**Some bits and pieces from the thesis' cutting room carpet. This off-cut is an attempt to delineate three responses to Neoliberalism**
There are two faultlines that run through writing on neoliberalism: effectively splitting comment and analysis of Neoliberalism into three camps. On the one hand are its supporters, who fail to see anything new or neo in what they consider to be Liberalism with its ‘traditional’ critique of government interference and belief in markets and civil associations as the storehouses and generators of human meaning and liberty. Secondly, there are those critiques of neoliberalism which identify its key method as the deregulation of state controls on capital and markets, a method which is articulated to other marketisations such as the privatisation of former state-owned enterprises, reductions in aspects of the social wage, and the installment of managerialist and casualisation regimes into state bureaucracies. For this second critical camp, the neoliberal project effects the removal of government from regulating and policing exchanges in what are often transnational market. This fostering of ‘the powerless state’ is cast by these critics as a de-democratising movement that reinstalls class divisions and deflects the costs of global trade and commerce unto the weakest and most vulnerable people. What is neo about Neoliberalism for these ‘Neoliberalism-removes-the-state’s-capacity to protect its citizens’ is that it is contra-Keynesian techniques of government [?]. The third stance on Neoliberalism arises out of Michel Foucault’s analysis, which initially coins the neologism governmentality in order to analyse a continuum of conduct ranging from techniques for ruling and guiding the self to those of states. The advantage of Foucault’s heuristic is that it brings to the surface the primary technique of Liberalism being a form of critique at being over-governed which constitutes a mode of self-government. In other words, the putative state of freedom from which the Liberal critique is issued is not outside government but is constituted in the act of the critique: an enacting of governmentality. Thus for political analysts and historians influenced by Foucault’s ideas on governmentality like Nikolas Rose Neoliberalism, advanced liberalism as he calls it, is a form of governing through freedom; a mode of governing that forms and guides conduct towards market rationalities but which is not the absence of government that either the first camp claim neoliberalism to be nor that which the second camp (inc Bourdieu, David Harvey, Michael Pusey) want to make present again through the modes of regulation familiar from the Keynesian period.
However, I don’t want to suggest that there is only the Foucauldian theory of Neo-liberalism, as the depiction of Neo-liberalism by the second camp is certainly descriptive of what constitutes a new attack on the Keynesian instruments of citizen support and formation. There has been a realignment in the wage-profit ratio since the mid-1970s when, proponents from the second camp like David Harvey argue, a redirection of capital into greater concentration occurred.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Neoliberalism: the conduct of economic conduct
Governmentality
For Foucault, the “encounter between the technologies of domination of others [power] and those of the self I call “governmentality”” (225). Drawing on a sixteenth-century Western European discourse of ‘government’ Foucault seeks to reactivate these older meanings of the term so as to break up the fusion that government and state have in current discourse (2001: 341). These older meanings of government
designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed—the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It covered not only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power would therefore be sought not on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary contracts (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power) but, rather, in the area of that singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. (341)
Thus for Foucault the state is not synonymous with government so much as subjected to
the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on. Thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality. (Foucault, 2001: 221)
Wendy Brown observes that “as is often the case with Foucault’s ideas [. . .] the notion of governmentality is both extremely theoretically fecund and woefully underspecified” and it is from the scholars of governmentality that much of the fleshing out and application of Foucault’s fecund concept has emerged (Brown, 2005: 142). Indeed, Thomas Lemke’s work on governmentality provides the conceptual basis for thinking it as a continuum of rationalities and techniques which stretches from the self to the state:
While many forms of contemporary critique still rely on the dualism of freedom and constraint, consensus and violence, from the perspective of governmentality the polarity of subjectivity and power ceases to be plausible: government refers to a continuum, which extends from political government right through to forms of self-regulation – namely, “technologies of the self.” (Lemke, 2002: 59)[i]
By taking governmentality as a continuum on which self and state both range, a re-conceptualisation is enabled for the reversible New Left and second wave Feminist tenet: the personal is the political and the political is the personal. Yet such a re-conceptualisation must itself be historicised if we are to move beyond the period of the heyday of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s when Neoliberal forms of governmentality began to emerge and be codified by Chicago University figures like Gary Becker. For Foucault
the interest of [Becker’s] theory of human capital is that it represents two processes, one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic. (The Birth of Biopolitics: 219)
Foucault's argument is that in these theories of human capital the proper theoretical consideration that capital and land have been given in economic theory has yet to be applied to labour. While for Marx it is capitalism that produces abstract labour, for Neoliberals like Becker the category of abstract labour is a false one that results from the limitations of classical economic theory and its concerns with mechanisms and processes of production and of exchange (221-22). Rather than see the self as the seller of labour, Neoliberals see the self as “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself“ (226).
