There are some signs that the ALP is gearing up to follow the example set by Tony Blair in Britain. Mark Latham, the most vocal advocate of Blair’s approach to government, the Third Way, has been returned to the shadow front bench, charged with the task of working out why the residents of Sydney’s outer suburbs failed to vote Labor. Lindsay Tanner, who disowns the ‘Third Way’ label but advocates a similar policy agenda to that of Latham, has positioned himself as a major player in the reform process. More generally, the rhetoric of reform shares many parallels with New Labour: the emphasis on community and participation, as well as the ritualistic blaming of the Trade Union movement for all the Party’s present ills.

On the face of it, Blair’s two landslide victories in comparison to the ALP’s six years in opposition seem to offer an obvious model for Labor. But when looked at more closely, Blair’s ‘landslide’ victories are not all they’re cracked up to be.

It ought to be recalled that New Labour won its second victory with around only 25 per cent of the eligible vote. Some commentators suggest the true figure may be closer to 20 per cent of those eligible to vote, given that many people who have dropped off the electoral roll to avoid paying the poll tax have never bothered to re-register. The 2001 British General Election was distinguished by having the lowest total voter turnout since 1918 when voter turnout was disrupted by the war. This year, only 58 per cent of the population bothered to vote. Labour MP Jack Straw tried to put a positive spin on this, claiming that the low turnout reflected widespread contentment with the government. Those with a firmer grip on reality attributed the lack of participation to voter apathy.

While comparisons with Britain and Australia are difficult to sustain because of differences in the nature of the political and electoral systems, party and political culture, the point here is that despite the appearance of landslide victories, there is no mass groundswell of popular support for Blair and New Labour.

Furthermore, if the ALP does go down the New Labour path, they will have to contend with the fact that the Liberals have already pinched most of the Blair agenda. Mutual obligation, social capital, social inclusion and all the rest of the New Labour lexicon regularly pop up in speeches by Howard Government ministers. Sounding like your opponent, even if there is a substantive difference in your policy, is not a smart strategy for a party that many perceive to be lacking in conviction.

If not the Third Way, then where to for Labour?

Part of the problem faced by Labor is its failure to develop new constituencies. The fact is that constituencies — as the term suggests — are constituted; they do not occur naturally.

In the 1950s and 1960s Menzies expanded home ownership, a consequence of which was to create a swathe of middle-class voters imbued with conservative Liberal values. Whitlam attempted to create a coalition constituency among young white-collar workers, women voters and the alternative lifestyle movement, by expanding government services. His time in office was, however, too brief to consolidate such groups.

In the 1980s and 1990s the ALP flirted with white-collar voters and the green vote, while its own policy settings (deregulation, privatisation etc.) contributed to the destruction of its core support in organised industrial labour. And therein lies the problem for Labour today: it is much easier to create constituencies with the resources of government than it is from the relative obscurity of opposition.

If current media reports are accurate, the ALP leadership is currently trying to woo so-called ‘aspirational’ voters. These are people who have no strong party allegiance, are working or lower middle-class, but aspire to ‘something better’. Such voters are the main target of Blair’s New Labour and Howard’s Liberals.

Barring a messy leadership change or a major scandal, the ALP’s pitch for the aspirational vote is likely to fail. The reason?

By the time the next election rolls around, the Liberals will have had around nine years to cultivate this constituency as their own. Moreover, in order to appeal to the aspirationals, the ALP will have to sound and look like the Liberals as much as possible. In other words, we will see a repeat of its recent election performance, where the ALP appears as the poor man’s aspirational party.

If the ALP is to avoid a repeat of its recent performance, it needs to reach beyond the aspirational voters to build and consolidate new coalitions of constituencies to outnumber the aspirationals. This might include those who rejected the Party in favour of the Greens at the recent election and, as far out as it may seem now, those who protested outside Crown Casino on September 11 2000.

To use a key phrase favoured by the proponents of the Third Way to characterise their approach, this would be to think the unthinkable.

Christopher Scanlon is Associate Editor of Arena Magazine

This move to open power in the aftermath of the terrorist attack marks a new stage in a process of global extension of its explicit power and of the institutions — overwhelmingly the semi-open market — upon which they are based. The Gulf War was an intervention into a dispute wholly contained within the Arab world for the purposes of guaranteeing a compliant oil producer — that ‘Nintendo’ war, whose casualties John Pilger reminds us of, spawned the Iraq sanctions and the immense sufferings of the Iraqi population. The signing of the GATT and the establishment of the WTO exposed the South to Northern economic power in a way that spawned the Zapatista uprising and the new global movement that sprang from it. Prior to that the Carter government — as former advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski now admits — established and funded the mujhadeen before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was intended to provoke just such a move (Nouvel Observateur 15.01.98). That act not only destroyed what had been a modernising society and launched upon the seas the asylum seekers our Navy is now firing upon, it created much of the extra capacity for the renewed global heroin trade — a crop the US encouraged the muj’ to develop as a funding base. Militant Islam was selectively encouraged by the US, but also served as a conduit for and expression of the rage felt by the Arab world and central Asia at the endless manipulations to which it had been subject by the West. With the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the attack, it all came together in a double fireball. Such a movement — combining ‘national’ rage with a religious calling out and networks of money and power — has expanded far beyond the root causes which gave it a start. Militant religion has become a mode of production for suicide warriors. Initial grievances about international relations, Palestine and Iraq have given way to the pure desire to land a blow on the enemy, to take revenge for being no more than a target in the Nintendo conflict. As has been noted, the attack on the Twin Towers was a very late skirmish in the Gulf War. That such a movement began as a reaction to the same global racket which also spawned the new global movement (sometimes called anti-globalisation movement) has been used by the Right to portray the opponents of the US as a single entity. The reverse is the case — expanding US power is a single entity which attracts the resistance of groups with totally opposed worldviews.

That the Twin Towers and Pentagon attack was evil and ruthless goes without saying. Yet the political uses to which it has been put are manifold. The Right, both in the US and here, has sought to label the very act of reflecting upon global power as an act of ‘blaming the victim’ and US culture — as Ray Nichols notes — has slipped over into an unabashed triumphalism, endorsed by the President. The attack on civil liberties is occurring on multiple fronts. As Damien Lawson and Nehal Bhuta note, much of it over here was prepared for by the mockery the government made of separation of powers and rights during the Tampa affair. The process of extending executive power into every sphere of life can now continue. Since the overall cultural and political effect of an expanding market is to make executive power into the only type of state power that is real (the strong leader, the no-nonsense government) crises such as war-scares cut with the grain of the age.

Parallel to the attack on such civil liberties as exist is an attempt to conscript the public emotions in the interests of foreign policy. For many, such sympathy as one had for the victims of the attack and their relatives became increasingly tinged by bitterness that the lives of those living in New York came to be valued more highly de facto than the nameless, numberless dead of the South. But as with the death of Princess Diana — which acted as a dress rehearsal for this sort of thing — reason and emotion came to be deemed mutually exclusive, and cleaving to the former an act of disloyalty. The implicit proposition — that the degree of one’s sympathy should be influenced by the spectacular character of the event or the number of cable channels covering it — is truly immoral. Nevertheless, it has become the official attitude. As Douglas McQueen-Thomson notes this is a war as constituted in language as any war that ever occurred, yet to ask the question of what a ‘war on terrorism’ really means is to invite the charge of ‘appeaser’. The idea is meaningless and the fact that various government and military figures talking about it being a ten, thirty or hundred years’ war indicates its true character. It is a blank cheque that the US and its closest allies — our government included — are writing themselves to give US power an unlimited pretext to abuse the sovereignty of other peoples in the name of protecting its own. It is a unilateral abolition of other people’s borders at the same time as one’s own are made into fortress walls. Our government is also dipping its toe in this water with the manufactured refugee ‘crisis’. Fortress Australia is being sandbagged with places such as Nauru whose independence has been de facto abolished using the leverage of their bankruptcy. The US has now abandoned any distinction between private terror organisations and the states within which they are located, yet this too will be selective. Pakistan continues to host Kashmiri terrorists, autonomous Kosovo, Albanian ones. Both may go quiet for a while, but only as a tactical maneouvre. The ruling as to who is in and out of the war will be as capricious and partial as the old freedom fighter–terrorist distinction.

