Red Toryism and Australia's Neoliberal past

British politics can be a useful guide for the direction that Australian political parties might head in. Thatcher's neoliberal programme--of privatisations, anti-unionism, small government, personal responsibility allied to a strident nationalism and moral and social conservatism--was a model that the Australian Liberal party took up and put into effect during John Howard's prime ministership: 1996 to 2007. Yet, to align the right-wing Australian party to the British Conservatives too neatly ignores a key point Guy Rundle makes in his essay "When the rubric hits the road":

Australia is not Britain, the neoliberal reconstruction of the economy was undertaken by a Labor government, which reemphasised a collective agreement with the nation, and offered some compensation for the effects of economic restructuring. And, by the standards of Thatcher, the Howard government changed almost nothing of the fabric of Australian life. (Overland 197: 9)

I think the subtext of Rundle's assertion here--that Howard had little left to work with in seeking to reconstruct society because Labor had already done most of that work--requires some unpacking. Such a disaggregation of the effects of Neoliberalism on the Australian economy and on Australian society is analytically useful because it helps in understanding why so-called Keynesian responses to the Global Financial Crisis do not end Neoliberalism but have, arguably, intensified aspects of it.

While useful as an exercise in comparisons and contrasts, mapping British political formations onto Australian ones--as though what is geographically distant is also temporally ahead--needs to take the specifically local and national characteristics of the two systems into account. So, in order to get to the main topic of this post--Red Toryism--I will quickly run through an historical sketch of Australian Neoliberal labourism. I do this as I think coming to terms with how Australian society (rather than economy) was Neoliberalised under Labor is a good starting point in seeking to understand what the implications of Red Toryism might be for Australian political culture, and, in particular, a good basis on which to see the forms of governmental practice and reasoning that Red Toryism enacts as being available to any formation within Australian political culture: the Greens, the Nationals, the Liberals and Labor. In other words, to begin to analyse Red Toryism from the understanding that Australian labourism was the carrier of neoliberalism helps to tune out the noise that disavows Labor's embedding of Red Toryist governmentalities. Such embedding might already be occurring, and whether it is framed and branded as Left or Right is, ultimately, noise.

To quickly rehearse Labor's Neoliberalisation of the Australian economy and society: it occured through the putative modernisation of Labourism and its core citizen-subjectivity: the industrial citizen. On the one hand, the transformation of the Australian political economy in the 1980s came about through the floating of the exchange rate, the relaxation of foreign banking restrictions, and the realignment of the Reserve Bank's objectives from reducing unemployment (c1983) to reducing the current account deficit (c 1986--when Keating made his Banana Republic warning) to its current and final focus on finance capital's key requirement: the minimising of inflation. Combined with reducing tariffs and privatising former government-owned enterprises, Labor's 'modernising' of the Australian political economy was accompanied by a reinstatement of the national health insurance scheme in the guise of Medicare, and a series of social-wage contracts--the Accords--which traded wage restraint for social goods, between the Government and the peak trade union body, the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions).

Labor's neoliberal reformation of Australian society, however, was embedded through practices of conducting one's own and other's conduct (the conduct of conduct is Foucault's definition of governmentality). These practices were, and are, saturated with forms of thought: reasoning, concepts, calculations etc. The industrial citizen--labourism's key citzen-subject--protected by arbitration, tariffs, belonging to a trade union, and benefiting from racially exclusive and sexist policies, became reformed as a flexible enterprise, that was open and mobile, efficient and productive, independent and entrepreneurial. Labour--as a category in understanding political economy--was reformed from a fundamental category which could be protected and de-commodified, to one that was subsumed within the category of capital: from labour to human capital. This form of reasoning opened up the category of labour to a foundational reconception whereby work becomes a form of economic conduct which the individual or society can choose to invest in, take risks over, across a portfolio of skills and practices in order to generate an income stream. This Foucauldian understanding of the transformation of labour under Chicago School neoliberalism is nicely summed up in the aphorism: in neoliberalism we become entrepreneurs of ourselves.

It was thus through the re-formation of Labor and labourism that Neoliberalism became embedded as the dominant form of governmentality in Australian political culture. Labor's social-market approach to Neoliberalism--closer to German ordoliberalism than the Chicago School variant--gave the Howard-led coalition a set of social governmentalities against which to define themselves and to remake. The 'Big Picture' directions that Keating sought to move Australian political culture in--a Republic, Reconciliation, and increasing Regional connections with Asia Pacific nations--were framed by Howard as too modernist a path for those Australian traditions and values that had kept Australian society unified and anchored. Thus Rundle argues that

Labor simply took over what should have been the Liberals’ historical role – neoliberal reconstruction – and badged it as a form of modernisation, making it part of a distinctive progressive package, and leaving the Libs with nowhere to go but populism with a use-by date (Rundle, Crikey Newsletter 26.11.09).

So, any mapping of British political culture onto the Australian scene while useful is never neat. Some argue--including Paul Keating, who would say this--that Blair's New Labour, and its third way projects, was a rehearsal of ALP policy in the long Labor decade: 1983-1996. The notion that the British present is our political future needs to be taken with a wary openness. That said, I think it's worth getting some sense of what is being called Red Toryism, as outlines of the projects that are being mooted under David Cameron's leadership of the Tories, start to take shape. As I argued above, there is no necessary pipeline which articulates British Labour's policies--governmentalities--to Australian Labor's, nor one between the Tories and the Australian Coalition.

