Whether it is same sex marriage or drones over Pakistan; what food is or art should be; selling uranium to India or the slow implosion of the United States; the fate of the countryside or the fate of Europe; the meaning of meat or the meat-axe approach of our national newspaper to its opponents, full and definite answers about why things are as they are simply donot pre-exist, to be pulled from some old kit bag.Liberalism, laborism, Marxism―it sounds like a Tom Lehrer song, but no genuflecting in any of those directions is likely to ultimately help in the present, even if their various proponents are making a play for their relevance around particular issues and crises today.

The Greens have announced they are more liberal than the Liberal party, and one version of liberalism is certainly the philosophy of choice for gay marriage proponents. It’s not long since the invasion of Iraq was justified as the spreading of the liberal idea, while the Northern Territory emergency was promoted, relatedly, as a humanitarian intervention, all the various non-sequiturs notwithstanding.

Marxism, too, has swung back into the picture, more or less articulate, and competing with serious anarchism in many places: in Greece and Spain and Britain and the United States, and Australia too. How would it not, one is inclined to say, as a chronic capitalist crisis grinds on and may at any moment throw the world into deeper crisis, whilethe owning and leisure classes only harden in their sense of entitlement, as work dries up and the welfare state continues to be neo-liberalised.

And then there’s laborism, which still has currency in this country at least. While the Labor Party struggles at times with more social democratic possibilities, much of its hardheaded neoliberalism is gunned into action by a masculinisteconomism. It’s an outlook that shapes the government’s dealings with the region, its economic policy, its climate policy and a good deal of its social policy, and leads the Labor Party  still to consider the idea that it has something like a natural constituency, if only it could pitch its message appropriately.

So much of this mixed and conflicting ideological legacy is nineteenth century in origin and flavour. Of course there were crucially insightful developments within these traditions in the twentieth century as new conditions spurred ideological conflicts and adaptations; there is no one liberalism and there is no one Marxism; even labourism has turned more than one trick.

In this issue of Arena Magazineyou will find a useful comparison of competing forms of liberalism around the question of how to argue democratically for or against same sex marriage. Marxist insights make reading and thinking about the place of mining in the Australian economy a whole lot more comprehensible. Marxist and anarchist informed protest, whether on the streets of New York or Melbourne, as reported in this issue, are a sign of an inevitable fightback against neoliberal orthodoxy and the capitalist part of its still deep-rooted hegemony.

Arena Magazine sees itself as indeed playing a role at this point of recognition of multiple conflicts of view within its broadly ‘left’ constituency,as in turn those competing standpoints project out to the sites and sources of larger powers and forces. The ‘left’ stands if nothing else as a symbolic counter to what goes unquestioned in the mainstream and is thus available as fodder for the powers. In this light we have several pieces in this issue of the magazine focused on the pressing question of how to reinvigorate democratic discourse―not the hunkering down into winner takes all positions (see Mick Leahy on liberalism), or worse, a kind of psychotic doublespeak that shuts out opposition and difference (see Justin Clemens on The Australian).

But it might be observed that this also means not only the reinvigoration of discourse in its colloquial meaning of discussion and disputation, but also in the ‘discourses’ that have shaped our commonsense, even those that in the modern period were in conflict with the norms and assumptions of the mainstream. For the arena editors, this is a pressing task that disputation alone simply cannot achieve. This is the view that the particular opacity of the present period requires radical new thinking: a decided break from our nineteenth century debt; the possibility of seeing anew the key complexes and shaping contradictions at the heart of an emerging new order andmode of life.

Of course late capitalism, or postmodernity, depending on your theorist of choice,has spawned distinctly new ideologies. But while postmodernism, poststructuralism and queer theory, as three related examples, are a critical disruption of the ideologies of that period, how far they are a critical commentary on the conditions of the present remains to be seen.

This is not to say that they are without real-world power or that they do not influence the mainstream political parties. Some representatives of, and certainly researchers feeding both the Labor Party and the Greens, will have been deeply shaped by just these frameworks of understanding. Yet it remains the old ideologies of the political sphere proper that must carry the burden of the new into action, as if the political mainstream can’t make a significant break onto the terrain of the new world that has produced them.

By way of example, the liberal Greens, and the middleclass Labor Party, claim aspects of classical liberalism to justify and do the work of their radical social policies. Same sex marriage is thus presented as a problem of liberal choice and right, or equality, rather than as a queer or postmodern demand given body by the powers of contemporary science and technology. If there are claims to marriage equality, there will certainly be claims to equality and rights to have babies. These claims could take different forms; with different justifications for gay parenthood and new configurations of familial groups; but the chances are that the loudest proponents will make abstract rights the core of their program and the new technologies and marketised ‘surrogacy’ essential elements of their demands; or they will be the creeping, flow-on effects of unthought-through attachments to populist liberal notions.

But it may be because these unspoken influences―both the new theories and the new circumstances―in fact haven’t yet been adequately interpreted. If new thinking hasn’t found a political representative in the public-political sphere, and the Greens don’t register the nature of the social groundthat has produced them and their disparate claims, it is because we don’t yet see the full implications of our postmodern condition. Can the Greens explain their commitment to the environment in liberal terms? On what basis could one be for the living earth and for same sex marriage? What is an articulate political philosophy in the present period?

The point here is not to say that the old social theories and philosophies aren’t still useful for thinking through where we are and how we should act. Of course they are. And it is not to say that the new theories, which shelter in old political philosophies, don’t point up crucial aspects of the oppressions and inequalities of modernity. They do. But it is a question of coming to grips with what constitutes the new terrain in which a new politics might properly be played out, and thus the choices that need to be made, if we are not simply to follow either outdated notions of the good (or ethical) life, or conspire with unannounced cultural-political imperatives embedded ina ‘spontaneous’ social order we have not chosen.

The Greens better than any other political party are situated on that new political terrain and perforce have broken with many of the basic tenets of the old ideologies. The threat to the earth and its human and non-human populations,of necessity, announces that cultural-political terrain. The true test for all of us, however, will be how to build new political discourses that face up to the full range of implications of post-modern culture under globalised capitalism.