The shocking nature of the Twin Towers attack has given the exercise of American power a new domestic strength. A peace movement has begun, but many middle of the road liberals who would support, say, an end to sanctions against Iraq, will find themselves lining up with the US government. As Kimberley Serca notes, the most high profile ‘left’ figure to line up with US power has been Christopher Hitchens who has figured the Taliban–bin Laden nexus as ‘Islamic fascists’ in a conscious recall of the popular front of the 1930s, but he is only the most eloquent of many who would have a similar disposition. Nor can one retreat into any easy blanket pacifism on this issue. Mohammed Atta and his cohorts were clearly acting as a self-contained group who had planned the attack over several years. Yet it also seems likely that they were partially funded and mentored by bin Laden’s Al-Qaida group — and it is clear that Al-Qaida is thoroughly intertwined with the Taliban — one of bin Laden’s wives is the daughter of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Now that bin Laden has replied to US actions with the promise of new attacks on the US mainland and a call to the Muslim world to launch war on the US, there is clearly scope for some legitimised US action. One could put it another way — the US now has the sovereign enemy it needed for a war. It may soon have many others.

The moral impossibility of supporting the war as it is being conducted is clear, even for those of us who are not pacifists. The bombing of civilian populations is unacceptable in any circumstances other than as defence against total attack by a whole sovereign power and this has clearly not occurred in the case of desperate Afghanistan. The Taliban’s hosting of bin Laden would have given the US the right to call on a UN force to bring him to an international court of justice — had, as Andy Butfoy notes, the US not embarked on an unprecedented effort to destroy international authority in recent months and years — but it no more sanctions an attack on the whole society than would Cuban exile raids on Havana give Castro an excuse to strike at the United States.

The issues of ‘host’, ‘sponsorship’ and ‘territory’ are far more complex than it would be convenient for the US government to admit. Yet looking at the still smoking hole in Manhattan and a city whose communal life has become dominated by funerals the question comes back at the nascent peace movement: what is to be done about terror?

The question cannot be ducked but that does not mean it needs to be accepted in those terms, either in principle or in practice. Principle first. The current and ongoing role of the US in the global South makes it morally impossible to line up with. Palestine and Iraq are the two causes which serve as the pretext for bin Laden’s activities, yet the more serious crime has been the US government’s active and zealous enforcement of the IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs and the WTO provisions which allow for the transfer of wealth from South to North. The human cost of this process in unnecessary suffering and cultural destruction over the last twenty years dwarfs anything thrown up by the fascism, Nazism, Stalinism or first-wave colonialism in the rest of the twentieth century. It is done by bankers and bureaucrats who are explicitly aware of its human cost. It is presented as an inevitable consequence of development and globalisation, but there are humane alternatives available, even within the development paradigm — most notably a global protection of labour rights to organise and global support of convivial technology and financing (small-scale banking) — so the moral–political choice is real. The dead are not shot or exploded, they die — as did most of those in the Gulag — through overwork, malnutrition and preventable disease. The universality of the neoliberal market gulag — it will take anyone as raw material — obscures the common roots it has with the more explicit tyrannies. The horror of the Twin Towers attack and the fact that its agents were devoted believers in a premodern form of religion that had nothing to say about this dimension of America’s global role has led many commentators to call criticism of the US hackneyed or irrelevant — as if it were a fashion for less volatile times. The role of the US does not in any way justify the Twin Towers attack or anything like it by any organisation, but that is not at issue. The issue is whether the Left can morally line up with the state, as the British Left could in September 1939. The answer here is that, unequivocally, it cannot.

The dilemma of the American Left in these circumstances is similar to the dilemma of an anti-Nazi German in WW2. In retrospect resistance to one’s own government was the only moral course of action — at ground zero, facing the British, French and Soviets without illusion of their magnanimity would have made this course of action somewhat less shiningly clear. As the US gets deeper into the war and the possibility of uprising in Pakistan or elsewhere, or the use of chemical or biological weapons, or a dozen other scenarios become more plausible, the dilemma for the American peace movement will deepen. But here the practical buttresses the principle. There is no path to security for the US public through the war on terrorism.

The degree to which the American attack on central Asia will destabilise various Arab regimes is unknowable. At the end of WW2 Orwell argued that a third world war would be preferable to a nuclear stalemate, as the latter would cement a power system that could last indefinitely. The prospect of Arab uprising in a number of states is looked upon by many with a similar uneasy ambivalence, since the alternative is virtually uncontested US power with the tang of easy victory in its nostrils. Yet the record of the sort of groups that could make such an uprising, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, are blood-chilling (as it should be noted is the virulent anti-semitism and Hitler-worship which disfigures some of the Arab press). But such groups will be rubbing their hands with delight as the US pushes increasing numbers of Arab and central Asian peoples to a fundamental solidarity.

For Australians the call to solidarity with the US comes on several grounds — that the states of the world have to defend themselves against free-floating terror; that bin Laden and his organisation want to dominate the world and impose a particular form of shar’ia; that solidarity should be based on cultural and historical connection. The last of these has no validity whatsoever — since there is no sign that the US would come unequivocally to our aid in the face of threats to us from any other powers. One week after the Howard Government signed a blank cheque of support to the US government, Congress signed its own blank cheque — in the form of an unprecedentedly huge amount of subsidies to American farmers. This further example of free trade globally/protect locally is a measure of our special relationship.

Nor has the second of these propositions been established. Bin Laden has expressed a desire to destroy America, but mainly because America is — as he sees it — actively humiliating and oppressing the Muslim world. His concerns are overwhelmingly with the ‘purity’ of that world. Those who align themselves unquestioningly with the US will unnecessarily make themselves a target. Australia’s relative insignificance should, in this respect, be a source of security, not talked away.

But it is the first of these propositions — lining up with the state (or a coalition of states) against free-floating terror — that is the skein from which power and positions are currently unravelling. The ‘war on terror’ has thematised the big T, the twentieth century’s shadow, as its enduring enemy yet it is, as always, unlicensed terror that is subject to eradication. Alluding to some of the themes explored here by Angela Mitropoulos we can say that it is not violence itself but legitimacy, sovereignty that is in question.

Terror — not merely violence — is central to the question of the state and power. Violence is graded and allocated to citizens to varying degrees from sport to self-defence to private security. Civil life is contoured with different degrees of violence. Terror is held to be the preserve of the state alone. Private use of it tears a hole in the fabric of power and the rip can extend indefinitely. Though bound up with warfare from the earliest times, modern terror begins when the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations — the scorched earth policy of Roman, Tartar, Inca and Conquistador alike — shifts to the killing of randomly chosen representatives of a social group. The technique comes to fruition in the European empires (Captain Arthur Phillip’s capture and execution of six Aborigines, rather than an entire group, as punishment for raids for example). Terror installs death and power at the heart of life, rather than simply killing. The terrifying Other is then permanently at home in the psyche of the terrorised, and autonomously polices them. What came to be called terrorism in the nineteenth century — especially as practised by Russian radicals — we now know as assassination, since the principal target was the Tsar. He was targetted not merely as the symbolic personification of the state, but as its actual keystone, whose shattering would cause a collapse of the whole structure.

The intertwining of unlicensed terror and technology pushed the activity into the centre of Western political life and fears — as measured by two classics of turn of the century literature, Conrad’s Secret Agent and Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men. (The use of dynamite to dispatch one Tsar and US President McKinley so shocked its inventor Alfred Nobel that he invented the peace prize to make amends.) Terror thus haunted the imagination of civil society as the other side of technology — even though the actual risk it presented was vanishingly small. Three innovations transformed it into a weapon of unparalleled effectiveness. In 1916 IRA leader Michael Collins moved from a guerrilla strategy to one of urban terror in which enemy figures targetted were not the leaders — whose identity and sense of self was bound up with enforcing British rule — but the small-fry. British informers, sycophants and camp followers were killed for no reason other than being who they were — for precisely the fact that their particular death would make little real difference. Terror was thus pushed towards a general condition. Anyone pro-British was a combatant. Collins’s strategy was the template for modern terror and of such success that one of the next innovators took the names of the IRA leader as a codename — Michael for Yitzak Shamir. Shamir, with Menachim Begin, developed a strategy of outrage with the Irgun and the Lehi groups during the fight to establish Israel in 1948, employing not only ethnic cleansing (the massacre of the Palestinian village of Dair Yassen) but also excluded middle — the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, UN negotiator for the mandate — the extension of the definition of combatants (the dead in the blown-up King David Hotel included numerous non-military stenographers and office staff) and the pornography of death (the execution/murder of two British sergeants was filmed and the film delivered to Mandate authorities). The tactics outraged the mainstream Zionist armed group the Haganah, and they exterminated most such groups. To little effect — the British quit the mandate before a two-state solution could be negotiated, which had been the Irgun’s aim. Begin’s insight was that terror could live off the horror of its friends as much as its enemies — that it relentlessly and irresistably shifts the ground of politics, that anyone ruthless and desperate enough to use it will be rewarded — in Ireland and Israel’s case with statehood. When George Habash and Wadi Hadid of the PFLP defined all Israelis as combatants by virtue of their nationhood and the Japanese Red Army put this into practice at Lod Airport they effectively completed terror’s universalisation.

