My starting point is the observation that the societies in which we live have been transformed by the political Right over the last 25 years. We live in what a number of people call libertarian capitalism.

This is a deregulated economy, where the ethic of competition is elevated above all else. It is a society defined by choice, self-interest and a narrowly conceived economic efficiency. Central to this is the belief that free operation of the market is the key to the good life which is largely defined in consumerist terms. It is a society in which all other values and needs are sacrificed to the needs of business to make profits. It is a society in which disproportionate power lies with a wealthy elite.

Allied with these facts is another. We live in a society which is the richest in human history. In part this is a long term development since world war two, and in part it arises from deregulation itself which has a dynamic and energizing effect on an economy. For our purposes today, a central point to grasp about this extraordinarily affluent society of libertarian capitalism is that, put simply, it is unsustainable.

First, it is socially unsustainable. Capitalism has always been encased or contained within a social and moral framework in which certain things were not done, no matter how profitable they might be and certain areas were no go areas. For a long time these limitations were largely based on religious beliefs. These have eroded for a long while and very little is now off limits.

That is why in my book 'Beyond Right and Left' I spend time looking at how the family is under assault 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. Libertarian capitalism pushes towards a 24/7 society in which commercial values take precedence over family values and over non-commercial values.
There is a relentless drive for 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 pushed increasingly 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 physical unfitness soars, and so on. This in turn leads to the entrenchment in society of commercial values in place of any altruism, and caring.

Some have called this a ‘risk society’. Where the individual must make a vast number of decisions for him or herself because the old certainties, the old institutions have weakened or disappeared. This risk society champions a certain kind of freedom but the flip side of freedom is insecurity. This gives rise to a strong popular desire for security, a desire for protection. And often this emerges in exaggerated and distorted forms - in fears of criminal behavior and of terrorism. In framing a response to libertarian capitalism we need to appeal to people’s desire for protection and security - in this case against the unregulated market.
Libertarian capitalism devalues non material, non market relationships, relationships of social bonding, of caring and dare I say it, love of fellow man and woman. Some have described this overall result of libertarian capitalism as form of ‘social recession’. [1] Others such as Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennis in their book Affluenza discuss the simple fact that affluence has not produced happiness. [2] In the book The Culture of the New Capitalism Richard Sennett has described how the modern economy shapes and rewards damaging behavior and empties work of meaning.[3] All these and many others are part of a search for what I would call a post-socialist critique of capitalism.

The second and more tangibly threatening aspect of libertarian capitalism is its environmental unsustainability, Libertarian capitalism is extraordinarily wasteful and unsustainable for reasons which we all know, to do with consequences of fossil fuel use. 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 seem to be 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 industrial societies like ours is predicated 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. 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.

So what I am doing today by sketching out the consequences of libertarian capitalism is to outline the new nature of the struggle for a good society.
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 the foundations on which to build a new kind of politics. That’s the first thing I want to say today.

As an aside, I might just pause and say that, every successful movement for social change has invariably had one major advantage over bigger and more powerful forces. That advantage is the ability to see problems emerging from beyond the horizon and to prepare for them with a new social vision.

Why is that? Well, because certain forces have a logic of their own. They impose themselves on events regardless. Things are forced to change - and if you are in tune with that change, if you understand something like climate change in all its shocking implications, then you can do one very important thing. To put it bluntly you can seize an opportunity when it arises. Because when things begin to change, those who have a vested interest in the present state of affairs don’t want to recognise the new reality, they want to tinker with it, they hope for the best. Those who do not have a stake in the present, but who have a vision of the future which is both principled and pragmatic can have an enormous influence.

Because you never know what is over the horizon. Let’s say in the next 12 months an unprecedented expansion of the drought occurs, after several years already of drought. Let’s say Sydney’s water supply once again dips down below 30 %, down to 20% or less. This frightening example of climate change would also be the kind of event which forces the whole society to consider new possibilities in public policy and politics. Being able to explain these events gives you have a tremendous advantage in being able to suggest a course of action.
That’s really a diversion into how a strategy of politics must be founded on a long term social and economic analysis. I now want to move back into the area of ideas.

The Left tradition

If I am correct, or mostly correct, about the social and environmental unsustainability, then this poses a kind of dilemma for a certain style of politics which many of us held to be self-evident.
Until now, most politics has been about a struggle over who gets what in a society of scarcity. The political leaderships of the rising working classes of the 19th and 20th centuries stood for many glorious things but above all, they stood for a better material standard of living. This simple human need, harnessed to a long term vision, drove the creation of powerful movements which transformed politics for more than century. Yet today, at least in societies like ours, it is an addiction to material abundance that may be the death of us.

