Some time around the beginning of the twentieth century, working people began to seize state power. Whether you date that from the world’s first, faltering, Labo(u)r government in Queensland, or social democracy in Norway, or the October Revolution; and whatever one might say about the failures and disasters of these projects, whether from timidity or corruption, or hubris or something worse, the fact is they happened, and that taking state power for the purpose of social transformation was part of the political imagination within which people worked.
That possibility is now more out of reach than at any time since the nineteenth century and that single fact governs a great deal of politics today. Across the world, and especially in the English-speaking world, lack of media outlets with a left or progressive perspective, and the economistic orientation of the trade union movement has created a cycle of disengagement which has now been at work for a generation — since the commencement of the Reagan–Thatcher era, and the economic rationalist turn of the ALP. To a degree this can be traced back to the globalisation of the economy, and the increased divisions within the working class — between those with (by global standards) good wages, often maintained only by overtime regimes which make a mockery of the forty-hour week, and those trapped in the cycle of benefits, casual work and the sadistically capricious process of ‘breaching’. Of equal importance is the rise of an ill-defined middle stratum of people in banking, insurance, finance, media and image production. A section of these — some cultural producers, some types of academics, and those in social policy and practice — are permanently allied with progressive parties, even when it is not in their economic interests to be so. The rest are up for grabs, and must be bid for, overwhelmingly with tax breaks. These new groupings are the precipitate of the new divisions of production and income in the world, and they are turning the more prosperous OECD countries into centre-right electorates.
But it is not income itself, but new ways of social integration that are the most important part of this mix. The individualisation of the workplace — where it is not being dissolved altogether — the fierce competition for scarce tertiary education, and the growth of ‘network’ (as opposed to class, religious or associational) forms of living are resetting the context within which social life occurs.
The effects of this can be seen everywhere: in politics, the Howard Government can announce a $7.5 billion surplus, at the same time as the long-term deterioration of the public health and education systems becomes clearer by the day. The ALP’s response is muted because it does not want to be portrayed as a ‘tax and spend’ party. On the other hand its response to poverty — Mark Latham’s matched savings scheme — is utterly individualised, but also gives the appearance of a party willing to give vast sums of money away, with little control over how it is eventually spent. In health, public hospitals teeter on the brink of closure, because of the mass resignation of doctors concerned about lifetime exposure to an expanded range of malpractice suits — yet public trust is so low in the profession and the system that people justifiably want to reserve the right of legal redress. Across the world, party politics is being increasingly supplanted by wealthy individuals whose power comes from the media. Thus we have Governor Schwarzenegger, President Berlusconi (who has near-monopoly control of the Italian media) and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg (head of the world’s largest finance-media outlet).
They are often grafted onto party structures, but increasingly they fund their own campaigns. Their rise is in part a continuation of the old dynastic politics of families such as the Kennedys and the Bushes, but it is also a victory of the image over actual people — the voters of California obviously weren’t voting for an immigrant Austrian bodybuilder per se. The culture within which such a politics occurs buttresses the assumption that parties and movements barely exist: shows like Survivor show many examples of genuine co-operation and human connection, but their overall take on social life is that of the war of all against all. People watch, absorbed and horrified, in a spirit of what one might call ‘comparative catharsis’ — the relief that things aren’t that bad at the office/factory/school/ college/Centrelink ... yet. Shows such as Australian Idol have none of the bumbling amateurishness of earlier talent shows such as New Faces. This makes them more watchable, but it also dedicates them to turning music from a Dionysian spirit of release and celebration to one of disciplined, individualised career obsessiveness, half protestant ethic, half New Age pop psychology. It does not succeed — the realm of excess will always escape attempts to govern it — but it does its work in transforming the personality and behaviour of those who like music, the young.
Faced with such a culture and economy, what is a social democratic party to do? Labor may win the next election, even though its policy development is in disarray, its feuding obvious and its leader less popular than psoriasis. It very probably won’t and, in the traumatic aftermath, it may become what the NSW ALP has become under Bob Carr — a right-wing, openly authoritarian party tapping into the worst of its historical traditions. It will present itself as a party that does law and order better than the Coalition, and link this to poverty, and to immigration. Such policies build on the culture of all-encompassing fear endemic to hyper-individualism. Supplemented with Latham’s redistributive Thatcherism, the party would likely become a completely different entity — just as the German Social Democratic party is unrecognisable as the heir of the nineteenth-century Marxist party of the same name.
The alternative is for Labor to begin talking about society again, and weather the increasingly worn-out baiting of the tabloids, to promote a new social vision — one that recognises the joys and advances of a network society, but also reminds people that it is cast on a bedrock of common life. It needs to talk not about ‘social capital’ — often a term used for ‘society’ by people who don’t believe it exists — but about ‘social plant’: the investment in hospitals, schools and services that have been run down as a deliberate attempt by the Coalition to create a privatised society. It needs to talk a simple language that makes these connections, not bubble out semi-crankish schemes that strike even their immediate beneficiaries as slightly dodgy. Otherwise it will simply cease to exist as a party, even though the name may carry on as the brand of an entity that has replaced it. A vacuum — and there has been one in the discussion of social life as social, and not as the coincident area of contractual networks — is noticeable, even if it has no content. It should be clear that people want to talk about this stuff, want some answers, want to know how it all works. Had Labor begun this five years ago it might now have been in a position so strong that not even a culture of fear and war would be able to defeat it. It cannot afford to wait another five.
GR
