Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Opening plenary - Challenging the neo-liberal danger
Saturday 30th July 2005
Back to conference program
Guy Rundle
Commentator and ARENA editor (on leave)
We’ve got a pretty big lineup so I’ll try to confine myself to talking in a broader way about a few key questions I think we should be asking rather than documenting the exact length and breadth of the decline.
It seems to me there’s three areas, globally speaking, of contradiction, which are emerging, or have emerged and that provide the focus for how we think about politics in the future. And they are obviously the global environmental crisis on a number of fronts, the emerging new energy crisis as we reach the end of big oil and the pressure on economically viable extraction. The global economic crisis potentially seen from various angles, whether there’s one of complete over production on a world scale or radical inequality between the North and the south. And the 3rd one is the cultural crisis, or misinterpretation between the North and the south, or the West and majority world, or whatever it wants to be called. That is something arising from the development on the one hand of a consumer society, a society based largely on media and more abstract forms of social integration, and on the other a greater individualisation of everyday life arising from that.
The most important thing to think about in terms of organising in the first world or the West, is that the first of these is the cultural contradiction. This should provide a key to some of the impasses that we face politically, or that we face thinking about the way that world is working. This is particularly true in relation to Australia and where Australia sits at the moment. As speaker after speaker has got up to say the situation is yet more depressing than the previous speaker had announced it seems to me necessary to reflect on that and say why are we in a situation where what we are doing is documenting ever greater levels of crisis and political defeat.
It seems to me in Australia that if we continue to think about the political situation as one of an overwhelmingly national character then we will inevitably think of it in terms of defeat. We are a country that was a social democracy of sorts, with a whole range of political institutions built up in an earlier era and now we no longer are and we aren’t going to be again. There is no way of simply restoring a national based social democracy within a 21st century global economy and there’s simply no way of restoring a national democracy by a very small peripheral nation as the great economies or the great societies of China and India enter into full scale capitalist development. If we think in terms of this or that social institution declining, falling away, then we can document that for several decades because it’s simply going to happen. We’re entering a ‘neo-liberal world’ to use the term that is organising this discussion and we have to think in those terms.
It is not a series of political defeats but a great cultural shift that’s pre-disposing it. The cultural shift is that as consumption develops, as the media society develops, as we move from an industrially dominated economy to an information and service based economy there is a fundamental effect on class and class consciousness and the ability to have a class consciousness. I don’t mean that class is disappearing or that new classes aren’t appearing, or there aren’t the capacities for people to reconnect as collective social agents. I mean that there’s been a whole series of factors which include an obvious, very big division between sectors of the Western working class. One group that is permanently or overwhelmingly on welfare and a group that is gaining, to a degree, a share of the global surplus, and in a global sense have relatively high wages, and relatively good access to consumption and who have an interest in the perpetuation of the sort of global economy we’re in consciously or unconsciously.
The other cultural aspect of that is the radical individualisation of the way people think about society and the way that applies to things like student unionism and the health system. It applies to any area of social life where in an earlier period it was possible to go out and argue about the social nature of these things and the collective nature of these things. But also because there has been a very deep structural change in the way people live, in the way they relate to the economy and in the way the first world relates to the global south.
And that is the primary area that we as the left or the social movements face in rethinking how we talk to a population. A group that can now no longer be thought of as a working class, a group of people waiting for an answer that is a social one or a community one or a collective one. But we now face a situation as activists, as people talking about ideas as commentators, whatever, we have to talk about that process of individualisation and the autonomous society at the level of everyday life. Otherwise you get a situation where we are going out presenting to people answers to social life that connect to nothing that is part of their reality any more, nothing that feels real. And that is why I think, at conferences like this we often get a sense of hopelessness or that our sole task is to document the degree of decline.
As I said I don’t think these are static things, I think these are contradictions. I don’t think you can organise a society on greater and greater levels of individualisation. You can’t organise a society in which people are integrated as persons, made as persons increasingly by a globalised media. What you start to get is a form of social dysfunction that looks individual but is actually a new social disorder. A lot of the writing I’ve done is looking at things like the so-called depression epidemic. Why have we gotten into this position where we assume that it’s normal for so many people to be depressed or call themselves depressed, for every second adolescent to have to be on suicide watch? Those, more than older style political crises, those are the signs of a culture and a society that is emerging into contradiction.
Now the problem in Australia is this. A large section of the Australian population, not a majority, but a significant section, that used to be part of the labour movement or the centre left or whatever has benefited enormously from the recent global boom, but it’s obviously an illusion in terms of the greater global contradictions. That we are not going to be a society that is going to be able to hold the wage levels that we do, competing against India, that graduates 500 000 engineers per year, or China that graduates 1 million doctors per year. We are in a large scale, a continued and sustained decline in our economic share and that’s going to go on. It seems to me that when people are confronted with the situation that when people don’t actually own a house as an investment property that the bank owns it and they’re minding it for the bank. When you have that sort of crisis, that economic crisis, and then it coincides with the cultural contradictions then you have a really deep problem and a real social cataclysm. The immediate beneficiary of that will be the Right because the Right always works on myths, concrete ideas and easy concrete people to blame, whether it’s this social group or that social group. The Left always has a greater problem in explaining more abstract processes. But in that respect, in the long run that is a positive thing, there is a way of connecting much more to a new politics, but it needs to connect at that cultural level as well.
Thanks very much.
Arena magazine and website of Left political and social commentary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to conference program
|
