The Left needs a new moral vision

I don't often read the financial pages of the newspaper but last week my eye was drawn to an article on The Australian newspaper's front page. It concerned the proposed merger between BHP and Billiton. The story reported that the senior executives of Billiton were insisting that they received a so-called 'reward' of 50 million pounds or $138 million in Australian dollars as part of the merger.

This demand is so greedy that even the world of business is shocked and there was talk of a shareholders revolt to stop or change the terms of proposed merger.

While this sort of greed may be exceptional on one level, it is not all that unusual in the broad landscape of inequality in capitalist society. An Australian study by two academics in 1996 found the following:

The richest one per cent owns 20 percent of the private wealth; the richest 10 per cent own half the wealth and the poorest 30 per cent have no net wealth - although they may own a car.

Inequality has always been a feature of capitalism and today it is joined by the increasing commercialisation of every aspect of life - from entertainment, to sport, to education, to the system of user-pays in many 'public' services. Along with this is the growth of advertising and marketing which now penetrates everywhere and is the subject of Naomi Klein's fascinating book 'No Logo'. Which has become something of a bible to the new radical anti- globalisation movement.

Both these aspects and a number of others mean that a new kind of capitalism is being created in Australia and around the world. My argument today is that a new kind of capitalism needs a new kind of socialism.

The new kind of capitalism is one in which the market values and individualism plays a much greater role. This is very different, for example, from the Australia in which I grew up where there was a strong sense of public service and public interest.

This was embodied in a series of major public institutions which have since been cast aside. Industrial arbitration has been significantly undermined; a variety of state owned institutions have been privatised or partially privatised (airlines, banks, Telstra; electricity) the dollar has been floated, exchange controls abandoned and foreign banks introduced; contractual relations with private providers have replaced state services in the area of ambulances in Victoria ; water treatment in various states; employment services, prisons, roads. Progressive taxation has been reduced while user pays practices and commercialisation have dominated the remaining government bodies.

The economist Clive Hamilton from the Australia Institute summed up the result.

"In the old Australia", he said, 'citizens agreed to play by the rules of a civilised and democratic society and their government agreed to maintain full employment, provide good quality community services and protect the vulnerable. This contract has been unilaterally discarded because of the belief by the policy elite in the imperative of globalisation'.

So, globalisation has ripped up the old consensus. Some companies once had a sense of loyalty to their employees and they in return had a sense of loyalty to the company. Today, with all major corporations, that's gone. Outsourcing, for example, has hollowed out many companies and institutions. Part time work and contract work are on the way to destroying career structures. 'Old money' used to stand for something other than the bottom line, even if that 'something;' was a conservtive social vision. Today the bottom line rules in every way, in all instances.

On top of this, the collapse of communism has meant that capitalism has lost its major competitor.

Some leading thinkers about capitalism are worried. A few years ago Lester Thurow wrote a book called The Future of Capitalism. He is worried that the day will come when something will crack. There is a contradiction because the political system is based on equality - democracy guarantees one vote per person -- but economy generates massive inequalities, This can't go on for ever he warns - and he is not an enemy of capitalism, rather he is giving it a friendly warning. 'In the short run capitalism can politically afford to be much tougher economically on its workforce than it used to be when socialism or communism threatened it with an internal revolution and an external threat. But at some point, something will arise to challenge capitalism and capitalism will need the political support of more than those small numbers of individuals who are actually owners of substantial amounts of capital, Where is this support to come form?. (p 313)

All of this leads us to the question: is there an alternative to capitalism, especially capitalism in its new form?

The state of the Left
The main political alternative to capitalism - whether local or global -- has been socialism and the labour movement, which were born out of the appalling conditions of the rise of capitalism in Europe and Britain.

The news on the Left in the late 20th and early 21st century is not good. First, one of the key indicators is union membership which has been declining for 20 years. It is now dangerously low in private sector and overall around 30 %. In addition the organised Left has shrunk in numbers after its revival in the 1960s and 70s.

Even more important is the way the Left has lost the debate about the economy and about society.

The Left was always been renowned for its ideas about social change with a special attention to political economy and economic questions. But that has changed, The Left is now on the defensive. In Australia, Labor's direction was steered by free market ideas and this is a parallel to what happened over the world. Neither the Left within Labor nor the Left outside had an alternative economic policy that had credibility and popular support. The Left largely lost the debate on economic issues to the free marketeers within social democracy.