It is testament to the power of photography and film, or what the culture has come to see as an immediate window onto reality, that there was such a response. The capacity of the camera to bring us confronting photo-journalistic images that marshal feelings of horror is well recognised; their importance cannot be underestimated (and on this basis one wonders why we don’t see more images of the true horrors of our war in Afghanistan and Pakistan or of life inside Australia’s concentration camps). But of course there was more going on here than the simple transmission of images. ‘Reality’ touched a particular nerve and had a broad significance, if not also an unconscious register. At one level we might suspect to be at work here a deep-going reaction formation to a core problem for human culture in general: killing for meat. At another, the Four Corners controversy and the practical reaction it has generated is redolent with all the elements of a distinctly late-modern politics of nature and our redefinition of just where we, especially the West, stand in relation to her.

One cannot discount the possibility that humans harbour species guilt over the destruction of animal life for our own life-giving purposes. Certainly we know that dead animals must be turned into ‘meat’ and then again into meals; from the raw to the cooked, and integrated into restrictive systems of meaning and psychologically acceptable forms: any potential horror involved in the production of meat, even in cultures where animals are likened to human kin, can be corralled or sequestered and explained culturally. Killing for life may be the original disavowal; perhaps more acute still in settled civilisations based on the growing of crops and killing for food of domesticated animals―those animal others we come to know closely. As with many unpalatable choices laid out by nature, humans have had to make their often conflicted actions palatable, even ethical, in order to answer to the higher gods and social ‘goods’ to which human natures also aspire.

In modernity, the need to sequester bloody reality has a whole anthropology and sociology of its own―from the generalisation of civilised behaviour from the European courts of kings and queens to

ordinary people, and Enlightened views of subjects and bodies leading to a distaste for public displays of blood or torture; to modern diversified societies’ divisions of labour around blood and bodies in trades and professions such as butchery and surgery; to today’s techno-mediated and mega-industrialised production of food for consumer consumption, globalised on the one hand, as in our export of live cattle, and fully sanitised, as in the meat we buy in supermarkets. Blood and guts have almost entirely disappeared from ordinary life (just like our wars, fought secretly or carried out at a distance by high-tech means), and certainly from shop windows, with the demise of butcher shops and with meat even touched up cosmetically on supermarket shelves.

So, hidden from view in our lives in general, animal death―or more particularly our confrontation with the fate of meekness and innocence at our own hands―is very hard to bear, and with the once relatively confident justifications for it beginning to slip away, the rawness of animal death itself tends to come into focus. In other words, the immediate sense of animal innocence and human cruelty is in play, but it is an opening to an enduring wound at the heart of culture.

I think it was something to be relatively proud of that the reaction from animal advocates and the cattle industry, as in Bob Katter’s statements and those of cattlemen and women themselves, was not one of racial accusation against Indonesians. There was no attempt to divert responsibility away from Australia even if Indonesia has latterly found racism in the government’s banning of exports to it alone. In fact, overall there seemed to be considerable sensitivity, albeit with very large commercial interests hovering in the background, to Muslim Indonesia’s halal requirements and the problems of poverty and unequal resources. The closeness of Australia’s north to Australia’s northern neighbour, geographically and in the kind of cross-cultural understanding that may be built via trade itself, was worth noting. And yet for all the attempts by mainstream animal advocates, cattle industry representative, independent MPs and the government, the debate has remained deeply unsettling. The language of animal ‘cruelty’ and its corollary in the ‘humane abattoir’, used by just about all the political players (though not some diehards who accuse the Australian middle class of denying poor Indonesians food), may be an attempt to bridge the nature–culture gap and to act decently, but whether that kind of distinctly ‘modern’ cultural solution will work today is a moot point.

Almost immediately there appeared in the debate the oxymoronic, weirdly redundant notion of cruelty in the slaughterhouse. Certainly there is a distinction to be made: animal death, on the one hand, cruelty through mismanagement, on the other. But it wasn’t merely that kind of cruelty that was exposed to us, and the notion of a humane abattoir sounds to postmodern people, and especially the young, just like Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the humane penitentiary, home to unspeakable cruelty―cruelty built into the notion itself. That modern institution, which like the insane asylum stood at the margins of society, was intensively involved in shaping modern people. The humane abattoir speaks similarly to the question of how animals figure as others to us, and what their autonomous natures and claims to life might be.

The independent MPs, the government and industry representatives believe that stun guns, the redesign of cages and modernisation of abattoirs in general are the solution. Animal suffering would indeed be lessened and many who have rectified the nature–culture faultline in their own lives as committed meat eaters will be content. But this will not settle calls for an end to the live cattle trade from other quarters. Again, much of the argument put against the transport of live animals for meat to other countries has revolved around cruelty. Animal suffering is the focus; conditions on ships and in slaughterhouses remote from Australia the target. But the sources of suffering in this context are both broader and more specific. While regional trade with our populous northern neighbour must be a (reciprocal) given, the vision of wealthy Australia’s mega-ships, huge animals and giant logistical operations that span the globe speak to many of the hubris and anti-nature attitude of growth-addicted global capitalism.

Many young animal activists have taken up Peter Singer’s notion of animal rights. But a much more telling, and historically apt, approach may rest in the critique of contemporary life symbolised in what has been called ‘self-kill vegetarianism’. This idea, that unless the individual is involved in the killing of their meat they will not eat it, does not discount animal killing as such. But it does indicate precisely the distance between the table and ‘meat production’ in our time. It is not likely that this is a practical politics for the mass of people, but it speaks of a hoped-for relationship that honours animals, brings the issue of food and nature close to home, and makes human responsibility an ethical confrontation, not merely a technical solution.

The turmoil on the stock markets and the threat of default in Europe bear witness to a further rupture following the GFC of 2008. But the world should be preparing for much more than the possibility of a double-dip recession. Over coming years we face nothing less than the winding down of the global economy. Media commentary has almost exclusively concentrated on whether growth can be restored in order to service debt. But this approach is not only short-term in outlook; its purely economic concerns leave unexplored the deep assumptions about growth and expansion that underpin capitalist economy.

Growth and expansion are not merely difficult in our present circumstances; they are fast entering a zone of impossibility. If this is so it is not only the global economy that is at stake: the viability of capitalism itself is called into question. No longer able to deliver what it has led publics to expect, we can expect growing waves of belligerence. Always a source of structural disorder―generating significant historical resistance, from romanticism to socialism to fascism―it is now culturally and personally destructive as never before, while ecologically it has come up against the limits of a finite Earth. Incapacity to expand on a systematic basis can only mean the breakdown of capitalism; whether we like it or not, we are facing a transition to a non-capitalist world.

The present panic in global markets arises out of confirmation that the recovery from the GFC of 2008 will not quickly restore economic growth. It focuses on two issues. Firstly, significant economic growth is essential for restoring the familiar everyday world of modernity, especially the fulfillment of our consumption expectations. Secondly, growth is needed to maintain employment in the general economy and for restoring financial order: to service and pay down debt.