Having cleared the decks a bit, I will get to an analysis of Red Toryism in a latter post. What, however, has sparked this post was doyen of the boomer cultural left in Australia--Phillip Adams--giving a warm audience to Phillip Blond and his ideas a dew days ago on ABC's Late Night Live. Blond's website is here and he is being talked of as David Cameron's court Philosopher. Adams' response to Blond alarmed me a little as Blond's advocacy of social enterprises sounds a lot like Hayek's notion of catallaxies. I wonder, in particular, what 'social' actually means in this form of neoliberalism?

The second prompt to this post--which was meant to be about Red Toryism--is from a truly excellent analysis of the phenomenon here, which comes via Voyou Desoeuvre. Alex Andrews presents a fantastic analysis of Red Toryism: "Tory Neoliberalism: Why a vote for the Conservative Party is a vote for continuity, not change".

As Alex writes,

it is quite clear what Cameron’s Tories are really offering. There is no change here it is neoliberalism almost all the way down, ‘conservative means’ to ‘progressive ends’ are the same as they have been for thirty years. Cameron is in seamless continuity with Thatcherism and, in fact, New Labour.

Compare this to Rundle's analysis of 'Ruddism' in Overland:

Ruddism is a mode of post-social democratic labour adapted to Australian conditions and history, one that displays no real interest in challenging an atomised neoliberal social order and must therefore explore increasingly specific measures in the management of a population. (10)

Rundle goes on to write that it is Rudd's micromanagerial reshaping of social life which constitutes the essence of Rudd's governmentality: an essence which leaves untouched the "inadequacy of the conventional political frame to humanity's challenges". Getting outside this conventional political frame requires an understanding of Australia's recent past that grasps the extent to which the embedding of Neoliberalism in Australian political culture was achieved through the transformation of Labourism. Such an approach to recent Australian political history also requires that the Ghosts of Whitlam are properly mourned and that Neoliberalism is increasingly understood as more than neoclassical economics.

***

Gary Sauer-Thompson has also pointed to Blond's Red Toryism, here. Blond's article from Prospect Feb, 2009 "Rise of the Red Tories" makes for interesting reading. Blond's vision is neoliberal in the sense that there are multiple neoliberalisms that are essentially critiques of the previous version of liberal capitalism, which seek to establish new modes of governmentality because the previous mode governed us too much (This is Foucault's basic insight into liberalism as a mode of government: we are governed too much). Blond's progressive conservatism reads as sharing much with Hayek's liberalism, where civic associations and markets are conflated and seen as the source of liberty and moral values. As Mitchell Dean argues--here--in his discussion of Hayek, this variant of neoliberalism is both radical and conservative. Blond does not admit that capitalism plays any part in the breakdown of social life, which he blames on 1960s left-libertarianism. This is worrying as Blond's governmentality opens the door to a reactionary authoritarian response to the social fragmentation that his concomitant advocacy of greater marketisation of social relations gives rise to.

Indeed, advocating decentralisation of state-enterprises--hospitals etc.--so that local trust funds, local capital can come into ownership and control of the management of these bodies, requires a removal of forms of welfare-state style government, but not forms of government as such. The state will govern differently: it will empower and enable. Such neoliberal rostrums sound excellent, but in reality there is no single act of empowerment to be followed by the enabled local community thereafter exercising its morally edifying, defragmenting, efficient and freedom-enhancing control over the local school, hospital etc. Rather, Blond's project would see an ongoing mode of governing through communities which would be constituted on a continuum with those who are capable of self-management and self-empowerment--at one end--and those that require greater policing, older modes of government--at the other. What, also, is to prevent these public-private bodies from becoming shareholder entities, where majority shareholders determine their directions and activities if not state-based regulation and enforcement?

Red Toryism's rediscovery of the social and society is a rationality that needs to be analysed. What are the objects, aims, methods and ends of this modes of governmentality--this Red Toryism- that seeks to radically alter modes of government in the names of "society", this "civitas", the "local". What, in other words, counts as society, civic and local?

Sloughing off the skin of Labourism

**Below is a long off-cut from the Phd. It summarises and evaluates a variety of political histories: Greg Melleuish's work on Australian Liberalism, George Megalogenis' The Longest Decade and Ken Wark's essayistic analysis of Australian political and cultural postmodernity.**

Paul Kelly’s extremely influential tome The End of Certainty stands out as the most widely read and referred to sources on the long Labor decade, and is still to be found on the reading lists of Australian University subjects in political science and government. Kelly’s main argument in this political history, that is densely filled with insider-detail, is that in the 1980s the exhaustion of the Federation era ‘Australian Settlement’ both became apparent and was wilfully, rightly dismantled by the Hawke-Keating government. Kelly’s text is the central history of the long Labor decade, and his heuristic of the Australian Settlement widely circulates in Australian political culture as the commonsense in popular Australian historiography of the period. As a number of critics of Kelly’s text and central heuristic have argued The End of Certainty is both a history of politics and a profoundly political historiography that claims that Australian modernity was prevented by long exhausted traditions instituted at the time of federation which were inward-looking and stunting, leaving Australia unprepared for the maturity and growth that are demanded by the new conditions of globalisation (Beilharz, 1993b, Macintyre, 2004 and Walter, 1996: 27-42). The argument of the text is that these traditions, the five pillars of the Australian Settlement,[i] are marks of an immature nation then and in 1992 and that their final dismantling under the supervision of the Hawke-Keating government  modernised Australia. Ultimately for Kelly in The End of Certainty the long Labor decade is the period of the long overdue modernisation of Australian political culture whose central hero was Paul Keating. However, the politics of this tome are located in its use of the Bildungsroman narrative form in order to use the cultural identification between Australian national character and Labourism that Russel Ward had written of in The Australian Legend (1966) to argue that the Labourist Australian national character was "a paradox: a young nation with geriatric arteries" which needed to mature by sloughing off the "Sentimental Traditionalism" of Labourism (Kelly, 1994: 13 and 2). 