The enterprising and entrepreneurial self is a fixture of everyday life now. But where does Libertarianism fit into these practices of American Neoliberalism? If Neoliberalism is, in part, a textual practice then how does it happen in text, in specifically local ways, in Australia? In order to explore these questions I will look below at Left-libertarian writer Moorhouse's shifting positions on governmentality around the time of the breakdown of the post-war boom and the financial system that had enabled it. What is of particular interest is how a Left-Libertarian practises literary politics before, during and after a shift in their own conception of governmentality and before, during and after what is arguably the emergence and dominance of the Neoliberal modes of governmentality. Lohrey’s Left-Labourist literary trajectory passes through the long Labor decade and hence Neoliberal governmentality at a later point. Yet, her initial orientation propels her focus away from technologies of the state towards those of the self. This is a curious cross-trajectory. Why would ostensibly Left novelists respond to the same phenomena in inverted ways? Before addressing this question I will move into a mid-range reading of Moorhouse and Lohrey's oeuvres.
[i] Barry Hindess also refers to governmentality as a continuum:
Foucault maintains that [. . .] there is a certain continuity between the government of oneself, the government of a household and the government of a state or community. Linked to this continuity, he argues, is the fact that the principles of political action and those of personal conduct can be seen as being intimately related. He suggests, for example, that successful government of others depends, in the first instance, on the capacity of those doing the governing to govern themselves. As for the governed, to the extent that it avoids the extremes of domination, their government must aim to affect their conduct—that is, it must operate through their capacity to regulate their own behaviour. In this respect too, successful government of others is often thought to depend on the ability of those others to govern themselves, and it must therefore aim to secure the conditions under which they are enabled to do so. (1996: 105)
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Transforming Labourism
I haven't posted for a while, a hiatus due, I suppose, to the ennui that followed obtaining the doctorate after having to revise substantial sections of what was a stitched together initial submission. While the examiners' reports had some good things to say about the content of the research and some of its presentation, it was generally chastised for poor organisation and structure. Justifiably.
What I find now, after having revised the work to a much more coherent and concise form, is that the blind spots that enabled so much of the argument to proceed, appear wilfully, embarrassingly ignorant. I wonder if this is a common post-research feeling: that the insight gained into a small area of a specific field of knowledge came at the expense of holding other areas at a distance; blurred and unfocussed at the edge of vision's field? At a conference I attended in July, a Professor talked about her earlier research project as being a search guided by the settings of her 'metal detector'--signalling the presence of colonial and post-colonial metals, rather than other cultural and political phenomena. To borrow this analogy my doctoral research's metal detector was set to the transformations of Australian Labor and labourism in the period 1983-96, the rise of neoliberalism and the representation of citizenship in Australian novels by and about young men.
Post-thesis I've relaxed the filters on the detector, and the nationalist, whiteness and masculinist settings--although I was critical of all three of these areas--of the thesis research, appear now as limited and narrowed. At present I feel that having spent so long ignoring other frequencies, all I can hear is noise: I'd managed to compose out a limited combination of cultural and political rhythms, and now that other political and cultural temporalities have become present, I have no idea where to begin writing. Indeed, I find myself increasingly playing and thinking in terms of the piano; trying to marry the left-hand to the right, feeling my way toward stride techniques, focussing increasingly on playing accompanied melody, rather then comping chords while a vocal or instrumental melody is imagined in my head.
Still, the sorts of insight that my doctoral research produced are, for all the blindness that enabled them, worth disseminating. Here then, below, is a summary of some of the key writings on Australian Labourism. A topic that seems to have come back around now that Labor is back in power, federally, and questions of What's Left have arisen. The degree to which Labourism itself was neoliberalised (in David Harvey's and Michel Foucault's senses of the term) is an historical fact yet to be worked through by many who identify as Left. Sorry to say, but a symptom of this malaise is the weirdness of Robert Manne lecturing the Left on what Neoliberalism and Social Democracy are. Manne's definition of social democracy empties it of its socialisation aims, making it a type of social liberalism. His definition of neoliberalism shares much with David Harvey's but, crucially, fails to engage with the subjective dimensions of neoliberalism: the self as entrepreneur of itself, the self as the store of human capital that one must invest in. Studying Grunge fiction, gives you a sense of how neoliberalism is lived with; how it was embedded into everyday life, and, in particular, how it articulated to labourist conceptions of Australian national character, presenting the coming-of-age of Australian society in the 1980s-90s as a labourism growing up by becoming open to the world, productive, flexible, independent.