In a very practical way this fact alone poses the need for a sharp rethinking of the goals of ‘a good society’ today. It poses a need for profound rethinking of the Marxist tradition, and the discarding of several key assumptions.

One of the many valuable things I learnt while in the Communist Party of Australia and while listening to people like Eric and Laurie Aarons was the great pitfall of radical groups - the occupational hazard if you like - is dogmatism. That is, a strong desire to hold on to a familiar set of beliefs rather than to recognize the painful reality that those beliefs have been undermined and how they need to change. And this is mixed up with sentimentality and nostalgia that is very human but which, in the end, does not help in grappling with new realities.

There are a number of reasons why traditional socialist theory is inadequate as a starting point - I set them out in Beyond Right and Left. They include the changing nature of class, the radically new nature of the global environment, the experience of dictatorships established in the name of these ideas. There are many others. I’ll just add one issue, relevant to the topic for today of ‘the good society’. I once believed that ‘the good society’ was a socialist society - a society with little or no private ownership of property, where social goods were distributed according to need and not according to the market. When you think of ‘the good society’ in such terms, its existence feeds back into your strategy and practice for today.

If capitalism is to be abolished in the future, then in today’s political work there is no need to, as we would once say, ‘reform capitalism’. If the market is the problem and will once day be cast side then there is no need to figure out ways it could be used to promote socially valuable goals. And so on.

But if we have learnt one thing coming from the socialist critique it is that capitalism is extraordinarily flexible. It can take an almost infinite variety of forms, depending on the social political and moral framework within which it operates. On the one hand there is 19th century style exploitation (which still exists in the 21st century) and there is fascism, and on the other, Swedish-style social democracy, and various other kinds of democratic and progressive society.

Today I think we won’t abolish capitalism but we’ll force another change to it, to create a kind of green capitalism, in which the full cost of natural resources, water, and energy are part of the calculation of what we today call the economy.
In this struggle the majority of the existing corporate world will be an opponent for a long while, because it has a material stake in the ways things are. A minority within business will be allies because they can see that it is unsustainable.

New goals, new ways of arguing

But I want to now turn to new possibilities which are opened up by the new situation in which we find ourselves. Let’s look at what becomes of progressive politics in libertarian capitalism. Once again I emphasize that I am restricting myself to certain issues, largely confined to the economy and its moral and environmental frame work.
One of the key strategies therefore is to build a moral and environmental framework for this new kind of capitalism while not having the illusion that it can all be abolished. The key contradiction therefore is between deregulated capitalism and humanist values. This is the crucial weakness into which we have to drive a wedge.

I want to close with three brief examples.
The first puts the traditional left alongside strange bedfellows. One of the destructive aspects of libertarian capitalism is the profit drive towards unrestricted 24 hour liquor sales and unrestricted gambling. It’s part of the same demand that we should all be available to work 24/7. If we move into this territory of values - and the struggle for a sustainable society, we find the ground has been colonised before. The language of values and the assertion of society against the economy has been the language of religion. We need to recognize and welcome this. In another area - the pressure on the family by libertarian capitalism - we need to value aspects of the family by asserting a new kind of family values.

The second example is more familiar and traditional. One of the most crucial struggles against libertarian capitalism is the union campaign to roll back the deregulation of labour laws represented by WorkChoices. This is a classic struggle for human values against instrumental and morally bankrupt neo-liberalism. But it has been fought in new ways, for instance by asserting the need to protect the family and working life, rather than using a more traditional language based on inequality and exploitation. Also significant, has been that the support that came from the churches.

The third example is not so well known, it touches on issues of multiculturalism. Deregulated capitalism has no problem with diversity because diversity means new, separate marketing niches. Diversity can be great - but too much can undermine shared values.
One powerful impulse towards diversity and division today is the movement away from public education and toward private provision of health care. One of the most powerful tools to argue against this is often not used. This is the argument that these institutions are institutions for social cohesion. Progressives tend not to use this language. We automatically talk in terms of equality and inequality but this cuts little ice today.
Protecting public education means recognizing how schools integrate the community and how they assert common values, especially in a society based on migrants. Using a language of protecting Australian values and calling for social cohesion is not familiar, but it picks up on peoples’ desire for security and protection in a deregulated world and in a risk society. Defining Australian values in progressive terms - and not assuming it inevitably means narrow nationalism - is a positive ways to engage in the battle of ideas.