Greg Melleuish’s essayistic history of post-federation Australian political culture is less inclined to see the long Labor decade as modernisation forced by global realities. Rather he sees it as a dual attack on moral and collective freedom and the traditional institutions that reproduce the conditions for these forms – the family, the Christian churches and the unified nation – by an expanding government in league with Unionism. Melleuish speaks from that morality of Liberalism that Judith Brett argues is central to the Liberal tradition in Australia (Brett, 2003: 7-12). For Melleuish "[t]he Labor mission was fundamentally corporatist and efficiency-based rather than individualistic and liberal’ and its ‘measures to deregulate the Australian financial sector and float the dollar were not introduced to enhance individual economic liberty" but were "always intended as a form of disciplinary control rather than as a tool for creating greater freedom" (1998: 55). Melleuish calls the economic rationalists ‘new liberal’ and in an assessment that chimes with those of neoliberalism in the Foucauldian school writes, “[t]hose who attacked protection and regulation used the language both of liberty and of managerial efficiency . . . the language and rhetoric [of which] achieved a wide currency [that] became embedded in public debate as an ideal measure against which the real world could be evaluated “(56).

Melleuish sees Australian political culture as having been subjected to cultural transformations that have been ‘sold’ to the Australian public through packages promising transformation and redemption (72).[ii] These packages operate against what Melleuish sees and values as the liberal propensity of localised free associations in civil society to conduct their own lives outside of any ‘’package’ that the government and the state has sought to impose on [these] ordinary Australians" (84-5 and 93). Melleuish’s analysis of economic rationalism shares much with Foucault’s analysis of Neo-Liberalism, except Melleuish has normative commitments to family, nation and church organisations as a Burkean conservative who values institutions which function to reproduce social forms that have a moral framework. The similarity then lies in Melleuish’s critique of economic rationalism as a set of practices which compel freedom: "Freedom compelled is no freedom at all. Efficiency disguised as freedom, and used to coerce individuals into forms of behaviour that economic managers desire, is no better. Despite its talk of liberty, economic rationalism – as state policy – smells too much of coercion’ (85).

There are a number of other political histories which intersect the long Labor decade. George Megalogenis, journalist for News Ltd.’s national broadsheet The Australian, in his The Longest Decade (2006) argues that the economic boom that began in 1991 and continued into 2006 is a useful periodisation on which to fashion a political-cultural history. For Megalogenis Paul Keating and John Howard’s rule should be considered as a continuous enactment of the project of economic reform. Of course Megalogenis is writing before the institution of Workchoices: a set of regulations that placed the individual contract at the heart of employment relations and also ultimately aimed to de-unionise Australian workplaces. As Megalogenis observes in his revised version: "Howard had the deregulation equation the wrong way around. He was preaching reform in the personal economy to make employees more productive. But when pressed on global warming, he reverted to a protectionist formula. He said he would not be exporting Australian jobs to Asia"(2008).

As a distinct period in the historiography of Australian political culture ‘the longest decade’ (1991-2006) is given coherence by the continuous economic growth that proceeded the recession of 1990-1991 and by Megalogenis’ claim that this ‘boom’ is the legacy of Keating and Howard’s shared project of reforming, meaning neoliberalising, the Australian economy. But Megalogenis’s periodisation is focused on the aftermath of the embedding of neoliberalism in Australian political culture rather than excavating the techniques by which it became embedded and contested. Megalogenis writes,

The boom of the past 15 years has not secured social cohesion. Instead, it has encouraged a mass outbreak of social climbing. Deregulation has taught Australians to see their self-worth through bricks-and-mortar and the size of the bribe they can extract from government. Avarice is the new black, and the political system has sanctified it with the term ‘aspirational voting’. [ . . . ] The open economy has flipped the clichés of the Australian character. Egalitarianism is now the motto of the haves; capital gains, the mantra of the punters. (2006: 299)

This is breezy, punchy journalistic history, that is colloquial in tone and firm in its evaluations. Megalogenis is an economist who marshals demographic statistics into his argument in order to support his claims like that above concerning the lack of social cohesion over the period. Yet as Megalogenis’ post-2007 election revised extract above makes clear the continuous narrative of the so-called longest decade cleaved around three central, and as I will argue below, ghostly pillars of Australian Labourism: Protection, Arbitration and Unionism. In this sense the return of spectres of Australian Labourism roused by the Coalition’s Workchoices legislation draws attention from the fact of 15 years of economic growth and the cultural politics of managing the boom over that period to questions concerning the history of Australian Labourism. For if the ‘longest decade’ ends with these Labourist ghosts haunting the body politic we must wonder at the extent to which and how the living forms of these ghosts were interred, discarded and lost. The periodisation used in this thesis – the long Labor decade – complements Megalogenis’s, while their overlapping period (1991-1996) points more to the contested legacy of the Keating Prime Ministership and to the disorienting temporal effects of a neoliberalising Labor government than to any defects in either that the other can explain.

Postmodernisation?