A grisly history, yet mild compared with the history of state terror — whether Red or White in 1917, the Nazis at Guernica, or the bombing of Cambodia. Non-state terror looms large on the social psychological horizon because it is purely rogue — not only is it unattached to any form of other power, it is resorted to when that power seems most absent, when the enemy seems all powerful. The attack on the Twin Towers took terror further into the territory of everyday life by its use of spectacle and icons. The venerable avant-guardist Karl-Heinze Stockhausen called it the ultimate piece of performance art. He was saying honestly what media outlets were acknowledging through their acts. Three days after the event, the US government had to ask the networks to stop playing the multiply angled footage of the event.

People can’t look at terror, but they can’t look away from it. It achieves the total presence in an enemy society, that the enemy assumes in the society of the terrorist. It turns everyday life against itself and reminds people that they are, at the bottom of it all, pure carbon to be blown apart at the will of the Other. The state’s great propaganda victory of this century has been to convince people that terror in uniform is not terror at all.

For the most part, this judgement has hinged upon the bombing of civilian populations. Prior to the 1930s this act was seen as the ultimate barbarity of the burgeoning doctrine of ‘total war’. Hitler’s use of it in Spain and Mussolini’s in Ethiopia deepened that identification, but it was also used by the British in Afghanistan, of all places. Churchill, who had been an enthusiastic proponent of both civilian bombing and the use of gas was the prime mover behind Britain’s WW2 practice of carpet bombing whole cities. At the time it was a major moral issue, with many Americans arguing that the practice rendered the UK morally equivalent to the Nazis, and obliged people of conscience to become conscientious objectors. Dozens of war movies have normalised the strategy as part of a general reinterpretation of the war as a crusade against the Holocaust —falsely of course. About the only part of the Nazi empire the Allies didn’t bomb was the rail lines to the camps. The WW2 model has served as the ground for the moral division between state and non-state terror ever since. The victims of terror fade to invisibility beneath the shadow of the bombers. I suspect I am not the only one who has had dismaying conversations with good-hearted friends willing to see ordinary Afghan people blown to pieces in their name — in order to make the world a place where civilians are not exposed to random airborne death.

The terror unleashed on 11 September has been as effective as any in history because of the unprecedented degree to which people’s lives are dependent on the technologies which have been turned against them. Whatever governments may say people know that hypermodernity is inherently indefensible. The current anthrax scare in the US is an indication of the widespread awareness that a further attack may produce casualties of five rather than four figures. Echoing a theme picked up by Paul James, it is the new willingness of people to achieve such destruction with their own bodies that makes most vulnerable the uniquely disembodied power structures of contemporary globalisation. And any attempt to lock down global society in the manner in which Israel is locked down would slow the velocity of global capitalism to a degree disastrous to its smooth working. As John Hinkson notes, the current set up is balanced precariously on hitherto unimaginable systemic risk, as expressed in contemporary insurance and banking funds. Confidence is as much a target as buildings.

The people of the United States wonder if life will ever be normal again. Yet for many across the world the presence of sudden death — albeit in a less spectacular form — is normality, and it was surely a part of the terrorists’ intention to bring this fact home to the American people.

The people they purport to avenge — the Palestinians and Iraqis — face a more mundane but no less lethal annihilation. When a globalising power has the capacity to visit such annihilation on people, such totalitarian destruction, it produces total opposition — those who believe they have no choice but to die fighting in order to live. Thirty years ago Arab resistance was expressed through the movements of nationalism and Marxism. Both these have been supplanted by a militant form of Islam which offers a transcendental, a spiritual, grounding for struggle that those other movements could only partially achieve. Thirty years ago suicide bombers were a rarity — now there are hundreds. Push hard enough and there will be suicide societies whose resistance is total. A form of Islam may steel such people for certain death, but that is not so different from the many people who have faced virtually certain death because they felt that they had no alternative that would still allow them to be a human being. The Vietcong are one example; the British crews of WW2 bomber command — the first suicide bombers, with virtually no chance of surviving a tour of duty — are another. Refusing to endorse someone’s ruthless disdain for the innocent is one thing; to believe, as many conservative pundits believe, that analysing the motives and contexts from which such people work is tantamount to dishonouring the dead is foolishness distilled. As Geoff Sharp notes, the fundamentalism of the terrorists has been called out by a fundamentalism inherent in the US version of globalisation itself — the relentless manner in which it seeks to make over all existing ways of life in its own image under the brand of ‘choice’.

The need to guard the security of hi-tech globalisation has made it inevitable that the liberal political sphere would come under pressure sooner or later. Attempts to extinguish it altogether will be a feature of the years to come, especially if the conflicts now occurring slide towards a more comprehensive global war. The peace movement that has now begun across the world has sprung in part from the global social movement that has rocked the cities of the world from Seattle to Melbourne to Genoa. In Australia it has also had confluence from the refugee action movement, to create a broad campaign based on expanding the principle that recent events have been only the most visible aspect of a rising global conflict. Such a conflict will only be resolved through genuine global justice, which will only come from a global movement above and beyond the official national and international bodies. Whatever is to come will be determined in part by our resolute actions, and anything is possible. We cannot know whether the best or the worst, reconciliation or destruction, will occur, but we can say for certain that whatever it is, it will be mutual.

Guy Rundle is co-editor of Arena Magazine.

Today we can imagine a rather different scenario — a war of hitherto unthinkable destructiveness between global power blocs, but one which does not result in species annihilation. Given the existing chronology it will be called World War III, but in reality it will be the real World War I — a conflict between post-colonial powers that is not focussed solely on Europe and the parts of Asia it owns, but involves the mobilisation of what were separate civilizations and are now multinational trading blocs with cultural features in common.

Like the twentieth century’s World War I, World War III will begin because sooner or later one bloc will believe it has no option but to strike first or be annihilated. The Belle Epoque period of 1890-1914 has been constructed in retrospect as a golden age of peace, at least for Europe. In reality it was a period of constant ‘war scares’, with at least a half-dozen occasions on which the European powers came close to conflict. We have seen the foreshadowings of a new series of such war scares with the confrontation of India and Pakistan, and the George W. Bush administration’s policy and rhetoric towards China. The recent US decision to withdraw commitment to international protocols on biological weapons had even its loyal deputy sheriff Australia squeaking in protest.

These tensions will be amplified in the years to come by a number of factors. The first is the new-found determination of the United States to openly assert its global power. As other groups start to use the mechanisms of globalisation to make alternative arrangements –witness the decision of Europe and the global South to proceed with the Kyoto treaty in the aftermath of US withdrawal — and as their dominance of hi-tech and other markets comes under threat, they may repudiate the facade of globalisation altogether, and use the Free Trade Association of the Americas as a geographically based power bloc, ‘protected’ by its missile defence shield. As the smaller states around China and India falter — both Pakistan and Thailand are effectively bankrupt — regions may become further destabilised, and the scramble to create power blocs via treaties or military annexation more rapid. Simultaneously, nationalism will come at them from the other end. Not only will there be the break-up of the most obviously vulnerable blocs such as Indonesia and the DRCongo, but hitherto solid states such as Mexico may find themselves under pressure.