All of these campaigns involve a clash of values, a battle of ideas. These campaigns assert a humanist set of values to those of libertarian capitalism. Both assert sustainable social relations against the values of self-interest and commercial freedom.
So the struggle for a good society is different today. Unlike the previous era, it is not based centrally around work or the workplace, though the labour movement remains important. It is much more a social struggle and an environmental struggle than it ever has been. Finding common ground between these three sectors - social, environmental and work-based - is absolutely crucial.

We face a big challenge today, which is the challenge to re-define and rethink what progressive politics means in a post-socialist age. This means developing a new kind of politics which meets and asserts human values in the face of threats to them, but a kind of politics which can ultimately have a broad popular appeal.

Most important of all is a serious debate about these issues and I am glad that the SEARCH Foundation is starting to give more emphasis to this aspect of the challenge.

[1] See for example a pamphlet by a group of former members of the British Communist Party, ‘Feel-bad Britain: a view from the democratic left’ downloadable in PDF from hegemonics.co.uk.
[2] Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough, Allen & Unwin 2005. See also the ‘Manifesto for Well Being’ : http://www.wellbeingmanifesto.net/index.htm
[3] Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale Univerity, 2006

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the enduring puzzles about the political response to climate change is the polite behaviour of those who are most aware of the impending problems. For many years activists have undertaken well behaved demonstrations, eloquent public statements and respectable lobbying but little beyond this range of polite political action.

The latest reports suggest that the changes are happening faster than predicted.

As a society we are sleep walking to disaster. The paradox was well expressed in a recent article in, of all places, the London Times. The columnist Camilla Cavendish reported that she mentioned to fellow journalists that she was planning to write another column on the latest alarming predictions that climate change was speeding up.

The responses of her colleagues was a collective groan. One summed it up by saying: ‘If it was really bad, they’d do something’. The human tendency to convince yourself that everything is OK because no one else seems worried is deeply ingrained, said Cavendish.

Cavendish cited a famous study of ‘bystander apathy’. Two psychologists placed students in a room and asked them to fill out answers to questionnaires. As they did so, smoke began to trail up from a vent. The room filled with smoke. While some left the room, few reported the ‘fire’ but most stayed put and continued to fill out the ‘questionnaire’. In another experiment the psychologists placed actors in the room who continued to write as the room filled with smoke. The inactivity of a larger unconcerned group reassured the naive subjects. The likelihood of the subjects to report the fire decreased as the number of bystanders increased. Cavendish concluded: ‘Our tendency to shrug off responsibility seems to hold true even when we ourselves are in danger …it is human nature to wait for someone to go first’.

Today we are all living in a global room in which wisps of smoke are rising from vents. Yet we feel a curious paralysis over climate change.

There are two reasons for this which immediately spring to mind. First, the social consequences of climate change are gradual in appearing and are not dramatic. So our protests tend to be polite. By contrast, in the struggle against racism in the 1960s and 70s, individuals actually put their lives on the line as they took the struggle right into heartlands of racism. In the US civil rights workers were murdered. In Australia at the same time, a busload of students headed for a racist country town was run off the road. But such risks were taken because the results of racism was dramatic and immediate. Similarly with the Vietnam war. In both instances polite protest was supplemented by dramatic, non-violent action and the combination action was politically effective.

This is not a pleas for mindless violence or counter productive adventurism on climate change. There is a fine line between dramatizing an issue and achieving the opposite. But so far, on climate change, we seem to have been excessively cautious, just like the scientists predictions on speed of change. This period may now be coming to an end.

The second reason for the paralysis is the enormity of the problem. If we follow through the logic of the IPCC reports we reach some startling conclusions about the nature of the changes needed in the future. In absolute terms we need to use a lot less energy derived from oil and coal. Just how that might be accomplished without massive social dislocation and deprivation is something which is often dismissed with an airy wave of the hand. But such problems will have to be confronted and the social and political consequences will be volatile and unprecedented. The battle to lower use of fossil fuel will cause social conflict and economic disruption.

The reason for this is diabolically simple. Once all the efficiencies that can be made, have been made, with new lightbulbs, solar hotwater, insulating homes etc, there are two major ways to lower use of fossil fuel. One is by regulation and one is by the market. The regulated road involves mandating that an increasing proportion of electricity must come from renewable sources. This would see the price of electricity rise dramatically. The market road involves directly raising the price of oil and gas dramatically. Given that every piece of technology that underpins out lifestyle is predicated on cheap energy and given that the price which people will pay is likely to be elastic, and given that we must reduce the absolute not relative level of fossil fuel consumption, then the cost of energy will need to be enormous. And just to add a final twist of complexity, when we talk about the price of energy we are talking about far, far more than what we pay at the petrol station, and in our electricity bills. Rather we are talking about the cost of everything that is produced and is transported using energy and that includes, well, just about everything, starting with food, clothing and shelter.