One indication of this Bildungsroman of Australian Labourism can be seen in the opening chapters of Paul Kelly's The March of the Patriots. Kelly asserts--rather than argues or brings together a set of historiographical writings--that Australian modernity began in 1983 with the deregulation of finance, under the Labor government. Apart from being myopic, and even narcissistic, historiography (it seems that Kelly's reference for his modernisation thesis is his prequel tome The End of Certainty where he argues that the Australian Settlement was demolished or dismantled by the Hawke-Keating governments) the notion that Australian modernity began in 1983 signals that labourism's coming-of-age was achieved through the financialization of labourist characteristics and practices. Thus the neoliberalisation of Australian labourism, for Kelly, marks the emergence of modern Australia, although Kelly would not see this history in those terms.
Kelly is right to mark this moment--1983's deregulation of exchange-rate controls, and relaxation of banking licences--as an important one. He is wrong, however, to equate this moment with the arrival of Australian modernity. Wrong, not least, for the conflation of one sequence of modernization (financial deregulation) with modernity as such. Thus, he posits a singular modernity that on inspection appears to be ultimately governed by the temporalities of finance capitalism. To reduce and singularize modernity to such a narrow conception of political-economy is enabled by a particular sort of blindness. What that is, I'm yet to grasp or understand, although I think Guy Rundle's characterisation of Kelly as a power intellectual (in contrast to the "public intellectual") hints at the uses to which Kelly's commentary and concepts of political-economic history are turned.
_____________________________________________________________________
Labourism
Fundamental to a consideration of the periodisation of the long Labor decade is the middle term: Labor and its discourse Labourism. Australian Labourism is a central discursive, ideological, cultural and institutional form of twentieth-century Australian political culture. The cultural and post-colonial projects of the second Keating Government (1993-96) are certainly important but they sit uneasily within those currents of Labor traditions that form around industrial issues and events. Beilharz writes that “[h]istorically [. . .] labourism kept returning as the more durable core of the Australian left. This may reflect its practicability; it also suggests, in one sense, that a weaker distinction than that firmly drawn between socialism and labourism might be appropriate, for labourism after all is also a kind of socialism” (38). But if labourism is a kind of socialism it is “the Australian version of those kinds of socialist reformism which construct socialism as a variation on capitalist civilisation rather than its negation. It is this longer, mainstream labour tradition which is now at risk” (38).
The gap between the discourse of socialism, as the negation of capitalism, and Labourism is made more explicit in Jim Hagan’s The History of the A.C.T.U., where he argues that
Similar to Hagan, Frank Bongiorno sees the articulation of trade unions to the ALP as the central mechanism of Labourism:
[t]he idea that an independent Labor Party, supported by a strong trade union movement, should seek a redistribution of wealth in favour of the working class through the parliamentary system [. . .] has been a tenet to which any activist working in the Labor Party has had to subscribe. It meant that socialism had to be a gradual affair because Labor sought to achieve its aims through popularly elected parliaments. (“Labourism”)
More succinctly, Beilharz writes that it is “the ideology, or better, the culture of the labour movement as it is articulated politically” (1994: 36). Ralph Miliband argues that its ideology resides in core demands that are industrial first, and social second:
Rob Watts defines Labourism so nebulously that it appears as an orientation towards the state that the social movement formed out of Trade Unionists uses to enact claims solely for improving their material conditions. For Watts, Labourism is merely “a strategy of using the state to advance the interests of the workers, deploying whatever political and discursive material is to hand” (52).