As the deliberate underdevelopment of selected areas continues apace, anti-systemic ‘rogue’ states may multiply — Nepal could well be the next to join the list, if its ruthless Maoist guerrillas take Khatmandhu in the near future. The potential of complex global movements such as Islamic fundamentalism is open-ended. The likelihood of large-scale terrorism, with casualties in the thousands or upwards rather than the hundreds or so due to the late Timothy McVeigh, will become all but inevitable. Water scarcity will become an overwhelming geopolitical consideration.

For all these reasons and more — not least the prospect of a global economic depression coincident with the above phenomena — large-scale war may present itself as a recourse for the power blocs.

In the lead-up to such developments, one might anticipate a political crackdown across the Western/global Northern world: something more than the piecemeal attacks on the separation of powers and the presumption of innocence that occurs today — an actual suspension of the liberal political order. The technical mechanisms are all in place: the CCTV cameras which have been introduced in the ‘war on crime’; the facial-recognition software that makes their operation autonomous; the interlinked databases which will make surveillance total. The cultural mechanisms are in place as well. The tabloid media, year on year increases the pitch of persecution and paranoia, and has added the anti-globalisation movement to its roll-call. The ‘new’ Labour parties in Britain and Australia, and the US Democrats, have cued themselves into this political style and willingly contort themselves into a variety of illiberal positions to accommodate the rhetoric. Right-wing parties have ventured into the territory of deep reaction in order to retain some form of political branding. Lip-service to the liberal political sphere is now universal — actual defence of it, rare. The missile shield above, the surveillance state below — rogue states, rogue groups and rogue persons will all be dealt with.

Clearly many authorities are gearing up for this. There is every sign that their patience with the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement is exhausted. Having believed that the Seattle demonstrations marked a highpoint of the movement, they were faced with a protest double or even triple that size in Genoa. Even conservative estimates put the turn-out at a minimum of 100,000. Having already resorted to scheduling large meetings of these ‘open’ institutions in closed states such as Qatar (the absurdity of which makes for bad publicity) or on the internet (which left them open to being hacked into) the Genoa G8 meeting retreated to a walled-off zone of the city.

Nothing could be more symbolic of the deep-structure of globalisation — quite aside from the fact that the wall was built of shipping containers, perhaps the key technological innovation responsible for the global economy. Nor is there any doubt that the fortification process will continue. The numbers attending such protests are now on such a scale that they could begin to spark continuing protests and the establishment of zones of autonomy after the conference itself has departed. Had ten, or fifty, protestors rather than one been killed in Genoa, what sort of cycle of response and counter-response would have been initiated?

That the current protest movement is now debating whether to take on the label ‘anti-globalisation’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ is a measure that an analysis of the structures of contemporary global power has begun in earnest. Nevertheless there is still an insufficient appreciation of the way in which both modes of globalisation — that of decentring and distributing power on the one hand and that of consolidating and integrating it on the other — persist, and the impact that such an observation should have on political strategy.

The new global social form promises infinite interconnection with no centre, but at the moment this is appearance rather than essence. The internet, half temporary autonomous zone, half global shopping mall, presents itself as a deterritorialised space. Ideally it is, but in reality most of it is now located in server farms in Boston and across the metropolitan United States. As the recent California power blackouts, the product of a conjunction of the ‘new’ economy and privatised utilities, have shown, the ‘weightless’ economy is weighed down by all the traditional concerns of political economy. The ‘free’ media space of the internet is the alienated labour of those — the Indian working class, latino-americans — who produce software and hardware in conditions similar to those who have worked looms or made cars in the past: dirty and routine work, done so that others could live a ‘free’ life.

That space will not exist forever. The powers-that-be are treading carefully because they realise that global dissatisfaction with the current arrangements is widespread, and that the response of the trade union movement, and of liberal-left organisations and citizens, to a global crackdown is unpredictable. On the one hand, a glance at the tabloid newspapers would assure one that it was a done deal, and that reaction will triumph. On the other, a reflection on the numbers who come out for, say, a reconciliation march — not to mention an S11 — would equally highlight the residual radical and democratic spirit that exists across the social order.

This unpredictable situation puts the ball in the court of radical organisations of the global North. The anarchist and postmodern critique of the Leninist mode of organisation is well-taken. But if there were to be a crackdown, it would seem that the postmodern/anarchist organisations would be gathered up instantly, devoid of any resources to resist the sudden transformation of the State from liberal pluralist to expression of reactionary global order. One must now pose the question as to what is in place to resist the prospect of a crackdown. What resources and actual organisational structures exist within radical groups who emphasise ‘autonomy’ to withstand a change in political space? It is a question for those who celebrate the decentred nature of their political and organisational structures.

Those who imagined that the twentieth century was the most brutal in humanity’s history may be guilty of pollyannaism. The coming century will be the narrow passage through which human beings pass — on the one hand the unprecedented development of modes of destruction, on the other the burgeoning forces of a fully human global–local/ethical–political order — and we will either survive it, and in doing so open up new and better possibilities for living, or pass through war to annihilation or worse.

De Quincey’s volume was one of the first in what has become a long line of addiction memoirs — although the honour could equally be awarded to the oeuvre of Coleridge, whose dreamy opium-filled work of the Kubla Khan variety alternated with more prosaic letters describing the ravishments of the condition, from cravings to agonising constipation.

At a time when the use of illicit drugs is rising across the world, despite the massive armouries of the ‘war on drugs’; when the supply of both opiates and cocaine mounts remorselessly year on year; when whole countries — Colombia and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — have become, with varying degrees of willingness, drug factories; when large areas of the global South are turning from opium use to heroin use, and when whole popular cultures — such as the youth culture of the UK — come to exist at the service of chemical consumption, it may be necessary to more deeply consider the central cultural role of such substances in contemporary life.

Such an inquiry becomes more urgent given the Howard Government’s recent launch of a national drugs campaign, and the increasing indications that a Beazley Government will be in a social conservative model substantially indistinguishable from that which now exists. The current campaign was inaugurated largely in response to the flood of cheap heroin that engulfed Australian cities — particularly Melbourne — in the late 1990s, and the large numbers of deaths that resulted from overdoses, as addicts became exposed to less diluted product. Few of these lives would have been lost with a medicalised supply of opiates in controlled dosages — the old British model of allowing registered addicts a safe supply — yet there was never any possibility that such a policy would be adopted.

Instead, the government’s strategy focusses on the conservative notion that stable family life is the best protection against dangerous behaviours, and adds to it the more liberal notion that communication between parents and child (rather than the imposition of parental authority) is the key to avoiding illicit drug use. The communication is overwhelmingly strategic — there is provided a catechism-style document with questions and answers to prepare the unwary parent for any curly ones (such as ‘well you took drugs’, the approved answer to which is that we all make mistakes) and a helpful table outlining the effects of various substances is provided. All effects are detailed, save for one — that drug-use is frequently pleasurable. The substances that the young are being warned against seem to produce only headaches, lethargy, paranoia, psychosis, cancer and developmental disorders, which would surely make any half-bright teenager wonder why they were being cautioned against them in the first place. There is only the slightest nod towards the possibility that opiates may have a more addictive capacity than other substances. This contingent category of illegal substances — drugs — bounded by the legal regions of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol and legal stimulants such as pseudoephedrine, moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.

Despite the explanation of their chemical properties and physical effects, the overwhelming impression is that they gain their power from pure illegality, from their embodiment of risk. Their anarchic possibilities serve as the occasion for a more than equal and opposite over-reaction — the imposition of systems of control. In the twentieth century this was confined to the police and criminal justice system on the one hand, and the therapeutic, medical and educational institutions on the other. The current campaign is an extension of the ‘reefer madness’ school of anti-drug propaganda, but it is also a departure, in which the entire repertoire of social responses becomes scripted — a feature clearly visible in the TV ads, in which families are shown watching an earlier series of TV ads and talking about them in a variety of approved ways. It is the manner by which the mutual interdependence of ‘drugs’ and empire is confirmed and extended in a globalised context.

Drugs and empire

Indeed empire and ‘drugs’ — in this case meaning consciousness-altering substances used in the absence of any ritual or medical practice — are two sides of the same coin. By now many people have some knowledge of the degree to which the British Empire was involved in the sale of opiates from India to China — fewer realise that it was on this trade that the nineteenth century expansion of the empire was funded and, of equal importance, that the modern form of drug addiction was created.

