is at least a better legal framework.

Today those subject to adverse security reports can lodge an appeal. Those who suspect ASIO is acting improperly can at least complain to the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security. None of this guarantees that abuses will not occur but it puts some balance into the relationship between citizens and 'the secret state.'

Posted by David at 10:34 AM

May 29, 2008

Climate change at the helm of Labor's next big idea

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 23 April 2008

Whatever else it does, the 2020 summit may be remembered as sounding the death knell for the Australian Labor Party. Events around the NSW Labor's conference next weekend may bury the corpse.

There was a time once, not so long ago, that when a Labor government took office, its ideas and policies would come from the Labor Party. Based on its local branches and membership, the party would hold conferences and convened policy committees to prepare for office. Left and Right would fight to ensure that their preferred policy was adopted. The stakes in the party were high.

Not anymore. Today the ideas and policies come from think tanks, universities, business, NGOs or religious bodies - anywhere except from the Labor Party itself.

There was a time once when MPs, elected to parliament on the efforts of grassroots members, did not dare reverse explicit policies decided by conference. Not anymore. The NSW Premier and Treasurer have decided to privatise electricity and will, if necessary, defy the party's highest body.

There was a time when party members collected many small donations to swell the coffers to fight the election campaign. The era of the chook raffle actually existed. Not anymore. Today election expenses are funded by governments and big corporate and union donations.

In the internal life of the Labor Party, all that matters are factions and the small group of people who run them. Factions now act as 'executive placement agencies' for ministerial staffers and would-be MPs, in the words of former Labor MP Rodney Cavalier. Star parliamentary candidates are recruited outside the party from those with media profiles.

In elections, parties have become franchises and campaigns are about marketing a brand, not a social vision.

All major political parties are undergoing the same process of hollowing out but this process affects the Labor Party most of all, since it still has the skeleton of a mass membership and the remnants of a grand vision of betterment.

At the heart of the problem is a crisis of ideas and vision. To have a political party that means something, its members must care about a cause. They must feel a passion. Last week Kevin Rudd argued that politics has moved beyond Right and Left and spoke about a new reforming centre. But where are the new ideas that will actually mobilise and revive a political party?

Perhaps the answer lies in something else identified by Kevin Rudd as one of the primary challenges of the our century : climate change. Preventing climate change depends on stopping 'business as usual', according to Ross Garnaut and Nicholas Sterne. What they didn't mention was that this involves stopping 'politics as usual'.

Politics-as-usual decrees that the purpose of politics is to have more. Governments tax and spend to give the public more goods, more money, more consumption. 'Enough' is not a word in the lexicon of old politics. But dealing with climate change means people must make do with less. In simple terms, the price of energy must rise and along with this the price of almost everything.

This will be the greatest challenge to Kevin Rudd and any other political leader in Australia for the next few decades. To implement genuine reforms on climate will involve sacrifice of personal convenience. Political leaders have only ever achieved this (and stayed in office) during a national wartime emergency. Moreover, such changes cannot be imposed from above, if they are to be accepted. Instead a genuine groundswell of support is needed to make the sacrifices acceptable.

Herein lies the chance for the revival of political parties like the Labor Party. The old vision of the labour movement was based on the threat of material deprivation and the need for social equality. It asserted that survival lay in a collective approach not an individual one. It called on supporters to make great sacrifices to achieve a grand humanitarian ideal.

Today a new vision and values built on the threat of climate change offers a close parallel. Climate change is a real danger in the same way that unregulated industrialisation once was for ordinary workers. Equality and sacrifice are vital for acceptance of the policies that are needed. There is no individual solution to climate change, we all share the same atmosphere. Climate change is an issue which won't go away. It is no longer an 'environmental' cause but one that centrally involves the economy. It may become a central driver of all government decision-making.

Along the way, it may become the One Big Idea to revive political parties.

Posted by David at 5:59 PM

May 28, 2008

Confronting the New Conservatism

Book Review of Michael J. Thompson (Ed), Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America, New York University Press, 2007.

This review first published in 'Democratiya' (London)
(www.democratiya.com)

In the final contribution in 'Confronting the New Conservatism', Stephen Bronner sets out how progressive and liberals (in the American sense) can challenge the Right. The Left, he argues, underestimated neo-conservative ideology and can learn from the success of the Right. The conservative message has been primarily aimed at everyday people rather than other intellectuals.

The Democrats have tried to speak to the same people but their pragmatism and their lack of any deeper guiding beliefs has meant the needle of their political compass is constantly drawn to the pole of the Right. Bronnor, a political science professor from Rutgers, argues that the Left must undergo changes itself if it wishes to defeat the Right. A key problem is the fragmentation of the Left into autonomous constituencies especially on the basis of identity politics. Because of this the Left 'appears far weaker than from the sum of its parts'. Academics and intellectuals of the Left are separated from the general public by a chasm. Which is all more or less correct.

Bronnor is grappling with the key problem of the Left in advanced industrial countries: how can the fragmented constituencies of the broad left become a political force which can confront the new conservatism and set a new political agenda? The answer is that a new kind of glue is needed to bind and inspire the movements which range from greens to trade unionists to democrats. He hints that the answer lies in a new kind of 'class ideal' which 'speaks to the interests of working people in all groups but privileges none in particular'. A 'class ideal' suggests some new kind of universalist set of beliefs is needed and that is certainly true. Bronnor does not spell out what his new class ideal consists of but appeals to class interests are not likely to succeed. In fact it was the slow collapse of socialism and social democracy - once robust frameworks and influential guiding beliefs based on class -- that was a precondition for the successful trajectory of the Right which began with Thatcher and Reagan. A telling expression of this is the rhetorical conceit pioneered by the neocons and now used by many conservatives that they represent ordinary people against the 'liberal elites'.

A book on the Right is a welcome thing because so much of the contemporary intellectual Left prefers either to memorialise its radical past or to specialise in cultural questions rather than examine why its ideals have been defeated and how this might be changed. To do this and to overcome the ascendancy of conservatism, it is well to keep in mind the statement attributed to John Stuart Mill that 'he who knows only his own position knows little of that. Take particular care to understand the position of your adversary - and to understand it not in a caricature or superficial form but at its strongest, for until you have rebutted it at its strongest you have not rebutted it at all.'

In this light only a few of the contributions to 'Confronting the New Conservatism' try to understand the success of the American Right, rather than simply describing it. The editor Michael Thompson does understand its success and argues that it is based on its ability to 'weave a new public philosophy'. The new philosophy is a new form of liberalism which rejects the 'old liberalism' which supported a strong social framework in which individuals could flourish. This new lean and mean liberalism grows out of the increased atomisation of modern American and expresses of philosophy of extreme individualism, he says. The genius of the American Right is that this economic liberalism has been synthesised with the contradictory stance of a religious Right which supports moral norms which are in essence collectivist. Claire Snyder points out that the Right is aware of this 'paradox of freedom' and that this explains why neoconservatism upholds family values, along with the religious Right. Values are the glue which holds the Right together but Snyder's conclusion is that we must therefore denounce family values rather than argue for a reframed and inclusive definition of family values.

If we did this we could exacerbate the potential divisions within the Right which are crucial to defeating it. For example, the kind of libertarian economy championed by the free marketeers actively undermines the family by deregulating working hours to the detriment of shared family time. This potentially offers a way of splitting the Right by appealing to blue collar conservatives but such an appeal is anathema to many (though not all) feminist intellectuals. The first generation of neocons - Irving Kristol and especially Daniel Bell were aware of these kinds of divisions. Bell's book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism argues that affluence undermines the ethic of deferred gratification that formed capitalism's disciplined core, as Nicholas Xenos reminds us.

Several contributors usefully trace the ideas and evolution of neo-conservatism, from its origins as a form of social democratic anti-communism preoccupied with domestic social issues, to its present state which emphasises America's imperial role and economic issues. Charles Noble points out that neo conservatism began as a critique of the Great Society's welfare state. Their views on the unintended consequences of government action, on the importance of the family and on the phenomenon of welfare dependency still need to be debated, in my view, and not simply denounced.

Remarkably, for a book wanting to confront the new conservatism, no contributor has much to say on economic policy. Yet neoliberal economic policy is one of its key strengths and conversely, it was especially on economic questions that the world view of the old socialist Left has foundered. Some contributors wildly exaggerate the dominance of the Right. Philip Green, who also has sensible things to say, prefaces them by talking about a 'proto-totalitarian moment' in US politics in which one party is intent on establishing a one party state.

There is a temptation, not absent in this book, to scorn the 'neo' in neoconservatism and comfort oneself that its ideas are merely the old ideas in new garb. This is usually allied with an emphasis on the power of right wing foundations to fund conservative think tanks. Both these points have the comforting effect that one need not concern oneself with grappling with the intellectual substance of neoconservatism. Yet this is crucial because neoconservatism's strength lies in its ideas. The first step in dealing with its ideas is to study them and for this reason Confronting the New Conservatism is valuable book though one which also reflects some of the analytical weakness of the US Left.

Posted by David at 6:03 PM

December 20, 2007

Family values and the renewal of social democracy

[The following article appeared in the British journal 'Renewal' (Vol 15, Nos 2/3, 2007.]

Why worry about the family? To many in social democracy and the Left, issues surrounding the family are of secondary importance to those of the economy and equality. Moreover, public debate around the family is part of the discourse of social conservatism and the Right.

In the United States and Australia 'family values' is seen as part of a conservative 'culture war' against the values of the labour movement and as a code for attacks on feminism, on single mothers, on gay men and women.

In this paper I will argue that a renewal of progressive politics depends in part on a rethinking of the role of family, particularly in relation to the workplace and working time but also in relation to the growing commodification of family life.

There are two strategic reasons for this. The first is that today it makes less and less sense to act as if the world of paid work and production is a separate sphere to that of the family and community. The former is encroaching on the latter in ways that undermine the historic assumption of many on the Left: that a movement based on the workplace and economic exploitation is an adequate foundation for a political movement. Second, within advanced industrial countries, some of the most destructive effects of globalizing capitalism are felt in the sphere of social life including the family. Traditionally social democrats and the Left assumed these were largely if not wholly confined to the economic sphere. On this basis they criticized the market for generating material inequality. The political significance of these social effects is that they provide a powerful new basis for mobilizing popular support in order to restrain and civilize capitalism.

Globalization, the free market and the family

If any one thinker can be said to be the intellectual architect of neo-liberalism it is Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist whose vast intellectual output and theoretical system helped give the neo-liberal movement its resilience and depth. Awarded the Nobel prize in 1974, Hayek inspired many economists and politicians. Among the latter was Margaret Thatcher who told the House of Commons in 1981:

"I am a great admirer of Professor Hayek. Some of his books are absolutely supreme - The Constitution of Liberty and the three volumes of Law, Legislation and Liberty - and would well be read by almost every honourable member. "

But Hayek was much more than an economic thinker. His elaborate system of ideas gave a central role to cultural and social evolution and to notions of human nature.

Hayek argued that modern societies have evolved to such a degree of individual variation that there are almost no common or shared values (i.e. ends) -material acquisition was the only exception. This variation among humans makes the market all the more necessary.

He argued that the value on which markets are based -- liberty --is not 'given' in the nature of human beings, like, say, the value of survival or of material comfort. Rather, it is acquired and developed in the cultural evolution of the 'institutions of liberty'. Liberty, and the discipline that it requires, is something we must learn. Liberty as a value, then, has been 'selected' by cultural evolution.

Free markets are therefore justified in a moral-historical sense because they represent the product of social-cultural evolution which, like biological evolution, had selected the characteristics best adapted to the environment. Societies employing the most successful cultural institutions (such as the market) prospered and their population grew. (Population growth was one of his key measures of success.) His views on morality gave central and over-riding importance to the rules of the market -- that is, good conduct and fair dealing by all people towards anonymous others who are rarely met face to face.
Good conduct concerned rules about 'several [i.e. private] property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain and privacy'. These are what Hayek understands by moral rules.

At this point the relevance of the family and non-economic community relations becomes central.

The unexpected - and repellent - accompaniment of his notion of cultural evolution is that feelings of altruism, and obligation, usually regarded as the kernel of morality, are here seen as its antithesis, as primitive instincts from earlier, hunter-gatherer societies which have to be overcome:

"For those now living within the extended order [the modern economy] gain from not treating one another as neighbors, and by applying - rules of the extended order such as those of several property and contract - instead of the rules of solidarity and altruism. An order in which everyone treated his neighbor as himself would be one where comparatively few could be fruitful and multiply."

Hayek turns our normal conception of morality upside down by insisting that it is 'primitive' and by claiming that untrammeled self interest is both moral and modern. Socialism was therefore an atavistic response to modernization, the re-emergence of ancient, instinctive values in the face of the impersonal market.

Hayek however, reserved a place for these 'primitive feelings' of solidarity and altruism - in the family and in voluntary associations. In a vitally important admission he argued that 'if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order [capitalism and the market] to our more intimate groupings we would crush them [original emphasis]. That is, if we treat parents, children, family and neighbors as we do when buying and selling in the market, we will destroy those relationships. Hayek is right - and one reason we know is because this damage increasingly happening as market relations invade formerly intimate spaces and neighborly relations. The word for this is commodification, the transformation of obligations based on love and altruism into those of commodity-based economic value (i.e. money).

A central weakness of neo-liberalism is therefore its moral underpinning, especially in relation to the family.

Libertarian capitalism and
the commodification of the family

Neo-liberal capitalism has two major effects, First, it deepens the commodification of things once done within the family economy: functions once performed by the family are commodified and sold back to it. For example, meals, care for children and care for the elderly. Second, it is associated with a rise in the number of hours spent at work for a growing number of employees.

Moreover, activities, once performed by government, non-profit or community institutions, are being commercialized. For example, in recent years one of the top performing companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange is a child care corporation. Private companies are now moving into the next lucrative market which is aged care for baby boomers.

The effects of this new phase of neo-liberal capitalism on community and family activities have coincided with the widespread move by married women into the workforce.

As a result of both these trends a whole new range of problems have emerged which are variously styled the work-life collision or the work-family balance. A sub-discipline, feminist economics, has emerged and a small but valuable literature about this has developed.

The Australian labour studies researcher, Professor Barbara Pocock, argues that paid work was not the only goal of feminism but it was a key goal for women's entry into public life and much progress has been made toward it. But 'this goal has found its happy co-conspirator in a market greedy for women's labour, its 'flexibility' and enthusiastic for the spending power of women's earnings. Of all of feminism's goals, entry to paid work has been the most compatible with the globalizing market.'

But at the time more women were entering paid work, the workforce was undergoing its neo-liberal transformation. Gains made in previous decades were being rolled back. The price of efficiency and competitiveness meant that in Australia workers started to work longer and longer hours, often unpaid overtime, and significantly, women's share of these longer hours grew and is still growing. The proportion of workers spending more than 45 hours a week at work increased from 18 per cent in 1985 to 26 per cent in 2001. In many workplaces, work has intensified and working hours now often cover weekends and unsociable times of the day. Advanced industrial countries like Australia, says Pocock, are developing a 'long hours culture'.

All of this has consequences for the families which juggle work and care responsibilities. As Pocock points out: 'Changes in workplaces have reduced the number of hours we have available to spend on our homes, communities and care. Activities that were once mostly the province of women at home -- cooking and care of small children for example - are increasingly provided by the market.' Spending on child care has increased four fold between 1984 and 1998-99 and between 1993 and 1996, the proportion of children under the age of three who were in formal child care rose by 27 per cent.

This has created a crisis in the intersection of family and work which is recognized by major political parties but rarely addressed since its solution would be a major challenge to existing workplace arrangements on hours and leave. It also has long term consequences for civil society.

Barbara Pocock notes:
"Mutual non-monetary exchanges have embedded within them - indeed create - personal and community relationships. These obligations are the stuff of community and generalized reciprocity - While the market hungrily offers its commodified supports (food and all kinds of services delivered to the door) where the prospect of profit exists, the engine for non-monetary community creation - is a weaker machine, one that is starved in the face of time pressures in streets where work sucks both time and place."

The significance of the crisis is often not recognized by either the labour movement, since it extends beyond the workplace, nor even by those influenced by feminism since it is interpreted as undermining women's entry to the paid workforce.

Another key study on work and family is that done by American sociologist, Arlie Russell Hochschild. This explores what happens at a large American corporation when lengthening working hours are combined with two job marriages in which women continue to do the lion's share of raising children and housework. The study gives no easy answers to the 'time bind'. 'Amerco', the anonymous Fortune 500 company which Hochschild studied for several years, was one of the top 'family friendly' companies, yet its employees took little advantage of these policies. Few women or men chose to work part time - and the obvious reasons for this such as financial need or resistance from middle management did not explain their choice. What Hochschild found was that, for many women, work was a relief from home. 'Work' was much more homely than 'home' which had become too much like work. Home was not a place to relax, it was another workplace, and one more onerous than 'real' work in some cases.

As well, family time is succumbing to a cult of efficiency with the rush to the child care centre, the skipping of family meals together and loss of other unconstrained time. To achieve maximum efficiency in the family, parents responded in different ways, Hochschild found. Some developed an 'emotional asceticism', in effect minimizing how much care their child or partner really needed. 'They made do with less time, less attention, less fun, less relaxation, less understanding and less support at home than they imagined possible. They emotionally downsized life'. (Ever ready to make a commercial opportunity of any of life's problems, one company has produced self-help books like Teaching Your Child to be Home Alone, while Hallmark manufactures greeting cards which say 'Sorry I can't be there to tuck you in' and 'Sorry I can't say good morning to you.' )

Other parents acknowledged the needs of family and paid others to meet these needs. 'They outsourced ever larger parts of the family production process.' Families, once a haven from the world of work (for most husbands and some wives) are being inexorably oriented to the industrial strategies of downsizing, outsourcing, industrializing and utility maximization. One of the results is that parents, especially mothers, spend less time with their children. Hochschild is alarmed (rather than dismissive) about studies which show this can lead to problems in later life development.

"In truth scholars don't know yet what, if any, the exact links are between these ominous trends and the lessening amounts of time parents spend with children-. It's enough to observe that children say they want more time with their parents and parents say they regret not spending more time with their children."

The benefits of commodification are immense - prepared food, ready-made clothing, professional child care and aged care - the trouble is that the downside and the costs of commodification are seamlessly wrapped in the same package. The main cost is the adulteration of the quality of human and family relationships because commodification smuggles certain values into our daily lives and into our relationships. The changes brought on by each step in the process of commodification are welcome - they meet a real problem, whether it's take-away food, child care or formula milk (instead of breast milk). None of these are wrong or destructive in themselves. Cumulatively, however, they reduce and supplant other values with those of the instrumental, the technically efficient and the self-interested.

What is happening to the family under the pressure of neo-liberalism is happening to other relationships in the wider society. Not only are families moving into crisis but wider social cohesion is fraying.

A number of feminist economists argue that an economy based on self interest tends to corrode values and practices based on altruism. They have responded to this situation by foregrounding and exploring a notion of care in society. In this analysis caring labour works against the grain of a market-oriented society in which all values are increasingly reduced to commercial values.

Economist Nancy Folbre points out that 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 achievement. 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."

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.
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. Conservatives have worried about it for the last 200 years and have romanticized mothers and their selfless labour. But as Folbre says the conservative argument which idealizes motherhood depends crucially on an argument about the 'separate spheres'. Men were fitted for the public world of production, and women for the private sphere of reproduction. But the separate spheres of home and work have radically changed forever.

What is happening to the family under the pressure of neo-liberalism is happening to other relationships in the wider society. Not only are families moving into crisis but wider social cohesion is fraying. Paradoxically, one of the grounds on which the Left and social democracy should base its appeal is on cohesion, rather than the traditional and instinctive desire for social change.

Work, family and care - and the
renewal of social democracy

All of this leads to a strategic conclusion about the renewal of progressive thought and practice: protecting the family from the inroads of the market should now be seen as a vital progressive cause.

Because the parallel world of social reproduction characterized by altruism and trust, is now the focal point of social and cultural contradictions precipitated by neo-liberal capitalism, 'family values' can become a rallying cry against the instrumental logic of an increasingly commercially-driven society.

Most importantly this can be linked to conditions of paid work and hence the stance of trade unions.

Essentially this means projecting a social vision with the valuing of care at its heart. Instead of a society based solely on the invisible hand of the market, such a strategy would project a society strongly based on the invisible heart. Instead of 'family values' being a catch cry to return women to kitchen and pram, it would mean family values as a call for caring for others. In this way 'family values' would spread beyond the family, so that we worry about care for all children, not just our own. In this way a new conception of the welfare state can be built..

As Folbre argues, if we really care about family values, we need to apply them critically to our economy as a whole. 'Extending family values to society as a whole requires looking beyond the redistribution of income to ways of strengthening cultural values of love, obligation and reciprocity.' This clearly has a message for the Left which is still preoccupied with economic redistribution and the workplace. The care and nurture of human capabilities has always been difficult and expensive. In the past a sexual division of labour based on the subordination of women helped minimize the difficulties and the expense. Today however, the costs of providing care need to be explicitly confronted and fairly distributed, she says.
Given the emergence of the dual income family and the decline of the male breadwinner model, a key area will involve regulating working hours for the sake of family-related responsibilities. This may be one way that trade unions can retain their relevance and be renewed.