“The Hawke legacy is a laboratory of empirical experiment that is, among other things, a ‘third way’ between dogmatic insistence on a politics of rationalism and a do-nothing politics of pragmatism” (Wark, 1999: 335). McKenzie Wark’s writing on the long Labor decade is mediated through his experience of being in a Liberal Party stronghold as the results of the 1993 election are announced hearing Keating’s speech on the true believers and reflecting on how this signifier makes him feel (1999). It is also mediated by three ‘documentaries’ (two are fictionalised documentaries) on Labor in power. The first is True Believers focussing on John Curtin and Ben Chifley in office, the HV Evatt leader in opposition then The Dismissal which hones in on the final period of the Whitlam government and finally Labor in Power the short Labor decade. Wark calls each an epic and there is something of the formation of nation in each media text, and a monumental size to the importance of the three government projects, their obstacles, conditions, opponents. In a sense what Wark does is similar to what Beilharz does in Transforming Labour, which is to assess Labor tradition through ‘historiography’ so as to assess the fidelity of the Hawke-Keating government to Labor tradition. While Beilharz’s politics are enunciated from a moving position across a spectrum of Left ideologies as he attempts to  stay left as the old certainties dissolve and Labor in power shifts right, Wark’s approach is cultural and minimal and libertarian: "I used to be true believer, and a labour movement leftist, but these days I’ve lost faith in anything but the practicalities of forming electoral majorities out of a commitment to [. . .] [m]inimising avoidable suffering – if there is a feeling that structures the whole of Labor culture, I think that’s it" (Wark, 1999: 181).

For Wark the Labor party is adept at producing and circulating fables which have to reach their publics and constituents through contemporary media like radio and television. For Wark these reinventions of the fables of Labor always have this structure of feeling – minimising avoidable suffering. Wark is adept at picking up on the key implications of shifts in policy and events like the Accord, which signal that the Australian Labor Party and ACTU agree to forego short-term pursuit of wage claims, compensated for by an increase in social wage, in order to address high inflation and high unemployment.

Effectively Wark re-rells the story of the long Labor decade through the Labor in Power documentary, with short excursions into his ideas about the vectoral nature of ‘politics’ and celebrity (179). Key events are summarised: the Accord, the float, the 1985 tax Summit. Wark’s narrative shifts to a focus on Keating, to the problems with Keating’s manichean, black-white, right-wrong rationalism in opposition to Hawke’s empiricist- consensual style of decision making. Keating as the celebrity starts to ascend for Wark and then we move into the 1986 Banana Republic episode (200). Next Wark unpacks economic rationalism: idealist extrapolation of understanding of part of economy to whole economy operating through an idealist and utopian faith in a future that the present actions can bring forth (201). Wark is of course astute, bringing to bear his sociology of culture:

It envisages a change from political to economic time where change that cannot be measured, the eventfulness of fortune, gives way to uncertainty that can be quantified, the calculus of risk. This pure quantifiable time never arrives [and displaces and defers in through the techniques used to move toward it], but it acts as a permanent alternative dreamtime, the purity of which stands as a measure of the impurity of the sordid political time of the present. (Wark, 1999: 201-02)

Wark also writes that, 

The changes Labor itself unleashed when in office created an economy, a polity and a culture that were considerably more dynamic than the quiet backwater in which people my age, who I’ll call Generation Gough, were probably the last to experience. The sense that there may be profound qualitative changes afoot in the 90s contributed to the resistant mood of the information proletariat and the reactionary instincts of Hansonite populism. (Wark, 1999: 260).

For Wark these judgements are preliminary to his (post)modernist advocacy of the need for Labor to enter the information and postindustrial age by carrying their ethos of “minimising avoidable suffering” into cyberspace through the urbane and cosmopolitan cultures that travel on the vectors of celebrities (260-64).[iii] Wark’s postmodernity is a particular brand of modernity[iv] in which the traditional and even modern cultures of Labor and Labourism are to be sloughed off as redundant skins suited to suburban and therefore ineffective politics. To make his point Wark enlists the memory of those for whom Gough Whitlam was only ever a figure on television: “Besides being culture and politics, the Whitlam fable is also television. For some of my contemporaries, it was more television than anything else” (265). Thus for Wark, “[p]art of the challenge for Labor at the end of the 90s became that of finding ways of articulating this broader, less directly political memory of Labor’s past to the party’s future electoral ambition” (267).

The key sections in Wark’s book, in terms of his writing of the long Labor decade, are ‘Steering the Third Way Leftwards” and “Postindustrial Class Struggle” (272-285). In these chapters Wark argues that “[s]ome on the left of the Labor party” need to join “the public consensus on what actually happened in the 80s and 90s” (273). Via Lindsay Tanner’s gloss on Kelly’s Australian Settlement thesis, Wark argues for a new Labourist pragmatism. What is missing from Wark’s vision is any account of labour that is not postindustrial or any account of culture that is not mediated by television. That culture might be experienced while playing footy or netball is somehow too suburban for Wark and thereby ‘traditional’. For Wark the social body can be re-assembled. In the language of Deleuze it can make new assemblages, in order to accommodate the new global flows of information and culture. Yet the gains of such cheerful positivity are hardly accessible to all. Indeed as the social body reassembles those parts no longer contemporary, urbane, or able to couple are perhaps simply abjected. Wark’s conceit is that they tell fables while he deals in facts and actualities (274).