By the 1760s the East India Company had been running various quantities of opium poppy from India to China in steadily increasing volumes for several decades, but it was not until Warren Hastings, the Governor-General, ascribed the resistance of the Moguls to the increase in poppy cultivation, and reorganised the trade using the resources of the British army and navy that it began to generate significant revenues. The Company — which eventually became the government — had justified its trade on the basis that its monopoly allowed a control of the supply of opium, whose dangers were already beginning to be recognised. It needn’t have worried overmuch, since the combination of power and supply of dangerous substances had an illustrious recent history in Britain — William III and Mary only agreed to accede to the throne if they could have a license for the import of ‘geneva’ liquor — or ‘gin’ — that was, to that time, little known in England. The subsequent flooding with heavy hooch of a market accustomed to ale gave us Hogarth and the temperance movement among other things, and was an early example of pushing/loss leader marketing – sold by the glass to undercut local beer.

That the global pushers were aware of the hazardous nature of the substance was indicated by the draconian legislation used to keep it out of the British population in India, much less at home. Poppy had been known as an analgesic in Europe since the time of the Crusades, but it was rare, and merely one part of the herbal pharmacopeia.

By the early 1800s, several events served to set the pattern of modern addiction in place. Romanticism had blossomed in European culture, with the Faust myth — the individual damned by his own ambition — becoming central to self-understanding of artistic producers. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ Blake wrote, and while his journey was largely on foot, others were getting a help along the way — principally through laudanum, a mixture of alcohol and opium, favoured not only by the poets, but also by anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, inventor Sir Humphrey Davy and many others. Morphine, an alkaloid opiate derivative, was synthesised in 1803, one of the first drugs to have an effect many times more powerful than its natural form, but the high cost of production slowed its introduction to everyday use.

In 1830, the opium trade was worth 2 million pounds per year — 50 per cent of the cost of running the government of the British Empire. The Chinese emperor had twice attempted to resist the trade, and twice been beaten down by imperial firepower. Tories opposed the trade, while free-market liberals vociferously supported it, arguing that it was clear that Chinese labourers needed the drug as it stimulated their efforts and gave them respite from the back-breaking work they had to perform.

This was curious to many — that Chinese opium users would be stimulated by the drug — since it was frequently observed that Indian users were relaxed, even narcotised by it, while Europeans seemed to be subject to both. Initial suspicions that the effect depended upon whether the poppy was smoked or eaten proved incorrect and the debate raged. In the same period as De Quincey’s classic work emerged — not to mention Tennyson’s The Lotus Eaters — Henri Murger’s Contes de la Vie de Boheme was published in Paris. This collection of short stories centred around the artistic margins of urban life set the template for modern bohemia, a text which for generations was subsequently reproduced in their lives. While opium was not yet a part of their lifestyle — the price was still sufficiently high that a contemporary commentator could call religion its equivalent ‘for the masses’ — excess was central to it. Not the excess of abandon or the pure carnivale, but an excess taken as the mark of a free spirit, a pure soul.

Yet it was not until the 1860s that the shape of modern drug-use began to emerge. The first mechanised war — the US Civil War — brought morphine into mainstream usage. It also began a cycle whereby large numbers of addicts were released into the community at the end of each conflict — to such a degree that morphine became known as the ‘soldiers’ disease’. The hunt for a cure in the latter part of the century led many to a derivative of the South American coca plant. Cocaine was the prozac of the 1880s, the wonder drug that promoted energy, alertness and cheerfulness with no apparent side effects, its most famous champion being the young and ambitious Dr Sigmund Freud.

Coca-leaf chewing had been a part of Inca culture for millennia, and the Spanish occupiers of South America had been engaged in an endless tussle over its use, with the clergy — who objected to its ritual and pagan usage — wanting it banned, while merchants — who admired its ability to extend the stamina of local labour far beyond the capacities of Europeans — presciently arguing for a respect of local cultural differences. Even then it was noted that leaf chewers would pace themselves, rarely choosing the largest or most robust leaves of the plant — an early version of smoking ultramilds. What was an integrated social practice in its traditional setting became something else entirely when both the practice and the active ingredient were extracted and placed in a setting of cosmopolitan modernity.

Both refined drugs — morphine and cocaine — showed themselves to have a power of movement above and beyond the herbal drugs of previous eras. Both connected to human physiology to a degree hitherto unknown in culture and beyond the powers of nature. At the same time as explicitly manufactured demand was starting up — with the rise of the modern advertising industry and the brand — the numbers who found themselves at the mercy of the ‘soldiers’ disease’ and addiction to the cocaine that had been presented as its cure was rising remorselessly. The answer was another drug, introduced in 1898, and guaranteed by its manufacturers to be non-addictive. An analgesic substitute for morphine, it was also seen as a way for the ‘heroes’ who had succumbed to ‘soldiers disease’, so it seemed like a good idea to give it the trade name Heroin.

Heroin

Writing of his heroin addiction in the 1950s, William Burroughs noted the singular feature of the drug — with heroin the product was not sold to the consumer, the consumer was sold to the product. That heroin became the acme of twentieth century addiction was partly accidental — morphine had been the drug that doctors prescribed to addicts in ‘maintenance doses’. Following the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act (USA) in 1914 — the drugs war beginning the same year as the world war — and further crackdowns in the 1920s, maintenance dose prescription became heavily punishable, and morphine disappeared from the emerging circuit of drugs and criminality. Morphine and heroin are virtually identical, but the latter has acquired the Faustian cachet of doomed glory, while the former has largely retained its medical image. Consequently sober citizens recovering from operations can take doses of morphine that, in the cultural context of ‘pleasurable’ usage, would speed one on the road to physiological addiction.

Burroughs’ insight into the power of opiates reveals their double character. On the one hand they are the ‘omega’ drug — the external substance that more or less replicates the internal substance that does a lot of the work in controlling the physical aspects of pleasure, jouissance, release from anxiety. It was more than 150 years after the synthesis of morphine that these chemicals were identified and their name — endorphines, or endogenous morphine — establishes the cart/horse character of the relationship. It is not inevitable that such a drug will begin to move autonomously through a culture — addicting a user and then passing itself on via the user becoming a supplier — but its power is substantial. In the last decade, opium consumption in areas such as rural Burma and Afghanistan has been supplanted by the use of heroin, as poppy farmers moved to the ‘value added’ end of the market and started doing their own refining, and the surrounding communities were flooded with refined product. Blame for this lies substantially with the United States, which encouraged anti-North Vietnamese Indochinese warlords and the anti-USSR Taliban to develop heroin production as a separate funding source.

Nevertheless, heroin works best when its cultural meaning serves as an agent of addiction equal to its physiological impact. Burroughs’ was the most cogent exploration of the meaning of such addiction and the medical-punitive state apparatus which grew up around it from the 1930s onwards — but he was also an agent of its carriage, his writings presenting themselves as overtures to the transcendent revelations of the drug itself. No matter how much he, or those who followed in his wake, from Lou Reed to Irvine Welsh, dissembled about the scourge of the drug, the more talked about it became, the greater became its power. By the 1970s the bohemian values of unique self-fashioning had become mainstream values, especially of youth, and heroin’s purview became general. By 1973, $4b of it was being imported into the United States, making it the single largest consumer import commodity, and one of the economy’s most efficient multipliers, a fulcrum for the law and order, insurance, entertainment and medical industries.

In a commodity culture it is the pure commodity — demand goes off the graph because the addicted will pay anything to have it. Initially it presents itself as the anti-commodity — the nepenthe that will take one beyond desire. Subsequently all it offers is a release from the pain of its absence. Clearly all commodities do this to a degree — heroin is an illustration of the degree to which addiction is a social product. It is a fusion of our technical means to intersect with hitherto inaccessible levels of human physiology, together with the cultural promise of transcendence in a handy and easily obtainable form, whether it be, as Humphrey McQueen has shown, an opiate, a fizzy drink or just about anything else.

That it is a cultural process can be seen from the fact that it does not need a physiological substratum. Gambling, love, shopping — all start to shift towards the addictive end of the scale. Of course talk of ‘x addiction’ is partly cant and partly a medicalisation of what would hitherto have been called passion or obsession, but it may also be the mapping of a real social process — the point at which the pursuit of desire begins to lose its particular character, and become a process emptied of content.

