Rethinking Progressive Ideas in Australia
by David McKnightMy book 'Beyond Right and Left' begins from the assumption that most sustained political activity arises on the basis of political ideas and a deeper philosophical vision. What we call the Left is undergoing a deep malaise -- and that this malaise is ultimately due to an exhaustion and decline in some of the ideas and philosophic underpinnings of the Left.
In case you think my reference to philosophy is highflying academic nonsense, I suggest you look at the current attack by the Howard Government on working Australians. It is founded on the philosophical notion of choice -- the primacy of individual choice in a market place. His vision is one in which individual employees will sit down and negotiate working arrangements on an equal basis, with their employer and sign a contract. In analyzing what's going on here it's important not to be blinded by hostility to such nonsense. These ideas of individualism and of choice are grounded in a philosophical vision which is usually described as economic liberalism, neo-liberalism or corporate libertarianism. The rise of these political ideas is one of the most significant changes in the political landscape in the last 25 years. It is also important for us to acknowledge that on one level, these ideas synchronise with the lived experience of many people today. These ideas make sense in the world of material abundance and of consumerism – and this combination partly explains the success of Mr. Howard.
With a similar focus on ideas, I‘d argue that the problems the Labor Party in Australia today is facing arise from the lack of an equally strong philosophy which connects with peoples' experience. The result is a weak vision which does not explain changes in society nor promote an inspiring set of values. You can see this in the breakdown of Labor's relationship with part of its natural base. The Liberal Party has won the votes of many working people who might be expected to vote Labor and these people are now known as ‘Howard’s battlers’.
One of the ways Mr. Howard achieved this by an appeal to traditional Australian values. He frames his appeal as against powerful vested interests, against political correctness and he has said he supports egalitarianism and mateship. He has attacked members of the 'elites' – by this he means those who sip caffé lattes in the inner city. And this rhetoric is very effective in dividing the coalition of social forces which Labor has built since the 1970s. This style and approach is known as populism.
But the traditional values and culture which Mr. Howard has seized have one peculiar aspect. For almost 100 years the vocabulary of the people, of the battlers, the elites, of mateship was the vocabulary of Mr. Howard’s opponents. Traditionally, Labor was the populist party. It was Labor and the Left which mobilised the resentment of the people and directed it against the elites. They still do but Howard has found a vocabulary and method which is more effective. And so what has occurred in politics is what scientists call a reversal of polarity – when a compass needle switches from pointing north and instead points south. When the traditional anti-elitists are successfully depicted as a cultural elite. All of this poses a problem for Labor and the labour movement. It was in a Labor culture that mateship and egalitarianism thrived.
But the material basis for these ideals has slowly been unravelling for years . These ideas originally grew out of a largely male working class which performed physically hard jobs and developed collectivist ‘battlers’ outlook. But today female and white collar work has grown, and workers developed a more individualist identity based on the consumerism. Moreover today there are wide inequalities in wealth between many workers. Some workers are wealthy, others are in poverty. The sense of collectivism, the ethos of battlers, is now more likely to be expressed as a cultural collectivism, -- and Anglo version of it -- defending, for example, a traditional notion of Australian cultural identity and not a collectivist economic class identity. The result is that today Labor is at sea in terms of ideas and ideals.
All of this is one expression of the problem that the idea on which Labor was founded – which went under various names such as socialism, social democracy etc – is no longer working. What we are witnessing is a historical shift in which the 150 year old tradition of class and socialism have ceased to be the most effective framework for explaining the world and giving a direction for change. So to understand the current crisis of the Left and progressive movement - we have to look at its foundational ideas.
But my book is not a weighty tome of philosophy – it is written for a popular audience and is based on the events in Australian politics with which we are all familiar. All good books arise from a passion, from a strong desire to say something significant. This book began in my mind’s eye quite a few years ago when I was considering how the world was changing in the 1990s against the backdrop of my own left wing beliefs. Two things in particular struck me.
The decade of the 1990s began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event which I unequivocally celebrated. The collapse of Soviet style communism marked the end of an era in which the great world-historic clash was between capitalism, led by the USA, and communism, led by the Soviet Union. None of us on the modern Left actually believed in Soviet communism – it was a tragedy born from a utopian dream – but its collapse did something very important – it crystallised a broader crisis of beliefs in left wing ideas that had been accumulating for years. This broader crisis of belief was connected to the cultural revolution of the 1970s – the rise of modern feminism, of the embrace cultural diversity and later, of the environment movement. At first, all these movements seemed to fit naturally together with the existing radical ideas of the labour movement. They all seemed clustered under the one umbrella, broadly called ‘the Left.’
But the connections between these causes that once made up the ‘Left’ are no longer obvious or natural. For instance, the idea that if you are militant trade unionist then you have an automatic sympathy to the cause of the environment is no longer true. And the reverse is not true either – environmentalists are not automatically sympathetic to the situation of ordinary workers. Nor is the idea that if you are a feminist then somehow you are also naturally predisposed to believe in state intervention or the welfare state. My view is that we need to recognise these things before we can begin a fair dinkum debate on how reconfigure progressive ideas to provide a more inspiring and modern political vision.
One instance of this concerns the most significant new factor in Australian politics, that is, the rise of the Australian Greens. Both the friends and the enemies of the Greens describe it as a left wing party. Its enemies describe it as a ‘watermelon’ green on the outside but red on the inside. Friends of the Greens also see it that way – that is, they think the radical Left is being reborn through the Australian Greens. I think they are totally wrong. What people mean is that they use the term ‘Left’ as a mere signal of approval. The rise of the movement to respond to environmental problems is a distinct break in political thought. The 150 year old tradition of socialism was, at bottom, founded on the labour relationship – between the worker and the owner of property. It was about class conflict. The radical shift in environmental politics is to found its tradition on the relationship between humans and nature. The environmental philosophy underlying green politics is not just about the economy as we normally understand it but about the earth – its water, resources, its air – considered as part of the economy. This is a radically new idea on which to ground a political philosophy.
And if the current relationship between humans and nature is becoming unsustainable – causing problems such as climate change – then this historical and philosophical shift of the greatest importance. Bluntly, we have to stop thinking in terms of a movement which sees an ever increasing level of living standards as the main goal. But my book is not a plea for Green politics nor does it damn the quest for material equality. Rather I argue that a new synthesis, a new set of ideas is needed – but unlike the past this can’t be just the arithmetical adding up of a shopping list of good causes.