This can be seen in a small way. Today a number of unions now talk in terms of 'working families' rather than workers. This may also have the political benefit of beginning to claw back socially conservative (mostly male) workers whose drift to the Right has been a feature for the last three decades.

One example of this occurred recently in Australia. The well-established conservative government of John Howard recently introduced a draconian series of laws on 'labour market reform'. It has been widely conceded that the ACTU (national trade union council) has won the initial public debate about the laws.
Central to its campaign were a series of TV ads which highlighted the effects of the new IR laws on workers' ability to manage family life and care for children. Apart from a powerful emotional dimension, these ads changed the terrain of debate, from the workplace to its impact on family life. They struck a wide chord. The new leader of the Labor Party, Kevin Rudd, has continued this theme, gaining traction and doing damage to the once entrenched conservative government.

By redefining 'family values' I believe the Left can begin to take back the initiative. But this will require new thinking by unions and social movements about a strategy promoting social cohesion, the family and the 'values crisis' more broadly.

Posted by David at 8:51 AM

November 26, 2007

Libertarian capitalism is unsustainable

This talk was given at a community forum in Coledale on the NSW south coast. It is also on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udt-K1fBHDc

Today I want to look at some of the issues that go beyond the current election and look at the future of Australia, long term. Certain issues won't go away whatever side wins the current election. And unless you identify those long term issues and deal with them, then politics just becomes small scale tactical fights in which nothing of substance is achieved, and politics becomes spin and PR.

It used to be that those in Australia with a long term vision were mostly on the Left but that vision has clouded and fragmented for reason I explain in 'Beyond Right and Left'. In fact the Left, as it once was, does not exist anymore. In spite of this, social problems remain and these long term problems or trends I want to talk about today.

The first trend is the spread of the free market into every sphere of our lives. The most obvious examples of this is the Workchoice law. This law is based on the idea that the people must be forced to act as individuals -- their contract of employment should be made one-on-one with employers. The old style of collective agreements in which people form groups for self protection is effectively made increasingly impossible.

This is one issue in which Australians have finally woken up. The market principle has been forging ahead for decades but finally it has gone too far.

What it means is that 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 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 the price of labour 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 of Workchoices will be the creation of large, low paid underclass - something similar to what you see in the USA - 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 will affect everyone not just those unlucky ones.

So one of the long term tendencies that we have to deal with is not just Workchoice but the creation of a different kind of Australia, a different kind of society.

But the introduction of the free market into labour symbolisess something bigger that is going on. I call it libertarian capitalism. And the emergence of this new kind of economy, this new libertarian capitalism, has raised new political issues.

The economy has always had spoken or unspoken rules which decreed that certain things were 'not done', no matter how profitable they might be. Certain areas where no go areas . For a long time these limitations were largely based on religious beliefs. The most obvious and current example of this is the spread of legalized gambling and liquor sales. The logic of libertarian capitalism which wants a free market in labour -- also wants gambling and liquor sales round the clock, 24/7. Now we have the treasuries of state government wholly addicted to this revenue. And this revenue is based on the calculated destruction of the lives of minority.

Less obvious than this the assault on the family and children from libertarian capitalism. A number of people have spoken against the commercialization of childhood and the massive drive to turn small children into consumers. And then there is the issue of working hours and family life. The time for a shared meal is often lost because both parent need to work. Libertarian capitalism pushes towards a 24/7 society in which commercial values take precedence over family values and other non-commercial values.

There is a relentless drive in the economy to commodify all human relations. Human relationships, with neighbors, with fellow students, with parents, with children, and on and on - all these are slowly pushed towards market relationships. Historically, market relations began literally in market places with the buying and selling of food and salt - but these are now penetrating far beyond the economy. So students in universities become customers and clients, so sport becomes a billion dollar industry while simultaneously physical unfitness soars, and so on. This in turn leads to the entrenchment in society of commercial values in place of older values based on tradition, religion, custom, respect and so on..

Non-material, non market relationships are devalued. Relationships of social bonding, of caring and, dare I say it, love of fellow man and woman, are increasingly taken over by relationship of buying and selling. And all of this is ultimately be socially unsustainable. .
That is to say, the kind of libertarian capitalism which is developing in Australia is socially sustainable.

An older kind of criticism of capitalism focused on poverty or inequality but today the most effective critique of new libertarian capitalism is that it damages social relationships.

Climate change & sustainability

I now want to turn to a different kind of sustainability.

We live in a society which is the richest in human history. Even in the space of my lifetime we have seen extraordinary changes. My earliest memories are of a kitchen with no refrigerator but what was called an ice box. High points in the life of my family the purchase of a car and a television set. All this is ancient history now -- we have gone far beyond the first tentative steps into consumerism.

But a central point to grasp about this extraordinarily affluent society is that, put simply, it is unsustainable. We regard our food, cars, consumer goods, as normal. But it can never become normal for the rest of the plant. If all people on earth had our lifestyle, it would take the resources of three more earths.

On a more realistic sense libertarian capitalism is unsustainable for reasons which you all know, to do with consequences of fossil fuel use heating the planet. I don't know if you are aware of the latest results of climate change but it all seems to be going much faster than the cautious scientists of IPCC suggested. We are sleepwalking to disaster.

Significantly, even within the Bush administration there is a slow shift to acknowledge the existence of climate change but to reassure everyone confidently that it can be solved by human ingenuity. In Britain there is a more realistic approach. The British economist Nicholas Stern regards the climate crisis as an example of 'market failure'. He said:

'Markets do not automatically provide the right type and quantity of public goods, because in the absence of the right kind of public policy, there are limited or no returns to private investors for doing so-Thus climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods -. All in all it must be regarded as a market failure on the greatest scale the world has ever seen.'

We will certainly need ingenuity but as Stern implies we need to restrain and tame the nature of libertarian capitalism.

Climate change poses problems of diabolical difficulty. The central one is that much of the good life which many ordinary people enjoy in societies like ours is built on unsustainable grounds. To decrease fossil fuels use and change to renewables, the price of energy must rise radically and this will undermine much of the lifestyle we enjoy. Easy to say those words but what do they mean?

We know renewable energy is expensive -- more expensive than coal fired electricity and we have not yet found a substitute for petrol which is as flexible and easy to use. If the price of new forms of energy increases it will increase the cost of every single piece of food we buy, it will increase those cost of transport to work, it will make overseas travel the province of a very small group of people, it necessitate the disruption of workplaces, industries and jobs. The truth is rather shocking, so shocking that it is hard to conceive of where it might all be going to beyond the sort term. The short term consists of say, 20% or maybe 40% of energy being sourced from renewables., but after that, who knows? We are in uncharted territory but one which involves profound social disruption, let along economic disruption.

The political problem is that no one wants to tell people this unpleasant truth. Certainly not a government or an opposition which wants to be re-elected.

But facts are difficult things. Regardless of how difficult or unpleasant the truth is, the facts of climate change are very slowly, but relentlessly, forcing themselves to our attention. The question will be how bad these climate changes will become, before we somehow get it in hand.

There are other big issues in society which I have not mentioned, but these two sets of objective circumstances - unsustainable social relationships and an unsustainable environment -- seem to me to be useful in examining the current election campaign, where it might lead, and what problems the Australian people and government face in the long term.

Posted by David at 10:05 PM

August 16, 2007

Right and Left and 'human nature'

There was a time on university campuses when you could provoke a violent argument if you mentioned 'human nature' as an explanatory factor in human affairs. Marxists, postmodernists, liberals and common-or-garden sociologists would tell you emphatically, that the world is socially constructed. Some would argue that ideas of 'human nature' are merely rightwing code for excusing racism or a justification for a belief in the natural superiority of males or of the 'naturally' violent or selfish actions of human beings.

By contrast, they would argue for a notion of 'social constructionism', the ideas that human behaviour was a product of its social and cultural circumstances. This makes eminent sense, up to a point. A child raised in an abusive household will behave in quite different ways in adult life to a child raid in a supportive atmosphere. A society which erects well funded systems of education and health will produce humans who are quite different to those who grow up in poverty and poor health. We are products of our social environment.

But social constructionism has evolved into a dogma which is particularly strong among intellectuals and the academy. Popularised by psychology and social science, it argues that human beings are a product of experience and environment -- and ONLY of our experience and our environment. Our attitudes and desires, our virtues and vices, are socially constructed. They do not, must not and cannot be explained partly by human nature. To believe this is to commit the ultimate sin of essentialism, a belief that there is a human 'essence'.

From the time of the Enlightenment, idealists have opposed essentialism. They believed that the human possibilities were practically limitless; that 'Man', as well as society, could be perfected. Given the right social conditions, greed and selfishness could be eliminated.

Social constructionism, whether in its weak or strong form, is a dogma of optimism. If we assume that humans are constructed solely by 'the ensemble of social relations' then in order to have happier and better humans, we need only to change those social conditions.

But dogmatic social constructionism, like its parent, rationalism, is an inadequate tool of analysis and guide to social change today. The belief in the totally plastic nature of humans and hence their perfectibility is being increasingly shown to be grounded on false assumptions about the human species. Popularised by writers such as Peter Singer and books such as Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, studies of human beings and their behavior are strongly suggesting that some sort of basic human nature is present among all people regardless of their dramatic cultural variations.

Singer makes the point that for over a hundred years 'human nature' was the underlying reason advanced to try to prevent almost any kind of social reform. It was also a counsel of passivity and despair. For example, the supposed natural inferiority of colonised people was justified by 'human nature' just as votes for women were said to be 'against human nature'. For a long while a popular version of right wing Darwinism argued that all kinds of violent, competitive behaviour was due to 'human nature'. Only more recently have studies found that social, co-operative elements exist naturally among humans along with competitive ones.

But rather than exploring what kind of nature humans might have, optimists and social reformers have dismissed the whole idea as irretrievably reactionary and opted for social constructionism. And this occurred in spite of many progressive liberals and leftists glibly acknowledging that BOTH nature and nurture as forces shaping human beings. Yet in practice, many have opted almost exclusively for nurture (culture). The result is, as Steven Pinker argues, that an extreme position (culture is everything) 'is often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme.'

The bio-ethicist Peter Singer is one of a small but growing group of thinkers who believe that we can now be confident that some kind of nature is common to all humans. While wide variation exists across cultures in many aspects of life, other aspects show little variance. For example, humans are social beings and do not generally live completely alone. In his book 'A Darwinian Left' Singer says:

Equally invariant is our concern for kin. Our readiness to form co-operative relationships, and to recognise reciprocal obligations, is another universal. More controversially I would claim that the existence of a hierarchy or system of rank is a near-universal tendency - Women almost always have the major role in caring for young children while men are more likely than women to be involved in physical conflict both within the social group and in warfare between groups.

Other near universals which Singer identifies are the existence of sexual infidelity and sexual jealousy as well as ethnic identification and its converse, xenophobia and racism. Both competitive and co-operative tendencies exist among humans.

Acknowledging some sort of human nature does not mean that every feature is unavoidable or inherently worthwhile (many human tendencies pull in opposite directions). Innate tendencies are moderated or magnified by culture. The point is that to be blind to the facts is to risk disaster. If humans naturally tend to form hierarchies and ranking systems, it is the height of naivete to imagine that we can 'abolish' them believing that they will not re-appear in some new guise. This is a lesson from attempts to enforce rigid 'equality'. But this need not mean abandoning attempts to create situations of greater rather than lesser equality. There is a world of difference between a ranking system based on a peaceful democracy and one based on brute physical force.

Social change and human nature

Any plans for social reform must take account of the limitations presented by human nature. As remarkable as human diversity and capacity is, it is not unlimited. Any new political vision which assumes we can create societies without conflict or without self interest, is doomed to fail. Attempts at perfection, in politics or religion, have proven disastrous.

As well, in several chapters of this book I discussed idea of human nature and how it related to political philosophies. I'd now like to return to this discussion because it relates to the central concept behind the idea of a common humanity: what it means to be human. Most would agree that, at the very least, to be human means that people from diverse cultures share a common biological constitution as human beings. Acknowledging this scientific fact is important in dismissing pseudo-scientific ideas of supposedly superior and inferior races. As they say, there is one race, the human race.

Most would also agree that humanity's biological constitution is the result of a process of evolution. But as well as evolved physical characteristics are other common qualities about humans. The writer Robert Wright points this out in his book The Moral Animal:

We take for granted such bedrock elements of life as gratitude, shame, remorse, pride, honour, retribution, empathy, love and so on -- just as we take the air we breathe, the tendency of dropped objects to fall, and other standard features of living on this planet. But things didn't have to be this way. We could live in a planet where social life featured none of the above. We could live on a planet where some ethnic groups felt some of the above and others felt others. But we don't. The more closely Darwinian anthropologists look at the world's peoples, the more they are struck by the dense and intricate web of human nature by which we are all bound.

A growing scientific literature exists that gives good ground for thinking that some form of human nature exists. This research has not settled the question and the idea remains controversial. Many believe that any acknowledgment of a human nature implies acceptance of a rigid set of qualities which must exist in all humans in all times. The kind of human nature which those who have researched it talk about is rather a set of innate tendencies whose expression is tempered by historical, cultural as well as individual circumstance. Critics however, see only the changing circumstacnes reflecting the dominance of what might be called the 'social science world view' which looks only for social and cultural reasons for the way we are.

Nevertheless even among social scientists there is widespread agreement that humans are social creatures, meaning that they naturally prefer to live in groups and are not naturally solitary. It is here that we return to the main preoccupation of the chapter. These social groups are, specifically, families and local communities. For much of human history these communities often consisted of a number of extended families which inter-married. Today, what we call ethnic groups are very large groups of extended families, as the Havard psychologist Steven Pinker argues. Ultimately, these ethnic groups grow and sometimes become nations who are bonded by a common feeling of identity and loyalty. Pinker believes, along with others, that there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the human mind evolved over a million years in the context of survival in small clan groups and that as a result ethnocentrism is a human universal. One aspect of this ethnic identification seems to be a preparedness to engage in conflict with other groups and the long history of inter-ethnic conflict from ancient to modern times - seen most recently after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- seems to bear this out. (In settler societies like Australia this occurred between the conquering tribes of 1788 and the indigenous people.)

Acknowledging that a disposition to ethnic identification is one element of a human nature has implications for political visions and philosophies. Basically, it means that we must accept limits on such ideas and visions. I have already argued that a fatal weakness of reforming visionaries (especially Marxists) was the misconception that humans are completely malleable and that traits such as self interest can disappear with the 'right' kind of social structure. For similar reasons we cannot imagine that ethnic identification will one day disappear. Social conditions will greatly shape its intensity and its expression but it will remain in some form.

But this raises a problem. Surely if we acknowledge that ethnic identification is a human universal we are condemning as hopelessly impractical the idea that we can appeal to a common humanity as a basis for opposing racism?

For instance, an Australian theorist of multiculturalism, Stephen Castles, summarily dismisses theories of human nature. He caricatures theories which indicate that all humans show a tendency to prefer kin and to develop group loyalty. This position he then transforms into the most extreme interpretation that racism is 'in our genes' and hence ineradicable and not tempered by other tendencies. If this is true, he concludes, 'then the only way to prevent it is to keep the 'tribes' apart. This is not a practicable nor desirable strategy in an increasingly integrated world.'

A different view is taken by another theorist of multiculturalism, Ien Ang. She argues that 'The main long-term goal of anti-racist educational programs should be the gradual development of a general culture of what I want to call interracial trust. It may be the case that some fundamental form of racism -- associated with ethno-centrism and intolerance against those who are different - -is part and parcel of human nature: it is deeply embedded in the very culture of human society.' It is likely that she is right. It is impossible to find a society which is not ethno-centric to some degree but it is quite possible to find societies which display a wide variety of behaviours towards people of other ethnicities, from a murderous suspicion to a peaceful trust or even better. And societies can display both qualities at different stages in their history.

The Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, in his book A Darwinian Left, agrees that ethnic identification is a human universal although societies differ greatly in their degree of tolerance or their degree of racism. 'Racism can be learned and unlearned, but racist demagogues hold their torches over highly flammable material', Singer argues.

But if a disposition to ethnic identification seems to be innate, so are other dispositions and capacities which moderate such feelings. Most importantly there is accumulating evidence that altruism or caring for others is biologically based. Perhaps not surprisingly, like ethnic identification, these capacities are also believed to be founded in humans' oldest social structure, families. Family members will routinely make sacrifices for each other to a degree that they will not repeat for non-family members.

That is to say that empathy and compassion begin as a local phenomena. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum made this point when reflecting on the events of September 11, 2001. She pointed out that in the days and weeks afterwards 'the world has come to a stop - in a way it never has for Americans, when disaster befalls human beings in other places. The genocide in Rwanda didn't even work up enough emotion in us to prompt humanitarian intervention'. Nussbaum's point was about the nature of compassion (which she argues is an emotion which is probably rooted in our biological heritage). Humans experience compassion most strongly when it affects people like themselves and they often fail to experience it when tragedy is culturally distant. Such tendencies 'are likely to be built into the nature of compassion as it develops in childhood and then adulthood: we form intense attachments to the local first and only gradually learn to have compassion for people who are outside our own immediate circle.' Hence the tendency for compassion to stop at national borders. 'Most of us are brought up to believe that all human beings have equal worth. At least the world's major religions and secular philosophies tell us so. But our emotions don't believe it.'

But Nussbaum's point is that compassion also has a reasoned element and can be educated. Compassion can move outwards from its local, family base. When it does it begins to assume the characteristics of altruism, of empathy with others just because they are human.

This also happens to have been the view of the discover of evolution, Charles Darwin, whose words I quoted at the start of this chapter. In the language of his time he foresaw a growing tendency for compassion to expand outwards, building on a foundation of local empathy. If the people within one nation can sympathise with the other anonymous members of the nation, only an 'artificial barrier' was preventing the expansion of those sympathies to the people of all nations and races.

This 'artificial barrier' has proved much harder to surmount than Darwin thought, although advances have been achieved by different nations and peoples since his time. Perhaps the best known is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Posted by David at 2:15 PM

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 9:24 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

April 19, 2007

Kevin Rudd and 'Beyond Right and Left'

One of the sources of new thinking for Labor's new leader is Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War the book written by David McKnight, the 'owner' of this blog-website. The book was quoted extensively in an article by Kevin Rudd in The Monthly magazine.

You can read Rudd's article, entitled 'Howard's Brutopia'

Rudd also cited the book at a speech he gave entitled 'What's Wrong with the Right', delivered at the neo-liberal think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, in Sydney.

(The speech is still on the CIS website, but takes some digging. It is also available at the ALP website at http://www.labor.com.au/media/1106/spefaistra160.php

Rudd was particularly interested in the critique of neo-liberal economics which was offered in 'Beyond Right and Left'. The critique is unusual in that it emphasises the social, rather than economic, effects of neo-liberal economics. These include the effect of long working hours and a 24/7 economy on the family and personal life.

As Rudd says:

"McKnight rightly concentrates on the central vulnerability in this philosophy: the problem that arises from the commodification of all things, that is, "the transformation of obligations based on love and altruism into those of commodity-based economic values (i.e. money)".

He describes the central dilemma:

"Hayek recognised this paradoxical inconstancy, and proposed that we must simply learn to 'live simultaneously within different kinds of orders within different rules - those of the markets and those of the family. We must be ruthlessly self-interested in the market and sweetly caring in the family; greedy at work and selfless at home..."

"Herein lies the core challenge for conservatives, as the impact of neo-liberalism cannot be effectively quarantined from its effect on the family - and beyond the family to other sub-economic, reciprocal relationships within communities, and other social and spiritual associations."

Once again, McKnight distils it best:

'Rather than the two worlds existing simultaneously, one world is slowly crushing the other. Hayek's intellectual paradigm has turbo-charged the privatised, marketised economy, which is relentlessly encroaching on the life-world of family, friends and community. The invisible hand is clutching at the invisible heart and slowly choking it. Thus the story of New Capitalism's effect on the family is just part of a wider story of what is happening to all non-market relations between people. Bonds of respect, civility and trust between people are being weakened, and relations based on competition, self-interest and suspicion are growing.'

Mr Rudd later expanded this to point out the historic changes which are being unleased by the Howard Government's 'Workchoices' law:

'Previous generations of the Australian Right have been variously dominated by old-style conservatives or social liberals: Deakin, Menzies, Fraser, Peacock and others. All supported the welfare state as a form of social insurance and an institutional corrective against market fundamentalism. This partly explains why, in the period of Deakinite Liberalism, it was possible for a number of Right-Left alliances to be formed to secure the passage of what can be described (in the context of the times) as progressive legislation. The Harvester Judgement of 1907, which legislated a minimum wage based on Justice Henry Bourne Higgins' determination of a living wage "for human beings living in a civilised community' - defined not by market forces but rather from an entirely different values-base - is a case in point.

'John Howard, though, has always wanted to overturn the Harvester Judgement (as David McKnight has noted, Howard said in 1983 that 'the time has come to turn Mr Justice Higgins on his head'), and he was finally delivered his political dream when, following the 2004 election, his Senate majority enabled him to legislate away a century of hard-won protections for Australian families. But in doing so, Mr Howard is also in the process of unleashing new forces of market fundamentalism against youth workers; families trying to spend sufficient time together; and communities trying to negotiate with single, major employers experimenting with their newfound powers. Breadwinners are now at risk of working less predictable shifts, spread over a seven-day week, not sensitive to weekends and possibly for less take-home pay. The pressures on relationships, parenting and the cost and quality of childcare are without precedent.'