As Philip Mendes’ following contribution makes clear, the burden of such addictions does not fall equally across society. The war on drugs is a war on the poor who are punished for living as consumers of desire in a desiring, consumer society. The federal government’s tough-on-drugs approach serves to take this a stage further. Its ideal subjects are what one might call ‘global Singaporeans’ — continent, hardworking people, imbued with a Protestant work ethic, bound by family affiliations, and aware that any step outside heavily policed social and psychological boundaries will have serious consequences for every aspect of their life. It is as much a vision shared by new Labor apparatchiks such as Mark Latham as it is a part of John Howard’s conservative fantasies. Because increasing numbers cannot be a part of that accumulating vision, they must be excluded — as an example to the others, and as raw material for a burgeoning prison industrial complex.

What global drug trade founder Warren Hastings called the ‘pernicious commodity’ — opium — is now both a mirror and means of production, distribution and exchange. A rational drugs policy will start from a recogntion of how intimately it is involved in the nature of our culture and vice versa.

Concluding In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, Robert Manne situates the ‘debate’ over the stolen generations as part of what he calls ‘a larger culture war — over the meaning of Aboriginal dispossession’. His incisive analytical work in the essay is bound together by military metaphor: the ‘campaign’ to undermine Bringing Them Home; the ‘troops’ drawn from the Institute of Public Affairs and Quadrant; and at the core, ‘General’ P.P. McGuinness. Manne points to the way this Right-company pictured its key battle as that for ‘the moral balance of power’ in Australia.

As they see it, a ‘sorry industry’ set up by white intellectuals lives off indigenous suffering, exploits guilt and deprives the bulk of non-elite white Australia of their own national history. Aside from sniping at those ‘black arm-band intellectuals’, the lines were drawn for the public denigration of the stolen generations, specious denial of frontier massacres and racist circumscriptions of Aboriginal culture in general. This tilt at the moral balance pushed toward the kind of arrogance of the ‘civilising mission’ — something we heard echoed by the Minister for Reconciliation in his comments about the invention of the wheel. It seems that when Australia federated it did not supersede all its colonial ways. It is from exactly this colonial mode of thinking that some have been attempting, for the last thirty years, to extricate Australia.

In his account of the stolen generations and its deniers, Manne has targetted two strands of Australian colonialism. One is the history of a state-practised assimilation and the other is its current ideological defence. If the transformation of government activity in Aboriginal communities came in the 1970s with policies of self-determination, then the broader social shift was certainly not complete. Today, persistent assimilationism re-emerges and presents itself as the answer to social problems in Aboriginal communities. The continuing suffering of those who were separated from their families and land is not the only colonial manifestation in the present. There is a broader cultural attack going on against every aspect of Aboriginal life, and we can find it in the daily papers.

Take recent reports in the Australian on social problems such as domestic violence in Aboriginal society. Nicolas Rothwell has proudly announced that a series of articles heralds ‘the demise of a generation’s worth of presuppositions and certainties’ in regard to the relations between indigenous and settler Australia. The project was initiated with a pair of articles in the Weekend Australian (14–15 April, 2001). One, by Paul Toohey, was about violence against Aboriginal women in the Northern Territory; the other, by Rothwell himself, outlined a new book by Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. Rothwell, in a manoeuvre perfected by those commentators who complain of being stifled by ‘political correctness’ (usually from within their column in some major daily paper), declares: ‘Once, almost nothing in this area could be easily discussed; suddenly almost everything seems to be on the table’. This new dawn and its sudden freedom of expression, sadly, revealed some quite old ideas. In regard to Toohey’s article, Marcia Langton’s critique is probably sufficient. Langton points to the limitations of narrowly racialised representations, indicating that there are a variety of ways of being an Aboriginal woman. She provides the example of herself, or Cathy Freeman, or any number of others. Without denying the existence of problems within communities, Langton points to the way Toohey, under the guise of an unflinching reportage, calls up images from as long ago as the frontier days: Aboriginal society is bound within victimhood and violence. But there does seem to be a new camouflage spread over this ageing position. Toohey writes: ‘Genuine culture is doing battle with a culture of convenience, whereby tribal law and alcohol have become ugly friends’. There is no parallel analysis of white communities with similar levels of alcohol problems or unemployment. Such an investigation might have established the degree to which these problems visit all communities of the excluded, regardless of colour. Instead, there is a jump to the unsubstantiated conclusion that attempts to preserve aspects of traditional life are to blame. Race becomes the only explanatory category, prior to gender or class or even history. This suggests a philosophical debt to, among others, Roger Sandall.

Sandall’s book appears to be an intellectual supply-line for assimilation’s rear-guard action. The main point is Sandall’s critique of what he has termed the ‘culture cult’. This is what he sees as the valorisation of indigenous cultural authenticity and autonomy at the cost of material infrastructural development. This debilitating delusion is apparently the prevailing legacy of Nugget Coombs and the cause of all social problems in Aboriginal communities. This blinkered glorification of tribal life is a convenient straw-target for Sandall — a product of his imagination, rather than Coombs’. But with it in place, Sandall is able to offer his own solution: policy makers and the general public should shake off this bad case of noble savage fixation and settle back into a pre-1970s assimilationism governed by the ‘law of historical advance’ or ‘creative destruction’.

The envisaged disappearance of Aboriginal people, or at least of their culture, is another story as old as Australia. It was wished into being with the legal fiction of terra nullius. Now a version of this strand of thinking is again being rehearsed in Sandall’s claims about the rigidity of Aboriginal culture and its likely surrender to ‘historical advance’. Happily, colonial dreams don’t always come true, even if they do continue to weigh on the brain of the nation.

There is a need to dismantle Sandall’s argument piece-by-piece, to resist this new claim on ‘the moral balance of power’. One key point can be addressed here: the false dichotomy between ‘the tribal world’ and ‘modernity’. Sandall maintains that there is a ‘Big Ditch’ between these two social categories — a gulf that the tradition-fetish obscures. He claims that this ‘romantic primitivism’ leaves Aboriginality stranded on the wrong side of the development gap. For Sandall, Aboriginal communities are fixed in a passive pre-modernity any way you look at it. They are either artificially preserved by being locked into ‘ethnographic zoos’ or they are swallowed by the modernising tide.What presents itself as a critique of the policy of self-determination is, in fact, a position that strips Aboriginal people of any individual agency, any cultural resources, any political will. Sandall’s vision allows no negotiation across the ‘ditch’ from the Aboriginal side, only volleys of ‘creative destruction’ launched from the citadel of a white modernity. Is this Australia today? What of the massed movement of Reconciliation? What of examples of co-operation in land usage within Native Title? If his critique of self-determination targets its perceived romanticism, Sandall’s alternative is no way out, it is in the thrall of his own illusory picture of the docile native.

This version of Australian modernity seems more intimately and necessarily linked to its pre-modern Other than Sandall is prepared, or perhaps able, to admit. It might well be time to debate what self-determination actually means. However, a way through to a nation that is truly beyond its colonial past will only be cleared when ‘the meaning of Aboriginal dispossession’ is no longer a terrain for the continued re-enactment of an old culture war.

This should give us pause. However those who too easily predict a coming collapse of capitalism leave themselves vulnerable to its seemingly eternal delay into a series of chronic crises and renewals. As Boris Frankel points out in his essay in this issue of Arena Magazine, left intellectuals who insist that capitalism’s collapse is around the corner debilitate themselves. This kind of apocalyptic hope cannot deal with the shape-shifting capabilities of this form of life. The market may have a terrible precariousness, but at the same time it is being constantly readjusted and reproduced.

To respond adequately we need to understand these processes. Its periodic convulsions are constantly smoothed over through new expressions of legitimation, and as these expressions wear thin, the ensuing crises have to be locally contained and smoothed over. In Australia we have seen the electoral consequences of re-using an exhausted language to reassure voters. John Hinkson argues here that the technological extension of the market into people’s lives pushes to the margins all those who are less than techno-savvy. A significant section of the public is now, in turn, rejecting the current expressions of a world from which they have been progressively excluded.

In response, other forms of control are called upon to give the sense that the nation is more than an administrative node for trade’s global flow. This control is exerted on the bodies of those who make the mistake of thinking that the ideal of security and mobility applies equally to all — for example, the figure of the refugee. For the moment, treating refugees as ‘illegal’ queue-jumpers works well to re-legitimise the idea of stable control. It is a strategy that for a time will have popular appeal, and it is a strategy that gets strange support from a new genre of television. The state in the role of vigilant regulator of the country’s borders has its popular-culture parallel in the taste for surveillance, administration and discipline in ‘reality TV’. As Simon Cooper asks — who stays on the island?