The central problem in Wark’s ‘narrative’ is that he confuses the culture of neoliberalism with cultural globalization: effectively arguing that any of the side-effects of globalization can be squared away through the more egalitarian cultural governance that such globalization brings in its wake – if only we are urbane enough to heed the call of and fall into line with the cosmopolitan slipstream. This is a dangerously circular argument that treats all blockages in the flows of globalization as opportunities for (good) cultural, and thereby economic, reform (283 and 290-2).[v] Culture is not merely as response to political economic forces not are political economic forces driven by changes in culture. Wark’s model of politics would seem to place culture in the position of that which mediates technological change and thereby is at the avant-garde of political and economic change: “[t]he medium through which economic or political change or negotiation takes place is partly cultural” (337). While there is a case for this conception of a cultural determinism, and theories of cultural materialism do give a central place to the material effects of culture, the claim that cultural forms precede political ones and that thereby politics needs to turn the forms of the cultural avant garde to its advantage, albeit guided by a specific ethos, is a more an academic disciplinary move or gambit whereby the methods and metaphysical commitments of political science and sociology are to be subsumed by those of cultural studies. Wark’s key slippage is between culture and economy: economy is a type of culture (283). Again there is some truth in this definition, but to argue that economic forms and systems are in part cultural is not to concede that the distinction is thereby redundant and the economic to be subsumed by the cultural. Equally, as John Frow among others argues, the cultural sphere is traversed by commodification and is itself an industry, part of the economy (1997 and Jameson, 1991). The other point that needs to be made is that Wark is confusing the social life of the post-commodity (the uses of information after it has been exchanged) with what is social about commodification: for Wark commoditized information cannot be reifying or alienating as information has a social life that exceeds the exchange. This is to read one temporal condition in the social life or career of a thing – the moment of use or waste or gift – onto that different temporal state of being a commodity (Frow, 1992). This is rhetorical and textual de-reification that takes information out of the circuitry of commodification by focussing on that type of information that is popular, already public and ‘cultural’. That certain information might be highly guarded, and patented, that it might constitute knowledge and disciplinary expertise within a field of technical specialities is bracketed by Wark due to the focus on popular culture, television in particular, in his text. This subsumption of economy to culture under the new conditions of media vectors in the postindustrial, information age opens the door to a discourse on cultural governance which can present itself as governance as such.[vi] What is missing in Wark’s post-long Labor decade account is a greater reach into the culture of Chicago School Neoliberalism and its focus on the microeconomics of human capital and the rationalities by which the human subject as labour becomes that human subject as enterprise and as entrepreneur of one’s potentials and capacities. Wark is too fixed on consuming and meaning-making subject to entertain the notion that information can be an investment in one’s own human capital, and that egalitarian access to information might be less a matter of keeping the postmodern light on the hill on than of furthering the Neoliberal project of embedding governmentalities which function to form the self as entrepreneur of one’s own human capital (Foucault, 2008).

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[i] I will return to a more extensive analysis of Kelly’s conception of an ‘Australian Settlement’ later. However, the five pillars of the ‘exhausted’ Australian Settlement were: a white Australia which protected white male jobs from Asian emigrants and promoted White citizenship rights over Aboriginal ones; a system of industrial tariff protection which enabled employers to vouchsafe the jobs that were to be paid a ‘living wage’ according to need rather than means; an Arbitration Court which adjudicated on these wage cases and upon the principle of a living wage; a paternalistic utilitarian State which sought to support and assist its citizens in achieving ‘happiness’; and an expectation that Britain (then America) would provide an imperial benevolence in terms of financial and physical security (Kelly, 1994: 1-11).

[ii] Transformation and redemption are both operations of narrative. Melleuish has missed the obvious narrative form of the coming-of-age ‘package’.

[iii] On the meanings of culture, celebrity and cyberspace Wark writes:

If Labor is a culture then it is flanked on one side by the problem of celebrity and on the other by the problem of cyberspace. By celebrity, I mean the need to create an image for the vectors of the media, through which the public reads proposal for what it could desire. By cyberspace, I mean the need to learn empirically from the great wealth of information available and create the peculiar kind of specialized knowledge that is the guile of the political generalist. (1999: 264)

[iv] John Frow suggests that postmodernism, as a word,

[c]an be taken as designating nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing. [ . . . Y]our first major gambit must be to predicate the existence or non-existence of the postmodern. . . . The classical structure of this gambit [ . . .] is this: first, you assume the existence of a historical shift in sensibility, which you call the postmodern; then you define it by opposition to whatever you take the modern to have been; finally, you seek to give a content to the postmodern in terms of this opposition. The content, that is to say, is deduced logically from the axiom of existence and only then described as historically real. (1997: 15)

Peter Osborne argues that modernity is a multiple, qualitative and not chronological concept (1995 and 1992). For Zygmunt Bauman the historicism of a post modernity elides, again, the qualitative shift in that experience of time and space that is better explained and connoted by the figuring of a move from a solid to liquid modernity (2000). Furthermore, the alternative modernities ‘school’ that surrounds the Chicago University based Public Culture journal, including Dipesh Chakrabarty, argue that the paths to and through modernity are multiple and that to fix any one path is often Eurocentric if not also teleological (Goankar, 2002: 4 and Chakrabarty, 2000:6-16).

In Wark’s account of the lessons for Labor of the long Labor decade revenants, ghosts, hauntings and utopias are suburban and backwards, to be blasted away by synchronising with the techniques and social forms enabled by the new modernity that is transnational, cosmopolitan and led by mediatised postindustrial information technologies. While this is a manifesto for a certain formation of Australian Left-intellectuals, not all intellectuals are caught in the slipstream that Wark argues is dragging humanity into the Network age, nor is his “temporalisation of time” (Osborne, 1995) able to account for disjointed time (Derrida, 1993) or the experience of multiple times which Ernst Bloch argued was one of the key techniques the Nazi leadership used to conduct the arrhythmic temporalities of a bloc of social formations in the 1930s (Bloch 1991: ).Overall Wark’s project for a postmodern Labor Party and Labourism is hampered, in a similar way to Paul Kelly’s project for a new Australian Settlement, by its politics of time: its deterministic modernisation that divides the social realm into those who are going forward, those stuck and those heading back.

