But of course this is part of the problem. Supporters gather the crumbs thrown their way and their identification with this cornerstone institution of Australian life, or broader hopes for an ethic of co-operation, commits them again to vote Labor, leaving them ever more prone to cynicism and negativity when Labor fails to understand them, again. Other voters of course seem to accept that politics is about marginal seats and swinging votes, with hip-pocket considerations uppermost in this calculative approach to politics. These voters may be cynical too, but they will make this corrupt form of politics at least work for them.

At one level it is clear enough that left-wing cynicism and accusations of Labor irrelevance have emerged because of Labor’s failure on climate change under Rudd. The longer standing criticism gathering steam for many years is the so-called convergence of the parties, which is really a general shift to the Right—by those old standards of political difference—of both major parties, with Labor perhaps shifting furthest.

But it is still common, in letters to the editor and in conversations with a broad range of people, to hear a tone of incredulity; just why Labor has moved the way it has seems never to be really understood, and never to be satisfactorily explained. People are incredulous not just because they don’t understand what the shift means (and some sense it means something beyond the range of their common sense), but perhaps even more because Labor itself seems not to grasp what is obvious to others—that the party’s would-be goals and principles, as we still imagine them to be, are practically undercut by its actions and policies. This seems fair enough when you think of Rudd’s ETS solution to climate change that would have funded polluters and turned carbon to profit-making; or Gillard’s education revolution that continues to fund private schools so grossly and insults teachers by offering them monetary incentives to do their best by students; or that deeply disturbing humanitarian intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Solutions, revolutions and humanitarian interventions have turned out to be their very opposite. (See Bill Hannan, and Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris in this issue.)

For the person who looks on in disbelief this mismatch is disturbing, but it is indeed to the other sense of the ground shifting beneath their feet that we should turn. In another register these same observers must know that Labor has gone down the neo-liberal path—Labor generally makes no bones about it; we know that the market matters to Labor—we have heard it clearly in its defence of any number of policy initiatives; we know that there is this thing called ‘modern Labor’, which Hawke and Keating put on track and which has been unfolding since Whitlam. No one inside the party is trying to hide the fact that modern Labor has adjusted itself to a globalised neo-liberal reality. It has felt the power of the high-tech economy oriented to consumption and individualist satisfactions. As Labor itself makes plain, any social vision it has is utterly tied to growth—understood economistically and universalised as the greatest good from which all others flow and to which all social goods must contribute. No wonder unions now sit down with business in ways they never could have in the past. Today their interests seem self-evidently to be the same. (See Phil Cleary in this issue.)

So is it just a question of these fundamental-change deniers, that so many of us are seeing the Labor Party for what it is, and either getting fully on board the mega-engine of high-tech growth or alternatively, voting Green as many have and may well now do permanently? Has it just been too hard, too gut-wrenching to admit that the good old party, once and for all, is finally dead, or certainly dying? Or is it also because the prospect held out by modern Labor at its heart is in fact unbelievable?

Consciousness of social change is a complex, often self-denying state—one simultaneously of knowing and not knowing, of living change but also fearing or denying it; of witnessing one level of life and action but also sensing change at other levels of being that haven’t yet fully revealed themselves or been integrated into belief or rationality. The neo-liberal prospect (whether the Liberals’ version or Labor’s) of an exponentially expanding society of hyper-individualist consumers built on a-social market principles thought fundamentally not to be humanly controllable is a dystopian vision if ever there was one. Why would we want to face this vision squarely? And then it might also take some hard work to do so, yet this too is denied us as the neo-liberal university, and especially Labor’s vision of education, was thoroughly re-geared towards economism and high-tech productivism. There is nothing (and no interpretive position either) outside of the economy. What is left to Labor, in that other guise as expert technocrat manager, is merely to most efficiently deliver the social goods it believes can be engineered from this market’s bounty. This is the crying shame of modern Labor’s difference from the Liberals. All the good things about those who continue to support the Labor Party, their attachment to deeper values of care and co-operation, have nothing necessarily to do with modern Labor’s core attachments.