In an article in the Age newspaper, the paper's associate editor Shaun Carney notes:

The Labor leader is convinced that social democratic parties are only ever electorally viable if they are associated in the public mind with the future, with optimistic plans and solutions. Merely diagnosing the faults of their opponents and offering to patch over their mistakes if elected cannot work. This is the essence of a well-received 2005 book Beyond Right And Left by academic and former journalist David McKnight, which increasingly appears to be a sort of blueprint for Labor's strategic and philosophical direction under Rudd.

Posted by David at 3:08 PM

March 5, 2007

The Invisible hand is crushing the social heart

When John Howard and Peter Costello were pushing their new laws on industrial relations through parliament, they discovered they had an unlikely opponent. Senator Steve Fielding of the conservative Family First party told parliament that he opposed the new laws because they undermined the family. The new laws, he said, were market friendly, not family friendly. Senator Fielding was like the boy in Hans Christian Anderson's moral fable who punctures the Emperor's vanity by pointing out that he has no clothes.

Fielding's stance highlighted a deep rift in conservative politics between support for free market liberalism and support for family values. By choosing to probe this vulnerability in recent days, Labor's Kevin Rudd is driving a painful wedge into the ideological underpinning that has allowed conservatives to dominate politics for a decade.

In his Sir John Latham Memorial lecture, Keith Windschuttle denied this rift. The Left, not the free market, is responsible for family breakdown, he claims. This debate is not merely philosophical. It touches on the daily lives of many Australians who have difficulty juggling work and family responsibilities. These difficulties will be exacerbated by the deregulation of the 'labour market' and will feature in the next federal election.

Adverse effects on family time are clearly shown by recent evidence. In the first months of the operation of the new IR laws, individual work contracts reduced public holidays, leave loadings and penalty rates, according to reports in this newspaper. More and more workers will be expected to work at anti-social hours undermining a stable family life and the shared meals and leisure that once accompanied it.

As Professor Barbara Pocock has shown in her latest book, The labour market ate my babies, Australian family life is already increasingly dominated by work to the detriment of children. The number of Australians working longer than 50 hours a week rose from 15 percent 1979 to 20 per cent 2003. More workers work at night than ever before -- from 56 percent in 1986 to 64 per cent in 2000.

Not surprisingly children feel the effects of parents whose lives are dominated by work. A US survey in 2003 showed that 69 per cent would like to spend more time with their parents, especially unstructured fun time, according to Pocock. A Swedish study in 2003 established the common sense conclusion that irregular and long hours caused greatest stress. A Canadian study, indicated that unsocial working hours had measurable effects on child welfare. The children of parents who work non-standard hours are more likely to have 'emotional or behavioural difficulties indicative of child stress', it said.

All of this is relevant to the debate on Australian values. We have an economy which rewards the values of competitiveness, individualism and personal advancement. Yet our society depends on opposite values in families and communities. These rely on care for others, co-operation and altruism. In the end, we live in a society, not an economy.

Yet increasingly we are industrialising our social and family lives. Our families outsource family production. We downsize our emotional need for time. We rush to the child care centre and work using Taylorised time management to gain utility maximisation. The values promoted by a hyper-commercialized culture are slowly crushing the values of an earlier, less commercialized culture.

Prime Minister John Howard once recognised this conflict and described juggling work and family as 'the barbecue stopper' although his government now exacerbates the conflict. In his book Faultlines, George Megalogenis points out that 'having raised the expectations of most women by giving them a career before motherhood, society has yet to work out how to facilitate their divergent demands once babies arrive.'.

Megalogenis has put his finger on the right spot. The formal economy of commerce sits atop a parallel economy of care provided, until recent times, largely by women. Economist Professor Nancy Folbre dubs this economy of care 'the invisible heart', a play on words of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market. The two need to be balanced, she says, but this is not taken seriously by free market economists. 'They have generally assumed that God, nature, the family and "Super Mom" - or some combination thereof - would automatically provide whatever care was needed,' Folbre said.

But this assumption is failing. The invisible heart is being squashed by the invisible hand.

That is, the market supplants the meals, childcare and care of aged parents once carried out by the family. All of this costs money driving the work-spend cycle of two income families which in turn means more work time and less family time. The answer is not for women to retreat to the kitchen but to more generously support caring by parents in a child's early years.

This will help avoid what Anne Manne in her recent book on motherhood calls the McDonaldisation of childhood. The principles of efficiency, fast turn around, and cost effectiveness are ideal for the mass production but are dehumanising when applied generally to caring, she says. While community-run centres were once the rule for child-care, child-care corporations with attention fixed on the bottom line have become the symbol of the neo-liberal future.

Even if we disregard the quality of childrens' lives and think in narrow economic terms we find that market fundamentalism damages the formation of 'human capital' itself. Falling birth rates are the starkest evidence of this and the Howard Government's rejection of even minimal maternity leave is further evidence of it ideological obsession.

In a 1999 speech, as Kevin Rudd points out, John Howard acknowledged there were two tendencies in modern conservatism, economic liberalisation and traditional social conservatism. Howard asserted that they complemented each other. The truth is they pull in opposite directions. It is time the Left rethought its attitude to the family and focused its ideological cross hairs on this gaping vulnerability of the Right.

This article was published in The Australian, 5 January 2007 and is based in part on Chapter 8 of Beyond Right and Left, New Politics and the Culture War (Allen & Unwin).

Posted by David at 1:52 AM

January 31, 2007

Idealistic Terrorists

A classic mistake in conflict is to underestimate your enemy. In the conflict with Osama Bin Laden and his followers, this underestimation takes the form of seeing only the violence of Islamic terrorism and not its idealism.

The warm and fuzzy associations of the word 'idealism' are a long way from the blood and body parts left by bombs in Bali, Madrid or London.

Yet when young men or women willingly sacrifice their lives in a suicide bombing, their murderous motivation includes a sense of idealism. Suicide bombers clearly believe they are serving a greater good, as perverse as that may appear to us.

Bin Laden himself cultivates an air of high-minded austerity, incorruptibility and self sacrifice. With flowing robes and beard, sitting in the wilderness, he resembles a Middle Eastern prophet as much as an anti-modern terrorist.

The association with a prophet is a clue. It is a long while since we have seen a substantial challenge by idealists and utopians in religious garb.

We shrink from seeing Bin Laden's group as idealists because we fear that if we see anything of ourselves in our enemy it will weaken our resolve to oppose them.

Another reason we cannot recognise the idealism and utopianism which are at work in Bin Laden's world view is that in countries like Australia our conception of idealism has been defined in terms of secular and Enlightenment notions of progress.

We have come define progress largely in material terms and in terms of individual rights. But this is not the only way to define progress. It can also be defined in ethical or moral terms and as collective obligations. This approach can be expressed in secular ways but is usually expressed through religious beliefs.

In his 1996 manifesto from a cave in Tora Bora, Bin Laden railed against the corrupt media which had tricked so many young Muslims into loving the 'materialistic world' of the modern West.

One of his sources of inspiration, the Egyptian writer Sayyid Kuttb, spent time in the United States in 1948-50. In his account of the period Kuttb was horrified not just by the relative sexual freedom but also by the obsession with technology and materialism and the denigration of spiritual values. Its moral paucity contrasted to its material greatness.

His critique forms a key part of radical Islamic ideology which damns the spiritual emptiness of modern industrial societies. Bin Laden's version of this ideology aspires to create a society totally suffused with religious values.

But the critique of advanced industrial societies as spiritually empty and materialistic is by no means the sole property of Bin Laden. In fact similar approaches are shared by a vast and diverse number of religious and secular critics.

In a recent article in the LA Times John Allen pointed out that the present Pope once made similar charges. As Cardinal Ratzinger he argued that 'the good and the moral no longer count, it seems, but only what one can do. The measure of a human being is what he can do, not what he is. Not what is good or bad.'

A similar but more scholarly critique came from the German sociologist Max Weber early in the 20th century. He argued that modern industrialised societies developed along a trajectory which he called 'rationalisation'. This long term historic process began with the Enlightenment and involved the triumph of rational, scientific methods of thought. A narrow kind of efficiency and instrumental logic gradually comes to dominate society and the economy. As this occurs other ways of thought and other values - largely religious -- are cast aside. Society became 'de-valued' or, to use his term, 'disenchanted' as the non-rational and spiritual side of life was progressively shrunken. Whatever else they were Christians religions in the West were the main source of ethics and values.

The author of Jihad versus McWorld , Benjamin Barber makes a similar point. He notes that the forces of 'integrative modernisation and aggressive economic and cultural globalisation' mean the trivialisation of religion and the displacement of ethics and values from the centre of life.

All of this has implications for our responses to terrorism.

The radical utopians and murderous idealists inspired by El Quaida will not be persuaded to abandon their cause by negotiations or concessions. A military and intelligence dimension to the struggle is legitimate and necessary.

But this will not defeat terrorism. The aim must be take away their false aura of moral superiority and dry up the stream of recruits. As Barber says, terrorists swim in a sea of tacit popular support. Part of the answer is ethical behaviour by Western governments and the creation of democratic global institutions. Another is to ensure that actual and potential sympathisers with Bin Ladens' group are challenged by different kinds of religious idealism. The only people able to engage in such a theological debate and be listened to are those with spiritual authority. The executive director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Amir Butler, makes the point that such people are mostly other kinds of fundamentalists in Islam who have long opposed the violence of Bin Laden's branch of fundamentalism. Only they can ground their arguments in Islamic law, he says.

To help this process requires the kind of sophistication which this Australian government has not displayed. In the short term it is far more politically useful to demonise Muslims and engage in catastrophic actions such as the invasion of Iraq. For these kinds of reasons the terrorists and their tacit supporters will continue to believe that they hold the moral high ground.

Posted by David at 12:04 AM

December 14, 2006

A new progressive think tank: will it make a difference?

The Australian Right's major think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. The event passed without notice for most people on the Left and progressive side of politics.

But we ignore the CIS at our peril. Rather, we can draw valuable lessons from its accomplishments. Given that there are several quiet moves to establish new progressive think tanks, it is worth exploring the reasons for the success of the CIS.

The CIS is well funded by the corporate sector. It has a substantial staff and is able to make grants to support research. Its views attract the attention of both federal and state governments. Articles written by its researchers are often published in major newspapers. The CIS helps set a political agenda for Australia.

To have a new progressive think tank with a quarter of the influence of the CIS would be counted as a big achievement.

But the secret of the CIS' success is not money or corporate support.

It is ideas. While progressives may detest the ideas promoted by the CIS, we need to understand that the effectiveness of any think tank depends on the quality and substance of its ideas.

In many ways the development of new ideas is the hardest thing of all. The CIS began in 1976 and was the brainchild of a crusading school teacher, Greg Lindsay, who originally worked out of his garden shed.

He and his band of supporters had radical new ways of looking at the world and the energy of true believers. They called conferences and put forward bold new ideas. They were 'economic rationalists' or what we now call 'neo-liberals'. They were a tiny minority.

Their obvious ambition to become influential and their method of building their organisation are both instructive. Instead of approaching potential 'big name' supporters to lend their credentials to CIS, Lindsay and his team targeted like-minded people who were, in the beginning, few in number. It was not a board of big name directors that was important but the formation of this core group of like-minded supporters. The economics departments of universities were their main recruiting ground.

Initially the ideas of the CIS genuinely shocked many on the Right. The CIS took on the sacred cows of the Old Right, which was built on the traditional conservative veneration of the nation, moral values and the family. Neo-liberal ideas undermine all three. Globalization destroys the nation, free market values discard moral values as irrelevant and the deregulation of working conditions make shared family time harder. But the New Right did not allow the shibboleths of the Old Right to silence it. They challenged, debated and even denounced their forefathers.

The danger of trying something different was that these fragile new ideas could easily be swamped by the complacency and weight of existing conservatism. The first stage for the CIS was to clarify their free market ideas and begin to examine how they might connect and apply to the existing conditions.

Only once the CIS had cemented its ideas and made an impact through conferences and seminars did a small amount of corporate support begin. It came from mining industry boss, Hugh Morgan, who was then a maverick in the world of business. Big business did not rush to the CIS in the first place - it supported entrenched and complacent organisations like the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

Looked at coolly, the success of the CIS is an inspiring testament to the power of ideas to transform the political landscape and set an agenda. It can give us hope that other more progressive ideas might also reshape the world and fashion it to more humane ends.

Of course funding is important but the question is always: for what? A well funded think tank that repeats the same old ideas in the same old way will get nowhere, even if the ideas are terribly worthy.

So the importance of fresh ideas is the first lesson for progressives - but there are two more.

The second lesson is that bringing new ideas into reality means challenging people on your 'own side'. It means saying the unsayable and disturbing a smug complacency amongst the progressives. It means challenging long-held, sacred beliefs. It means being regarded as a heretic.

In my own work I have tried to provoke a debate around accepted ideas. These include dominant visions of multiculturalism, which is defined as an endless celebration of diversity, with no regard to common humanity. Existing progressive ideas on the family also need to be challenged. Allowing the Right to 'own' family values is mistaken. The real enemies of family life are casual jobs, long work hours and inadequate support for parents who care for their children. My book also argues that the debates which Noel Pearson began need to be picked up and taken further. His ideas represent a new way of looking at political issues well beyond the standard indigenous issues. Too often he is dismissed by progressives.

The third lesson from the Right is to be prepared for times to change.

Times change. They always do and they always will, no matter how gloomy things look. The New Right had developed its ideas for a number of years before they struck any resonance. In the 1970s when the old Keynesian mechanism failed and unemployment rose at the same time as inflation, there was a crisis. Into this breach stepped the New Right with its new free market ideas.

The same kind of turnabout will happen in Australia if progressives can rethink their political framework - perhaps with the help of a new think tank. Climate change will soon make a deep impact on the lives and minds of more and more Australians. Progressive must be ready with new ideas to meet this window of opportunity. The strain on working families will become more and more obvious. The inability of affluence and hyper consumption to nourish the human soul will increasingly assert itself. New approaches will be relevant, if we can only agree on them.

So, on the progressive side of politics where are the new ideas burgeoning? I have to confess to a vested interest in this, since identifying such ideas was my motive in writing my recent book 'Beyond Right and Left'.

My abbreviated list of people with new ideas is as follows:

At the Canberra-based think tank, the Australia Institute and through his books, Clive Hamilton has pioneered new ways of thinking about the economy, environment and consumption.* Judith Brett of La Trobe University and Marian Sawer of ANU have identified how the Liberals now use a discourse of 'cultural elites vs the people' as a key strategic stance. The Liberal Party now presents itself as the party of popular nationalism. Robert Manne has spotlighted the moral bankruptcy of the Howard government on refugees and on 'political correctness'. Noel Pearson has said what was unsayable on issues of indigenous future. Barbara Pocock has targeted work-family balance as a key issue for rebuilding a progressive majority. Anne Manne warns of the commodification of family life and caring. On the Labor side, Lindsay Tanner and Julia Gillard have proposed new approaches, and Tanner's book 'Crowded Lives' has valuable insights into social policy. Mark Latham had new ways of articulating politics which wrong-footed Howard for the first time. Bob Brown of the Greens articulates the importance of environment issues in ways that connect with many ordinary Australians.

I don't agree with everything all these people say. But they are pushing the boundaries of tired and stale left wing ideas -- or finding new ways of highlighting long standing issues.

Without rethinking ideas even the best funded think tank in the world cannot play its part in turning around the political climate. And that, in the end, is its real purpose.

Posted by David at 9:20 PM

September 21, 2006

PM's values platform is a two-pronged attack

IF THE Cold War was a clash of ideologies, the new global conflict is about values. In the US, neo-conservatives argue that Western values are threatened by terrorists and postmodernists. In Australia, the Prime Minister, John Howard, argues that better proficiency in English and a knowledge of history and civics are needed to combat a threat to Australian values.

For some time now Howard has positioned his party as the true inheritor of Australian values, winning the votes of many battlers and other Australians.

On Australia Day this year he argued that cultural diversity must give way to an emphasis on Australian values. He repeats this mantra as if unnamed parties strongly disagree with him. In so doing he has created a framework and political agenda in which he is triumphantly, if banally, right.

This values strategy neatly appeals to our desire for security against terrorism and our desire for a cohesive community. That's why comments about Muslims who refuse to integrate or learn English are symbolically powerful and are a coded appeal to Anglo-Celtic workers fearful of globalisation.

The appeal to Australian values is also a textbook example of a strategy outlined in two books being widely read in political circles. One is George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant. The title relates to an exercise Lakoff sets for students when teaching cognitive science at the University of California. He asks his students to do something and adds, "and don't think of an elephant". Not surprisingly, the first thing many students think of is an elephant.

Lakoff's book is about the ascendancy of the right in American politics, which has set a political agenda by articulating a unified, coded discourse, not just particular policies tailored to interest groups. Lakoff argues that if you simply deny an opponent's claims you adopt his discourse in spite of yourself. So when former US president Richard Nixon said on television "I am not a crook", many people thought, "Nixon is a crook".

Lakoff's point is that political leaders are successful when they use words and concepts that reflect a deeper and persuasive framework of values. If their opponent adapts those words, they fight on foreign territory. The central framework for the American right, Lakoff says, is family values. The right argues its case on everything from welfare to foreign policy using a model of the "strict father" who protects and punishes the nation-family.

The framework of the hard-but-fair strict father resonates with the values of many Americans. Rational argument and facts are not enough. "People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest," Lakoff says, "they vote their identity. They vote their values."

This point is also made by Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas? Kansas was the historic home of the Populist Party, which stood for ordinary Americans against the elites, especially the banks, yet in Kansas today fundamentalist Christian groups thrive and the Republicans ride high even though their policies lay waste to manufacturing jobs. Values can trump economic interest, Frank argues.

Howard hopes to make values the new battleground in Australian politics. He hopes to emulate the American right's success by getting Australians to ignore his elimination of their union rights and to endorse his version of Australian values.

This zeroes in on Labor's weakness, since Australian values, defined as mateship and egalitarianism, were once Labor's identity. When large numbers of blue-collar workers voted Labor, they voted their identity. Paradoxically, today Howard speaks the language of class and populism.

If Lakoff is right and values are king and voters "vote their identity", can Labor get back into the debate on values? Applying Lakoff locally needs a moral vision based on a big picture that carves out new frameworks and genuinely resonates with popular feelings. It must set an agenda , not trail behind. It won't be easy. Values politics requires political boldness and risk-taking; articulating it means developing a new populist language. But the hardest thing is to identify issues that resonate with sufficient numbers of voters.

Issues such as time poverty, climate change, family values and commercial values may well emerge as the new ideological battleground.

Time poverty crosses the class divide, affecting not only high-powered lawyers but also working families. Unpressured time is needed to build a work/family balance and local communities. Similarly, climate change highlights the values of conservation and caution.

As for family values, allowing conservatives to claim "family values" was never smart politics. Working families with children are already under pressure and will be more so as the new laws on industrial relations begin to bite.

Finally, commercial values. A strong case can be made that the Government consistently puts the values of corporate Australia above the values of ordinary Australians, and residual scepticism towards big business could be tapped.

This could open the door to a fuller debate about Australian values than the limited one both sides of politics have been carrying on so far.

Posted by David at 11:37 PM

August 10, 2006

Rethinking political ideas - the search for Australian values

The following article appeared in the Autumn 2006 edition of 'Green' magazine, the publication of the Australian Greens. It argues that free market economics is a radical not a conservative idea. The true conservatives are those who want to conserve communities and the environment, not destroy them.

The power of ideas to shape societies is profound although we are largely unaware of their effect. Buried underneath peoples' common sense and the slogans of political parties are sets of philosophical ideas and values. These new ideas often begin with a small committed group, then filter out into the surrounding society. If they find fertile ground they can spread and transform societies.

But I am not talking about environmental ideas and Green parties. Instead, I am talking about the most powerful new political movement based on ideas in the last 20 years which has been the New Right. Few progressive people bother to think about and analyse the Right of politics -- the terms 'right wing' and 'conservative' are simply words of abuse, not analysis. Yet the New Right is the force which largely calls the shots in Australia and the world and whose activities have to be challenged. In this article I want to discuss how this might be done but first I want to analyse what we are up against.

Also described as neo-liberal or 'market fundamentalist', the new Right's economic ideas support free trade, privatisation, deregulation. Its social ideas revolve largely on the individual providing for themselves -- in health, educaton and so on. Like all deeply ideological movements (religious and political) it believes that it has discovered a magic key which explains the world and guides the path to a better life.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of this New Right is that it is a radical force. It is radical in re-shaping society along the lines of its libertarian economic ideology. And the consequences are radical. I say this for three reasons: First, it believes in the endless expansion of the economy and of production of commodities. It has no concept of 'enough'. This presents a radical challenge to the earth's carrying capacity. Second, its fixation with economic growth damages the social fabric. Human relations become more market-driven and anonymous. Working hours actually increase and the family comes under pressure. Increasingly, we live in an economy not a society. Third, it is an amoral force. Its values are commercial values and economic efficiency is its main yardstick of worth. These clash with many human values such as altruism and care for the community which are still entrenched in spite of years of cultivation of competition and self-interest.