Labourism is a flexible set of practices, institutional relationships and ways of making meaning that articulates the labour movement to the Labor Party and both to the apparatuses of the state in the interests of improving material working rewards and conditions as a first measure, and in gaining social goods and conditions as a second goal. One key question of the long Labor decade for Beilharz was whether or not Labourism was flexible enough a discourse to weather the dismantling of Hagan’s first three tenets without becoming empty and ceasing to be a source of tradition which could be drawn on to generate a political culture capable of participating in shaping the political economy (Beilharz, 1994: 4-5). Furthermore, could Labourism still be said to be active in Australian political culture once the ‘protection’ that it had struggled to institute was disappearing? (3) Was Australian Labourism during the long Labor decade so discredited that it was unable to re-vitalise by re-articulating to formations on its Left and even Right wings? If there was a emptying of Labor tradition, as Beilharz argues, then was this disposal to be rued considering that Australian Labourism had been racist and heavily biased against equal opportunities for women for much of its existence? (McQueen, 2004: 30-44; Sawer, 2003b: 373-75). Was Labourism flexible enough a discourse to be modernised without being entirely lost?
Beilharz’s Transforming Labor is a long, mournful and sometimes melancholic argument against such effective flexibility not because Labourism is not a flexible discourse but because the political economy upon which it functioned no longer existed in 1994. Beilharz’s argument in Transforming Labor is that Australian Labourism is a species of the discourses of modernity, and like modernity comprises an interconnected series of Janus-faces: Social-liberal with socialist; backward-looking Romantic with forward-looking modernist; statist with civic; and utopian with pragmatic (36-48). Of course, Beilharz’s judgement about the culture-political economy relationship in Labourism is not to be taken uncritically. If the Hawke-Keating Government fundamentally altered the governance and shape of the Australian political economy then how are we to assess the degrees and origins of what determined these changes: were such governing changes inevitable considering the shifts in geopolitics and global finance and trade capitalism, or were they contingent and driven by nationally immanent cultural, social and political forces? Was Labourism a large ensemble of traditional forms and principles, utopias and pragmatic alliances, or did it possess a hard core of central tenets that if refused or negated would empty the ‘tradition’ to the point that it could no longer be meaningfully drawn on? Where does Labourism fit into narratives of the long decade? Was Labourism, as a set of principles and traditions, fundamentally recast by the Hawke-Keating Government? Was there a betrayal of a socialist or social democratic project, or were the accusers nostalgic for, or melancholy about, a type of Labourism that had never existed, except as hope and oppositional critique? These are all difficult questions which will be addressed throughout the thesis. The beginnings of an answer, however, requires shifting our focus to the discourse to which Labourism was articulated through long periods of the twentieth century: Social-liberalism.
______________________________________________________________
Works Cited
Beilharz, Peter. Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Hagan, Jim. The History of the A.C.T.U.. Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1981.
Kelly, Paul. The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia. Rev. ed. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994.
“Labourism.” Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Rev. ed. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. 374-75.
McQueen, Humphrey. A New Britannia. 4th. ed. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2004.
Sawer, Marian. “Reinventing the Labor party: From Laborism to Equal Opportunity.” Ed. Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis. It’s Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor. Armadale: circa, 2003b. 373-92.
Watts, Rob. “Laborism and the State: Confronting Modernity.” Ed. Paul James. The State in Question: Transformations of the Australian State. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996. 38-73.
What I find now, after having revised the work to a much more coherent and concise form, is that the blind spots that enabled so much of the argument to proceed, appear wilfully, embarrassingly ignorant. I wonder if this is a common post-research feeling: that the insight gained into a small area of a specific field of knowledge came at the expense of holding other areas at a distance; blurred and unfocussed at the edge of vision's field? At a conference I attended in July, a Professor talked about her earlier research project as being a search guided by the settings of her 'metal detector'--signalling the presence of colonial and post-colonial metals, rather than other cultural and political phenomena. To borrow this analogy my doctoral research's metal detector was set to the transformations of Australian Labor and labourism in the period 1983-96, the rise of neoliberalism and the representation of citizenship in Australian novels by and about young men.
Post-thesis I've relaxed the filters on the detector, and the nationalist, whiteness and masculinist settings--although I was critical of all three of these areas--of the thesis research, appear now as limited and narrowed. At present I feel that having spent so long ignoring other frequencies, all I can hear is noise: I'd managed to compose out a limited combination of cultural and political rhythms, and now that other political and cultural temporalities have become present, I have no idea where to begin writing. Indeed, I find myself increasingly playing and thinking in terms of the piano; trying to marry the left-hand to the right, feeling my way toward stride techniques, focussing increasingly on playing accompanied melody, rather then comping chords while a vocal or instrumental melody is imagined in my head.