So it is not that ‘means’ have perverted the message: that Labor has chosen the wrong methods to deliver its education program, or to deliver its humanitarian goals, and that it is these that need to be changed, as many seem to hope will be possible. Rather, Labor has come to share the same basic model of society, the same basic goals: it has been carried along on the curl of a mighty techno-economic wave and believes it will garner a social dividend from it. For modern Labor, practically speaking, this is what the social is. This is not to say that Labor politicians and the broad array of its supporters don’t value a fuller experience of the social than the notion of a dividend implies. It’s just that the Labor Party is essentially uninterested in the question as a political (or philosophical) one.

On the one hand, politics is about managing the economy and delivering the dividend; on the other Labor already knows what the people want, which is to go on living the way they do, if in ways bigger and better than before. Politics is about technical know-how, with citizen-subjects lost to meaningful awareness of the social changes filtering into life and reshaping their aspirations, as surely none of the central political players have any purchase on the social meanings and consequences of the techno-economic shift, and no inclination to discover them.

The question of just how society is constituted always returns in periods of far-reaching social change. For the present Labor is not questioning its frame of reference.

* * *

As the Greens win in Melbourne and their vote across many seats exceeds expectations, we may not be seeing much of this kind of preparedness to search deeply either. A good part of the vote will be part of that bitter anti-Labor protest mentioned above. A good part of it will not reflect a single thought about the nature of the social, or even see the main task in the face of the neo-liberal market as the reassertion of its primacy. There will be plenty of technocrats within Green ranks, explicit or implicit, of the mind that technology will solve the planet’s woes. But at base the question of growth and alternatives to the version of it we already know is in play. The question of the social form in which we live is pressing beneath the surface of contradictions confusingly experienced—how to live well without consumerist notions of what that entails or, most recently, how a population might express itself in a degraded liberal-democratic form in which the cornerstone parties had nothing to say about the most pressing issues of our time.

More immediately perhaps, a fundamental valuation of the natural world is being held up as a counter to the economic vision associated with modernity, which is to say of either the Left or the Right, and which is just so out of date. As an autonomous realm of value vis-à-vis the techno-economic, and of potential new meanings for cultures positively oriented to the future, any practical defence of it will draw in questions of social being and organisation, and they won’t take the form of distributive questions primarily, and not at all in terms of ‘dividends’.

Alison Caddick

Of course this isn’t the reality for every teenager, but the research from various quarters is convincing in building a general picture of a trend. Left-liberal critics have, over years now, argued that the neo-liberal market has set this trend in motion, with advertising and markets being key factors; a story of exploitation through the selling power of sex. Conservatives typically pinpoint the issue as the moral bankruptcy of a certain ‘postmodern’ coterie who promote porn as liberating or, more mundanely, simply an aid to good sex. Needless to say, the conservative position neglects the fact that neo-liberalism has indeed unleashed an amoral market calculus in just about every sphere of personal and social life—the same one whose economic growth they celebrate—and if there is a morally bankrupt ‘postmodern’ understanding of sex and porn, it hasn’t emerged out of a vacuum.

Pornification refers not just to a revaluation of sex and sexual freedom—the message of the 1970s—but to the mainstreaming of porn in raunch, the style typical of Ralph and other mid-level-porn men’s magazines and represented over and over in sporting magazines, bill-board advertising and television shows revelling in the license now given to a certain range of men’s fantasies. Hard porn is certainly an object for both sets of critics mentioned above. But it is the filtering down of the pornographic gaze and attitude of barely contained salaciousness that is the larger cultural presence, and which is of special concern when we’re talking about children and the forming of sexual attitudes.

The idea in psychoanalysis and social theory that fantasy is important in individual and social life has by now filtered down into popular culture. Few would deny that how we think and act in the world is at some level mediated by fantasy. But the cultural inclination to see this as meaning our sexual fantasies should be ‘freed’, so that our unique needs are expressed, or amorally cultivated as an exploration of a performative self (sex is a complete construction), are already tired ideas. They certainly offer no critical help in grasping the meaning of pornification as a broad-ranging phenomenon. Sexual fantasy has jumped individual experience and the self’s individual projection in fantasy to return as an ideological object in the pornification of society as a whole. As there is no generally accepted social or cultural constraint in operation around the expression of sexual desire, we don’t know where to turn for justifications to limit it or why we should be cautious when it takes on a public life of its own.