Arguably growth is no longer defensible culturally or environmentally, but the immediate issue is why it has stalled right now. On this question some economic commentary has offered useful insights into the scale of the 2008 collapse of the financial bubble across the West, and how such collapses produce contractions, multiple ramifications and lagging consequences for extended periods. The model here is Japan of the 1990s, which languished for fifteen years after its property bubble burst. It still has not returned to sustained growth, the effect of undeclared and undeclarable bad debts hidden in the banking system, which restrict the possibility of  lending risk capital, thus dampening attempts to stimulate the economy.

Keynesian stimulus solutions in the current global crisis have avoided the level of contraction in production that occurred during the Great Depression. This is an achievement. But it is often assumed that had stimulus been applied in the 1930s then the following decade of average zero growth would have been avoided. Arguably this is not likely. The problem is that finance and credit are not just a function of technical settings. The credit and investment process has to be constituted over time. The same can be said about the consumer and the institutions of consumption. They are more fragile than we usually grant: the systems do not bounce back to normality easily. Further, stimulus has its own costs in the form of debt, which becomes unmanageable when there is zero growth. In the meantime, the capacity for further stimulus has largely been exhausted.

In Europe these problems are compounded by the attempt to sustain a currency across the EU without banking institutions that can properly support it. In particular, the EU has no lender of last resort other than those supports cobbled together out of national differences, which, predictably, are likely to fall apart in difficult times. The prospect of growing indebtedness because of further budget deficits, with the threat that all debts will become unmanageable if interest rates rise, combined with growing public dissension and pain, only fuels this crisis in the heartlands of capitalism.

Looking more broadly, the GFC can be interpreted as a rupture in the major shift in capitalist structures that took place in the 1980s. Arising out of the crisis of the 1970s that ended the Long Boom, seizing upon new technological possibilities (exemplified in the silicon chip), capitalism launched into a most turbulent and dangerous phase, emptying out historical communities and associations, often making them over into abstract associations supported by the media, the internet and the global market. A key to understanding this revolution was the drawing of the universities directly into the ambit of the capitalist process. Capitalism has, for the moment, corralled the intellectual practices directing the techno-scientific revolution into an amplification of the capitalist process. A more abstracted social life has been legitimised through the offer to liberate individuals from biological and prior social constraints, together with vastly expanded consumption possibilities.

At the heart of this intensified utopian project of progress lie two contradictions. At the level of social life and social institutions, this shift undermines social institutions crucial to the renewal of humanity: institutions grounded in history, locality and particular others. The self is released from stable reference points and is opened to reconstruction via the techno-sciences. With respect to our fundamental physical conditions of existence, humanity’s relation to nature become so extended through abstract means that we only know it as a resource to be exploited, destroyed or remade; or as pure wilderness.

So from this perspective the GFC is an aspect of a larger crisis. It arose out of those transformations of the market and capitalist process that opened the world to info-money and high-tech markets. Deregulated markets and currencies, the commodification of international education, the automation of risk in global monetary markets, economies oriented towards leisure and global tourism, easy debt and property as wealth, the endless array of free trade schemes: this is the unstable mix that makes up this new world. Relative to earlier capitalist forms, it draws on the techno-sciences to undermine familiar worlds and reconstruct them around radical individualism, and pushes towards the further dominance of markets, privileging trade over local development and employment. Now, struggling for stability as it lurches from one institutional crisis to another, we might better see these as elements of a world built upon a utopian fantasy, a world unrelated to a viable reality.

It is not the first time capitalism has come up against a wall. The key example from the past, the Great Depression, was so intense that the major counter-movements of communism and fascism were able to challenge its hegemony. Yet their critique of capitalism also left untouched some core elements. F. A. Hayek characterised the genius of capitalism and the market in terms of its constant expansion and growth―of product, territory and population―yet the counter-movements (apart from the communist critique of empire) did not challenge these core properties. Fascism avidly pursued them. Communism defended expansion and growth by purporting to substitute a higher rationality (a command economy beyond the market), which eventually turned sour. The capacity to go beyond class division and irrational cycles of boom and bust while achieving similar levels of prosperity to that of capitalism was a core claim, while criticism of population growth was usually considered counter-revolutionary.

What is markedly different today is not just the crisis of global growth in the short and medium term but that the economy of global capitalism can no longer rely on what has been assumed for 400 years: the possibility of expansion and growth. The reality of a finite world has begun to restrict the possibility of ‘recovery’ and a return to sustained growth. It is hardly possible to overstate the significance of this collapse of modern assumptions.

Capitalism has been the West’s major means of pursuing growth and expansion. This was not only a matter of expanded forms of production. Hunger for territory expressed in the expansion of empire and colonialism in the New World was also important, as were our attitudes towards population. In the early period of the emergence of modernity, the rise of humanism and the doctrine of progress, the population of the world was around 500 million. Today it is 7 billion; soon it will be 9 billion. In little more than 400 years, progress has called into being an expansion of production, territory and population that is now exhausting the environment and resources generally. But it is not only a matter of economic exploitation; progress is a way of thinking about and feeling in the world—it is in our pores.

Whether in high culture or popular culture, the sentiment is the same. Witness John Milton’s openness to expansion into a wider universe, and the unity of his view with that of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke 400 years later:

Witness this new-made world, another Heaven

From Heaven-gate not far, founded in view

On the clear hyaline, the glassy sea;

Of amplitude almost immense, with stars

Numerous, and every star perhaps a world

Of destined habitation.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 7, 1674

Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space.

Arthur C. Clarke, The Challenge of the Spaceship: Previews of Tomorrow’s World, 1959.

Neither Milton nor Clarke is speaking simply of humanity’s wonder at the existence of a wider universe. Rather they, and humanity as they perceive it, are practically oriented towards that wider universe. If not exactly disembarking from Planet Earth, we are nevertheless open to colonising the stars. This is one of the grounding myths of modern culture, yet a myth that has little prospect of finding fulfillment in a finite world.

That the world is finite is denied practically and imaginatively by capitalist progress. One key example is the desperate strategies that have emerged around the peaking of oil production―witness the plunder of the arctic, shale oil and coal seam gas.