All of these things - -endless expansion, damage to community, and amorality mean that neo liberalism is a radical force. How have people reacted to these changes? Many react in a conservative way. They want to conserve what exists. They feel uncomfortable with an libertarian ideology of individualism and the glorification of self interest.

In this article I want to argue that opponents of the new Right, including Greens, need to think about drawing on conservative attitudes and instincts as a way of re-thinking political ideas and their political appeal. Not to 'become' conservatives (in the disreputable, right wing sense) but to realise the potential of issues of security, caution, and social cohesion -- with which traditional conservatives are associated. These can and should be re-framed as an agenda demanding stable jobs and communities, common values and social solidarity, rather than an agenda based on more individualism, more choice and even more freedom.

The British sociologist Anthony Giddens is also one who argues the modern free market economy brings radical changes. An ever-expanding capitalism runs up against the environmental limits of the world and the freer play of markets and globalisation has the effect of making communal life less traditional, he says. The security associated with regular jobs, stable community and family life is undermined by the spread of markets beyond the economy and into society.

As a result of this radicalism, he argues, "what might be called philosophic conservatism - a philosophy of protection, conservation and solidarity - acquires a new relevance for political radicalism today".

The old paradigm of Right, meaning conservative, and Left, meaning radical, is eroding. A conservative frame of mind - -as opposed to Big 'C' political conservatives -- is not necessarily defined by the old verities of race, church and nation.

Conservative instincts often lie behind the political support of the Greens. Take the issues of genetic engineering and biotechnology. Many regard criticism of biotechnology as left-wing, but one of its thoughtful critics is the American conservative Francis Fukuyama. He fears that continuing to apply biotechnology to humans will alter human nature and will move us into a 'post-human' stage of history. The stage may see the rise of new problems such as a genetically superior social elite, the creation of generations living well over 100 years, the possibility of new types of quasi-humans. He wonders what would happen to the notion of human dignity and equal worth of all humans. So do Greens.

Green ideas intersect with the conservative tradition in other ways. The conservative British philosopher Michael Oakeshott argued that to be conservative "is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss".

To prefer the sufficient to the superabundant could well be the motto of a society which rejects consumerism and which does not seek fulfilment through ever-increasing material goods. Frugal habits have been abandoned as a cornucopia of commodities are endlessly generated. This is common ground between Greens and conservative church figures in Australia today. And this common ground is not an accidental blip.

Tradition is central to conservatism and Green thinking. Practices handed down to us are the result of many generations of trial and error and should be valued.
But as well as the traditions of humans, tradition presents itself through the ecology of the planet. The inter-dependence of living organisms which has evolved through millions of years is a tradition indeed. But the radical market ideology driven by profit attaches no value to ecological tradition.

Conservatives in this instance strive for sustainability. The conservative philosopher Professor John Gray says that there is a natural congruence between the ideas of the great British conservative Edmund Burke and green ideas. Burke saw society governed by a social contract, not as an agreement among anonymous ephemeral individuals, but as a compact between the generations of the living, the dead and those yet unborn. This conservative idea that the present generation must act as stewards of heritage, on behalf of our ancestors and to the yet unborn generations, is virtually identical to that found in the Greens.

At its heart the shared ground between conservatism and Green ideas is in scepticism towards ever-increasing progress. By contrast, Enlightenment theories of liberalism and socialism share a notion of unending progress based on the accumulation of material goods. Such theories have no concept of 'enough'.

This version of the good life and progress is understandable, since material deprivation for masses of people is still in living memory in industrial countries and is a living reality for millions in developing countries. But endless material progress on the model of advanced industrial countries cannot be applied to the rest of the world because it is simply unsustainable at a global scale.

I say all of this to try to provoke new frameworks of thinking which I see as the pre-requisite to a renewal of progressive politics at national level. I explore this more deeply in my recent book 'Beyond Right and Left'.

On the other hand, some Greens supporters seen their party as the rebirth of a defeated Left. They frame their political appeal around traditional radical Left watchwords. They emphasise it is not just an environmental party but one which stands for human rights, trade union rights and radical egalitarianism. In this mixture the genuinely new and profound ideas on the environment are sometimes in danger of being lost.

This plays into the hands of critics who label the Greens "watermelons": green on the outside and red on the inside.

But the Greens is not a rebirth of the Left nor should it be. Of course, privately owned corporations, as they are constituted, are major vehicles of environmental destruction. They are very powerful, they encourage over consumption and public needs are sacrificed to private profit. Massive changes are needed to economic activity. But abolishing private ownership and abolishing the market (ie. socialism) is not the answer, even if it were possible.

The clash between labour and capital is not fundamental to a Green analysis of the world. Rather, the clash is between humanity and the natural world need to sustain life.

The economic battle is not to redistribute wealth to create equality nor to abolish the market but to make the economy sustainable. Some environmental thinkers have seized on the market mechanism as one way of allocating scarce resources, by attributing a much higher value to water, coal, oil and other finite resources. And some private corporations are profiting from creating the building blocks of a sustainable society.

If the Greens are to consolidate their gains and expand, they need to recognise that part of their message is a conservative one. It is deeply attractive to certain conservative instincts in the broad public and this should not be a matter for embarrassment but for celebration.

The image of green politics as left-wing and radical not only drives away potential supporters, it more importantly straitjackets new thinking into old categories.

David McKnight is the author of Beyond Right and Left (Allen & Unwin, 2005). He teaches in the humanities faculty, University of Technology, Sydney.

Posted by David at 11:45 PM

August 9, 2006

Can progressive politics find a new vision?

This is a talk delivered on August 5 2006 to the Blackheath Philosophy Forum, a community meeting in the town of Blackheath, in the Blue Mountains in NSW Australia.

The title of my talk today is 'Can progressive politics find a new vision? It's a rhetorical question, of course, and my answer is yes. But you might respond in a quite different way. You might ask -- What exactly constitutes progressive politics anyway? It's a rather nebulous term. Why not talk in terms of the Left?

This nebulous nature of what constitutes progressive politics or the broad Left is significant - it indicates that much of what we might call progressive politics relies on a vague and sentimental attitudes. It is more often than not a shopping list of items and attitudes which don't form anything coherent. It relies heavily on an oppositional stance, not on a stance which projects a positive vision and certainly not on a coherent intellectual framework. Not only that, but that different parts of progressive politics 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 and 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 ever increasing living standards part of the problem?

Or to take a different issue: look at the way in which opinions are divided about phenomena like 'welfare dependency' - is it real, does it exist ? is it a problem? Or is it part of some right wing move to condemn vulnerable people?

Nor are all of these issue merely confined to the fringes of political life in this country. The Australian Labor Party - like progressive politics - has been undergoing a crisis of belief and ideal 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. Today Labor represents a patchwork of constituencies with no unifying vision.

So these issues of an underlying vision of political movements are, in my view quite real and significant. And not confined to the margins of political life.

Indeed, I would argue that the decreasing impact of progressive politics in Australian political life is fundamentally due to the lack of any coherent new vision. Just to make the point historically - when Malcolm Fraser took office in 1975, a small but significant radical movement existed which challenged his every move and which had a significant impact on the political agenda of Australia. Has this occurred under the last 10 years of John Howard - the comparison is embarrassing. Instead there is passivity, demoralization and an inability to combat him on the terrain that was once the Left's strength - the terrain of values and ideas. Worse then that there is an attempt by some activists to carry on a radical left wing style of doing politics whose day has passed and which has no attraction to potential supporters, especially young ones.

The difference between the Fraser years and the Howard years is that under Fraser one could still speak in meaningful terms of a progressive movement which had something approaching a coherent vision. This gave it the intellectual resources and confidence to challenge a government which had a strong mandate from the ballot box. Today this is not possible. And in this lies the key weakness of the left or progressive politics

Let's take this comparison further. The progressive movement that existed, say 30 years ago, was really the political Left which was defined in a way that does not exist today. This political Left was a force which had its roots in a cluster of political theories around socialism and Marxism. These gave a central role to the workplace and to paid work. Thus the trade union movement was the political sun around which other planets orbited. In turn this was a reflection of the theory that 'class' was the determining reality in advanced capitalism.

These theories gave the Left that existed then a real strength. What happened in the intervening years is that those theories have became increasingly unable to explain the world and inspire a confident movement.

This view of the world was challenged from two directions. On one side were the new social movements which offered radical challenges but which did not rely on a class view of the world - I am thinking here of the emergent women's movement, the environment movement and the movement of cultural libertarianism and radicalism.

On the other side was a challenge from a reinvigorated Right which emerged with Margaret Thatcher. This new Right is and was a movement based on One Big Idea - the idea of individual freedom and choice. It is a movement based on the philosophy of liberalism, That is, it is an ideological movement.

But more than that, the new Right was a movement in tune with the times. By this I mean that it responded to one of the most significant features of our society - the rise in material well being of ordinary people. The expansion and cheapening of the number of consumer goods led to a growing expectation of greater individual choice in satisfying material wants. When we look at the product of affluence we immediately recognize the cultural revolt of the 1960s which it spawned but the less recognised consequence is that affluence laid the material bases for the neo-liberal, free market Right. Its philosophy of personal freedom and choice was in tune with the experience of many people.

Today we see this philosophy of choice and individualism reflected in the Howard government propaganda for the changes in industrial relations - one of the most radical changes ever implemented by a government in Australia.

The rise of the neo-liberal Right has lessons for the other side of politics - the progressive side. In crude shorthand the lessons are, first, if you want to have an impact you need a coherent political philosophy and, second, that to be successful that philosophy must be in tune with objective circumstances and the spirit of the times.

Let's look at these in turn.

As I said Marxism and socialist ideas once were the core of the intellectual framework of the left. Marxism acted as a kind of well spring of ideas and intellectual strength whose influence rippled out into the Labor Party, into cultural and academic life and into the society generally.
Today this is no longer the case. But I think it is important to understand why, if for no other reason than to avoid making the same mistakes again.

Central to the socialist vision was the struggle against material deprivation and for material equality and for material abundance. Material deprivation certainly exists in Australia society. The ABS reported recently that, in the past 12 months, due to a money shortage, 13% of Australians said that they had gone without meals or had been unable to heat their home.

As against that, on a longer time frame, 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. My point is not to brush poverty under the carpet but to point out that a vision based centrally on addressing material deprivation is misplaced

Until relatively recently, socialists thought that capitalism would eventually plunge large parts of the working class into poverty - and that it would then become obvious that that poverty could only be ended by large scale government control, if not ownership, of productive resources. But it is has not turned out this way. Capitalism has proved to be very dynamic and very productive. Indeed this may prove to be the real problem.

The socialist Left with its class analysis also saw clearly who the agent for change would be - it would be the working class. Today it is doubtful whether this way categorizing people really has any use at all. particularly if your theory prescribes that this class will somehow develop a class consciousness

The most striking characteristic of workers in modern times is one of great fragmentation. The work-force has been transformed by part time work, by white collar and service jobs. There are wide discrepancies of income in the working class - a layer of employees are very affluent others in genuine poverty. The gender composition of the workforce also changed radically. The idea that this class, as a class, could act in any unified progressive way is a utopian dream.

There are many more things you could say about the flaws of classical socialist Marxist theory, and some of these are outlined in my book.

I now want to move on to perhaps a more familiar political force -the group I have called in my book the cultural left. This describes the broad political force which emerged out of the cultural revolt of the 60s and 70s.
The cultural left recognized long ago the inadequacies of the old Marxist Left's intellectual framework with its narrow focus on class and its economic determinism.

It rightly focussed 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. But the central ideas of the cultural left are also limited and flawed.

It made a fetish of cultural identity. It celebrates the variety of cultures, tended to romanticize all 'oppositional' cultures to the dominant culture. The diversity of cultures should be celebrated but if that is all you do, then this has dire political consequences.

One consequence of this has been a deep alienation of much of the cultural Left from the mainstream culture—not surprisingly, since this is seen to be 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 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 the cultural Left often finds it hard to talk about politics in terms of an overall vision, a national interest or a common good. It has little to say to society as a whole, but in its own fragmentation addresses a series of separate constituencies.

By contrast, the person who has most effectively articulated ideas about an overall Australian identity has been our old friend John Howard.

AS the Melbourne academic Judith Brett argues, Howard has made the Liberal party the part y of Australian popular nationalism - a role that was once reserved the Labor party and the trade union movement. AS I said Labor now looks like a patchwork of noisy dissident group with no unifying ideas.

A new vision

All of this unraveling of the problems of progressive politics may sound terribly depressing. Nevertheless I think it is important.

But what of the future of progressive politics? Can it fashion a new vision that is inspiring, challenging and realistic. Moreover a vision which addressees real problems, not the ghosts of yesteryear?

I think it can and as I have suggested this involves developing a new framework of ideas and values. I put it that way to make it clear that I don't think any new progressive vision will be expressed as a rigid system of ideas likes Marxism or liberalism. Rather it will be a coherent, but less defined set of values..

What are the element of such a new vision?

Perhaps it's the last remnant of Marxism within me but I think the best place to begin to answer this question is with the actual material reality and with the actual problems which the world faces - rather than with a set of utopian ideals.

The first bit of material reality to my mind is the growing problem of how humanity -especially the developing world -- can live a good life without destroying the ecological basis for that very life.

An analysis of the environmental crisis is a basic starting point, it seems to me.
This marks a distinction with the previous basis of progressive politics which foregrounds the increasing material well being. Bluntly, we have to stop thinking in terms of a movement which sees an ever increasing level of living standards as the main goal.

On this basis our conception of the economy must radically change -- the economy in future includes what are called ecological services - that is - the constant renewal and cycle of water, of the atmosphere, resources, its air -- considered as part of the economy,

On this basis we live in a society and an economy which is ultimately unsustainable -- and we have a particular form of capitalism which relies on the endless expansion of the economy and ever increasing of production of commodities. This libertarian capitalism has no concept of 'enough' -- and this is big problem.

The second basis for a new vision revolves around the issue of care. Care for children, care for the old and care for sick or disabled. This is a society which really does not value care. A large part of the work of care is unpaid or poorly paid. Think mothers, health workers or child-care workers. Moreover, juggling work and care is one of the really profound problems for many ordinary Australians- greater than their living standard.

Progressives politics has not been associated with deep concern for the family as a central political issue. Rather, the discourse of family values has been the territory of the Right. In fact the Right is utterly hypocritical on family values - and this makes it very vulnerable,. The Right talks in the same breath about supporting the free market and supporting family values - in fact these two things pull in opposite directions.

For too long the Left and supporters of feminism have damned the phrase 'family values' as simply a code for intolerance and discrimination.
Yet the real forces undermining families are the forces of the market, of rampant consumerism, of low pay and of long and inflexible working hours. Re-thinking family values means focussing on the private and the social meaning of care -- and how care will be paid for. Will it be resolved in the marketplace -- with what Ann Manne calls the industrialization of child care? Or will provision for care -- say through a generous paid parental leave ---- become a new goal for progressive politics?

The third issue on which I think progressive politics can be renewed concerns a vision of Australia, a vision of what we all hold in common, a vision of the public interest, One of the great strengths of the Right has been to frame a set of values about what constitutes Australia and Australians. It has mobilized and articulated a national sentiment -- one built on such appalling things as xenophobia but nevertheless one which strikes a resonance with many people. Progressives must overcome the fetish of diversity and their distaste for anything that smacks of nationalism. We must re-learn the way to articulate a populist philosophy imbued with progressive values.

Progressives used to be populists -- in the original and the good sense that they took up the concerns of ordinary people against the elite. This was true of the labour movement, the trade unions-- to some degree they still express this quality. Today progressives are successfully depicted as an elite and this strikes a resonance because of the behavior and politics of some of the cultural left.

The fourth issue concerns self-image. Progressives see themselves as radicals who stand for social change. Given the rapid economic and cultural changes of the last 20 years, this is actually a liability. More than that, it is not really true. The real radicals are the advocates of libertarian, deregulated capitalism. We refer in short hand to Howard's government as a conservative government but it is not. The so -called conservatives are no longer afraid of radical change. In fact they embrace it. That is what the new Industrial Relations laws are about -- human labour is reduced to a commodity and the most vulnerable are the worst hit.

When you put the market in charge of a university, a health system or a community then you begin to transform the values of that community, and more importantly you transform the social bonds between people. The market radicalizes society -- it destroys old habits, old values and old relations --

So it is the free market liberals who are the radicals, not progressives. Progressives need to realize the value of terms like - security, caution, and social cohesion -- with which the Old Right are associated. These can and should be re-framed as an agenda demanding stable jobs and communities, common values and social solidarity, rather than a society based on more individualism, more choice and ever more freedom.

On this basis it would make more sense for progressives and people on the left to frame their appeal as people who want to conserve and who reject market-driven social change. Conserving the environment, preserving families and communities in the face of a relentless individualism -- seems to me to be a new and important way to exploit a gaping vulnerability of the new Right. So the old idea they we progressives are the radicals, and that the Right are the conservatives is not true and we should cease to think this way.

Fifth, progressive vision can be renewed on the basis of values. Traditionally progressives appealed to the public at large on the basis of unacceptable material inequalities. Today a more relevant and powerful appeal can be made on the basis of humanist values.

And the neo-liberals of the Right are vulnerable on this. Their policies and philosophy promote the rise of commercial values in place of older social and moral values. If a university course does not attract students in the short term, then we cancel it - it has no intrinsic value, other than its market value. Nothing has any value, other than short term popularity expressed in the votes of consumers through their buying power. Commercial populism reigns.

More than ever before we live in a society in which everything is valued in dollar terms, everything is valued in terms of efficiency. All human needs are commodified and can only be satisfied in a market.

It is a world instrumental processes, of rational objectives, a new age of Reason. But this world creates a material abundance and a spiritual emptiness. Ultimately this is an anti-human world because humans can not live by bread alone. We need much more than that. That is the reason for the seeming paradox of the rise of evangelical religions in a society like ours -- and this need for a spiritual or transcendent side to our lives is also part of the explanation for the rise of environmental consciousness.

In a clash of values, where the commercial logic of neo-liberalism is pitted against a movement based on a new kind of humanism -- I don't have any doubt about which values will succeed. But to get to that point requires a lot more attention to renewing the worldview and values of progressive politics.

And all of this I explain in a far more detailed and less crude way in my book Beyond Right and Left (available from Allen & Unwin ).

Posted by David at 10:56 PM

March 21, 2006

Why has the Right gained the ascendancy in political ideas and values?

This talk at the Australian National University also appeared in slightly shorted form in the Newsletter of the Australia Institute (Dec 2005).

I'd like to begin by posing one of the questions that inspired my passion for the book. Why has the Right gained ascendancy in political ideas and values in Australia? In the short term there are two major reasons why John Howard has won recent elections -- one is the steady performance of the economy and the other is the threat of terrorism.

But I'd like to look at some deeper reasons and I'll do so by making three points.

The first is the observation that the possibility of adequately fitting contemporary politics into a Right-Left spectrum is disappearing.

We all routinely describe the John Howard's Liberal-National coalition government as Right and Labor as representing a broad 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'. This is more than a cheeky crack on Fraser's part. I believe it says something about the deeper forces at work in our political system.

The Right-Left model assumes that all the big questions of the day can be fitted on this spectrum. But if this is so, then 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 make the family central to a political vision? I don't think either of those assumptions make any sense any more.

The neo-liberal revolution

Part of the key to understanding the current ascendancy of the Right is that in the 1980s the Right underwent an intellectual revolution. The Right became a force centrally based on militant economic liberalism.

The price of this liberal renewal was the destruction of the older kind of Right and the creation of a radical, neo-liberal Right. This new Right is dominated by economic liberalism, and in a supporting role is a new kind of conservative populism . But if we focus solely on the conservative populism of the Right we miss a vital element, I believe. That is that one of the consequences of these changes is that the so -called conservatives are no longer afraid of radical change. In fact they embrace it.

The radicalism on the Right is radically transforming Australian society. Setting in place market mechanisms not only in the economy but well beyond it, in the wider society, leads to a constant and swift evolution - to give just two broad examples, the old Right stood for two key institutions: on the one hand the family and on the other, a patriotic idea of the nation. Free market policies are undermining both of these institutions, The family as an institution is being undermined by the intrusion and needs of the economy - most obviously in the shape of long hours of work by both parents. The national economy (and any sense of sovereignty) is being undermined by the forces of the global economy.

The other consequence of the penetration of the market mechanism is 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. Indirectly, this is fuelling a growing desire by many people for a values-based politics. While this is widely recognized, I would emphasizes that part of this is a desire for non-commercial (and sometimes pre-modern) values in an increasingly commercialised modern society.

As I said, the point I am making is that the neo-liberal Right today is a radical force. Its goals and the kind of economy it prescribes are having radical effects on social institutions and on civil society.

Two things flow from this: first, the most effective critique of neo-liberalism can be based on these radical social effects, rather than the traditional Left critique based on inequalities of wealth.

Secondly the market radicals of the Right have reversed the previous meaning of Right and Left as Conservative and Radical. The most effective ground for the Left to stand on now is as a conservative force -- with conservative defined in a particular way. I develop this unusual argument at some length in my book.

