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 05:59 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 06:03 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 08:51 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 02:15 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 09:24 PM

June 20, 2007

The utopia of economic liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by David at 10:27 PM

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 03:08 PM

March 05, 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 01:52 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 09:20 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 | Comments (0)

August 09, 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 a