And this is a perfect example of the conundrum that capitalist economy faces in the present crisis. Any sign of global growth in Western economies now produces significant spikes in the price of oil, but this immediately undercuts growth. There is a new structure in place due to the peaking of oil production globally. Cheap energy in the form of oil underpinned capitalist growth for half a century. Now that is ending we are witnessing the first stage of an unfolding process around one component of that wall which will deny the option of expansion. It puts an end to the utopias of endless growth and expanding trade. The demise of the export-oriented economy is now objectively predictable. Do we allow our manufacturing industry to collapse before this reality materialises, or do we organise now to have a viable economy in a post-capitalist world? Do we continue down the road of agribusiness and farming that undermines local community, where land loses all local meaning in order to sell through super-marts to the mass consumer organised around world trade?

We are entering an unfamiliar world in which the modern notion of progress as an opening to infinite development must collapse. Now, rather than observe the decline of the academy, as significant elements of it are drawn further into a pact with progress, we must call upon it, together with working people, ethically concerned citizens and those leaders willing to re-think their assumptions to help plot a course that will take us beyond 400 years of capitalism.

In several places locally we’ve been told that interpretation of the events in London is mere punditry without on-the-ground reporting (Media Watch, for instance), as if nothing can be said without the words and justifications as given by those involved themselves. Has our social knowledge, and the practice of interpretation, receded so far as to preclude considered judgements of a more general and systemic kind? Social life operates at different levels of awareness, and at different levels of emotional and practical commitment to the culture that shapes us. It used to be the role of the humanities—in universities that held interpretation to be a core function—to study such in broad terms, making our actions meaningful and meaning more complex. In fact, though marginalised and perhaps repressed, broader interpretations of neo-liberal life—what it means, and how it can’t last—have been ‘out there’ for as long as neo-liberalism itself; the signs were always there to be read. We are nothing if not deeply mired in contradictions in our present world of radical cultural change and disparate social futures for different social groups. In the midst of collapse and confusion perhaps general thinking will again become popular as we are forced to work out what those contradictions mean.

While Cameron and his constituency are plugging crime and gang behaviour as the explanation for London’s woes, more social commentary has focused on poverty and want, especially the alienating quality of Britain’s huge housing estates and the poor’s lack of education. More on the money still has been commentary that combines a focus on poverty with consumption and desire, or how want has been transformed and come to mean those contemporary identity fixers: products and lifestyle. If the underclass kids of England are not in want of food and shelter as such, but are undereducated and demeaned in myriad ways in their life circumstances, and at the same time bombarded with images of what counts in the society they liminally inhabit, it makes sense that what they want is an identity that holds sway—that means something to them and affects how others treat them. Howard Jacobson pointed out the Dickensianism of the images of kids labouring under the weight of huge LCD screens as they scurried or slinked or brazenly made their way round the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester. But this is Dickens postmodernised, both in terms of consumption desire and, as Jacobson himself suggested, in terms of some notion of ‘rights’ as deployed by the young—an often empty call that bolsters a sense of entitlement but may have little actual content for those who have experienced extreme (cultural) disadvantage.

Of course, who can blame them for that? Some other commentary has been important in pointing out that there is a parallel in the apparent desires of looters/rioters and the scions of the neo-liberal order: consumption is where it is at broadly in the culture, and raised to an art form by that ‘lucky’ few—increasingly few proportionally speaking—who sit at the top of the pile. Financiers and corrupt politicians (moats anyone?) have figured in this assessment, and while some commentators have cast doubt on such a connection of corruption as directly linked to the riots, and fair enough—culture, it should be said, works by way of mood and undercurrent as much as the transmission of explicit views or the making of conscious connections. The mood across much of the Western world is not only one of fearfulness in the face of all kinds of change and collapse but radical suspicion and confusion, that is, where it has not already begun to transmute into explicitly radical anti-neo-liberal action (see the articles in this Arena Magazine on Spain and Croatia). If the markets can shudder and fall on the strength of ‘emotion’, as we are now being warned to expect at any moment, so too can ‘volatility’ erupt on the streets, although ‘emotion’ here may be some way from ‘irrational’.

Neo-liberalism has been the executive philosophy and overriding form of governance of a supercharged capitalism for some thirty years, as its basis in the communications revolution and other high-technological advances have carried it past the wildest dreams of any common-or-garden capitalist of the first half of the twentieth century. Hayek and his neo-conservative acolytes, all the way down to our common-or-garden Liberal and Labor politicians in Australia, may have ‘freed’ the economy, and much of civil society, from social constraint and thus opened the way institutionally to production and consumption on an unimaginable scale. But the real engine of change and ‘growth’ has always lain deeper and acted earlier in the culture and economy, propelling us towards a radical leap beyond the modernity with which we had all become familiar.

One aspect of that modernity was the welfare state, and understandings of care, comfort, education and morality writ large into state-based institutions, justified, contradictorially, as variously improving people or their social opportunities. Another was consumption, but within the bounds largely of the natural world and mechanical processes at the disposal of industry, and within the terms of an emergent but still only ‘picket-fence’ individualism, which was held in check by moralities of rectitude, or self-control, and softened by the ongoing existence of relatively stable local communities and their institutions. If the welfare state has abandoned many or most of its responsibilities to a broadly understood social constituency; if individualism now knows few bounds; and consumption has reached completely unsustainable levels environmentally and morally, ‘neo-liberalism’ is only partly to blame, though it will be the most visible target, especially the ‘corruption’ and ‘greed’ with which it is given a human face in everyday understandings of why things went wrong.

‘Greed’, however, is hardly a big enough or social enough concept to nail what has been going on—neither neo-liberalism itself, as theory or practice, nor, certainly, the underlying technoscientific revolution that emerged in a range of fields, offering late capitalism new substances to work on (for example, biological entities, newly isolated compounds), new means for the transformation of the material world (reconstitutive (techno-)science), new means for the promotion of products as identity aids (new media), a new space to research them (the neo-liberal university) and new, globalised conduits for rapid expansion and movement of finance (networked communications technologies). Neo-liberalism has been an especially expansionist and brutal regime of executive power in its paring back of historically achieved conditions for (relative) social decency, as in the welfare state and its fundamental assumption of social inclusion, or education (including the liberal university) focused on the formation of the person not just technique—with consequences like those witnessed in London. But that it has also ushered in, and in many respects obscured the deeper processes at work, in part because of its hubristic understanding of its own power has meant that the other layers of change unsettling culture and society today have not been easy to gauge or assess.