The collapse of socialism

The other reason that the Right- Left spectrum is becoming irrelevant is that the ideas of socialism, as an explanatory framework for Left politics, have definitively collapsed.

There are many reasons for stating this but the one on which I will touch briefly concerns the passing of social class as a broadly useful explanatory mechanism.

In its time, the class analysis of socialism was an enormously powerful weapon. It cut through the ideologies that obscured the self-interested actions of the corporate elite both locally and internationally. More importantly it gave a confidence and inner-strength to working class movements. The central role of class in a political vision was the idea that all workers shared a status in that they were oppressed by the same force and that this was the basis for class-wide solidarity, - the first expression of which was the formation of trade unions, on which were founded labour and socialist parties in the late nineteenth century.

The fact of social class is still important in understanding Australia, and indeed any advanced industrial society. The social power and privilege conferred by individual wealth to a small elite is a central feature of such societies. But my point is not to deny this. Rather it's to say that a world view based on class presumed that workers would develop a collective interest and that this would be expressed in trade unions, and labor parties. With this class consciousness the working class was to be the designated driver of social change. But this has not happened and will not happen, in my view.

Moreover, the great issues of our time concerning race and the environment cannot be explained in terms of class except by the most extreme economic determinism. And class inequality within a society has today much less power to explain the causes of a range of social problems.

The most immediate political consequences of this is the undermining of parties built on class and of institutions built on labour. It means that today the trade union movement is one social movement among many others. It seems only a short time ago, when the trade union movement was the sun around which other planets orbited, a reflection of the theory that 'class' was the determining reality in advanced capitalism. Today the trade unions are just one social movement among many. The other local consequence which is obvious in all of this - the decline of socialism as a world view and the inadequacy of class analysis in the real world, are some of the deeper driving forces of the crisis of belief and vision in the Australian Labor Party.
The culture war

I now want to turn to what is usually called -- at least by the Right -- The culture war over values

If the free market revolution is one of the broad forces shaping political discourse in contemporary Australia, the other is the backlash against the cultural revolution of the 1970s - in particular the rise of feminism and the acceptance of cultural diversity. In sum the Right is winning this culture war.

Before we go any further we should note just how paradoxical this is. The battle over culture wasn't meant to be won by the Right, it was meant to be won by the Left. In the 1970s as old style socialism faded, culture became the chosen terrain of battle of the new Left which emerged from the new social movements. This new Left increasingly rejected the inadequacies of class analysis and preoccupation with economic analysis. It saw that the working class was not particularly radical and it seemed quite content to insist on a fairer division of the consumer spoils of capitalism. Social change was blocked not by armed force but by comfortable beliefs and values which in sum constituted capitalist culture and ideology. By contrast the new social movements of women, youth, ethnic groups and gays challenged the values and beliefs of dominant culture and ideology. Their terrain was not the factory floor but the public culture. Starting from activist campaigns, demonstrations and a multitude of creative protests, the new Left set an important cultural agenda. It waged a culture war and it had enormous success. A new Cultural Left emerged alongside the old Economic Left.

But as I say this is ancient history now because the people who are winning the culture war are the Right.

But why is this?.

Broadly speaking, the reason for this, I think, is the fact that while many people experienced the cultural change of the 1970s and 80s as liberation from religious and conservative restrictions, others experienced it (and still experience it) quite differently -- particularly as changes occurred in the family and as the effects of economic globalisation began to take hold. Rather than experiencing liberation, some began to experience disintegration. Rather than feeling free, they felt fractured. Instead of gains, many felt the loss of stable families and stable jobs and the ebbing of familiar truths. Nor was this merely imagined. Divorce did rise, the incidence of certain crimes did increase, social change occurred rapidly. And progressive ideas with their emphasis on liberation and personal change were blamed for this.

These concerns are often dismissed with a wave of the postmodern hand. They are mere 'moral panics' and 'anxieties'. Such phrases often amount to an evasion of genuine moral issues. Unless everyone celebrated every social change, it seems, they are conservative. While intellectuals may revel in unstable identities, blurred boundaries and shifting meanings, most people don't, because when such abstractions are translated into social practices they can result in aimlessness, anger or alienation.

Diversity and the common good

I now want to turn to a related aspect of all this which is a notion of cultural diversity -- and discuss how it has played out in national politics

I begin by noting that this notion marks a significant break from the traditional Left's adherence to social justice, equality and to socialism in various forms, which was based on a philosophical universalism. It saw all people as equal without significant difference. In this older framework diversity usually meant some kind of inequality.

At the high water mark the new cultural Left, the idea of cultural diversity was made into a kind of fetish. While it legitimately celebrated the variety of cultures, it tended to romanticize such feelings and saw them as laudably 'oppositional' to the dominant culture. The consequence of this has been a deep alienation of the cultural Left from the mainstream culture -- not surprisingly, since this is seen to be the oppressive norm -- and a cultivation of marginality.

This loss of the universalist component of the Left has meant that the approach emphasizing cultural diversity often finds it hard to talk about issues in terms of an overall vision, in terms of a national interest or a common good. It has little to say to society as a whole but in its own fragmentation addresses a series of separate constituencies.

By contrast , from the 1990s onwards, the intellectual Right in the Liberal Party increasingly began to articulate their politics in new terms by a new kind of common good. This was a culturally-defined common good revolving around a national identity of Australian-ness. This meant that John Howard and the Liberal Party talked about egalitarianism and the 'battlers', which is a bold form of cultural politics since it is code for making an appeal to the Anglo-Celtic working class Australians. (All the while their economic policies are destroying the institutional bases of the egalitarianism of 'old Australia'.)

One of the consequences of all this is a phenomenon with which you are all familiar. This is the characterization of people like us as 'elites'. The elites are those who sip lattes in inner-city cafes and drink Chardonnay while they busily undermine the values of ordinary Australians, the 'battlers'.

This appeal to a cultural identity neatly turns the tables on the old Left and the Labor ethos. All of this is set out in Judith Brett's recent work, as well as mine. In the 1950s left wing intellectuals such as historian Russel Ward began to construct a vital definition of Australian national identity. In an Anglophile society they insisted that Australians should be proud, instead of ashamed, of their convict origins and of Australia's pastoral working-class pioneers. They argued that the convicts, shearers and drovers embodied a spirit of rebellion and egalitarianism. Thus it was the Left which associated the common man, the battlers and mateship with the 'true spirit' of Australia.

John Howard, that master of cultural politics, consciously cultivates this very ethos to win the allegiance of part of the Labor Party's base. One of the strengths of Labor's former leader Mark Latham was to recognise this and to skillfully try to recapture this allegiance by a more nationalist foreign policy and by framing his policies as an appeal to ordinary Australians

I want to leave you with two new ways of thinking about political issues.

The first concerns the family. The left has not been associated with deep concern for the family as a central political issue. Rather, the discourse of family values has been the territory of the Right. And this is taken by all sides to , mean , for example, shunning gay love and advocating conservatives moral values.

I think the Left needs to re-think its view of the family-- indeed I think it is central to the revival of the fortunes of the opponents of the Right. The reason for this is that even though the Right talks in the same breath about supporting the free market and supporting family values - in fact these two things pull in opposite directions. This was the surprising message recently from the new Senator Fielding from Family First. And he drew the logical conclusion - that John Howard's new industrial relations laws are market friendly and they are not family friendly - particularly when it is likely that ordinary workers will be forced to bargain away weeks of annual leave, to work longer hours and unsociable hours.
For too long the Left and supporters of feminism have damned the phrase 'family values' as simply a code for intolerance and discrimination. Rather than challenging in the meaning of 'family values' they have allowed themselves to be positioned as opponents of something with which most people sympathise. Ceding the terrain of 'the family' to the Right allows it to speak in the names of many millions of people who are themselves not necessarily prejudiced or intolerant but who are worried by rapid social change and dislocation. Yet the real forces undermining families are the forces of the market, of rampant consumerism, of low pay and of long and inflexible working hours. Rethinking family values means focussing on the private and the social meaning of care -- and how care will be paid for. Will it be resolved in the marketplace -- with what Ann Manne calls the industrialization of child care? -- or will we try to retain care out side the formal economy-. This a theme I develop in my book

The second concerns how we conceive of environmental issues. Many people see the rise of Green politics as the replacement for the Left. They see environmental politics as leftwing. I think this is entirely misconceived and to achieve advances we need to re-think the meaning of green politics. To my way of thinking, the essence of green politics needs to be understood and re-framed as a new and genuine kind of conservatism, moreover a kind of conservatism that has a positive appealing to Australians broadly.

How might we do this? First, Green politics first arose from what was originally called the conservation movement. It aims to protect the natural world (and the heritage of the built world) from predatory forces which see the existing world as a mere raw material. Concepts such as the sustainability of the biosphere, I would argue, are conservative concepts.

Second, unlike the Left, green politics are not based on class and their analyses are not reducible to class. The enemy is not capitalism but relentless expansion of an industrial system aimed at generating products to satisfy a consumerism which, past a certain point, substitutes for other meaning and value in the peoples' lives. Rather than abolishing markets, it arguably makes more sense to increase and regulate the market price of timber, of coal, of oil, and of fresh water in order to lower their destruction or wasteful use.

In conservative thought tradition is important because it represent the refinement of wisdom of that past. As well as the traditions of humans, tradition presents itself to us through the existence of the ecology of the planet. The inter-dependence of living organisms which has evolved though millions of years is a tradition indeed! Allied with tradition is the conservative notion of stewardship on behalf of our ancestors and for our children's children, -- a notion originally enunciated by Burke -- which fits perfectly with green philosophy. Such conservative notions are central to indigenous and first nation peoples whose societies are extremely conservative.

Finally then, my summing up is this: the paradox and challenge to those who identified with the original values of the Left, but whose intellectual framework has collapsed, is to re-frame their values and create a new political discourse which has a particular kind of humanistic conservatism at its heart.

Posted by David at 12:17 AM

February 2, 2006

Rethinking multiculturalism

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

What do most people mean by multiculturalism?

Before proceeding let's examine what positive motives are behind this concept. What's positive is a deep desire to oppose racism. Support for multiculturalism expresses a desire for a world in which people from different cultural backgrounds will respect each other and in which the inevitable disagreements within any society do not lead to violence based on ethnic or cultural difference. It also represents a rejoicing in diversity and variety. It can represent a rejection of being confined to the narrowness of one's own culture and a desire to share aspects of a culture not one's own. Multiculturalism is also motivated by a desire for equality, expressed as an equality between groups.

On a more abstract level, some people support multiculturalism because they rightly see the limitations of formal civil equality when discrimination based on cultural groups exists. They argue that identical formal treatment can sometimes mean very unequal treatment in practice. These feelings and aspirations are very positive but the concept of multiculturalism which is used to articulate them has problems, some of which undercut these very aspirations and ideals.

One of the main problems is that multiculturalism is a rather fuzzy concept. It is not clear what intellectual roots it has nor what its moral content is. It appears to be a repackaged form of old fashioned liberalism and pluralism, albeit one which extends those concepts. More practically, it is not explicit what ultimate social arrangements it favours. What would a thoroughly multicultural society look like? In their book 'Multicultural Questions, two academics Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes, point out that multiculturalism is easily capable of a spectrum of meanings. They range from what they call 'Hodgepodge multiculturalism' to 'Mosaic multiculturalism'.

'Hodgepodge' multiculturalism is a celebration of the mixing of cultures in which people and cultural practices begin to blend and in which ultimately the boundaries blur and new syntheses emerge. This hybridisation threatens some and is celebrated by others. One of the latter is the writer Salman Rushdie whose life was threatened and who had to live in hiding for many years for supposedly 'offending a culture' in The Satanic Verses. The other version of multiculturalism is one which resembles a celebration of separatism. Instead of blending and hybridisation, there is a mosaic, a richly patterned society but one in which each tile of the mosaic is a sharply defined, definite and self-contained cultural group. It advocates virtually no shared values other than absolute respect for difference.

From a distance 'hodgepodge' and 'mosaic' may look the same but there is a world of difference, to coin a phrase.

Before delving deeper into the implications of this, one crucial consequence must be noted which is not apparent at first but which deeply affects how multiculturalism is defined in both local and national politics. 'Hodgepodge' multiculturalism has no natural political base to mobilise and fight for it. In contrast, 'mosaic' multiculturalism has an immediate base of ethnic groups each of whom will mobilise and fight for its group rights, under the banner of the larger cause, multiculturalism. No political leader that I am aware of has ever publicly championed hybridising multiculturalism and the creation of a new hybrid Australian national identity. But hundreds of minor political leaders have traded on the mobilisation of group loyalty of ethnic minorities in return for favours. Ethnic branch stacking in the ALP is the most notorious and corrupt example of a practice in all parties. In turn such practices strengthen the 'mosaic' version of multiculturalism.

Mosaic multiculturalism has big problems. The most obvious of these is that it encourages what we could call 'group thinking'. Instead of treating individuals as having individual characteristics, we see individuals as representatives of categories or cultures. This is understandable at one level. Ethnic minorities can suffer discrimination as a group and members of that group usually share some common interests. But building a politics based on 'group thinking' can be a dangerous practice. This is because 'group thinking' is not so far removed from the stereotypes in which generalised judgements are made about particular groups (Aborigines are lazy, Jews are greedy, the English are snobs, Asians are hard-working etc). Preserving the authenticity and integrity of a culture is not far removed from notions of racial purity.

Mosaic multiculturalism elevates the rights of the group over the rights of the individual within the group. In the case of women this can be very oppressive since those who define the interests of the group are often older and male. The (rare) practice of female genital mutilation is an issue on which authorities still tread carefully. More common are a series of assumptions and expectations about women, marriage and family honour. Research evidence suggests that murder is more frequent among the overseas-born couples as part of a pattern of domestic violence. The report which found this, Shattered Dreams, (1996) by Patricia Easteal, documents many other indications which suggest a disproportionate amount of domestic violence among overseas-born couples. But Easteal is painfully cautious in revealing this fact because it might fuel racism. But the contrary is also true. Tiptoeing around such issues also fuels opposition to multiculturalism because it is seen to justify a double standard toward the local and overseas born.

Part of its fuzziness is that, in the way it is often publicly articulated, it appears to be a concept without limits. If a little bit of diversity is good, why not a huge amount of it? Multiculturalism is often articulated on the Left as an 'oppositional' concept, undermining the constraints of the dominant culture. Because of this, those espousing a multicultural stance rarely qualify or make conditional the application of the concept. If a group insists on a demand in the name of cultural diversity or respect, who can say whether the limits of acceptable diversity have been reached, and on what basis? Multiculturalism therefore poses but does not answer the highly charged question about how to resolve competing and antagonistic cultural values, particularly in relation to families, marriage and the treatment of women and children. In practice such questions are usually settled by reference to Australian law which favours individual over group rights. But the public debate over the limits of cultural diversity is not 'settled' so easily. The pressure to legitimise group rights over the rights of individual women and children is one little-recognised source of hostility to multiculturalism.

Mosaic multiculturalism also has the problem that emphasising the rights and particularities of groups usually comes at the expense of emphasising what all groups share, whether that's expressed at the level of the national interest, or social cohesion and trust. One high profile supporter of multiculturalism who recognised this some time ago was the West Australian academic Laksiri Jayasuriya. In an article in 1990, he argued for a 'paradigm shift' from what he called 'cultural pluralism to democratic pluralism'. He argued that the official recognition of cultural diversity in the early 1970s rested on a 'largely hidden belief in eventual integration'. One of the critical problems for this approach 'has been to demarcate with any degree of consensus the precise limits of cultural pluralism in relation to policy initiatives such as ethnic media, schools and services'. That is, the idea was fuzzy. Nevertheless, the policy worked especially in catering to the needs of first generation migrants. But other research, he argued showed that in the second and third generations, inter-ethnic marriage meant that ethnic boundaries were becoming more fluid and a 'mixed' cultural society was developing, rather than a multicultural one. In this situation, a more symbolic ethnic identity developed which involved 'a loose nostalgia for one's historic origins but no compelling sense of identification or group loyalty'.

A similar notion is expressed by the secretary of the British Fabian Society, Sunder Katwala, in an article titled 'Why I'm Proud to be a Mongrel Brit'. The son of an Indian father and Irish mother, he argues that 'multiculturalism has not valued integration enough. Retreating to ethnic enclaves - demanding our own share of recognition and resources as Gujeratis, Somalis, Bangladeshis and so on - is a dead end. We need a shared society. Integration is a two-way street. We should demand allegiance and loyalty from citizens - and tackle the racism in employment which prevents the promise of integration from being kept.' Both these writers anticipate the need to promote an evolving, hybridised cultural identity which can accommodate both cultural blending and the persistence of diverse cultures but which should occur within the framework of the values of an evolving common culture.

To read more: see Chapter 8, 'All in the Same Boat' in 'Beyond Right and Left', which can be purchased online here.

Posted by David at 11:55 AM

January 20, 2006

Thinking beyond that coloured label

GREAT movements in politics and history have always been underpinned by powerful ideas. In the historic conflict between capital and labour, one side championed the ideas of socialism, and the other a mixture of liberalism and conservatism.

But what powerful ideas underpin the newest global political force, the Greens? Although the Greens represent something new in politics, both their enemies and friends try to categorise their ideas under the old labels of right and left, based on the class war.

Some Greens supporters see their party as the rebirth of a defeated left. They emphasise it is not just an environmental party but one which stands for human rights, trade union rights and radical egalitarianism. In this mixture the genuinely new and profound ideas on the environment are sometimes in danger of being lost.

This plays into the hands of critics who label the Greens "watermelons": green on the outside and red on the inside.

But the Greens are not a rebirth of the left. In spite of their tough criticism of corporate power, they do not propose the abolition of capitalism. The clash between labour and capital is not fundamental to world view. Rather, it is about humanity's relationship with nature.

According to the Greens leader and author Drew Hutton, green politics are about "changing the nature of human relationships with the planet and other species on the planet".

The economic battle is not to redistribute wealth or abolish the market but to make the economy sustainable. Some greens have seized on the market mechanism as one way of allocating scarce resources, by attributing a much higher value to water, coal, oil and other finite resources. In its own way this is the direction of the Kyoto agreement.

But neither market liberalism nor socialism are the founding ideas of the Greens. Surprisingly, the central idea of the Greens is a kind of conservatism of a new kind.

The British sociologist Anthony Giddens points this out. He argues the modern free market economy brings radical changes. An ever-expanding capitalism runs up against the environmental limits of the world and the freer play of markets and globalisation has the effect of making communal life less traditional. The security associated with regular jobs, stable community and family life and social solidarity is undermined by the spread of markets beyond the economy.

As a result of this radicalism, he argues, "what might be called philosophic conservatism - a philosophy of protection, conservation and solidarity - acquires a new relevance for political radicalism today".

The old paradigm of right, meaning conservative, and left, meaning radical, is eroding. A conservative frame of mind does not necessarily rely on the old verities of race, church and nation.

Conservative instincts often lie behind the political support of the Greens. Take the issues of genetic engineering and biotechnology. Many regard criticism of biotechnology as left-wing, but one of the most thoughtful critics is the conservative Francis Fukuyama.

Fukuyama fears that continuing to apply biotechnology to humans will alter human nature and will move us into a posthuman stage of history. The stage may see the rise of new problems such as a genetically superior social elite, the creation of generations living well over 100 years, the possibility of new types of quasi-humans. He wonders what would happen to the notion of human dignity and equal worth of all humans. So do Greens.

Green ideas intersect with the conservative tradition in other ways. The conservative British philosopher Michael Oakeshott argued that to be conservative "is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss".

To prefer the sufficient to the superabundant could well be the motto of a society which rejects consumerism and which does not seek fulfilment through ever-increasing material goods. Frugal habits have been abandoned as a cornucopia of commodities are endlessly generated. This is common ground between greens and conservative church figures in Australia today.

Tradition is central to conservatism and green thinking. Practices handed down to us are the result of many generations of trial and error and should be valued.

But as well as the traditions of humans, tradition presents itself through the ecology of the planet. The inter-dependence of living organisms which has evolved through millions of years is a tradition indeed. But radical markets driven by profit attach no value to ecological tradition.

Conservatives in this instance strive for sustainability. The conservative philosopher Professor John Gray says that there is a natural congruence between the ideas of the great British conservative Edmund Burke and green ideas. Burke saw society governed by a social contract, not as an agreement among anonymous ephemeral individuals, but as a compact between the generations of the living, the dead and those yet unborn. This conservative idea that the present generation must act as stewards of heritage, on behalf of our ancestors and to the yet unborn generations, is virtually identical to that found in the Greens.

At its heart the shared ground between conservatism and green ideas is in scepticism towards ever-increasing progress. By contrast, Enlightenment theories of liberalism and socialism share a notion of unending progress based on the accumulation of material goods. Such theories have no concept of enough.

This version of the good life and progress is understandable, since material deprivation for masses of people is still in living memory in industrial countries and is a living reality for millions in developing countries. But endless material progress on the model of advanced industrial countries cannot be applied to the rest of the world because it is simply unsustainable at a global scale.

If the Greens are to consolidate their gains and expand, they need to recognise that part of their message is a conservative one. It is deeply attractive to certain conservative instincts and this should not be a matter for embarrassment but for celebration.