Just as the categories of ‘economy’, ‘nation-state’ and ‘society’ are presented through images under reconstruction, the sense of the ‘self’ is also being de-stabilised. Like the Japanese watcher at the window, there is now occasion to confront a less than solid vision of the self. As the market becomes an increasingly shifting glass of refracted images the consequences for us are devastating. The depression epidemic, argues Guy Rundle, is a manifestation of this kind of deep-felt ‘framelessness’. Individuals are left to re-construct themselves from a fragmentary psychological model or through the binding properties of drugs.

Alternatives to this atomised condition require seeing politics as a sustained project across every aspect of life, but possibilities could also emerge in areas that do not offer a typically political program of resistance. Despite the ubiquity of dislocation, the communicative aspect of art as a point of potentially shared meaning is one small area in which to reclaim some stability. Here we might glimpse a beginning of more thorough social change beyond art. The works of Colin McCahon and Rosalie Gascoigne (featured on the front and back covers respectively) display the way a formal cohesion can be gleaned from otherwise disparate social particles. In McCahon’s work we see older, religious frameworks restructured for newer problems of place and self. Gascoigne’s work manages to inject newly framed possibilities into life’s ephemera and detritus. It is not spiritual retrieval that is the key here, but rather the process of collecting what is left behind, the process of capturing meaning in the context of a shared and co-operative sense of the future. It is a process that might benefit the Japanese office-sitter — and the rest of us too — that is, if we can bear to drag our gaze away from the false security of the corporate window.

Matthew Ryan

That it was a political achievement is undeniable, and the event has been useful as a point at which to uncover the buried history of national debates, especially around issues of free trade and protection. But it wasn’t an achievement of the political imagination in the same way as the American or French revolutions were, or any occasion of independence in which nationhood was wrested from an oppressor, or brought together by a fusion of demands and possibilities, of the real and the ideal. To unite six colonies founded by the same imperial power on a single continent does not begin to compete with the Bastille or the Long March, and people are well aware of the fact.

The event itself was the least disruptive sort of independence possible — the declaration of limited dominion status, with continued domination by Westminster on matters of trade policy and foreign affairs, and the persistence of the Privy Council as a final court of appeal. Even the timing of the event — the first day of a new century — makes it look more like an exercise in book-keeping rather than nation-making. What was widely understood at the time to be an act of continuity with the British Empire is being retroactively redefined as the first in a chain of events whose logical conclusion is the declaration of a republic.

The ‘Federalists’ are trying to revive a sense of nationhood in the political dimension, by reminding people that part of their identity is a politically constituted one. As global neoliberalism proceeds apace — to the point where it has taken on the neutralised term of ‘globalisation’ — and party politics flows towards a unitary centre, the realm of nationhood has been driven back into the purely symbolic, and attached primarily to sport. The double whammy — the retreat of national political and economic independence, and the expansion of purely symbolic nationalism to fill the vacuum — is far from uniform. The success of One Nation — and its potential rebirth — is indicative that there are social groups for whom a sense of national identity exists in the old style, as a concrete myth fusing political history and symbols in a continuous narrative. Yet their appeal has been largely confined to a rural white population, and they have had little success in gaining a base in the industrial working class (though this will change if there is an economic downturn of any seriousness later in the year).

The ‘branding’ of Australia began in earnest in the 1970s, as a correlate to multiculturalism and the dissolution of an anglo-Celtic hegemonic culture. As other commentators here and elsewhere have noted, the ‘branding’ form of nationalism drew on a number of alleged national traits — an easygoing character, an enthusiasm for the ‘fair go’, a familiarity with striking nature — rather than on an internalised and widely shared national story. In the last decade or so it has been fused with the tourism industry for the sake of international ad campaigns, and played up as a contrast to the revived nationalisms and ethnic myths of the post-Cold war era.

Australia is, in this account, the post-national nation, a respite from the world, a place where people can relate to each other with total transparency, having rid themselves of the baggage of their ethnicity, retaining only that which is pleasantly different, such as cuisine and customs. This sense of the place as a new world destination which — unlike the US — does not impose a history of its own was behind the giddy suggestion that Sydney become the permanent venue for the Olympics, Australia as a place where the world comes to get away from itself. It was an image that was achieved only by a marginalisation of the most concrete and tragic narrative of all, that of Indigenous Australians — the masterstroke of which was the faux-naif ‘wonderland’ style of the opening ceremony.

The world as Alice, fallen into the South, where everything is upside-down and nations mock and satirise their own history at triumphal occasions — it is this sort of thing that Don Watson dubbed the ‘post-modern republic’ during his tenure as eminence brune for Paul Keating. Watson called for an ‘aleatoric, bebop’ republic, an improvised and open-ended form of national self-understanding. Such a nation would go beyond the US in identifying its character with a liberal polity — unlike the US it would not seek to impose a specific type of liberalism on individual citizens, but would foreground pluralism and respect for diverse and divergent cultural ways. The ‘Federalists’ have added a political theme to that vision which, at its most exuberant, amounts to the identification of an ‘Australian genius’ for peaceful nation-making.

Alas, Minerva’s wombat forages at night. The achievement of a post-modern nationalism occurs by the grace of a historical process which dismantles the foundations of the Nation — and the best and worst it can offer — in a fashion more comprehensive than the new nationalists realise. The global neoliberal order and its flows of capital, labour and images intersects with the self in a way that makes possible the post-modern national citizen, someone who understands their particular culture as no more than one way of being human, the equivalent of a preference for strawberry over chocolate. Yet at the same time it creates a different form of relationship between person, society, culture and nation, one in which groundedness plays less of a role.

By ‘groundedness’ of course we mean the material nature of community, not the ideal myths of Nation or Race. Social interdependence, limits to mobility and the particular nature of the locality have historically been key sources of cultural meaning and social being. Crude myths of Nation have always been ‘reverse engineered’ — a unified community invented to legitimise an existing polity. The attempt to create a non-National nation from a fusion of actually existing cultural attributes and pluralist liberal hopes is a worthier project, but one more likely to be defeated by its own paradoxes.

The cultural space within which the new nationalists seek to build can no longer be seen as a ‘wedding-cake’ structure in which a local cultural ground is overlaid with external mediated influences, be they British or American. Many core elements of social and cultural development — mass culture, curriculum, consumption — are now oriented to the development of the person as pre-globalised. Particular national identity comes as a mediated form — one’s flavour — but the core psychological structures are general and universal, the necessary hardware for global mobility and flexible work patterns. Real access to global options may vary, but the principle itself dominates aspirations, meanings and values. In fact those who gain the greatest class mobility from the process — working class children who gain a professional education — are the least likely to have any attachment to particular origins, at least in the first part of their adulthood.

This process of social development yields many paradoxical results. Those most likely to politically sympathise with the aspirations of indigenous people are those least likely to have a real and incommutable relationship to country. Those most opposed to indigenous struggles are more likely to have a — comparatively vestigial — sense of place. The desire for a grounded culture throws up absurdities, such as the search for an ‘Australian’ cuisine, in the absence of bounded cultural practices which bring cuisines into being.

On the ground, the downside of such a process is becoming increasingly visible — the combination of social-economic redundancy and cultural-psychological dysfunction. Politically, it presents us with multiple possibilities and few probabilities. As many have observed, our federal system is a fluid and open-ended form, which could be conducive to the most imaginative political developments. Currently much attention is focused on union with New Zealand — a clear mark that the relationship between culture and politics remains little understood. But there is no reason why other possibilities — the creation of new states to promote a renewed focus on regional and local economies, for example — could not come into play.

Yet there is little chance that they will. The Australian political framework resembles a cicada. The popular enthusiasm that made a constitution have now died away, leaving a constitution resistant to change, ruling a population whose identity is by and large not defined within politics. Thus Australians will stir themselves to reject an elitist model of a republic, but no subsequent positive campaign for an independently elected president takes root.