The Left’s response has not assisted very much in this either. Overrun and overawed by neo-liberalism’s apparent power, and with parts of the Left in any case deeply committed to a productivist view of society and any future we might inhabit, they fell in with the dominant project. In the case of Labo(u)r governments in the United Kingdom and Australia, they of course furthered the neo-liberal project, ‘streamlining’ the state, establishing new conditions for wealth accumulation and globalisation’s free-wheeling financial arrangements and, in the United Kingdom especially, for the spectacular financial collapse of 2008. That their commitment to neo-liberalism, unwavering as it is, is a key element in environmental collapse and climate change barely rates a mention. Certainly there seems little consciousness of the legacy of left economism and modernist productivism within these parties which today ties super-consumption and ‘growth at any cost’ to both social decay and planetary disaster. The ‘postmodern’ Left, on the other hand, while decrying many of the inequities produced by neo-liberalism and often arguing on the basis of ‘values’ and ‘rights’ for a range of ethical positions, is

similarly blind to the nature of the underlying transformation that has powered neo-liberalism. Indeed, in the way that cultures work, surreptitiously, beneath the level of our awareness, our worlds have been shaped not simply by ‘neo-liberal values’, but by an emerging, new relation to knowledge, each other and the natural world, effected in the present conjunction of technique and science as carried by its intellectually trained agents. Techno-science has not merely given us new frontiers and means for production (the emphasis of left and right neoliberalism), but is transgressive of many of the fundaments of previous ways of life, reshaping our being in the world today in myriad complex ways.

Howard Jacobson’s comment about young people’s sense of their ‘rights’ leading to a generalised sense of entitlement has a right-wing ring to it, but he didn’t mean it like that, and it is worth examining further. We must be careful, given the coming period of potentially very serious rightwing reaction, to tease out this sort of question adequately.

Just as the middle class has lived off the transgressive frisson of wearing gangster chic, so transgressive theory and practice generally on the cultural Left, as in mediatised culture, celebrates the breaking of all sorts of bounds—of ‘respectability’, ‘hierarchy’, the ‘natural’ (the whole culture as an avant-garde). If there is ‘no respect’ forthcoming from London’s rioting youth, it is hardly surprising, not only because they have been left out and are ‘poor’, but because they, like us generally, don’t understand this transgressive ideology and where it comes from, deep in the common culture of techno-scientific capitalism, even if it fills up their lives and hopes and dreams.

In several places locally we’ve been told that interpretation of the events in London is mere punditry without on-the-ground reporting (Media Watch, for instance), as if nothing can be said without the words and justifications as given by those involved themselves. Has our social knowledge, and the practice of interpretation, receded so far as to preclude considered judgements of a more general and systemic kind? Social life operates at different levels of awareness, and at different levels of emotional and practical commitment to the culture that shapes us. It used to be the role of the humanities—in universities that held interpretation to be a core function—to study such in broad terms, making our actions meaningful and meaning more complex. In fact, though marginalised and perhaps repressed, broader interpretations of neo-liberal life—what it means, and how it can’t last—have been ‘out there’ for as long as neo-liberalism itself; the signs were always there to be read. We are nothing if not deeply mired in contradictions in our present world of radical cultural change and disparate social futures for different social groups. In the midst of collapse and confusion perhaps general thinking will again become popular as we are forced to work out what those contradictions mean.

While Cameron and his constituency are plugging crime and gang behaviour as the explanation for London’s woes, more social commentary has focused on poverty and want, especially the alienating quality of Britain’s huge housing estates and the poor’s lack of education. More on the money still has been commentary that combines a focus on poverty with consumption and desire, or how want has been transformed and come to mean those contemporary identity fixers: products and lifestyle. If the underclass kids of England are not in want of food and shelter as such, but are undereducated and demeaned in myriad ways in their life circumstances, and at the same time bombarded with images of what counts in the society they liminally inhabit, it makes sense that what they want is an identity that holds sway—that means something to them and affects how others treat them. Howard Jacobson pointed out the Dickensianism of the images of kids labouring under the weight of huge LCD screens as they scurried or slinked or brazenly made their way round the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester. But this is Dickens postmodernised, both in terms of consumption desire and, as Jacobson himself suggested, in terms of some notion of ‘rights’ as deployed by the young—an often empty call that bolsters a sense of entitlement but may have little actual content for those who have experienced extreme (cultural) disadvantage.

Of course, who can blame them for that? Some other commentary has been important in pointing out that there is a parallel in the apparent desires of looters/rioters and the scions of the neo-liberal order: consumption is where it is at broadly in the culture, and raised to an art form by that ‘lucky’ few—increasingly few proportionally speaking—who sit at the top of the pile. Financiers and corrupt politicians (moats anyone?) have figured in this assessment, and while some commentators have cast doubt on such a connection of corruption as directly linked to the riots, and fair enough—culture, it should be said, works by way of mood and undercurrent as much as the transmission of explicit views or the making of conscious connections. The mood across much of the Western world is not only one of fearfulness in the face of all kinds of change and collapse but radical suspicion and confusion, that is, where it has not already begun to transmute into explicitly radical anti-neo-liberal action (see the articles in this Arena Magazine on Spain and Croatia). If the markets can shudder and fall on the strength of ‘emotion’, as we are now being warned to expect at any moment, so too can ‘volatility’ erupt on the streets, although ‘emotion’ here may be some way from ‘irrational’.

Neo-liberalism has been the executive philosophy and overriding form of governance of a supercharged capitalism for some thirty years, as its basis in the communications revolution and other high-technological advances have carried it past the wildest dreams of any common-or-garden capitalist of the first half of the twentieth century. Hayek and his neo-conservative acolytes, all the way down to our common-or-garden Liberal and Labor politicians in Australia, may have ‘freed’ the economy, and much of civil society, from social constraint and thus opened the way institutionally to production and consumption on an unimaginable scale. But the real engine of change and ‘growth’ has always lain deeper and acted earlier in the culture and economy, propelling us towards a radical leap beyond the modernity with which we had all become familiar.

One aspect of that modernity was the welfare state, and understandings of care, comfort, education and morality writ large into state-based institutions, justified, contradictorially, as variously improving people or their social opportunities. Another was consumption, but within the bounds largely of the natural world and mechanical processes at the disposal of industry, and within the terms of an emergent but still only ‘picket-fence’ individualism, which was held in check by moralities of rectitude, or self-control, and softened by the ongoing existence of relatively stable local communities and their institutions. If the welfare state has abandoned many or most of its responsibilities to a broadly understood social constituency; if individualism now knows few bounds; and consumption has reached completely unsustainable levels environmentally and morally, ‘neo-liberalism’ is only partly to blame, though it will be the most visible target, especially the ‘corruption’ and ‘greed’ with which it is given a human face in everyday understandings of why things went wrong.