A third major blow the Left was the collapse of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Very few on the Left saw these countries as a light on the hill. Most of us regarded them as repressive societies which were a model of what NOT to do. However the nature of the Soviet Union's downfall was significant. It was not defeated militarily - it collapsed. Its economy - which was entirely state owned and centrally planned --- could not deliver better living standards and both it and its political system collapsed. Today socialism only survives where it has a market of some kind and/or is allied to a strong nationalism.

To many this meant that, like it or not, some form of capitalism and democracy is the only possible way to have a good society. Personally I believe that a form of 'mixed economy' is not only inevitable but desirable. But then, that's because I don't see 'ownership' as providing the magic key to a better society.

Fourthly and finally, the other factor affecting the Left's fortune's has been its one area of success. This has been in projecting the issues of the 70s on the mainstream agenda - where they remain, much to the chagrin of social conservatives who are found in both Labor and Liberal parties . These were about opposition to racism, about feminism and about damage to the natural world. But this progress has come at some cost. In promoting the rights of women or of groups faced with racism, we often find that as each group's interst is advanced, there is a lack of a shared, common vision. We have not yet synthesised a positive and egalitarian vision for families or for sexual relations generally, or a common vision for all Australians regardless of ethnicity or origins.

In many ways it would be fair to say that the Left has lost its vision which was rooted in traditional socialism.

You can see this if you ask yourself: when idealistic students and young people get interested in politics, who do they vote for? Often it is not the Labor Party but the Greens or, to a lesser extent, the Democrats. It's the same when they decide to join a party or group. Why is this? To my mind, it is because the Greens and Democrats seem to offer a new vision, a new philosophy which strikes a chord with idealistic young people.

Ideas about wealth inequality, about work and about unionism on their own are not enough to inspire more than a few. That is, the ideas of the labour movement and of socialism are not enough.

New vision
Some in the ALP want to ditch Labor's support for women's issues, for green issues. They argue that this is the way to claw back working class voters. This was argued by Martin Ferguson in his introduction to Michael Thompson's booklet 'Labor without Class'.

The arguments in that book boil down to a nostalgic yearning for the myth of happy families and happy (male) workers. Philosophically it is an argument that the only contradiction worth worrying about is between capital and labour (and even saying this elevates a puerile and spite-filled booklet).

But Ferguson and Thompson are right on to one thing. That Labor no longer has a coherent vision which fits together. Often it seemed that Labor in government consists of making a patchwork of deals with special interest groups - women, ethnic groups, indigenous groups, gays and the multitude of lobby groups which make up civil society.

I believe that somehow we have to put together a new vision which incorporates most of the traditional insights of socialist movement but which also incudes new challenges raised above all by the insights of feminism and the green movement.

What are some of the new challenges ?

• an economy which provides a decent living standard and meaningful work and provides a range of strong public services;
• an economy which is genuinely sustainable and which does not continually expand; in which material goods play a lesser role in giving meaning to our lives.
• a new set of public values to replace the view that the market can decide such questions. Instead of liberalism's individualism - a vision based on communities in which there is a sense of a common good. Instead of seeing nature as a resource, to see ourselves as a species as part of nature.
• a practical program to help work life and family/personal life to exist together along with a re-ordering of parental roles, to give fathers a far more involved part in parenting.
• a society in which different cultures and nationalities can live together with their differences but can genuinely forge a new identity, leaving much of their old identities behind.

Just to make one simple point.. How do we reconcile a decent material standard of living with the need for an environmentally sustainable economy? At the moment the United States with about 6 per cent of the world population consumes about 20 % of its resources. If every human on the planet has this living standard, the world would run out of oil, the atmosphere would be full of greenhouse gases and life would end fairly soon.

The key to it, I feel, is not a vision based on class and ownership (though these will remain important) but on forging a new moral vision. In the face of neo-liberal capitalism, many thinkers are turning toward an ethical revival. Such a vision could start to unite the patchwork of movements which we call 'the Left'; it would challenge economic rationalism at its weakest point - its amorality; it will allow the Left to link up with broader allies outside its activist ghetto; and it will retain what is of most value in the socialist project.

This is the project to which I think we must turn our minds. It is both philosophical and practical challenge and, whatever its weaknesses, such a vision could be the basis for a much needed debate on sustaining the values which were once at the core of the socialist vision.