Most of us register the greater presence of porn today, both its greater accessibility and the libertarian justifications put forward for it by business organisations like the Eros Foundation. But how we engage with pornography can no longer be contained within the terms of earlier understandings, where debate about porn assumed its limited circulation, a private sphere, a self capable of sustained reflection upon its actions and a market where the circulation of images and identities for sale had limits. Today porn circulates ceaselessly and is virtually ubiquitous in expanding networks of digital media, colonising and commodifying the body, sexuality and the private.

* * *

Germaine Greer was recently pilloried in The Monthly by Louis Nowra. As some feminist commentators noted, it might have been more appropriate to ask a woman to comment on The Female Eunuch’s 40-year anniversary (one might add, especially someone equipped to analyse Greer’s texts seriously and, even better, the meaning of the whole feminist, and now post-feminist enterprise). Nowra so badly missed the point about Greer, and The Female Eunuch, it was almost ludicrous. He thinks she doesn’t really like women, a view echoed by some younger women intellectuals over the years as part of their critique of second wave feminism’s emphasis on structure and patriarchy. But this is a view clearly not subscribed to by lots of women who see in her work a fearless advocacy on their behalf. Nowra also ridiculously criticised The Female Eunuch for not having got women into a better place over forty years—for having not got the future right—when surely its major purpose was to show how masculine power has worked to shape the lives and subjectivities of women. Does Nowra think that would have ceased to be the case?

One of Greer’s shocking observations that has always stuck with me is that it will be hard for men and women to achieve equality because of there being a hierarchy of those who penetrate and those who are penetrated. This is one of the things those younger intellectual women hated: the idea that women may be always-already vulnerable. Three other, not unconnected, contributions include Greer’s early observation of the tutoring of young girls in ‘how-to-look-after-your boyfriend’-type sex articles in girls’ magazines. Another was her rejection of the idea that a man who becomes a ‘woman’ is a woman. The third was her idea that the vagina is being replaced by other mere receptacles. Of course there is hyperbole in all this. But as people are more generally starting to worry about the pornification of society, devaluing of girls, the often criminal antics of footballers, with Ralph playing on prime time everywhere, it’s possible that Greer has a good nose for some of the brute-masculinising trends in our culture.

But should we be, as Nowra seems to be, worried about the kind of tough talk about sex that feminism itself has bequeathed us? Does it contribute to a general coarsening of sexual talk and imagery? Is it implicated in the pornification of society?

Of course feminists have been in an unenviable position in relation to the ‘exposés’ they have mounted in the spirit of laying bare gendered structures of power. ‘Making the personal political’ on one definition is pornographic itself, where practices once embedded in private life are flattened out and displayed on the cultural surface of conscious reality. Whether it’s domestic violence, incest or rape, the content is unseemly. But how is the unpalatable to be raised if not by breaking certain types of taboo?

An argument about the flow-on effects or unintended consequences of talking tough about sex might be applied to post-feminism too: if sex and gender are performative, in this view porn is just another sexual game, sophisticatedly understood as constructed in ironic narratives that only pious fools take seriously. But it follows that men’s-club-type fantasies and mass ‘sluttification’ are simply ‘what men want’, with lap dancers and swimsuit models enjoying being in on the joke. So billboards for men’s clubs are put up beside primary schools, while any basis in thinking as to why this might be a problem has been so undermined that those wanting them removed are called prudes.