‘Greed’, however, is hardly a big enough or social enough concept to nail what has been going on—neither neo-liberalism itself, as theory or practice, nor, certainly, the underlying technoscientific revolution that emerged in a range of fields, offering late capitalism new substances to work on (for example, biological entities, newly isolated compounds), new means for the transformation of the material world (reconstitutive (techno-)science), new means for the promotion of products as identity aids (new media), a new space to research them (the neo-liberal university) and new, globalised conduits for rapid expansion and movement of finance (networked communications technologies). Neo-liberalism has been an especially expansionist and brutal regime of executive power in its paring back of historically achieved conditions for (relative) social decency, as in the welfare state and its fundamental assumption of social inclusion, or education (including the liberal university) focused on the formation of the person not just technique—with consequences like those witnessed in London. But that it has also ushered in, and in many respects obscured the deeper processes at work, in part because of its hubristic understanding of its own power has meant that the other layers of change unsettling culture and society today have not been easy to gauge or assess.

The Left’s response has not assisted very much in this either. Overrun and overawed by neo-liberalism’s apparent power, and with parts of the Left in any case deeply committed to a productivist view of society and any future we might inhabit, they fell in with the dominant project. In the case of Labo(u)r governments in the United Kingdom and Australia, they of course furthered the neo-liberal project, ‘streamlining’ the state, establishing new conditions for wealth accumulation and globalisation’s free-wheeling financial arrangements and, in the United Kingdom especially, for the spectacular financial collapse of 2008. That their commitment to neo-liberalism, unwavering as it is, is a key element in environmental collapse and climate change barely rates a mention. Certainly there seems little consciousness of the legacy of left economism and modernist productivism within these parties which today ties super-consumption and ‘growth at any cost’ to both social decay and planetary disaster. The ‘postmodern’ Left, on the other hand, while decrying many of the inequities produced by neo-liberalism and often arguing on the basis of ‘values’ and ‘rights’ for a range of ethical positions, is similarly blind to the nature of the underlying transformation that has powered neo-liberalism. Indeed, in the way that cultures work, surreptitiously, beneath the level of our awareness, our worlds have been shaped not simply by ‘neo-liberal values’, but by an emerging, new relation to knowledge, each other and the natural world, effected in the present conjunction of technique and science as carried by its intellectually trained agents. Techno-science has not merely given us new frontiers and means for production (the emphasis of left and right neoliberalism), but is transgressive of many of the fundaments of previous ways of life, reshaping our being in the world today in myriad complex ways.

Howard Jacobson’s comment about young people’s sense of their ‘rights’ leading to a generalised sense of entitlement has a right-wing ring to it, but he didn’t mean it like that, and it is worth examining further. We must be careful, given the coming period of potentially very serious rightwing reaction, to tease out this sort of question adequately.

Just as the middle class has lived off the transgressive frisson of wearing gangster chic, so transgressive theory and practice generally on the cultural Left, as in mediatised culture, celebrates the breaking of all sorts of bounds—of ‘respectability’, ‘hierarchy’, the ‘natural’ (the whole culture as an avant-garde). If there is ‘no respect’ forthcoming from London’s rioting youth, it is hardly surprising, not only because they have been left out and are ‘poor’, but because they, like us generally, don’t understand this transgressive ideology and where it comes from, deep in the common culture of techno-scientific capitalism, even if it fills up their lives and hopes and dreams.

It is testament to the power of photography and film, or what the culture has come to see as an immediate window onto reality, that there was such a response. The capacity of the camera to bring us confronting photo-journalistic images that marshal feelings of horror is well recognised; their importance cannot be underestimated (and on this basis one wonders why we don’t see more images of the true horrors of our war in Afghanistan and Pakistan or of life inside Australia’s concentration camps). But of course there was more going on here than the simple transmission of images. ‘Reality’ touched a particular nerve and had a broad significance, if not also an unconscious register. At one level we might suspect to be at work here a deep-going reaction formation to a core problem for human culture in general: killing for meat. At another, the Four Corners controversy and the practical reaction it has generated is redolent with all the elements of a distinctly late-modern politics of nature and our redefinition of just where we, especially the West, stand in relation to her.

One cannot discount the possibility that humans harbour species guilt over the destruction of animal life for our own life-giving purposes. Certainly we know that dead animals must be turned into ‘meat’ and then again into meals; from the raw to the cooked, and integrated into restrictive systems of meaning and psychologically acceptable forms: any potential horror involved in the production of meat, even in cultures where animals are likened to human kin, can be corralled or sequestered and explained culturally. Killing for life may be the original disavowal; perhaps more acute still in settled civilisations based on the growing of crops and killing for food of domesticated animals―those animal others we come to know closely. As with many unpalatable choices laid out by nature, humans have had to make their often conflicted actions palatable, even ethical, in order to answer to the higher gods and social ‘goods’ to which human natures also aspire.

In modernity, the need to sequester bloody reality has a whole anthropology and sociology of its own―from the generalisation of civilised behaviour from the European courts of kings and queens to ordinary people, and Enlightened views of subjects and bodies leading to a distaste for public displays of blood or torture; to modern diversified societies’ divisions of labour around blood and bodies in trades and professions such as butchery and surgery; to today’s techno-mediated and mega-industrialised production of food for consumer consumption, globalised on the one hand, as in our export of live cattle, and fully sanitised, as in the meat we buy in supermarkets. Blood and guts have almost entirely disappeared from ordinary life (just like our wars, fought secretly or carried out at a distance by high-tech means), and certainly from shop windows, with the demise of butcher shops and with meat even touched up cosmetically on supermarket shelves.

So, hidden from view in our lives in general, animal death―or more particularly our confrontation with the fate of meekness and innocence at our own hands―is very hard to bear, and with the once relatively confident justifications for it beginning to slip away, the rawness of animal death itself tends to come into focus. In other words, the immediate sense of animal innocence and human cruelty is in play, but it is an opening to an enduring wound at the heart of culture.