[v] Wark writes that

whether anyone likes it or not it [Labor] will have to be open to the global information vector to some degree, for it is through globalisation that new sources of wealth creation will produce the pudding to be shared out to Labor’s traditional base. The paradox is that the only way for Labor to honour its traditional communities is a leap into a modern, perhaps even postmodern future.(1999: 292)

This is view that could be almost entirely substituted for the one Paul Kelly proffered in 1992 in The End of Certainty, save that while Kelly proselytisers for free markets Wark speaks for free information. It’s the teleological inevitability of both positions that is identical, and this is surprising since Wark’s use of the term postmodern should suggest that a teleological conception of history is rejected. The opposite is the case. Chapter 3 explores discourses of modernisation and postmodernisation in depth.

[vi] Carol Johnson is sceptical about those more ‘positive’ and triumphalist narratives, like Wark’s, in which the inevitable political implications for any Left response to a wholesale shift into the post-industrial information are glibly presented:

A modernist belief in the inevitability of technological progress and the grand narratives of economic liberalism have been combined with more postmodern conceptions of an information and cultural economy. . . .Various governments have used the information revolution to justify policies of free trade and deregulation that have a long history in neo-liberalism. Nor has the cyber-age succeeded in undermining traditional identities and power relations, rather those identities and power relations have been adapted to the new conditions. . . One needs to be deeply sceptical regarding the way in which politicians use arguments about the ‘inevitable’ implications of unprecedented social change. (2000: 138-9)

The Labourist-Social-liberal armature

(Another PhD extract. This one is from the historical sociology section of the PhD. The concept of the armature is counter to the notion of consensus, or social contract, that is contained in Paul Kelly's Australian Settlement. Again, any comment will be welcomed)

The Labourist-Social-liberal armature

Australian Labourism was primarily articulated to Social-liberalism throughout the twentieth century. We can see and feel this articulation through the heuristic of an armature. This armature generated, protected and provided the framework for fashioning the white male productive wage earner as the citizen-subject and thereby primary object of government. It was a complex structure of feeling centred around the concepts of protection and the just wage, the driver for a set of institutional tools – centrally the Arbitration Court – and increasingly those utilities that provided education, health, and housing services through the welfare state, during the post-war period. It brought together a harmonic convergence of political actors who enacted and were emboldened by its forcefield and energy.

The Arbitration Court was the key state institution which both directed energy into the armature and was in turn driven by it. The court was given dynamic institutional weight through the Harvester decision made by the head of the court Social-liberal Henry Higgins who, in 1907, judged that employers should pay wages according to the need of the male employee in so far as such need was measured not on the bases of an employer’s capacity to pay but rather on the basis of what a nuclear family required to live reasonably: the living wage (Sawer 58-9, Castles, 2002: 44). Sawer calls this decision “the defining event of Australian social liberalism” (58).

The establishment of this court and the Harvester decision might sound like distant, minor events in the long Labor decade, but any sense of the depth of change in the long Labor decade must account for the loss that the evacuation of the commitment to this institution wrought. Combined with the Social-liberal practices of Keynesian government which dominated the post-World War II period until 1973-74 and which were articulated also to the institutions of the “New Protection” – tariffs and racially based labour migration limits – the Arbitration Court’s governance of social citizenship through industrial techniques melded Labourist and Social-liberal tenets into a forcefield that established a hegemony surviving numerous challenges until the 1970s when it began to break down.

Higgins’ 1907 Harvester Judgement and its significance for the long Labor decade was seen in the choice of H R. Nicholls for the name of a political society whose main goal was to “promote a debate on industrial relations and to promote the system’s reform”: meaning to expunge the Arbitration Court and thereby this central institution of the Labourist-Social-liberal armature from Australian political culture (Castles, 2002: 43 and Kelly, 1994: 253, 260-2). Nicholls was editor of the Hobart Mercury newspaper and won a contempt of court case against Higgins after labelling Higgins “a political judge” in 1911 (“Nicholls, Henry Richard”, Nicholls cited in Kelly, 1994: 260). A group of businessmen, lawyers, academics, intellectuals and politicians formed this New Right society in 1986; its invitation to join was co-signed by future federal Liberal Party treasurer and deputy leader Peter Costello, and it read in part: “[w]e would probably have to go back to the early days of Federation, and the debates leading up to the passing of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act, to find a precedent for this debate” (cited in Kelly 260). Ironically, Costello held the federal lower house seat named after Nicholls’ enemy, and it was Costello who earned his New Right political reputation as an industrial barrister in the Dollar Sweets case where common law was successfully used to break a union strike in 1985 (Kelly, 1994: 258). This case and others like it weakened the power of the Arbitration Commission and the Unions (255-9).

This movement in the long decade away from the institutions and forms of the armature struck at the core political arrangements that had provided the protective forcefield and framework for much of Australia’s post-federation history. These arrangements have been described by Francis Castles as composing a “wage-earner’s welfare state” (Castles, 1994: 8). Castles’ conception is, for Beilharz, based on “the relative strength of the local labor movement, linked together with a largely economic or material conception of wellbeing, [which] saw the development of political and welfare arrangements which functioned primarily in the interests of men as workers rather than of citizens as such” (Beilharz, 1994: 7).

Castles has four axioms for the Australian wage-earners’ welfare state:

occupational welfare has been more important than state expenditure [;] collective saving for social security provision has been outweighed by private saving for owner-occupied housing [ ;] the preferred model of social services financing has been progressive taxation [; and] women have had a different and lesser status than men. (12-15)

He argues that it survived into the 1980s despite the changes to its central axioms that the social movement for women’s equality, the collapse of the White Australia policy and the diminution of the role of wage regulation all brought (16). Castles notes that while “the Whitlam government flirted with more European notions of social insurance as well as beginning Australia’s disengagement from high levels of tariff protection,” the “post-tax dispersion of male wages from employment as egalitarian as any in the advanced world” remained a central pillar of the wage-earners' welfare state into the mid-1980s (16).