* * *

Critics of feminism who blame the tough talk of feminist critique for adding to a culture of degradation and obscenity miss the deeper change that it going on around us. Older understandings of sex, desire and gender are being gathered up within new relations of power that draw upon older debates but also transform them. What is new here are our culture’s hyper-individualist belief in autonomy, a deep-going visual fetish fed by high-gloss advertising and screen culture, and the high-tech accessibility of porn; the old is inescapably patriarchal, but recreating itself in new forms. What might feel like an uncontrollable contagion moving through society is in fact a social process working its way through culturally authorised practices along old faultlines in our species being, part of which is that we are sexed and gendered and have an ambivalent attitude to our ‘animality’.

It’s unlikely that we are going to get over this ambivalence or complexity around nature/culture, an always volatile anchor point of sexual relations and the raising of children. Cognisant of this, not only should markets in sex and sexualised markets be restricted but moral discourse should be re-valued as a necessary adjunct to adult autonomous decision making.

Second-wave feminism was strongly focused on the question of women’s autonomy in the sense of women being able to act on the basis of their own decision making, when it was considered that women’s capacity for serious moral deliberation had been denied in historical patriarchy. This was itself a modern notion of autonomy; the rights of men, to their own conscience and sphere of personhood, applied to women. Post-feminism has been far more radical in its practices and understandings of autonomy, not unlike the culture in which it has emerged and flourished (although a reversion to young women calling themselves feminists seems to be underway).

In the context of the break-up of the modern social structures in the post-war period and the rise of neo-liberalism, autonomy can no longer be individual in the sense of the person exercising serious moral thought, including individual choice, about a taken-for-granted world. Rather, women, like everyone else, now experience a shifting world offering radically new kinds of choices built on technical means for dispensing with prior physical and social boundaries and the obligations that once attached to them.

Porn via high-tech massification of product, in a context of autonomy from cultural constraint, is exactly one such break out from obligation. It is also a break out from moral thoughtfulness as viewers of its content, as with pornification generally, are likely to believe it’s ‘just fantasy’. Yet the figures produced for and justified in porn culture will act back with the force of social facts, defining girls and women and enforcing their identities.

Some critical version of feminism, attuned to the new, will still be necessary.

Alison Caddick

But examples like this cannot be taken too seriously in their own right, for there is a distinctly larger picture that demands our attention. Within its terms such failure is only one aspect of an unravelling process focused on the Rudd government. How can this be, after the spellbinding hold of Kevin Rudd over the Australian people for the past two years? No doubt a souring of sentiment caused by the GFC is taking its toll, as it has in the United States and the West more generally. Politics usually loses its gloss when economic boom goes to bust, easy money runs out and people suffer. Rudd’s stimulus packages have been widely supported by the broad community, but a souring note can’t help but creep in. People’s confidence has been undermined; their futures are much less likely to be clear. While things could have been much worse, life has been made more difficult for many and, fair or not, this was not what electors hoped for when Rudd offered change from eleven years of John Howard.

This souring of sentiment has in fact come to permeate the four main planks of Rudd’s campaign success. The demise of WorkChoices has not restored the work conditions people can still remember. The whole environment of work is more stressful and unpredictable for many workers compared to twenty years ago, and WorkChoices symbolised this transformation. It is now clearer to people that WorkChoices was a symptom rather than the cause. The revolution in education has largely been a fizzer and bears no resemblance to the opening up of hope and possibility (however romantic some of that feeling may have been) associated with the expanded educational strategies that began with Bob Menzies and were enhanced by Gough Whitlam. Now a consumer mentality and a managerial meanness towards others sits at the centre of educational institutions, reflected in education being sold as a commodity on the world market. This has set a generalised pattern that has its equivalent in school education and Julia Gillard’s competitive grading of schools. The health revolution has amounted to little. And then there is the central promise of the 2007 campaign: that Rudd would take climate change seriously.

While many people are concerned deeply by the prospect of climate change, they manage that concern to a significant degree by compartmentalising it from other aspects of their lives. Yes, we will have to change the way we live, by using a lot more renewable energy, say, or as per that illusory proposal, by making coal clean. Somehow the change can be made without significant cost to or transformation of how we live. The idea is, the economists tell us, that while there will be a slight fall-off in growth and the standard of living we have experienced in recent years, in the main life will go on as before. This view is widespread among both environmentalists and policy makers. It is also the formula adopted by Rudd and is the framework for his Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which seeks to integrate climate change strategy into a further elaboration of the market economy.