I think it was something to be relatively proud of that the reaction from animal advocates and the cattle industry, as in Bob Katter’s statements and those of cattlemen and women themselves, was not one of racial accusation against Indonesians. There was no attempt to divert responsibility away from Australia even if Indonesia has latterly found racism in the government’s banning of exports to it alone. In fact, overall there seemed to be considerable sensitivity, albeit with very large commercial interests hovering in the background, to Muslim Indonesia’s halal requirements and the problems of poverty and unequal resources. The closeness of Australia’s north to Australia’s northern neighbour, geographically and in the kind of cross-cultural understanding that may be built via trade itself, was worth noting. And yet for all the attempts by mainstream animal advocates, cattle industry representative, independent MPs and the government, the debate has remained deeply unsettling. The language of animal ‘cruelty’ and its corollary in the ‘humane abattoir’, used by just about all the political players (though not some diehards who accuse the Australian middle class of denying poor Indonesians food), may be an attempt to bridge the nature–culture gap and to act decently, but whether that kind of distinctly ‘modern’ cultural solution will work today is a moot point.

Almost immediately there appeared in the debate the oxymoronic, weirdly redundant notion of cruelty in the slaughterhouse. Certainly there is a distinction to be made: animal death, on the one hand, cruelty through mismanagement, on the other. But it wasn’t merely that kind of cruelty that was exposed to us, and the notion of a humane abattoir sounds to postmodern people, and especially the young, just like Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the humane penitentiary, home to unspeakable cruelty―cruelty built into the notion itself. That modern institution, which like the insane asylum stood at the margins of society, was intensively involved in shaping modern people. The humane abattoir speaks similarly to the question of how animals figure as others to us, and what their autonomous natures and claims to life might be.

The independent MPs, the government and industry representatives believe that stun guns, the redesign of cages and modernisation of abattoirs in general are the solution. Animal suffering would indeed be lessened and many who have rectified the nature–culture faultline in their own lives as committed meat eaters will be content. But this will not settle calls for an end to the live cattle trade from other quarters. Again, much of the argument put against the transport of live animals for meat to other countries has revolved around cruelty. Animal suffering is the focus; conditions on ships and in slaughterhouses remote from Australia the target. But the sources of suffering in this context are both broader and more specific. While regional trade with our populous northern neighbour must be a (reciprocal) given, the vision of wealthy Australia’s mega-ships, huge animals and giant logistical operations that span the globe speak to many of the hubris and anti-nature attitude of growth-addicted global capitalism.

Many young animal activists have taken up Peter Singer’s notion of animal rights. But a much more telling, and historically apt, approach may rest in the critique of contemporary life symbolised in what has been called ‘self-kill vegetarianism’. This idea, that unless the individual is involved in the killing of their meat they will not eat it, does not discount animal killing as such. But it does indicate precisely the distance between the table and ‘meat production’ in our time. It is not likely that this is a practical politics for the mass of people, but it speaks of a hoped-for relationship that honours animals, brings the issue of food and nature close to home, and makes human responsibility an ethical confrontation, not merely a technical solution.

OK. We know that human beings aren’t monkeys (even though we are both primates), and that care and comfort can be provided by non-biologically associated carers. But extreme closeness, constant touching and intimate suckling, which most mothers know create ties of the deepest kind with their children, are hard to recreate away from the actual mother, especially in the earliest weeks and months of the newborn’s life, a period of great intensity that leaves its mark for life. Mothers matter; and they happen to be female.

We also know that the closeness and complexity of this bodily and psychological tie, which goes both ways between mother and child, is implicated in difficult relationships that sometimes turn out to have pathological consequences for either or both parties. This is sometimes pointed to in post-humanist arguments for new, technologically mediated means and relationships for birthing and raising children (children can be scarred for life in heterosexual families; why shouldn’t men be mothers too etc.). But the kinds of difficulties that can grow up between mothers and children would seem to me to be part of the human condition, which is to say one of the risks of being human; one of the many things like sexual love, birth and death that, as we practise them, define us as a very particular kind of primate (one with culture, language, self-awareness, complex sociality). In the main, those relationships don’t turn out to be destructive. Indeed, they are usually a bedrock that helps to sustain whole complex webs of familial and extended familial life and the empathy for the ‘other’ basic to sociality.

The post-humanist view, which is also post-primate, actually, is just one of the self-serving arguments for commercial surrogacy that is currently supporting the farming out of pregnancy and birth to women in various circumstances. Often these women are from third world countries, or third world parts of the United States, and it doesn’t take much to see the truth of it: they are oppressed people with few options, being used by wealthy couples from the West. Other surrogate mothers, especially from the United States (where commercial surrogacy is legal), like many prostitutes post feminism, claim that it is simply their choice, and making money by selling their bodies is a commercial transaction like any other. But many of these women seem no different really from the first group: oppressed and used, though here they have adopted a rather sad notion of individual rights. The typical liberal goal of self-actualisation that usually justifies ‘choice’, whatever it may be, is absent.  ‘Choice’ may be no more than what these women end up doing— ‘choice’ as a post-hoc explanation dressed up morally as if to describe an act of independent will and action.  There may also be women who really do believe in the neo-liberal view of the world as an unrestricted market, where ‘rights’ actually means trading rights, pure and simple; where just about anything goes so long as there is a market for it. But why would we honour that view as a moral one?

In a number of recent television and newspaper depictions of surrogacy, some surrogate mothers do seem to veer towards a form of self-actualisation justification, saying they feel they have a special gift for giving birth (although why they do rather than any other female or mother is never raised). The work of such statements, however, seems mainly pointed at making clear that although these women are accepting payment, their motive is altruistic. In concert, in these same television shows and articles, we are shown how the buyers of women’s gestational services attempt to build caring relationships with the mother. ‘We went every day to see X and hold her hand before the birth’, ‘We sat with her when she had the ultrasound and watched our baby on the screen together’ etc. etc. The ‘altruistic’ commercial surrogate and the caring purchasers of gestational services are two side of the same happy narrative coin.

But there is something murky here. Images of the buyers’ relationship with the surrogate are typically incredibly uncomfortable-looking, as if the new parents just want to get the hell out of there―get on that plane and get home as fast as possible to enjoy the child by themselves in the happy cocoon they have imagined.  Despite the voiceovers that attempt to convince us of the protagonists’ good intentions and sometimes desperate need, there is something deeply perturbing going on. It is written in the images and the narrative: they always involve loss, vulnerability and inequality; the class and cross-cultural differences involved between buyers and sellers are patently obvious. The story inevitably ends with many viewers asking themselves what will the child think when s/he comes to consciousness of that past transaction; what will the real ending of the story be? This is especially slippery as such ponderings are usually against the grain of the meta-narrative that suggests we should be accepting of ‘difference’ and that any reluctance we might have is because we haven’t yet caught up with the cultural revolution happening before our eyes.