Writing on what he calls “the Labor decade” Castles declares any interpretation of Labor’s impact in the area of Social protection to be “paradoxical” as the government’s “policy activism” promoted managerial and economic rationalist techniques in administration which did little to change the “policy norms” in the area of social protection (17). Castles argues that Hawke-Keating Labor adapted rather than overturned the wage-earners' welfare state, with the reintroduction of universal health care and introduction of the S.G.C (Superannuation Guarantee Charge) being cases of social and industrial citizenship respectively (21). Yet the living standards of average wage earners over the Labor decade – which in a wage-earners' welfare state must be the prime metric – decreased, the use of the Arbitration Court decreased and the financialisation of the Australian economy produced forms of market-based income other than wage-earning ones (22-23). The key change, though, is in the loss of male full-time jobs due both to the steady increase of female labour force participation and to changes in manufacturing brought about by “structural reforms,” striking at the central pillar of the wage-earners' welfare state: protection of the white wage-earning male (22).

While Castles sees the wage-earners' welfare state as being “refurbished,” rather than demolished, his 1994 essay is not interested in the regimes and techniques by which citizen-subjects are themselves refurbished (25). In order to enter this characteristic of the Labourist-Social-liberal armature, and to begin to analyse how citizen-subjects were being reshaped and re-sculpted in the long Labor decade we need to bring the discussion and analysis to this level and consider industrial citizenship.

Unbecoming of age: Australia's financial deregulation

After Kevin Rudd's post-Neoliberalism manifesto it was only a matter of time before his predecessor -- John Howard -- would appear to both set Rudd straight and to provide a set of scissor-ready quotes that can be cut'n'pasted into further Labor rhetoric about the defence and affirmation of neoliberalism residing in the Liberal party.

Howard, in his inaugural speech last night at the Menzies Research Centre, did voice the common-sense argument that the Hawke-Keating governments must be included in the list of those who Neoliberalised Australia. This is the central political flaw in Rudd's polemic: that any repudiation of Australian neoliberalism can't reasonably ignore the great neoliberalisers who floated the exchange rate, relaxed banking restrictions -- including permitting the entry of foreign banks --, oversaw the shift of the Reserve Bank's primary goal from unemployment, to the current account deficit, to the focus on inflation --effectively from protecting jobs to protecting finance capital --, privatised former government enterprises, reduced tariff protection, and used the increasingly hollowed out Accords to both dismantle the Arbitration system and de-unionise labour.

Yet Ruud's essay signals that there has been a change in rhetoric, or at least ideology, as David McKnight argues, which constitutes an opening for much needed government intervention in the face of the climate and financial crises. Let's hold Rudd to his anti-free market ideology, is McKnight's preferred response to this shift in political language. This is a useful goal, but there are lessons here from the long Labor decade that might be worth revisiting as a warning to such pragmatic support for what might merely be a change in ideology, rather than in governing practices.

Firstly, we need to admit that the ALP neoliberalised Australian society. Not just the economy. Neoliberalism is a political, social and cultural project, and not just a doctrine about free markets and minimal government. Neoliberalism is a political project equally at home in the Labor and Liberal parties.

Secondly, there might be elements (practices) of neoliberalism that are worthwhile, that promote equality and justice. Just as the New Liberalism of the late 19th and early 20th century did much to establish the social and economic protections that stabilised many sections of Australian society during the twentieth century, there are also techniques and rationalities of neoliberal forms of governing that promote social justice and democratic participation better than so-called social democratic techniques. The desire to wholely repudiate neoliberalism from the Left is an understandable yet dangerous one. For example, flexible work practices are odious when they are used to casualise and make precarious the lives of manual labourers, so that employers can minimise costs and committments to employees. On the other hand, flexibility in working hours for parents or carers is to be encouraged. The sorts of practices of flexibility that result in job-sharing could do much to reduce job-losses as employers increasingly look to cut labour costs as turnover suffers. James Ferguson has developed this line of thinking based on his anthropological work in Africa.

Thirdly, the Hawke-Keating government modernised aspects of white, male, heterosexual Labourism that needed changing. This modernisation, however, was caught up and entwined in the national coming-of-age narrative that had financial 'deregulation' as its central event . Those worthwhile elements of Australian Labourism -- elements which articulated to those social democratic practices that Whitlam sought to implement -- need not be cast off as part of the adolescence of Australian political culture: as the eczema of Australian modernity which was cured by the mature openness and independence that opening the financial arteries of the Australian economy achieved. Neoliberal globalization is essentially a project aimed at installing a political culture which serves the movement of finance capital to all reaches of the globe. Neoliberalism is the (political-)culture of finance capital, and it's that nexus that needs to be broken and rearticulated to other political-cultural forms.

To that end, Steve Keen has a useful breakdown of the emergence of Neoliberalised finance capitalism, Australian-style, here. Keen, in response to John Howard's specch last night, writes:

how anyone could champion the first reform–the deregulation of the financial system–as a “great” reform in today’s climate beggars belief.

As I argued in the Roving Cavaliers of Credit, financial deregulation was based on a misguided belief that the financial system operated like an ordinary market for goods, where the market itself would work out a sensible volume of and price for credit. A proper analysis of how money is created shows instead that a deregulated financial system will pump out as much credit as borrowers can be enticed to take on. In a world in which leveraged speculation on asset prices is possible, that will lead to the economy taking on so much debt that it will ultimately fall into a debt-induced crisis–which is where we are now.