Still, the sorts of insight that my doctoral research produced are, for all the blindness that enabled them, worth disseminating. Here then, below, is a summary of some of the key writings on Australian Labourism. A topic that seems to have come back around now that Labor is back in power, federally, and questions of What's Left have arisen. The degree to which Labourism itself was neoliberalised (in David Harvey's and Michel Foucault's senses of the term) is an historical fact yet to be worked through by many who identify as Left. Sorry to say, but a symptom of this malaise is the weirdness of Robert Manne lecturing the Left on what Neoliberalism and Social Democracy are. Manne's definition of social democracy empties it of its socialisation aims, making it a type of social liberalism. His definition of neoliberalism shares much with David Harvey's but, crucially, fails to engage with the subjective dimensions of neoliberalism: the self as entrepreneur of itself, the self as the store of human capital that one must invest in. Studying Grunge fiction, gives you a sense of how neoliberalism is lived with; how it was embedded into everyday life, and, in particular, how it articulated to labourist conceptions of Australian national character, presenting the coming-of-age of Australian society in the 1980s-90s as a labourism growing up by becoming open to the world, productive, flexible, independent.
One indication of this Bildungsroman of Australian Labourism can be seen in the opening chapters of Paul Kelly's The March of the Patriots. Kelly asserts--rather than argues or brings together a set of historiographical writings--that Australian modernity began in 1983 with the deregulation of finance, under the Labor government. Apart from being myopic, and even narcissistic, historiography (it seems that Kelly's reference for his modernisation thesis is his prequel tome The End of Certainty where he argues that the Australian Settlement was demolished or dismantled by the Hawke-Keating governments) the notion that Australian modernity began in 1983 signals that labourism's coming-of-age was achieved through the financialization of labourist characteristics and practices. Thus the neoliberalisation of Australian labourism, for Kelly, marks the emergence of modern Australia, although Kelly would not see this history in those terms.
Kelly is right to mark this moment--1983's deregulation of exchange-rate controls, and relaxation of banking licences--as an important one. He is wrong, however, to equate this moment with the arrival of Australian modernity. Wrong, not least, for the conflation of one sequence of modernization (financial deregulation) with modernity as such. Thus, he posits a singular modernity that on inspection appears to be ultimately governed by the temporalities of finance capitalism. To reduce and singularize modernity to such a narrow conception of political-economy is enabled by a particular sort of blindness. What that is, I'm yet to grasp or understand, although I think Guy Rundle's characterisation of Kelly as a power intellectual (in contrast to the "public intellectual") hints at the uses to which Kelly's commentary and concepts of political-economic history are turned.
_____________________________________________________________________
Labourism
Fundamental to a consideration of the periodisation of the long Labor decade is the middle term: Labor and its discourse Labourism. Australian Labourism is a central discursive, ideological, cultural and institutional form of twentieth-century Australian political culture. The cultural and post-colonial projects of the second Keating Government (1993-96) are certainly important but they sit uneasily within those currents of Labor traditions that form around industrial issues and events. Beilharz writes that “[h]istorically [. . .] labourism kept returning as the more durable core of the Australian left. This may reflect its practicability; it also suggests, in one sense, that a weaker distinction than that firmly drawn between socialism and labourism might be appropriate, for labourism after all is also a kind of socialism” (38). But if labourism is a kind of socialism it is “the Australian version of those kinds of socialist reformism which construct socialism as a variation on capitalist civilisation rather than its negation. It is this longer, mainstream labour tradition which is now at risk” (38).