All of this is by way of responding to an article in a recent Arena by Geoff Sharp entitled ‘The End of Growth, then what?’ The above scenario crudely sketches a number of the problems which I see as defining much of the landscape of future progressive political struggle. Rather than the end of growth we face the end of cheap fossil fuel. What has been known until now as ‘the environment crisis’ will become the axis on which turns most politics in advanced industrial countries.

I foreshadowed this in Beyond Right and Left arguing that for a variety of reasons we have enter a new historical era. The old political ideas of Right and Left have been shown to have failed. For progressives this means trying to work out some new intellectual and moral basis for their politics. A set of values was needed, I suggested, rather than a new ideology. Such a new political framework has to confront the energized Right which has transformed itself in the last 20 years into a form of militant economic liberalism. Beyond Right and Left made a number of important points about the future of political ideas of which I want to emphasise two.

The first was that progressives need to give up the utopian idea that an entirely non capitalist society can be created. By capitalism I mean the irreducible elements of the operation of the market and the institution of private property. The attempts to construct an economy and society without private property and the market have failed (in the case of the USSR and its satellites) or survive in partial form, (China) only because society is ruled by a party nomenclature capable of extreme violence.

Geoff Sharp acerbically noted that I am happy to ‘rub along with neo-liberalism’ by which I can only presume he means capitalism, since one of the main targets of Beyond Right and Left was neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is libertarian form of capitalism which emphasises expansion, choice and self interest. It has proven very dynamic but its very economic success is revealing its fatal flaw.

The climate change crisis highlights this flaw. The economist and environmentalist David Korten argues that one of the key weaknesses of free market economics is that corporations can ‘externalize’ their costs. That is, they usually don’t have to pay for, or face the consequences of the true cost of their operations. It is basic to market theory that the producer must bear all the costs of production and that these be included in the selling price of a commodity. But in fact, corporations constantly try to externalize their costs. They try to ‘free ride’:

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

A similar situation exists when corporations pollute the world with carbon dioxide. The normal and legal expulsion of waste into the atmosphere that arises from petrol and diesel powered trucks and cars is an example of externalizing costs. In this case the price will be paid by some of us in old age and by our children and our grandchildren.

So rather than ‘abolishing the market’ we must find ways of putting a high ‘market value’ on resources. Their wasteful use and poor levels of recycling depend on there being a fresh supply of cheap resources on tap. When natural resources are more expensive, individual behaviour and corporate practices change. It becomes sensible to carefully re-use and to recycle resources. When the costs of climate change are calculated, renewable sources of energy become more ‘economic’. But as we have seen this involves major costs to society. High priced resources will exacerbate differences in wealth and income. Part of the battle to force business and industry as well as consumers to adopt sustainable practices will involve battles around what some have called ‘a just transition’.

In this context, progressives should call for equality of sacrifice. The collectivist and egalitarian values associated with socialism will acquire a new relevance in the emerging political situation.

The second point about rethinking progressive politics in the age of climate change is the need to think laterally and boldly about political ideas. One point which surprised many people was my argument in Beyond Right and Left that there were continuities between green ideas and forms of conservative values.

This insight began by acknowledging that problems of the global ecology have confound traditional progressive ideas of liberalism and socialism. Both rely on notions of material progress and expansion. On the other hand, certain kinds of conservative ideas prove useful.

These ideas are based on what I called ‘conservation values’. Such values emphasise that the current inhabitants of the planet are stewards of the biosphere which is part of a heritage for succeeding generations of humans. This ‘green’ idea is actually a very old idea, expressed by conservative philosopher Edmund Burke’s view that society involved a contract ‘not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those to be born.’ This is the opposite to the short term view of neo-liberalism which discards traditions of all kinds, including that of our environmental heritage. These kinds of ‘conservation values’ are also the kind of values nurtured by indigenous and pre-modern societies.

The conservation or ‘green’ values are found in neither liberalism nor socialism which have a shared view of endless progress in which no limits should be placed on the economy or on humans’ needs. By contrast conservation values involve a recognition of limits and the concept of ‘enough’. Conservatives prefer the ‘sufficient to the superabundant’, as Oakeshott said. The concept of ‘enough’ is an important assertion in the face of the radicalism of neo-liberal economics and its growth fetish.

The intersection of conservation and ‘green’ values with aspects of conservative philosophy is paradoxical yet it is a sign of the new times we live in. To be radical now is to want to conserve, in some sense.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The economic left’s vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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