Once in this situation, deregulated finance then amplifies the problem by going from supplying too much credit to cutting off the credit tap in a manner that reduces overall economic activity.

So the financial deregulation that Howard championed last night, and that successive Labor and Liberal governments introduced, led not to a better functioning economic system, but to a financial catastrophe that is still in its infancy.

To argue that the entire crisis was due just to the subprime scam, and lax financial regulation, is to ignore the obvious signs in the data that too much credit was being generated relative to income. These signs go back to mid-1964 in Australia, and to Armistice Day in the USA.

I expect that the belief that the Australian banking system is immune from the problems that have beset the rest of the world will be sorely tested in the next year or two, as the macroeconomic crisis caused by financial deregulation strikes at the heart of Australian homeownership. The level of household debt in Australia is as high as in America (when measured in terms of each country’s GDP), and though all the focus has been on the USA’s irresponsible lending to the Subprimes, in fact household debt in Australia grew three times as fast as it did in America in the last twenty years.

The Australian financial system is thus dependent on all Australian mortgage holders being able to service their debts, when the only source most of them now have to do that is their jobs. As jobs go as the crisis deepens, the solvency of the Australian financial system will be sorely tested.

No-one will then claim that financial deregulation was a “great reform”.

Paul Keating on his unfinished business

From The Monthly's slow tv a video of Paul Keating's address at the launch of Unfinished Business: Paul Keating's Interrupted Revolution by David Love.

Here we have about 50 minutes of Keating at the podium launching David Love's almost hagiography (but since Keating's ego is sizable, his own commentary on the salient points of Love's political biography, are going to make the history sound like hagiography**).

Keating's main point about the value of the book is that Love has a few years under his belt: Love was around during the Menzies period and so lived through what Keating describes as the 'Age of Hopelessness' (a.k.a 'the age of incrementalism'). This is in contrast to the 'revolutionary,' (as in the book's title) and heroic period of structural reform performed in the long Labor decade.

The revolution in structural reform is three-pronged: the 'clean' float of the $A; the move to Enterprise Bargaining; and the Superannuation Guarantee Charge (SGC). The unfinished business, of the title, is the extension of the SGC from 9 to 15%.

Love's longer perspective is valuable, for Keating, as it places the 'revolution' against the slower moving lethargies and reticences of the Menzies government and of the Howard decade.

Keating makes some telling points: that the amount in the 'Debt truck' that the Liberal-National coalition drove around in the 1996 election campaign, 'demonstrating' the failure of the ALP Government to contain foreign and private debt, grew threefold in the Howard decade (from $190 bill to approx. $600 bill) and that treasurer Costello willfully conflated private with public debt, paid down the public debt (an easy task according to Keating as tax revenues increased), but did nothing to reduce private foreign debt. For Keating, Costello and Howard (C & H) renegged on a promise to lift the SGC to 15% which would've increased domestic savings and thereby reduced foreign debt and probably reduced the current exposure of Australian interests to the credit crunch. For Keating, H & C refused to extend the SGC because that would've given Trade Union based superanuation schemes power over capital, and H & C were not only antipathetic to Union control but to ordinary working people having more control over capital.

Hearing and watching Keating speak arouses mixed feelings in me: the appearance of mastery and control over economic government (how to conduct the economy) is convincing - I want to believe. John Forbes begins his poem Watching the Treasurer with 'I want to believe the beautiful lies.' The Left populist attacks on Howard and Costello (slow, stupid, lazy, safe, establishment) resonate and yet Keating's left populism grates against the deeper (Australian) Labourist structures of feeling and generic conventions that proceed by an attack on capitalism and advocacy of government protection for the less fortunate and structurally underprivileged as a means of ameliorating the predations of capitalism's atopic* operations.

Meaghan Morris ends her essay on Forbes' poem and study of the coming of neoliberalism through economic governance to Australia by treating Keating's discourse as ambivalent:

double-edged, two faced. On the one hand, nostalgia for "the Economy" as a source of sovereignty and self-determination - a precious myth that proved hard to sustain in the aftermath of financial deregulation - was rampant in the ebulliently macho bombast of politicians identifying their own discourse with the power of market "forces," and denying the social reality of limits to (their mastery of) economic Reason; the government could seem never more securely in control of the nation's future than in the very moment of losing it. On the other hand there was, in all the speculation about the social meanings of "Keating" (his voice, his narrowness, his rehtoric), as it resonated over the decade with other images and stories of the decline of the Left and the epic collapse of socialism, a kind of sadness for that utopia, always known to have an "only ideological reality," that [Craig] McGregor calls "the great humane ideals of the Labor movement.
In knowing its object, however (perpetually demystified by historians and critics and activists from all sides of politics, and so perhaps impossible to lose), this sadness was less strictly a form of nostalgia than the economic ecstasy that shaped it, and, in its feeling for the beautiful lies that help people to act, more like a way of seizing against the helplessness a"chance for continued survival."

"Ecstasy and Economics.” Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998a. 158-194. 194.


*Atopic - from atopic diseases like eczema and asthma, where chronic symptoms caused by the antigen (allergy-causing matter) are displaced and deferred. Thus capitalism, like eczema, displaces and defers the illness and disease that it causes. A good example of the metaphorics of illness that capitalism forces into consciousness through the poetics of politics is the commonplace of the subprime crisis as a contagion or virus.

** Alongside 'hagiography' there is a case for the term 'econography': where a treasurer's (or other economically important figure's) life is written through the simultaneous emergence of 'globalisation' or economic modernisation, such that the economy and the individual life merge into a single dramatic and narrative shape.