The hopes that the centenary of Federation would provide a springboard for political renewal are overwhelmingly the hopes of those who still work and think within a mindset that sees politics and history as occupying the same space. That does not mean that campaigns to re-extend the reduced scope of democracy within Australian life will not have some successes. But the causes that will move a mass of people to politics will not only be different to those of a hundred years ago — they will be of a fundamentally different form.

Yet the big private schools are not the principal target of the government’s largesse. The turn towards funding based around socioeconomic strata is aimed at the myriad of small, often fundamentalist religious, private schools springing up across lower-middle income suburbs, and the people who will form their clientele. As a world of stratified, full and long-term employment recedes ever further into the distance the scramble for private education spreads much wider than the small subgroup who once made a class transition. It becomes a formation in its own right, those determined to give their children the chance to become information age human capital.

Such schools can’t compete with the laptops and baccalaureate exams offered by the big schools. Instead they offer a certain type of individuation, one based on discipline and focus and the haunting fear of parents that government schools are ‘out of control’ — that their children will never acquire the selfhood necessary to surviving and prospering within a globalised world. Doubtless David Kemp has championed these moves because of a genuine belief in choice. With equal certainty we can say that the policy wouldn’t have gone anywhere had it not had an important strategic dimension. It’s an attempt to carve out the nascent ‘aspirational class’ — the bulk of whom are swinging voters — and draw their loyalties more closely to the Liberal Party. It has no interest in increasing funding to the likes of Geelong Grammar whatsoever, but the resulting furore provides a welcome cover for the main game.

One could suggest that such a point has been reached with the news that Kerry Packer has received a kidney donated by one of his employees. The donor, his pilot and good friend, may be left with chronic pain down one side of his abdomen as a result of the operation, and he has a 1 in 500 chance of suffering kidney failure himself.

The spectacle of Australia’s richest man copping an organ from a loyal retainer after a lifetime of robust drinking and smoking will fill many people with fear of a world in which the rank-and-file act as little more than organ banks for the super-rich, yet that’s hardly the issue here. The donor is apparently not only willing to give Kerry his kidney, but eager to do so. Nor is there any suggestion of coercion or money changing hands. The pilot is apparently doing this as an act of love.

Yet it’s the very altruistic nature of the act that’s the problem, more so than the possible corrupt use of it. It’s the fact that we can now give a friend a vital organ in the same way we could once have given them a loan or a blood transfusion which raises dilemmas that can’t be solved within our existing assumptions about what we owe to each other.

Every significant relationship — kinship, friendship, love — carries with it the expectation of risk and sacrifice to varying degrees. Parents will risk their lives to save a drowning child even in circumstances where the risk that both parent and child will then drown is high, and anyone who made a rational calculation about the futility of the attempt would be seen as something less than human. The same would apply to live donation from parent to child — in most circumstances it would be simply unbearable for the parent not to make the effort. What is then owed to adult siblings? To spouses? To partners? To friends? A moment’s reflection will tell you that what we have hitherto understood as the obligation of risk — that we would, or hope we would, rescue a stranger from a burning building — does not even start to extend to something like live organ donation. To have a world in which we routinely assume that others will submit to voluntary dismemberment in order that we can continue to live is not the gift of life, but something like the reverse. The unrestrained assumption that we are an organ bank for our close others would poison human relationships to such a degree that such closeness would be replaced by a savage calculus of obligation and demand. And beyond that power — economic, social, emotional — would come into play.

But how does one handle something like this — a historical development which appears to have its own momentum, running on the automatic assumption that the level of technology should determine the overall framework within which we make moral decisions?

Many would suggest that live organ donation should be illegal, with the exception of parent-to-child cases, and some other exceptions. And it should be, but that is hardly the key issue. More importantly, there needs to be a broadened understanding of the deeper consequences of these individual acts. A starting point would be an emphasis on the onus of the would-be recipient to refuse any offer. For what sort of person would not consider making the offer faced with the fear and pain of someone close? But what sort of person would accept such an offer?

Yet any attempt to argue for addressing both the legal and moral limits to live organ donation come up against the widespread belief that legal limits to any consensual activity cannot be justified. Leaving aside drug laws — which are unjustified — aiding suicide and consensual mutilation are the only private acts deemed illegal. Yet in other areas — wage rates for example — restrictions on private arrangements are widely accepted as right and just, and the social consequences of the deregulation of such widely understood. This did not just happen — it occurred as a consequence of transforming the political culture, of raising the level of public understanding and consciousness. Everyone knows this, yet few think of this new wave of social developments as amenable to a similar process — perhaps because such attitudes — those which make laissez-faire organ exchange seem an unqualified social good — run so deep. Yet it is their very depth which makes such a political circumstance ripe with possibility for the transformation of public attitudes.

Some of that will come from religious groups — one would hope. The Catholic bishops, so eager to intervene in the IVF access debate, may be less keen to tackle the capacity of the super-rich to furnish themselves with reconditioned body parts. Such would be a test of whether their motives for public intervention are motivated more by the ethical or prejudicial dimensions of their beliefs. But there is also a need to make visible an argument against living organ exchange on secular grounds — and thereby emphasising that if you start by dismembering living bodies you end up by dismembering the body of life.

No issue so vividly accentuates the dilemma of the individual and the social so viscerally as does that of organ donation. Nor does any other issue so neatly demonstrate the manner in which morality has been submerged within the limits of nature for all our history. In an era when possibilities reach towards the infinite, the onus falls on culture to understand and the manner and preconditions by which it lives — or fails to.

This iconic use of the image of the ‘ordinary person’ to bolster the standing of state and corporation is everywhere, and the Games have accentuated its force. The travels of the Olympic flame around Australia were central to this process. It is not an adequate critique of the ‘sacred flame’ that it was first revived in 1936 by Adolf Hitler as a way of linking the people of Nazi Germany to the deep past. It is not sufficient to note just that the munitions manufacturer, Krupps of Essen, produced a series of stainless steel torches weighing about a kilogram, to be carried in relay from Olympia in Greece to Berlin. And it is not enough to document that IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch used to be a fascist. We have known that for a long time. Writing in the New Statesman in 1993, Andrew Jennings recorded Samaranch’s dubious past:

Samaranch, now in his seventies, deserted from the army of the Spanish Republic during the civil war and hid in Barcelona until Franco had won. He spent the next thirty-five years climbing the ladder of fascist politics, ending up as the head of Franco’s rubber stamp Catalan ‘parliament’. Ten years after the Allies discovered Auschwitz, he volunteered for the elite fascist Falange, wore its uniform and gave the fascist salute. This he did until Franco died in 1975.

What is needed is a thorough examination of the use of the myth of ‘ordinary’ heroes. Nevertheless, such stark connections to corporatism point up the way in which states and corporations bask in the uncritical milieu of myths connecting pseudo-sacred meanings, instrumentalised passions, and beliefs in the ascendancy of ‘the ordinary person’. Despite what the Foster’s ad tells us, the use of ‘the ordinary person’ as signifying the peace-loving nation (Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom), masks a new reality of mediated and globally projected violence. These are the nations that are continually being drawn into war despite their postnational ‘pacifism’. Just as Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson in The Patriot) is tired of violence, having fought against the Indians and French, so are we. He is reluctant to fight the English in the American War of Independence, but when following the threat to his family he does enter the war, it is with a vengance. And so do we.

This point can be taken further. Ordinary people, non-combatants, now bear the brunt of wars whether it be in Iraq, Kosovo or Chechnya. State-down attempts to contain or even suppress national liberation movements now increasingly use ‘ordinary people’. In East Timor, the Indonesian government supported the outlaw local militia groups such as the Besi Merah Putih to disrupt and terrorise the independence process. Currently in West Papua, the ruling Indonesian party, Golkar, is said to financially support a local counter-independence militia called the Satgas Merah Putih or Red and White Taskforce. In the Philippines, the government is using local groups called the Civilian Armed Forces Geographic Units against the Muslim autonomy movement.

Next time let us not pretend that these things are not happening. Global events such as the Olympic Games could be splendid events if people such as John Howard, Juan Antonio Samaranch, John Elliot, Paul Hogan and Team Nike had to pay for tickets like the rest of us. If only we didn’t have to see repeated television footage of John Howard stepping into the reflected glory. Next time, let us get together without them, and leave behind the history of an instrumentalised, commercialised patriot games. As John Clarke might then say, ‘Let the People’s Games begin’.