The image of green politics as left-wing and radical not only drives away potential supporters, it more importantly straitjackets new politics into old categories.

Posted by David at 1:00 PM

December 28, 2005

Don't equate ideologies

Sydney Morning Herald
12 January 2005

Hope and optimism were associated with Marxism in a way that was impossible with fascism. This article responded to a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by writer Louis Nowra.

Do Australian communists have blood on their hands? Is the Che-T-shirt-wearing generation a modern version of the Hitler Youth? Louis Nowra claimed on this page on Monday that communism and fascism are equal and he lamented that a plaque near his home records the life of an East Sydney communist.

The fact that Che is chic and that Soviet-era kitsch is sold widely is significant but not in the way Nowra thinks. Not only have these symbols been emptied of their original meaning but the old framework defining right and left has been transformed since the end of the Cold War and the reconstruction of the right by the free-traders and neo-liberals.

On the left, Marxism no longer sets the intellectual and moral compass as it did for 80 years. On the right, an older style of conservatism has been sidelined. This is symbolised by people like Malcolm Fraser and Robert Manne, whose conservatism was built on a moral outlook now disparaged by both amoral free-marketeers and neo-conservative populists who fan fears about cultural identity.

Like the anti-communism which Manne and Fraser once espoused, the ideas of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong are relics from a historical period now closed. But history still has its claims. One of them is an argument about interpretation.

The claim that Stalin and Hitler were equals is part of an argument which tries to prove that Marxism, as an intellectual framework, was akin to fascism.

Marxism, now largely defunct, was very unlike fascism. Marxism was very much part of the Enlightenment heritage of the West. It was an ideology based on rationalism, science and progress. As such it influenced social science and the humanities. Its critique of economic power has become part of the common sense of our era. It was the militant wing of the Enlightenment.

By contrast, fascism was a product of the counter-Enlightenment. Its call to blood, race and nation was utterly different to Marxism. Both produced dystopias but for different reasons. Marxism's fatal flaw was precisely its utopianism, based on a literal implementation of its Enlightenment values of equality and rationality. It took little account of the nature of human beings, and did not have a functional and elaborate moral sense. (A similar critique can be made of current ideologies of free-trade globalisation.)

That Marxism won a wide following in the West is therefore hardly surprising given that Marxism's core ideas were a utopian elaboration of core values of the modern West such as equality and fraternity. In Australia it is humorously, but probably accurately, said that the biggest political party has always been the ex-members of the Communist Party.

But is it true to say that Australian communists slavishly supported Stalin and leave it at that? Partial truths can distort as effectively as untruths.

It is true that until the late 1960s Australian communists believed that the Soviet Union was a progressive and humane society. They admired the opposition of the Red Army to Nazism during World War II. They denied the obvious truth that Stalin's rule rested on secret police, labour camps and an unworkable economy.

But history is paradoxical, not simple. While the Communist Party of Australia embraced a Russified Marxism and worshipped Stalin, it also represented a genuine extension of native Australian working-class radicalism. It was both a victim of the Cold War and it used Stalinist methods internally.

But it is also true that in 1968 the Australian communists were the first in the world to condemn the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. For the next 25 years, the Australian party chose an independent course, which included acknowledging the horrors of Stalinism.

One consequence of this independent period was the communists' embrace of environmentalism, which helped save much of Sydney's heritage from the demolisher's hammer. Another was that, alongside certain Christians, communists were some of the few Australians who could hold their heads high with a consistent record of opposition to racism against indigenous Australians.

Such stances won support from the young new-left radicals of the 1970s. I know because I was one of them.

I joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1972 at the age of 21 out of unashamed idealism but with a full awareness of the tragedy that was Stalinism. I was confident that socialism did not automatically lead to Stalinism. I had enjoyed George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 but also his idealistic Homage to Catalonia. Socialism and equality seemed so obviously the answer to the world's ills. By the late 1980s my views had changed. Both the problems and solutions were not so simple any more. I drifted out of the Communist Party and by 1991 the party itself dissolved.

Optimism, hope and idealism were associated with Marxism in a way that was impossible with fascism. The theory of fascism wanted to crush Jews, the disabled, trade unionists and many others. The theory of Marxism wanted a better world for all. In Nazi Germany fascist ideals were realised. In the Soviet Union, as in present-day Cuba, Marx's ideals were not realised, and can never be realised.

New kinds of idealism need to be rethought, not buried.

Posted by David at 11:32 AM

October 31, 2005

The culture war and moral politics

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of "Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War" (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

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.'

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.'

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'. 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. 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.

In the 2004 federal election, 'culture war' and values issues were present but not as sharply posed as in the 2001 election where security and border protection were vital after the September 11 attack and the 'Tampa crisis' over the arrival of asylum seekers. But values issues were present in the choice by the Howard Government to campaign on 'trust'. The strength of this powerful word was that it was capable of meaning both trust in the economic management of the Howard Government (and lack of trust with the untested Labor leader, Mark Latham) but also capturing a less focussed pubic desire for this quality in daily life.

The culture war continued after the election. In January 2005 Tony Abbott talked about the fourth term of the government. He signalled that the Howard government would increasingly set an agenda on issues that were once the home territory of the Left. It would do this by changing the 'pessimistic and narrow minded aspects of Australian conservatism.'

Fear of Asia, mistrust of difference, obsessive concern with whether people are getting more than their share are much less part of our national make-up than they were. Modern Australian conservatives seek allies among indigenous people and take pride in their achievements. They are no less committed to a sustainable environment than the green movement, just more practical and realistic about achieving it. They no longer feel threatened by diversity.

Critics often described the Right's campaign on values as a 'return the 1950s', as a desire to return of women to traditional roles and to roll back the acceptance of cultural diversity and the gains of multiculturalism. While the Right does capitalise on such sentimental desires to return to a supposedly uncomplicated past, this 'return-to-the-past' analysis seriously underestimates what is going on.

Abbott's statements reflect a flexible and confident conservatism which looks to the future as it adapts and reframes issues which were once solely part of the Left's agenda. This can be seen especially in areas such as indigenous policy and social welfare. Genuine return-to-the-past issues such as abolishing abortion rights, are not likely to get anywhere given wide pro-choice sentiment in Australia and the Liberal Party itself.

Such an analysis is anotehr example of the way that the Left has consistently underestimated the Right's intelligence and flexibility. Rather than mindlessly wanting to drag Australia back to the 1950s, the thinkers of the Right are addressing a series of very real and topical problems felt by many ordinary Australians which the Left either cannot see or in some cases refuses to recognise.

To explain. Over the last 30 years two upheavals occurred in Australia. One was that caused by liberal economics, the other was a libertarian cultural revolution. In the former, the working lives of people changed, respected institutions, both public and private were transformed and economic efficiency became the new measure of value. In the libertarian cultural revolution the role of men and women changed, the family loosened and a more culturally diverse national identity emerged.

These changes made Australia a more tolerant, diverse society and spurred economic dynamism so that Australians became richer. But with these changes came losses as well as gains. Family life changed and marriage became less secure. Stable identities and expectations of father, mother, husband, wife, and children changed. Assumptions based on an Anglo-Celtic population with shared values could no longer be made. The history of British colonisation in Australia was reassessed and a simple kind of pride in the past became less possible.

To many people Australia is a less secure place. Sociologist Michael Pusey who studied 'middle Australia' in the late 1990s found widespread 'moral anxiety'. Security is unfamiliar territory to the Left. The Left of politics conceives of security as economic security. It means having a job or decent income. It means reliable government services in health, education and elsewhere. This captures one aspect of security but misses another dimension altogether. People worry about their job security but also about quite different, less tangible things. One is cultural identity. In the case of the 'old Australians', fears about loss of identity rate very highly and can be mobilised for political gain. In the 2001 election the Howard Government did precisely this by placing 'border protection' as a central issue on the political agenda. The desire for security also drives 'law and order' campaigns for tougher jail sentences. The Left regards these as phony issues and sees only a desire to punish rather than a desire for security. Yet in its time the Left has connected with and reconfigured a public desire for security and for law and order. One of the main victories of the women's movement was to massively transform the operation of the criminal law on domestic violence, violence against children and sexual assault. This was possible because the women's movement had won a 'culture war' and had changed social attitudes and values on these question. (This model of long term grass roots activism combined with legal and policy reform should be applied to other culture war issues.)

But too often issues of security are left to the Right and are automatically discounted by the Left. Grappling with them means entering a territory in which both legitimate and fanciful fears lie in wait. But skirting this territory is no longer an option in a world where globalisation is disrupting established patterns at home, at work and in the national culture. Globalisation has been seen as primarily an economic event, but its cultural impact is arguably more dramatic.

In the face of cultural insecurity Labor and the Left has not found a way of articulating their values into a coherent and convincing popular stance. This is not a problem of 'packaging' but a much deeper problem, It is a problem of whether to recognise cultural fears as legitimate and as facts. It is also a philosophical confusion and incoherence about which values and which ideas constitute a progressive standpoint in Australia today. To win a culture war, a political force must exercise intellectual and moral leadership, but this is impossible without clarity on underlying issues.

The culture war - declared by the Right on the Left - is a central feature of modern politics in the US and Australia. While the clash between labour and capital was largely about material things - wages, jobs, and a positive role of the state, the culture war is about post-material concerns of values and identity. In fact both are about similar things (such as education and public schools) but expressed in different ways. And 'post-material' issues have actually have been part of human existence since the beginning of time: each clan had an identity and values as well as being engaged in a struggle for material survival. What is occurring now are the political consequences of the gradual dissolution of working class identity based around male breadwinners often doing hard physical labour and organised in trade unions.

Above all the culture war is about mobilising political support through articulating issues which strike a chord with many people. In a sense that is what all political rhetoric is crafted to do. But the Right's method of fighting the culture war is about framing the issues of politics as moral politics and setting this agenda in such as way that you isolate and divide your opponents. Hence the companion phrase to 'culture war' is 'wedge politics'. The immediate purpose of cultural politics is to drive a wedge which splits the supporters of your opponent and draws one section nearer to you.

But the culture war is more than a way of achieving short term advantage. It's about deeply held but slippery concepts such as social cohesion in a multicultural society; it is about 'family values'; it is about the national identity of Australia and who counts as 'Australian'; it is about relations between the indigenous people of Australia and the non-indigenous settlers and it is about Western values. Above all, the culture war is about ideas of right and wrong, both in society at large and on the personal level.

In contrast to politics seen in rationalist terms, the culture war is about emotion and how people feel. And in case such matters are regarded as vague and insubstantial remember that 'how people feel' covers a range of emotions and includes both passionate love (eg. for children) and intense hatred (eg. against other ethnic groups). To this extent playing politics as a culture war means playing with some of the most powerful ingredients in human nature.

To a significant degree the culture war is the backlash of the Right to the rise of feminism, multiculturalism and libertarian social attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s. When these ideas emerged they recast the political and cultural landscape and helped create a better society. But everything has unintended consequences. Some ideas that still form the basis for a progressive outlook have turned out to be wrong or silly. For example, that moral wrongdoing should be discussed in terms of underlying social problems and not in terms of holding people morally responsible for their actions. But as time went on the inherent weaknesses of such a one-sided idea have emerged. The Left's flat-footed refusal to recognise them has laid the ground for the Right's largely successful roll-back on the cultural and values front. (I discuss what this means later in this chapter and in the next two.)

Posted by David at 10:25 AM

October 11, 2005

The Death of the Old Right: when conservatives become radicals

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of "Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War" (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

One night about 30 years ago I drove in a battered car with a comrade through the darkened streets of inner Sydney, spray cans at the ready. That night we endlessly painted a slogan on brick walls, fences and the side of factories. The slogan read 'Stop Work to Stop Fraser'. It was just a few days after the notorious sacking of the Whitlam Labor Government by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, and the abrupt installation of the leader of the Liberal Party, Malcolm Fraser, as Prime Minister. The response of the Communist Party, of which I was a member, was to try our hardest to organize a general strike by trade unions to protest the assault on democracy represented by the sacking. Politically, lots of things have changed since then but I don't regret for one minute trying to help organize that strike.

One of the things that has changed is Malcolm Fraser's political outlook and therein lies a significant key to understanding the new politics of social change. One of the trade unions which supported the strike was the metalworkers' union. Recently the same union invited their former foe to address their national conference about the issue of asylum seekers and their detention in detention camps. Trade union delegates interrupted Fraser's speech with applause several times and after the speech, the metalworkers' leader, Doug Cameron, commented that Fraser 'had grown in stature since his period as Prime Minister. He is a true statesman for this country and a great spokesperson for the issue of humanity for all people around this globe.'

The wheel has turned for the former Prime Minister who, for seven years had headed one of the most disliked governments in Australian history. Today Fraser is a changed man. Gone is the bluster and bullying of yesteryear. His government is seen to have failed according to the new orthodoxy of the Liberals and their economic rationalist philosophy. Fraser is in a philosophical no man's land. He is no longer a reactionary conservative nor is he an economic rationalist. He laments, 'our generation is without a political philosophy relevant to our time and circumstances. We have a theory of globalization but, baldly stated, it is cold and technical -. We need an idea of how our society will develop and how, in a more global society, people will relate to each other. We need a philosophical framework.' As we shall see, Fraser's pin pointing of a crisis of political philosophy is accurate.

The journey that he made beyond the Right is not unique. From 1990 to 1997, another conservative, Robert Manne, edited Australia's premier right wing intellectual journal, Quadrant. In his time Manne penned many attacks on left wing causes. In 1990 he celebrated the collapse of communism but warned about the 'fashionable new orthodoxies' of 'radical environmentalism, feminism, gay liberationism, multiculturalism and animal liberationism'. But soon after this he began to genuinely re-think his position and that of the magazine in the new post-Cold War world. This lead to deepening disagreement with most of his editorial board and to his highly public resignation from Quadrant. Today Manne supports many causes usually described as left wing. He supports a republic and feminism and he has championed issues concerned with indigenous people. He mounted the most effective attack on the Right's denial of the 'stolen generation' of indigenous children. He has become an outspoken advocate for a more humane policy toward refugees. He now describes himself as someone on the Left and is regularly (and bitterly) attacked by conservative commentators.

Fraser and Manne are two examples of what one writer on the journal Lingua Franca called the diaspora of the 'ex-cons' --- conservatives who have cut themselves adrift from the Right. Lingua Franca also focussed on John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. Gray was once a house intellectual for Margaret Thatcher and a darling of the New Right. He wrote a book on John Stuart Mill and another on the theoretical godfather of the New Right, Friedrich Hayek. Of the latter, Hayek himself was effusive in his praise. It was 'the first survey of my work which not only fully understands but is able to carry on my ideas beyond the point at which I left off'. Today Gray is a savage critic of Hayek and of market-driven globalization which he regards as a form of fundamentalist utopia. Gray's ideas, which were touched on in the last chapter, will be examined in more detail and represent a new kind of conservatism which has a place in the reconfiguring a new politics beyond Right and Left in the 21st century.

Neo-liberalism is more radical than conservative. Its trajectory is corroding much of the social fabric. Genuine conservatives like Gray therefore become its natural and effective critics.

Another critical voice was that of Charles Kemp, the founder of the oldest think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs. By 1991 he had had enough of the simplistic nostrums of the economic rationalists. In Quadrant, he warned that the 'great danger of extreme market philosophies is that they enthrone profit, greed and self-interest. After the horrors of the eighties it is not surprising that the restoration of decent ethical standards is figuring high on the agenda of the nineties.' His ironically titled article 'Those Terrible 80 Years?' points out that the era before market economics had enjoyed full employment, low inflation and a booming economy. By that time both of Kemp's sons, David and Rod, had rejected their father's position and become militant economic rationalists. Both became ministers in the Howard Government and the latter spent the 1980s at the head of the institute which his father founded unravelling his father's work and rebuilding right wing philosophy.

Finally there was the populism of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party, not so much a remnant of the Old Right as a new force prompted by its dissolution. Part of her appeal to many country people was her attack on economic rationalism which had closed banks, government offices and railway lines in country towns. One Nation's rural policy argued that Australia's competitors 'have continued to protect their industries and national sovereignties while Australia has exposed itself to deregulation, free trade, globalisation and economic rationalism.' To One Nation's constituency (8.4% of voters in 1998), a seamless connection existed between their fear of cultural globalisation and loss of national identity and their fear of economic globalisation and the loss of national sovereignty.

Social liberalism in Australia

The Old Right in Australia was often seen as a single force, labeled 'conservatism' but it was actually an amalgam of different political ideas and trends, some of which now oppose the current neo-liberal and neo-conservative hegemony. The great icon of Australian Right, Sir Robert Menzies, for example, supported social justice and the welfare state. The Liberal MP who now holds Menzies' old parliamentary seat, Petro Georgiou, points out that 'pro-market purists' in the modern Liberal Party damn any notion of social justice as a 'Labor plot' when it was in fact a foundation stone for the Liberal Party. Georgiou cites Menzies' colleague, Paul Hasluck, who said, 'Although a traditionalist, Menzies was not a conservative in any doctrinal sense - His political thinking was in accord with the liberalism of Alfred Deakin and the liberalism of late nineteenth century England.'

In a similar vein, the former Liberal Party minister Peter Baume, argues that 'liberals welcomed measures, and continue to welcome measures, which empower people. Free public education empowered young people. Extension of the franchise empowered adults. Home ownership and income support empowered families. Anti-discrimination legislation empowered people otherwise powerless-' Retired Liberal Party president, John Valder, actively campaigned against the war in Iraq on quintessentially liberal 'human rights' grounds while former Liberal cabinet ministers, Fred Chaney and Ian McPhee together with former leader of the coalition, John Hewson, deplore the Howard Government's xenophobic attitude to race.

People like Petro Georgiou, Peter Baume, Ian McPhee and others were the first victims of the neo-liberal takeover of the Liberal Party in the 1980s. But they are more than this. The liberal tradition which they inherited had been deeply affected by 'social liberalism', a radical variant of liberal thought at the turn of the last century. Deeply influential in Australia, especially at the time of the federation of colonies, social liberalism became part of the conservative amalgam and its values and achievements are being studied anew by researchers such as Marian Sawer. Her work and that of others emphasises the gulf between social liberalism and modern neo-liberalism. Advocates of the latter, like Hayek, claim to be the inheritors of the true tradition of liberalism but this can be strongly contested. In my view acknowledging a vital social liberal tradition is important in trying to establish new philosophies beyond Right and Left and I deal with this in the final chapter of this book.

What is social liberalism? It is the name given to an important development of liberal thinking in Britain and in Europe which placed great emphasis on what is called 'positive liberty'. In the latter half of the nineteenth century social liberals argued that the era of liberalism as a philosophy opposed to the privilege of the aristocratic state had passed. These 'New Liberals', as they were then called, believed that there was an important distinction between private and public spheres. In the latter it was possible to speak of a public good and a common interest. They argued that the abstract liberal notion of rights-bearing individuals and freedom of contract could become oppressive. 'Freedom of contract' for example, meant one-sided and unequal bargains between employers and workers. 'The social liberals,' notes Sawer, 'did not seek the abolition of the market economy but believed that it must be subordinated to the democratic state which put the welfare of its citizens before the sanctity of contract and the rights of property.' The 'New Liberalism' was influential in Britain and elsewhere well into the twentieth century. Discrediting it and seizing the mantle of liberalism was one of Hayek's main motivations (discussed in Chapter 3).

In Australia the popularization of these ideas influenced Alfred Deakin, who was Prime Minister of Australia in the decade after federation and instituted a number of reforms with the support of the young Labor Party. This early Left-Right alliance between labourism and liberalism was vital in defining Australia as one of the most progressive democracies in the first half of the twentieth century.

The reforms included the establishment of a system of industrial arbitration, age pensions and, eventually, the vote for (white) women. In this context social liberalism was expressed specifically in Justice Higgins' 1906 famous 'Harvester' judgement. This legislated a minimum wage based, not on market forces, but on a conception of workers as 'human beings living in civilised communities'. (Overturning the Harvester judgement was one of the early goals enunciated by John Howard who said in 1983: 'The time has come when we have to turn Mr Justice Higgins on his head'. ) A similar commitment to fairness and of the obligations of a state to its citizens was behind the introduction of old age pensions and what grew into the welfare state, said Sawer. As well, she points out, social liberalism provided an obvious framework for early feminist ideas and activism. Because it helped set a intellectual and practical agenda in Australia's formative years, social liberalism was a major element in the ideological make up of both the non- Labor and Labor parties. As Sawer said, it was translated into the Australian notion of the 'fair go' .

Posted by David at 11:22 PM

October 3, 2005

The triumph of an idea: how neo-liberalism succeeded

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of "Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War" (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005).

The power of ideas to shape societies is profound although we are largely unaware of their effect in our day to day lives. Underneath the common sense of an epoch and the slogans of its political parties are buried sets of philosophical ideas and values. These new ideas often begin as the property of a small group which then filter out into the surrounding society. If they find fertile ground they can spread and transform societies in a relatively rapid time. This has occurred with many new religious ideas, such as Christianity and it also occurred with the ideas of the socialists in the nineteenth century. The ideas of democracy, equality and reason fermented in French society before they burst out in 1789 in a revolution which not only transformed France but Europe and beyond.