If the wheels have dropped off Rudd’s policy agenda, it is more true of climate change than any other policy area. One does not have to take a sceptical position on climate change to acknowledge that the ETS generated a valid fear of unnecessary complexity. If some have turned against Rudd because they are no longer convinced of the validity of scientific claims about climate change, others may have taken a more positive turn that looks to wider possibilities in the long run. The slow realisation that any attempt to address climate change and environmental challenges generally will have deep repercussions for how we live is not a negative outcome. It is a gain. While at the moment there is a degree of uncertainty about where to turn, this hesitation may well become an opening to a more realistic and necessary phase culminating in a more serious practical approach. In the short term, while the collapse of Rudd’s strategy for climate change may deeply trouble many people, whatever else, the simplistic solutions of his initial response have lost their credibility.

While these particular elements of public mood and the reassessment of policy are having a significant effect in unravelling the Rudd political ascendancy, there is also a more profound level of change at work. Why is it that politics is increasingly composed of policies and strategies that seem convincing only for relatively short periods of time, where ‘certainties’ last no longer than a few years? This is not a problem merely for the Rudd government; it also characterised some of the problems faced by John Howard, who suddenly saw the certainties of his political world melt before his eyes.

Politics is often described as the art of the possible. Politicians typically address the social issues and conflicts that confront them and move the electorate, while assuming that the underlying social relations that produce conflicts remain largely unchanged. Political immediacy is hardly a new phenomenon. But the world that attitude takes for granted is now a much more complex and dangerous place, as social conflicts no longer arise out of well-known social patterns. In a recent interview in the New Left Review (no. 61) Eric Hobsbawm commented: ‘Historically, communities and social systems have aimed at stabilisation and reproduction, creating mechanisms to keep at bay disturbing leaps into the unknown … How is it, then, that humans and societies structured to resist dynamic development came to terms with a mode of production whose essence is endless and unpredictable dynamic development?’ In this observation Hobsbawm has in mind the restlessness of capitalism as the root cause of this dynamic. But the truth is that the extraordinary nature of our times arises out of a combination of capitalism and a new social principle that drives the dynamic at a frenzied pace and takes hold not only of the mode of production but also our life-ways.

Behind the ‘permanent revolution’ that life in the contemporary world has become lies the high-tech revolution. The intellectual agents of this revolution have been drawn into the ambit of capitalism and rapid changes to many fundamental aspects of human existence have become a fait accompli. Supported by the media on the one hand, including the increasingly popular possibility of living via the internet, and developments in techno-production, the post-human calls to us. We change the balance of our lives by putting aside the substantial presence of others in favour of abstract associations. While resistance to change is still a deep reality, it is nevertheless muted, as people are drawn into processes that place fleeting mobility at the centre of their lives. And this composes that restless reference point of contemporary politics.

These are the processes that provide much of the backdrop and material for the populism of a John Howard to exploit. Populist politics is made possible when broader social changes disturb people, threaten their jobs, alter their sense of selfhood, and are constantly mutating into new social conflicts that may or may not be manageable for the politicians of the day. So the very same society that made it possible for John Howard to exploit a fear of ‘border crossers’ and terrorists supplied Kevin Rudd with the electoral lever of climate change, which helped bring Howard down. The society that gave support to Kevin Rudd in this goal continues at the same time to pursue consumption and growth—of economy and population—with such vigour that climate change and environmental catastrophe more generally seem unavoidable. It may be possible to ride this unpredictable monster in the short term through superficial policy adjustments, but the shelf life of any government is likely to be short.

Every challenger believes they can perform differently. Now Tony Abbott is staking his claim and there are some signs that the electorate is ready to grab even that possibility, at least for the moment. But all such choices avoid coming to terms with the fundamental question of our time. What is to be done about the emergence of a high-tech capitalism that never ceases to provide evidence that such a society is unsustainable?