The gap between the discourse of socialism, as the negation of capitalism, and Labourism is made more explicit in Jim Hagan’s The History of the A.C.T.U., where he argues that
[t]he tenets of Labourism were White Australia, Tariff Protection, compulsory arbitration, strong unions, and the Labor party. White Australia kept out Asiatics who threatened the standard of living and the unions’ strength; tariff protection diminished unemployment and kept wages low; compulsory arbitration restrained the greedy and unfair employer; a strong union movement made it [. . .] possible to enhance and supplement arbitration’s achievements; and Labor Government made sure that no one interfered with these excellent arrangements. (1981: 14)
Similar to Hagan, Frank Bongiorno sees the articulation of trade unions to the ALP as the central mechanism of Labourism:
[t]he idea that an independent Labor Party, supported by a strong trade union movement, should seek a redistribution of wealth in favour of the working class through the parliamentary system [. . .] has been a tenet to which any activist working in the Labor Party has had to subscribe. It meant that socialism had to be a gradual affair because Labor sought to achieve its aims through popularly elected parliaments. (“Labourism”)
More succinctly, Beilharz writes that it is “the ideology, or better, the culture of the labour movement as it is articulated politically” (1994: 36). Ralph Miliband argues that its ideology resides in core demands that are industrial first, and social second:
Labourism is above all concerned with the advancement of concrete demands of immediate advantage to the working class and organised labour wages and conditions of work; trade union rights, the better provision of services and benefits in the field of health, education, housing, transport, family allowances, unemployment benefits, pensions and so on. (cited in Beilharz, 1994: 36)
Rob Watts defines Labourism so nebulously that it appears as an orientation towards the state that the social movement formed out of Trade Unionists uses to enact claims solely for improving their material conditions. For Watts, Labourism is merely “a strategy of using the state to advance the interests of the workers, deploying whatever political and discursive material is to hand” (52).
Labourism is a flexible set of practices, institutional relationships and ways of making meaning that articulates the labour movement to the Labor Party and both to the apparatuses of the state in the interests of improving material working rewards and conditions as a first measure, and in gaining social goods and conditions as a second goal. One key question of the long Labor decade for Beilharz was whether or not Labourism was flexible enough a discourse to weather the dismantling of Hagan’s first three tenets without becoming empty and ceasing to be a source of tradition which could be drawn on to generate a political culture capable of participating in shaping the political economy (Beilharz, 1994: 4-5). Furthermore, could Labourism still be said to be active in Australian political culture once the ‘protection’ that it had struggled to institute was disappearing? (3) Was Australian Labourism during the long Labor decade so discredited that it was unable to re-vitalise by re-articulating to formations on its Left and even Right wings? If there was a emptying of Labor tradition, as Beilharz argues, then was this disposal to be rued considering that Australian Labourism had been racist and heavily biased against equal opportunities for women for much of its existence? (McQueen, 2004: 30-44; Sawer, 2003b: 373-75). Was Labourism flexible enough a discourse to be modernised without being entirely lost?
Beilharz’s Transforming Labor is a long, mournful and sometimes melancholic argument against such effective flexibility not because Labourism is not a flexible discourse but because the political economy upon which it functioned no longer existed in 1994. Beilharz’s argument in Transforming Labor is that Australian Labourism is a species of the discourses of modernity, and like modernity comprises an interconnected series of Janus-faces: Social-liberal with socialist; backward-looking Romantic with forward-looking modernist; statist with civic; and utopian with pragmatic (36-48). Of course, Beilharz’s judgement about the culture-political economy relationship in Labourism is not to be taken uncritically. If the Hawke-Keating Government fundamentally altered the governance and shape of the Australian political economy then how are we to assess the degrees and origins of what determined these changes: were such governing changes inevitable considering the shifts in geopolitics and global finance and trade capitalism, or were they contingent and driven by nationally immanent cultural, social and political forces? Was Labourism a large ensemble of traditional forms and principles, utopias and pragmatic alliances, or did it possess a hard core of central tenets that if refused or negated would empty the ‘tradition’ to the point that it could no longer be meaningfully drawn on? Where does Labourism fit into narratives of the long decade? Was Labourism, as a set of principles and traditions, fundamentally recast by the Hawke-Keating Government? Was there a betrayal of a socialist or social democratic project, or were the accusers nostalgic for, or melancholy about, a type of Labourism that had never existed, except as hope and oppositional critique? These are all difficult questions which will be addressed throughout the thesis. The beginnings of an answer, however, requires shifting our focus to the discourse to which Labourism was articulated through long periods of the twentieth century: Social-liberalism.
______________________________________________________________
Works Cited
Beilharz, Peter. Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Hagan, Jim. The History of the A.C.T.U.. Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1981.
Kelly, Paul. The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia. Rev. ed. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994.
“Labourism.” Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Rev. ed. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. 374-75.
McQueen, Humphrey. A New Britannia. 4th. ed. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2004.
Sawer, Marian. “Reinventing the Labor party: From Laborism to Equal Opportunity.” Ed. Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis. It’s Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor. Armadale: circa, 2003b. 373-92.
Watts, Rob. “Laborism and the State: Confronting Modernity.” Ed. Paul James. The State in Question: Transformations of the Australian State. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996. 38-73.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)