A more modest revolution has occurred in the last 20 years. Like similar changes it was preceded by a ferment of ideas that were originally the property of a small group but then struck a chord and changed society.

Today our world is not just made by markets but by 'free markets' a phrase which operates as a code word for the triumph of a politico-philosophical trend known by various names but increasingly by the phrase neo-liberalism. In popular Australian parlance it's 'economic rationalism'. Other critics, like George Soros, prefer the term 'market fundamentalism'. I prefer the term neo-liberalism because it conveys the profoundly important philosophical ideas which underlie what are often seen as merely economic policies. Conversely, to oppose the logic of neo-liberalism requires a different set of philosophical ideas and values, not just different policies or a set of slogans.

Neo-liberalism stands for a range of ideas but the most popular expression of its best known stances are:

* individual choice expressed in markets is better in principle and gives better outcomes than any other;
* government regulation of private business should be abolished in favour of self-regulation and greater competition;
* the public sector should be commercialised and state owned enterprises sold to shareholders;
* tax should be as low as possible, with a user-pays principle for many government services;
* barriers to trade between nations should eliminated;
* the market principle should be applied far beyond the economy to all public goods - education, health, the environment etc.

There is more to this than meets the eye, including certain deeper assumptions about human nature. But 25 years ago the small group of economists and philosophers who held these views were regarded as rather eccentric even by the mainstream Right. They met in small discussion groups and debated each other in obscure magazines and economic journals. They dreamt of a world reshaped by these ideas. We now live in this world.

Looked at coolly, this transformation is an inspiring testament to the power of ideas to shape society. It can give us hope that other ideas might also reshape the world and fashion it to more human ends. But first, the ideas of neo-liberalism need to be understood. In fact the success of neo-liberalism contains many lessons for those who oppose its relentless commercial logic. The fact that its critics have understood neither its ideas (including their strengths) nor why they have taken root, means that the emergence of new political philosophies beyond Right and Left continue to be delayed.

Neo-liberal ideas trace their origins to the Scottish economist Adam Smith. Smith's weighty book The Wealth of Nations is still a reference point and in Britain his name is commemorated by the Adam Smith Institute, a think tank founded in 1977. The glory days of economic liberalism were mid-nineteenth century Britain, still an idealized reference point for modern neo-liberals. But perhaps the key date for us is 1947 when the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society. The Society was no secret cabal of conspirators, but a regular forum for discussion by the tiny minority of post-war economic liberals who swam against the tide of opinion which favoured the welfare state and government intervention.

But the tide changed, as it always does. By the late 1960s the ideas of Hayek, and of other economic liberals, such as the US economist, Milton Friedman, had won important ground among academic and professional economists in universities, government and corporations. Global institutions such as the IMF and World Bank had been increasingly staffed by people who described themselves as 'neo-classical economists'. The tide of opinion was slowly but inexorably turning among elite economists, but this was not enough. Their target, the welfare state and government regulation of the economy, was the product of both conservative and social-democratic governments. Both had been pragmatic in their economic theory, adjusting their policy sails to the winds of key constituencies such as farmers, manufacturers, trade unions and exporters. When it finally succeeded the neo-liberal revolution was as much a trampling of an older conservatism as it was the beliefs of socialism. (See Chapter 4).

Two processes opened the door to the storm that was to come in the 1980s and 90s. The first was a series of events in 1971-74 which crystallized problems in managed capitalism. In 1971 after a series of trade deficits attributable to the costly war in Vietnam, US President Nixon removed the US dollar from a system of fixed exchange rates - the dollar floated. In 1973, the largely Arab organization of oil exporters (OPEC) dramatically raised the price of oil to the industrialized countries. As well, for some time, the unusual combination of both inflation and lack of growth ('stagflation') had become apparent in industrialized economies. This meant that the Keynsian approaches to managing the economy, supported by both conservatives and non-conservatives, simply did not work. The Keynesian approach to inflation recommended higher interest rates and tightening government spending but these measures would further deepen stagnation and worsen unemployment.

The second process was a quite different phenomenon. It was not an economic crisis but a slow building, deeper social and cultural change. The long boom of the 1950s and 60s in advanced industrial countries had increased material wealth for nearly all their citizens. The expansion and cheapening of the number of consumer goods led to a growing expectation of greater individual choice in satisfying material wants and more importantly, elsewhere. For example, the motor car came within reach of far more people with the consequent decline of state-supported public transport. Personal choice for women was widened by the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill. All of this generated a climate in which individuals chafed at the restraints of a narrow minded moral uniformity favoured by church and state. The result was the cultural and political revolt of the 1960s which saw a blossoming of libertarianism.

This revolt has been largely claimed by the Left but its effects were far deeper and complex. While the conservative moral order enforced by government and churches was flouted it was only a matter of time before all sorts of other regulatory, restrictive policies, including those on businesses small and large, came under fire. When the 20 year olds who asked 'why should a government censor films' turned 30, they were open to neo-liberalism's questions: 'Why should a government run a national bank, an airline or a phone company?' As one commentator on Thatcherism notes, on moral issues the British New Right worked against the grain of the 1960s but they worked with the grain on economy-state issues. 'Many of the Thatcherites viewed their politics as a crusade against the pettiness, restrictiveness, traditionalism and inertia that characterised the post-war settlement', argues Richard Cockett. Such were also the terms of Left libertarianism of the 1960s.

Hayek: Prophet of the free market

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.

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. 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'.

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'.

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.

Posted by David at 10:39 PM

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 7:47 AM

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 6:01 AM

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

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

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

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

August 27, 2005

Australian film and the cultural cold war

This article was published in the media journal, Media International Australia, in May 2004. It is based on the 2003 Ian McPherson Lecture delivered by the author at the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Film Festival.

The Cold War between the communist bloc and the capitalist countries is traditionally seen in terms of the grand politics of international relations, including rivalry in the deployment of nuclear weapons, or by proxy wars, like Vietnam and Korea. While an ideological dimension has been studied, most prominently in the attacks on communist influence in Hollywood, interest has been revived in the wider cultural conflict between Left and the anti-Communist Right on the terrain of literature, the arts, journalism, television, radio and cinema. (Saunders, 1999; Lashmar, 1998; McKnight,1998; Eldridge, 2000, Urban, 1997)

The article examines the long term cultural effects of the Cold War on the Australian film industry, on film culture, such as festivals, and on the emerging industry of television. I want to suggest that this global ideological clash considerably affected the direction of government policy toward Australian film, the lives and work of film-makers and the cultural climate of film festivals. In particular I want to examine the interaction between the main government agency responsible for security matters, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, and the film industry component of what might be broadly termed 'the cultural Left' in Australia from 1945 to 1965. I will explore this through four issues which were of great concern during the Cold War: the involvement of left activists in the film society movement; the screening of films from the Soviet bloc; the activities of left wing film-makers, especially in connection with the Commonwealth Film Unit; and the activities of the trade union, Actors' Equity, in favour of Australian content, especially in the emerging industry of television.

The association between film and politics was established very early. The reason for this was that, from their beginning in the last few years of the nineteenth century, films proved to be cultural form which aroused immediate and broad popular interest. Films fascinated the mass popular imagination, much as television was to do in the late 1940s and 50s. On the basis of this ability to fascinate and excite large numbers of people, film was widely assumed to be an influential medium that could shape minds and political opinions. Democratic governments wanted to use film and cinema for education, for national unity and for propaganda about the nation and national interest. Fascist and Communist governments wanted to use film as unadorned propaganda for their ideological causes and for their national legitimacy. The Venice Film Festival, founded in 1932, was born in an Italy dominated by Mussolini and was a de facto vehicle for celebrating the new fascist society. In 1937 Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) was denied the top prize because of its pacifist sentiments and this led later to the formation of the Cannes festival in France. (Turan, 2002:18)

In Australia prior to World War Two, political activists particularly in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), used film to promote Soviet socialism and mobilize people in support of Republican Spain. (Merewether, 1985) In a similar way, both radio and television were believed to be enormously influential, a belief that continues to this day. A concomitant to this was that film, television and other cultural activities were seen as especially dangerous if they fell into the wrong hands. This largely explains, I believe, the degree of political surveillance exercised over film, radio and television from the post-war period onwards.

An indication of this attitude can be seen in a speech by the Victorian Labor MP Mr Cremean. In debate over a bill to control the screening of films in 1948, Mr. Cremean damned the screening of Soviet films and said: 'This poison seeps into the mind of those who otherwise would be well disposed to democratic procedures- People who have been indoctrinated to adopt Communism in that way seem to become the most vicious of the Red propagandists.' (Cunningham and Routt, 1989:204) The Bill which Cremean supported was never passed, but the attitudes he expressed were widely held on the Right, and from 1949, the federal government passed to the Right in the shape of Sir Robert Menzies' coalition government. In office Menzies was determined to defeat the influence of communists and appointed a new head of ASIO, Colonel Charles Spry, with whom he developed a relationship of mutual respect. (McKnight, 1994:39-41) While initially established to protect defence secrets, ASIO soon exercised a broad brief against subversion, including in the field of culture and media.

Film societies

One of the early security concerns of ASIO in the cultural field was centred on the growth of small film societies. These were often suburban-based groups of enthusiasts who projected films in community halls, in private homes and sometimes out of doors. In Australia there had been something of an upsurge in film societies during and immediately after the Second World War and on the crest of this wave was born the first Australian film festival, which was held at Olinda, near Melbourne.

Security interest in film societies began in May 1951 when the ASIO Director General asked all states to provide details of film societies which had been penetrated - such was the language of the memo -- by the Communist Party of Australia. Of particular interest was the Sydney Film Society whose president was John Heyer, and whose vice president was Anthony Michaelis, both of whom had ASIO dossiers. Heyer is well known to anyone who has studied post war film in Australia. Heyer worked at the Film Division of the Dept of Interior (later Commonwealth Film Unit) between 1945-1948 where he made a number of documentaries which expressed an idealistic populism about post war reconstruction. (Moran 1991: 49) He later worked for the film unit of the Shell Oil company where he made a landmark documentary, The Back of Beyond which was one of the highlights of the first Sydney Film Festival. Heyer was suspected by ASIO of being a communist.

In early 1954, ASIO drew up a summary of its concerns about film societies. It noted that since 1952 there had been a marked increased in non-commercial film societies in Australia and that some of these screened films from the Soviet bloc. The ASIO report said :

While claiming to be purely cultural societies, concerned with merely providing high class international films for the public, these organizations do, in fact, exploit those films which show the Soviet Union and her satellites in a favorable light, thereby providing the Communist Party with an effective means of spreading propaganda in Australia.

This ASIO report was shown to certain public figures to alert them to the dangers; this was quite outside the charter of ASIO and constituted an early tendency for ASIO to be a player in politics and not simply an observer.

While ASIO was busy investigating film societies, hostility to communism was present within the film society movement. One anti-Communist was a film lover, Neil Gunther who wrote an article in Film Guide entitled 'Goodbye Mr Red' in which he urged all film societies to force communists out as soon as possible. (Cunningham and Routt, 1989:208) Such people were not genuine enthusiasts, their enthusiasm was 'in proportion to its usefulness in promoting Communism'. The Film Society Red, he said, was:

a battler for discussion groups, purely for the use he can make of them in thought-direction. For the same reason he is in favour of the society running a journal. He's sold on the idea of a film-society federation, for concentration of power in a few hands has long been the goal towards which he has worked. With such power he can hope to swing the film society movement his way, import more films to be used in the fight against freedom and get more backing for his censorship quarrels.

Partly as a result of such moves, the constitution of the NSW Film Users Association was amended in 1954 after a bitter argument, to make it compulsory for all candidates for office to submit a statutory declaration that they were not members of the Communist Party. As a result the Sydney University Film Group left the Association. (Donaldson, 2003)

Mr Gunther's action was significant because it illustrates an important point. It is tempting sometimes to look back on the Cold War and see things in the simple terms of 'good idealistic film people' versus 'big, bad government agency'. But in many film institutions, the Cold War was fought out internally at the grass roots between leftists and anti-Communists, most of whom acted independently and some of whom co-operated with ASIO.

Film Festivals in Australia

One of the consequences of the popularity of the film societies was the creation of an audience for broader film festivals, the first of which was held at the village of Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne in January 1952. The Olinda festival has attained a legendary character now among film lovers and film historians. It was a raging success and a triumph of grass roots improvisation. It highlighted the vitality and vision of alternative cinema exhibition in Australia. Its long term success was the impetus to the creation of both the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals.

The program for the Olinda Festival featured a congratulatory message from Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Paradoxically, at the same time ASIO was collecting information on the event. In a sense this would have flowed naturally from its surveillance of left wing influence in the film societies movement but another reason may have been that the Olinda festival had planned to feature two films from the Peoples Republic of China, 'The White Haired Girl' (1950) and 'Daughters of China' (1949). It also featured several Soviet films, including 'Forest Story' on the underground life of a family of beavers in Russia. But 'The White Haired Girl' was not shown. The Commonwealth Censor banned it on the extraordinary basis that it was likely to be 'offensive to a friendly nation' that is, Nationalist China. The Censor did not pass 'Daughters of China' in time.

Film society enthusiasts who were influenced by or were members of the CPA presumably wanted to show these films because they would humanize the Chinese and undermine the war which the US was waging at that moment in Korea and which many feared would extend to the People's Republic of China. The Olinda festival was held four months after a referendum which attempted to ban the CPA in Australia.

When the Olinda Festival opened, the organisers were amazed at the response. Every guesthouse and possible bed in the mountain village was booked by film enthusiasts. Among the enthusiasts was a field officer from ASIO who was also amazed to find that three of the seven members of the organizing committee had ASIO dossiers. After watching some of the discussion sessions, he noted the presence of pro-Soviet speakers and tried to get the names of a group of about 25 film-goers who clapped them and who seemed to be enthusiastically pro-Soviet. The field officer spent quite a bit of time looking and listening at the Olinda Schoolhouse which held the most obvious Communist Party presence at Olinda -- an exhibition of Russian and East European photographs and posters. He noted that Ken Coldicutt, from the Realist Film Association, seemed on good terms with the organizers. He also recognised Betty Lacey who, he noted in his report, 'was once employed by the Victorian State Film Centre, but dismissed because of Communist tendencies.'

The ASIO officer concluded that communists had a strong presence on the organising committee of the festival but also noted that one member of the committee was from the 'Victorian Amateur Cine Society' which has a clause in its constitution which prevented communists from becoming members. He concluded that the festival was not communist inspired, although he noted that a number of Olinda locals and festival subscribers believed it was. Several contemporary newspaper reports of the Olinda Festival highlight the political undercurrent during the event. Before it was held, something of a red scare was mounted, so much so that a few days after the big success, Roberts Dunstan on the Melbourne Herald wrote an article reassuring readers that the Olinda festival, in his words, was not a 'Communist Show. Dunstan reported that in a forum on censorship, CPA members argued for 'freedom on the screen' while their much more numerous opponents were worried about moral aspects of cinema. But all in all, he said in the overblown rhetoric of the time, 'the Reds took a hiding' at Olinda. Nevertheless the CPA regarded the Olinda Festival as a 'cultural landmark' in part because , it argued, it showed that people were sick of seeing American horror films and because they responded enthusiastically to old Australian films such as Longford's The Sentimental Bloke and O What a Night by George Wallace (Guardian 7 February 1952) .

The Olinda Festival was clearly seen by both sides in the Cultural Cold War as a battleground. It was a chance for the CPA to popularize films from the Soviet Union and China as part of their political work, and this called forth a hostile response from both some within the film community but especially by the government security agency. By the time of the third Melbourne Film Festival in 1954, the CPA newspaper The Guardian complained that no Soviet, Czech or Chinese films were screened. 'The Festival organizers may believe that by avoiding controversy they will curry favor with the government authorities and the commercial film interests but this is no way to build a strong film society movement', the newspaper argued. (Guardian 1 July 1954) It also argued that unlike the Olinda festival, the subsequent festivals did not allow participants to discuss the films or other subjects of interest.

The CPA's cultural policy at this time attacked US cultural influence generally and championed a national culture especially in popular forms such as film and later, television. In September 1952 a conference of the CPA-inspired Australian Cultural Defence Movement warned that many Australian artists could not possibly find work in Australia and had gone overseas. In large part, conference speakers argued, this was due to the fact that Australian drama and book publishing were actually in decline while at the same time there was a growing importation of American movies, syndicated radio, magazine articles and comics. The conference argued that along with local cultural decline went growing political conservatism. The painter Lloyd Rees opined that 'I hope the beautiful colour vermillion is not eliminated from our palette.' The left-wing conference also called for a National Opera and criticised the disbanding of the Victorian Ballet.

The Commonwealth Film Unit (Film Australia)

In those early and formative years of the cultural cold war there was another institution which drew a lot of attention from Australia's security authorities. This was the film division of the Department of the Interior, later the Commonwealth Film Unit and after 1973, Film Australia. It had emerged from wartime documentary enthusiasm which included a visit to Australia from John Grierson who successfully urged the Minister for Information, Arthur Calwell, to set up such a body. (Moran 1991) But like all federal government bodies, the unit was open to the scrutiny of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization which was charged with conducting security clearances for government employees.

In addition to this surveillance, the film makers of the Unit were divided politically and aesthetically. One group tended to be younger, animated by idealism about the social purpose of film and interested in artistic issues. They were largely directors and producers. The other tended to be older, more artistically conservative and uninterested in the social purpose of film-making. They were largely editors and cameramen. (Moran 1991:33)

A number of film makers in the first group had worked on Joris Iven's 1946 film, Indonesia Calling, though not officially. One Film Unit employee, Catherine Duncan wrote the commentary which was spoken by left wing actor (and later Hollywood star) Peter Finch. Indonesia Calling, which was a stirring piece of political filmmaking, was part of the Left's struggle against the attempt by the Dutch to re-establish their colonial rule in Indonesia.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the unit produced a strident film warning of the dangers of communism, called Menace (1952). Originally suggested by Ernest Turnbull, the general manager of Hoyts Theaters, the film was sponsored by the Minister for the Interior, Wilfred Kent-Hughes. The film's producer, Jack Allan wrote to ASIO's Director-General and described the film as 'a pretty scorching indictment of the menace of communism'. He invited ASIO to vet the script which they did in June 1952. The film had the biggest distribution of any Film Unit film since the war being released in September 1952 through Hoyts, Greater Union and MGM cinemas. After the success of Menace, Allan went on to make One Man's War, a film based on an Australian soldier who fought in Korea, which he told ASIO had 'a strongly anti-Communist theme'.

But such films were unusual. From the film unit's founding in 1945 until around 1953 it produced many documentaries imbued with an optimistic nationalist streak, promoting civic consciousness and often depicting the lives of working people. But from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, the unit's output became much safer and less interesting artistically. Moran notes: 'The federal security service was suspected of having a plant in the unit. Factionalism continued and whether out of mischief or patriotism, some in the unit reported innocent political activities of fellow members to the security authorities. There were two sackings (although the two were later reinstated) in which politics were implicated.' (1991: 35) A number of files released by National Archives now confirm that there were informers and close surveillance of the Film Unit.

One of the key concerns about the unit was that its members often made classified and defence-related films on topics such as the British A-bomb tests and missile testing. On this basis, film unit members were subject to security scrutiny and the participation of a number of them in Indonesia Calling damned them in the eyes of ASIO.

In 1958 a detailed report on the Film Unit was undertaken by the security division of the Department of Interior which also worked closely with ASIO. Apart from describing the political views of many film-makers, the report contains a vicious personal attack, to a degree which was actually unusual in such files. It concerned a female member of the Film Unit who was described as 'an undoubted communist'. It outlined her alleged sexual liaisons and her 'unusual moral code' and, on this basis, her ability to influence senior men at the unit. The source appeared to be someone working at the Film Unit.

The 1958 report named several other people as security risks or as possible communists such as Frank Bagnall, Bern Gandy and Malcolm Otton. The report also described another person of security interest, cameraman Ted Cranstone, who had been sent to make a film on the testing of tanks on Manus Island and was then brought back to Sydney after security concerns. Even the head of the unit, the respected British producer, Stanley Hawes, was regarded as a possible member of the Communist Party for a number of years.

Another director of the unit, Richard Mason, aroused security concerns because of his connections with the Waterside Workers Film Unit and New Theatre. According to an ASIO source, probably within the unit, he also apparently made it known that as a Methodist lay preacher, he would never offer prayers for the Royal Family in church services. Given all of this it is surprising that the unit survived at all, give that there were several attempts to disband it and hand its work over to the private sector.

Blacklisting

The chilling effect of cultural anti-communism induced forms of self-censorship. For example, when film maker Cecil Holmes tried to get a job at the Commonwealth Film Unit, he privately approached the unit's chief producer, Stanley Hawes who was 'polite and agreeable', according to Holmes, but who made it clear he 'would not have his particular government boat rocked by the presence of some trouble-making Red.' (Holmes, 1986: 38) . Holmes was an unashamed member of the Communist Party and had left New Zealand after being sacked and blacklisted. However he had made one of the few Australian feature films in the 1950s, Captain Thunderbolt (1953). This had the rare distinction that it was denied normal exhibition in its own country for four years and it is likely that Captain Thunderbolt was blacklisted by the major exhibitors, perhaps prompted by ASIO. But policing of communism extended to voluntary bodies such as the Sydney Film Festival. In 1956 he approached the Sydney Festival to screen Three in One (1956). Three in One was a 'portmanteau' film comprised of three smaller and independent stories, linked by a theme of mateship. These elements were Henry Lawson's short story, Joe Wilson's Mates , Frank Hardy's story The Load of Wood, and The City, a story by contemporary writer Ralph Peterson. (Shirley and Adams, 1983 : 189-90)

At that time all Festival films were ordered by the director, David Donaldson and were not previewed by others. He later recalled: 'It seemed to be in the genre of 'Reedy River', the extraordinary stage success with New Theatre. Suddenly I heard we had to preview it! Quite a large ad hoc panel arrived, to my surprise. I thought the film had substantial, indeed exciting merits together with the over statement that one came to recognise as Cecil Holmes' style . . . But everyone seemed to be down in the film, even before we discussed it. John Kingsford Smith seemed to be the leader in this strange little event.' (Donaldson 2003) The upshot was that the Three in One, a rare Australian film, was not screened at the Festival.

Holmes' treatment, both by exhibitors and some colleagues raises the wider issue of blacklists. While the existence of such lists are very hard to prove, archival research has indicated at least two blacklists in the cultural field which operated in Australia. The first was a black list directed against leftwing actors and is referred to in a 1953 ASIO document. The document, circulated among employers in the radio world in Sydney, listed 11 actors - most little known today -- as 'definite communists'. Three others including Leonard Teale and Peter Finch were listed in the 'very doubtful' category which, the ASIO document explained, meant that management was 'almost certain' they were CPA members. Teale went on to be a very well known actor in early TV dramas such as Homicide while Finch had a successful career in Hollywood.

The other blacklist was one operated by the ABC and is referred to in an ASIO memo about a militant trade unionist in Actors' Equity. The file is not completely clear in its reference to what it calls 'the ABC black list' but it is well known that an official vetting process existed designed to exclude people from the ABC with past or present sympathies with the CPA. (McKnight 1998)

The Sydney Film Festival

Around 1960 ASIO showed a sudden and deep interest in the Sydney Film Festival which was to last for many years. The reason appears to be that in that year diplomatic relations between Australia and the Soviet Union were re-opened after a break caused by the Petrov Affair. After 1960 the Sydney Film Festival was able to deal more easily and directly with Russian cultural attaches in order to obtain Soviet films such as Bondarchuk's Destiny of a Man (1959) which was screened at the 1960 festival.

In ASIO's eyes the problem this presented did not lie solely in the films themselves although the files showed that some ASIO officers and one or two unidentified members of the Festival described them as 'communist propaganda'. Rather, it was that such a cultural exchange necessitated many contacts between Australians and Soviet diplomatic personnel. The Russians had a long history of inserting their intelligence officers into jobs such as cultural attaché precisely because it allowed them to travel and mix with people of the target country. This was useful for an intelligence officer, who was always on the look out to recruit agents but who also might use the freedom to make surreptitious contact with an agent already in place. Such activities might sound like scenes from a bizarre spy movie, nevertheless these kind of activities actually did happen during the Cold War.

Cultural exchange therefore was seen as a weak link. Just as science and scientists had a tradition of free exchange across borders, at least in peace time, so it was with artists. Writers, filmmakers, musicians and dancers are often natural internationalists because they recognized the common humanity in people from other countries. They were also impelled to explore other cultures and were prepared to be explored by other cultures. In a polarised Cold War this was a dangerous weakness. The trouble was that in order to watch cultural contacts between Soviet diplomats and Australians, for example, ASIO had to examine many people doing many normal things.

For example, when Ian Klava, the Festival Director, dined with the Czechoslovak consul in 1963, his dinner companions were Sir Charles and Lady Moses and Sir Bernard Heinze. At this time a record of a conversation with Klava was put in ASIO's files. Either someone whom Klava met at the dinner was an informant or he was in a room which was bugged, presumably the Czech consulate.

This in turn lead to a routine check in June 1963 to establish just who Ian Klava was. This revealed a matter of interest to ASIO immediately. A witness to Klava's electoral enrollment was a film maker, 'Joe' Scully, who had an ASIO file. Ian Klava therefore had a question mark over him, since he was associated with someone who was 'adversely recorded', as the jargon had it.

Another more probing report on the Sydney Film Festival was done in January 1964. Of the 33 office bearers and committee members, one diligent ASIO officer noted that 11 already had personal files. The field officer then said:
'If further inquiries are required- it is suggested that [ name deleted] could be approached as he has indicated that he would co-operate with ASIO as he did not like to think that the Festival was being used as a means of exhibiting Communist propaganda films. It is also respectfully suggested that [second name deleted] is another person who would be willing to supply informant to the organization.'

In 1965 ASIO formally recruited a source within the Sydney Film Festival whom they described as someone 'who has been connected with the Film Festival for many years' In February 1966 one of ASIO's contacts within the Festival reported that the Festival had received a letter from Moscow offering an exhibition of 300 art works related to Eisenstein for the 1966 Festival. In July 1968 a security officer reported to ASIO that he had been to a cocktail party at the Polish Consulate in Sydney and met Festival Director, David Stratton. The latter, he said, 'celebrated the occasion by wearing a red tie and pocket handkerchief.' A year later when Stratton called the Soviet embassy in Canberra, his telephone conversation was routinely recorded and passed on to ASIO counter-espionage section. And when he visited the embassy, his photo was taken. All of this was routine, ASIO drew no obvious implications from his visit.

Conclusion: Anti-communism and the cultural Cold War

What were the long term cultural effects of the cold war in terms of the Australian film, industry, film culture and the nascent years of television? This is the most important question but the hardest of all to answer simply.

One of the characteristics of the Cold War was that political and cultural issues became polarised between Right and Left and that certain positions were declared to be communist or communist-inspired simply on the basis of an association. This dynamic affected two important aspects of cultural life: the failure of an indigenous film industry to revive following World War Two and linked to this the introduction of a television service which 'should have guaranteed consistent employment for those fleeing from the void in feature film activity but - it saw a continuing drain of Australian creative talent'. (Shirley and Adams, 1983:185)

There are connections between the anti-Communism of the Cold War and the problems of film and television which followed, though they are not simple and direct connections. From the start, the issue of government support for the film industry and for quotas of Australian content were partisan issues that divided the Labor Opposition from the Menzies Coalition government.

This was entangled with the issue of the degree to which commercial interests should participate in television. Labor, church groups and the CPA shared a disquiet over the likely decline in moral standards if commercial television was allowed. (Curthoys 135,149) All opposed the issuing of license to commercial groups and favoured a national government-owned television service on the British model. A number of artistic and trade union bodies influenced by the CPA (such as Actors Equity) made submissions to the Royal Commission which examined TV in 1953-54. They had little impact.

Once the government's dual public-private television system was introduced in 1956, it faced attacks from Labor and the Actors Equity over commercial TV's heavy reliance of American drama and movies. In October 1957 Actors' Equity took industrial action to protest the federal government's easing of control over the import of films for TV (SMH 12 October 1957). A week later, when Equity members demonstrated in Kings Hall, Parliament House, the Attorney General asked ASIO for information on the union 'which could be released to the public'. The purpose of this was to smear Equity and its communist officials and its campaign for Australian content on TV. In the event, the smear backfired because ASIO said that the general secretary of Equity, Hal Alexander, had stood as a communist candidate for election in 1955. This was in fact another Hal Alexander and the Senator who revealed this was forced to apologise. In any case the government continued to defend commercial television and blamed Actors' Equity's lack of co-operation as one of the reasons for the low level of Australian content. (SMH 18 Oct 1957) This practice of discounting Equity continued into the 1960s when ASIO assessed the communist influenced union as the 'prime mover and driving force' of the reform-minded 1965 National Television Congress.

But regardless of the mistaken 1957 smear, the Government was quite correct in believing that Actors Equity was strongly influenced by the Communist Party. The post-war CPA had developed a strong 'radical nationalist' approach, especially in cultural matters (Docker, 184-87) and this approach was particularly appropriate for a union like Equity. The security authorities and government were both well aware of Equity's links with the CPA and thus its public campaigns were constantly undercut. Movement on the relevant policy issues only really began in 1960 when the independent-minded Liberal Senator Hannan suggested that 'national sentiment and culture' were being endangered by the virtual monopoly of foreign films screened in cinemas and television (SMH 18 August 1960)

Another instance of anti-Communism undercutting the campaign for Australian content occurred in the run up to the first TV license hearings. It concerned the production company Associated TV run by a New Zealander, Colin Scrimgeour. The company had gathered significant business backing and part of its bid for winning a TV license was a pledge that it would be heavily committed to local production. But both Scrimgeour and one of his film-makers, Cecil Holmes, had associations with the Left and this badly damaged the bid in the license hearings. (Shirley and Adams 1983: 188-89)

Broad brush anti-Communism directly affected the creative work of left-wing film-makers and this in turn affected the struggling film culture of Australia. For the small number of film makers who actually were -- or had been -- communists the effect was very direct. Loss of jobs and loss of opportunities for screening their work minimized their cultural input into the wider Australian community. Less direct but more widespread was the knock-on effect on broadly liberal and leftish filmmakers. This is most easily seen in the evolution of the Commonwealth Film Unit which began with a flowering of creative and idealistic post war documentaries. By the mid-1950s these hopes were eroded and only revived when the political climate brightened. (Moran 1991: 55-81) A similar kind of evolution affected the ABC.

Nor was it confined to the public sector. John Heyer's loving portrait of an outback mail deliverer, The Back of Beyond, was produced for the film unit of the Shell Oil company. But at this time Heyer was regarded as a 'suspected communist' by ASIO. Heyer was never a CPA member but perhaps not surprisingly he joined the cream of Australia's artistic and intellectual elite in leaving for Britain in 1955.

Finally, there is the issue of screening of Soviet, Chinese and East European films at the Film Festivals. At first glance this seems to have little direct relevance to the constriction of film-making and television in Australia. In the framework of anti-Communism these were propaganda films, whose intent was to glamorise countries with little or no artistic freedom. Within this framework but taking an opposite position the CPA members and their sympathisers saw the screening of these films as little victories for their side in the Cold War. They believed that the communist world really was the precursor to human liberation.

But there was another way to interpret the validity of screening of these films. To the vast majority of non-communist film-goers these Soviet films were important not because they were excellent films but because there was a profound problem of cultural insularity in Australia at the time. The anti-Communist hostility to such films was linked to a desire to subject literature and art to narrow political criteria. Thus support for their screening was a way of supporting cultural diversity and breaking down insularity.

For all these reasons it is worth acknowledging the significant effects of anti-Communism on Australia's film culture.

References

Cunningham and Routt (eds), 1989, 'Fillums Became Films' in Ina Bertrand (ed) Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History, UNSW Press, Kensington.

Donaldson, David 2003, Personal communication to author, 22 May 2003.
Eldridge, David N., 2000, 'Dear Owen: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 20, No. 2.

Holmes, Cecil 1986, One Man's Way, Penguin Books, Ringwood.
Lashmar, Paul and James Oliver, 1998, Britain's secret propaganda war, Sutton Publishing, Phoenicx Mill.

McKnight, David (1994) Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards.

McKnight, David (1998) 'Broadcasting and the Enemy within: political surveillance and the ABC, 1951-64.' Media International Australia, No. 87.

Merewether, Charles 1985 (1981), 'Australian Left Film History' in Albert Moran and Tom O'Regan, 1985 An Australian Film Reader, Currency Press, Sydney.

Moran, Albert 1991, Projecting Australia: Government Film Since 1945, Currency Press, Sydney.

Saunders, Frances Stonor, 1999, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books, London.

Shirley, Graham and Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Currency Press, Sydney 1983.

Turan, Kenneth, 2002, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Urban, George, 1997, Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy, Yale University Press, New York.

Posted by David at 6:57 PM

May 2, 2002

Stuck in Noam-man's land - the Left and terrorism

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald,
29 December,2001

On the morning after September 11, I bought a coffee before I boarded the train to Central. The man who sold it to me said: "The Arabs will pay for this." This cry for vengeance against a whole civilisation has been expressed in the past three months by a revival of crude hostility against Arabs and Muslims within Australia.

In central Asia we have watched the bombing of civilians, the mass exodus of refugees and a sky-high tech war resulting in blood and bodies 10,000 metres below. In Britain, the US and Australia civil liberties are being reduced as social conservatism undergoes a resurgence.

For some of the liberal-Left all this seems to fall into a familiar pattern and has therefore provoked a familiar response: the "war on terrorism" should be opposed just as the Vietnam War was, and millions of people should be mobilised to oppose US foreign policy.

But there are significant differences from previous situations and the liberal-Left is in danger of mechanically applying political formulas crafted in a different period rather than responses based on a concrete examination of current circumstances.

Where's the evidence?

In the initial weeks after September 11 many people asked "where's the evidence?" of Osama bin Laden's guilt. On face value, it was a fair question. But it was also naive. The evidence is obviously based on intelligence sources, which were still being used to pursue him.

Other questions are more sensible, such as: is the American Government genuinely concerned about the attack? Yes. Would it truly like to know who is responsible? Yes. So when its intelligence agencies say everything points to bin Laden's group, can we dismiss this lightly with a "political" argument?

Having been so publicly accused, bin Laden has not denied responsibility; indeed, he has praised the attack. When it became clear that the US would bomb his Taliban protectors, he still did not deny responsibility. Instead, he issued threats of more attacks.

But some people's reason for asking "where's the evidence?" reflected a cast of mind that is reluctant to confront the consequences if bin Laden is clearly guilty. This reflex is part of the Left's deep post-Berlin Wall malaise.

Perhaps the best place to begin unravelling this riddle is with bin Laden himself. In 1996 he spoke to an Australian group of Islamic fundamentalists, the Islamic Youth group (see www.islam.org.au/articles/15/LADIN.HTM).

The interview outlines bin Laden's fight against the Communist party in Yemen and the Russians in Afghanistan. It makes clear these arose not from political nationalism or a desire for liberation but from a religious faith because communism is secular and atheistic.

Bin Laden also damns the "apostate" Saudi regime, not because it is feudal or undemocratic but because it is not feudal enough. He wants stricter religious law applied. He wants women repressed. He is anti-Semitic (ie, he hates Jews) rather than anti-Zionist. His stance is not anti-imperialist. It is religious zealotry.

When asked for his response to the charge of terrorism, bin Laden replied that "terrorising the American occupiers is a religious and logical obligation". He then goes on to accuse the US of terrorism, citing the blockade of Iraq, massacres in Lebanon, attacks on Muslims in Bosnia and even the Hiroshima/Nagasaki attacks of 1945.

Whose responsibility?

When the Left tries to respond to September 11, it often falls into a kind of popular "social science theorising". In trying to explain the roots of events in history, the Left (or parts of it represented by people like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky) almost appears to absolve the perpetrators of their
crime.

Pilger, for example, describes a litany of US and British crimes and then refers to Islamic fundamentalist groups in this way: "Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home." (www.johnpilger.com)

His implication is clear: the US and Britain are completely responsible for the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and are now getting their reward. The idea that the US "caused" Muslim fundamentalism is reductionist and wrong, apart from lessening the moral responsibility of bin Laden's group for its own actions.

Lots of people in the Arab and Muslim world are critical of the US, many "rage" quite justifiably. Only a few become extreme religious fundamentalists. Fundamentalism existed long before the US began to play a role in world affairs.

Generous US support for Israel has indeed played into the hands of religious fundamentalists who do not seek a political settlement but rather the total destruction of the US. But to acknowledge that the US has "played into the hands" of these groups is not the same as saying that the US bears responsibility for the creation of these groups. This simplification is tantamount to blaming the victims of September 11.

As the left-wing commentator Christopher Hitchens observed in The Nation (www.thenation.com): those who argue that September 11 would not have occurred "if only the US had not been so blindly pro-Israel" can become "self-appointed interpreters for the killers".

This line of thinking implies that bin Laden is some kind of anti-imperialist, like Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela or Gerry Adams.

But September 11 was not a "demand" for anything nor a stage of any recognisable political struggle. The Taliban and bin Laden have not been struggling for a Palestinian state - rather, they are opportunists who use this cause and who want to destroy Israel and kill every last Jew. September
11 was a piece of "propaganda of the deed" directed at the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, apart from anything else.

One reason that fundamentalism receives support is that the openings for democratic protest in many Arab and Muslim countries are very limited. But that is largely the fault of the undemocratic local regimes, not the US.

Fundamentalism is not an automatic consequence of US power and to imply it is, as Pilger does, is not only wrong but will lead the Left deeper into a blind alley.

Hypocrisy and the US

The other powerful argument articulated by some on the Left is that the US is hypocritical on terrorism. Chomsky argues that the US has supported or still supports repressive regimes in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere (www.Zmag.org; www.monthlyreview.org). That is certainly true. But he then goes further and describes the US as "a leading terrorist state". Pilger reaches a similar conclusion.

The logic of this thinking is that if the real terrorist is the US, Islamic fundamentalists are of minor importance and have a justifiable and understandable "rage" at the "real terrorist". The effect of such a line of argument is to trivialise the September 11 attacks and to nullify the moral ground on which any US action could be based, including through the UN.

Yes, the US has condoned terror by others, and its agencies have carried out terrorist actions. But Chomsky and Pilger's arguments imply that it has zero moral right to protect its citizens against further attack, the reductio ad absurdum of their position.

A similar logic was invoked during the Gulf War. The argument went: the US has invaded many countries, therefore it could not legitimately
intervene against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. But that logic is flawed. If invading another country is wrong, then the starting point for an analysis is that Saddam Hussein's action was wrong and opposition to this action was fundamental to developing an attitude to the Gulf War.

This logic reached its most absurd over Kosovo. Having watched the massacres in Sarajevo and Bosnia, and wishing someone would "do something", the purist Left was appalled when someone "did something" (US and British air strikes) about Kosovo.

Yet the consequences have not been all bad. Milosevic and many of his barbaric lieutenants are now on trial, a more democratic government is in power in Belgrade, some kind of order has returned to former Yugoslavia. It's a long way from any kind of peace and communal respect, but frankly I prefer it to the alternative: the triumph of Serbia and its ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

The Chomsky-Pilger argument implies that everything awful in the world is a reflex or creation of "the West", otherwise known as the US. No
wonder fundamentalist ways of thinking are not as abhorrent to them as they are to many others on the Left.

In a recent edition of Arena magazine (www.arena.org.au), Professor Tom Nairn, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, argued that after September 11 we must clearly distinguish between the nationalisms of the Middle East, which are almost intractable but ultimately amenable to a solution, and the fundamentalism of al-Qaeda.

Nairn argues that such fundamentalist groups fear the universalising and positive trends of globalisation - expressed concretely through the spread of access to information and, in the longer term, the force of notions of citizenship, the rule of law, women's rights, religious tolerance and government authority being vested in democratic votes.

Far from being "chickens coming home to roost" and a revenge for globalisation, September 11 was a calculated attack on these positive aspects (and on liberties won in the West by the labour and democratic social movements).

In turn, the attacks have unleashed some deeper philosophical issues concerning cultural pluralism. The most pernicious is the "clash of civilisations" thesis by the American historian Samuel Huntingdon, which treats each "culture" as a monolith that shares nothing with any other. It is based on a them-and-us perspective, which has been the basis of racial and religious wars.

A related phenomenon is a woolly-headed left-wing relativism which attacks the imposition of "Western values" and refuses to judge violent non-Western fundamentalism.

WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?

In spite of Chomsky and Pilger's arguments, and the relatively speedy rout of the Taliban, the war in Afghanistan is the wrong way to go about stopping bin Laden. But what is the alternative? What does the Left say to the ordinary people of New York? Presumably it consists of more than urging them to contemplate the justifiable anger of many victims of US policies in the Middle East, Latin America and so on.

There was and is an alternative. It means genuinely globalising the pursuit and punishment of al-Qaeda, including the creation of a special tribunal for crimes against humanity. Since al-Qaeda crimes have occurred in several countries, any such trial should not be in the US.

But to have a trial, you must have an accused in the dock. This entails the global equivalent of police raiding the hide-out of the criminal. The police may do this with or without a warrant and people may get hurt during the raid. But a violent confrontation is sometimes unavoidable in apprehending
criminals.

It doesn't necessarily mean war on the scale of the current events, but violence would be involved. That doesn't, however, make the apprehending of criminals the moral equivalent of the criminal and his or her actions.

Declaring war is another, less justifiable road which fits a pattern of unilateral self-interest which the US exhibited before September 11, symbolised by isolationism over greenhouse emissions and its threat to break the ABM treaty.

The movement against exploitative corporate globalisation has been paralysed since September 11 by commentators who have cynically equated its
protest against capitalism with bin Laden's terrorism (the perverse logic being that both groups are linked by their hatred of America).

But the former is based on a notion of humanitarianism, that the several billion human beings on the planet deserve respect. The latter is based on possession of an ultimate truth in which only the faithful deserve respect.

David McKnight is a senior lecturer in the faculty of humanities at UTS. He is a long-time writer and activist on the Left in Australia.

David.McKnight@uts.edu.au

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0112/29/text/spectrum5.html

Posted by David at 4:23 PM