We already know it is very difficult for adopted children to accept that their biological mothers gave them up, even if those children consciously accept that as single women their mothers were blamed and shamed and faced intolerable societal pressures. Why then, should a child be expected to be sanguine about their being the object of a commercial exchange, or about a mother who gave them up for personal gain? Of course surrogacy usually involves the use of the gametes of one member or both of the purchasing couple—the man’s, or one of the men’s, usually (but not always), and if there is a woman, then sometimes the woman’s, depending on the status of her fertility. So often at least a part of the child’s genetic and familial line is ensured in the transaction, through the intervention of in vitro fertilisation techniques. In large part, I imagine, it is this that carries those who must be unnerved by the whole process past the psychological hurdles. The child isn’t just an ‘orphan’ picked up at the body shop. And together with the hefty fee paid for the service, a sense of just entitlement prevails. This of course plays within and against experienced desires and projected pleasures, which carry people forward, though those desires and imaginings now have much fuller rein exactly because the new fertilisation technologies exist.

As we live in a liberal democratic society in which democracy has come to mean openness to individuals’ personal rights and needs, with virtually no examination of what they might mean, the campaign for commercial surrogacy, as with other forms of ‘self-fulfillment’ and commercial transaction around body parts and processes, is readily conceived as one against mere superstitions and oppressive labellings. A sense of just entitlement takes off as a militant assertion of one’s ‘democratic’ rights. One’s ‘right’ to a child is put across as natural and fundamental, despite the fact it is only possible by virtue of a new class of technologies that promise to transcend human embodiment altogether. Politically, the problem is a conflation of political and basic human rights with personal desire, and with the limitless horizon of post-human engineering. The childishness of this vision of democracy and of cultural value is at times breathtaking.

So radically sensitised as we are to the claims of difference and suffering upon us, and to the imperative of individual self-fulfillment, Western populations have lost the capacity to make good judgements about the sources of our human being and how they may restrict what it is that we should desire. Sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, have long observed how human desire abounds and is in all cultures controlled; today any such basic propensity to boundlessness is supercharged by the high-tech revolution, especially in the biological techno-sciences. It is a cultural contradiction that for the things we want―often the most cherished things like babies and intimacy―we are prepared to sacrifice what arguably makes them thus: in the case of commercial surrogacy, the mother, and all she has stood for; and deeply embodied social relationships that do not take the abstracted form of money transactions.

Alison Caddick

Wikileaks is everywhere. The fall-out from the recent release of US diplomatic cables is everywhere causing havoc, raising blood pressure, embarrassing petty local upstarts and great powers all at the same time, and emboldening impressive demonstrations of solidarity by hackers, A-list celebrities, representatives of the ‘new class’ everywhere and civil rights lawyers. Julian Assange’s arrest, and the legitimacy of his actions as a member of the media, albeit of a new form, in the face of US threats to silence him by one means or another, do indeed require action: broad support for his mission to bring greater ‘truth’ to dealings between governments and their peoples; and for the rule of law, rather than the lynching mob (Palin) or the Machiavellian ‘conspiracy’ (Clinton), to come into play.

We can expect to see much more of both, however—crude assertions of power and legitimacy and the right to take violent retribution, in which camp so far Julia Gillard sits; and the Machiavellian playing out of strategies to trap and undermine Assange, to which, of course, we will not really be privy, but which in this now heightened atmosphere of conspiracy we will tend to see everywhere. And this is almost certainly where the Powers will ultimately win out. While being collectively alert to the possibility of ‘conspiracy’ may seem politically responsible, which is one of Assange’s aims, it may be this mindset itself that will make it hard, ultimately, to tell truth from lies, reality from fabrication. Assange is giving the public the opportunity to ‘see for themselves’, rather have others interpret for them, what is ‘really going on’ behind closed doors. Unfortunately, conspiracy theories by their nature mire us in more conspiracy, flooding the scene with undecidables.

The leaks themselves are being hailed in various guises, depending on who is doing the talking. As pointed out by Jonathan Holmes, Assange himself knows well enough that many of the leaks show no actual wrong doing, and his interest in revealing them has more to do with his overarching political philosophy (more of which in a moment) than the specific information in them. Needless to say, many of the cables are very substantial indeed in their content and are both politically explosive and revealing of attitudes and actions of profound importance. For Australia, perhaps, the most significant are the cables that reveal US and Australian government anxiety about the rising power of China, and the expression of US interests in maintaining a sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. In this context, we not only get to see Australia’s pathetic subservience to the United States in the likes of ALP power broker Mark Arbib (and many others); we must also come to see more clearly just how important Australia is likely to be in this particular strategy, and how integrated into the US military/intelligence complex we may have to become for it to succeed (see Richard Tanter’s article in this issue of Arena Magazine).

But the underlying story in all this is not the content but the form—the form of the vehicle that brings the revelations in this mass (apparently) uninterpreted form, and the claims that are being made of it. As various commentators have pointed out, Assange is no simple whistleblower. Indeed he appears to have an enunciated philosophical/political position, which is basically that through mass breakthroughs of raw information the ‘conspiracies’ that governments routinely enact to protect the interests of a certain few will be undermined. He appears to be acting on the basis of a mathematical formula, worked out by him, whereby the conspiratorial cabals, which he conceives as relating to each other in terms of information exchanges via a pattern of networks, can be chopped up and incapacitated (through breakouts across established links) such that real parity in knowledge and power might, in theory at least, be enacted.

In his recent article in The Australian Assange describes what he is doing as ‘scientific journalism’, or providing readers with the ‘truth’―the raw data―so, as mentioned above, they can make up ‘their own minds’ (though as to what exactly it is not entirely clear). This immediately sounds an awfully naive note, because journalism and truth have never enjoyed a one-to-one relationship. It is not as if they ever could have: journalism―even exposés and investigative reporting―always involves an element of interpretation. It is in the nature of writing and publishing. Even in the contexts into which Wikileaks’ cables have tumbled or been placed (and let’s not forget that there is a strategy here) the cables do not come innocent as a little lamb. There isn’t much in this world that is raw data or unadulterated truth. But the juxtaposition of truth and science here perhaps has little to do with any standard of ‘scientific truth’ which suggests itself in this grab of terms. Perhaps ‘scientific’ means nothing more in Assange’s thinking than journalism empowered by his mathematical estimation of the quantity of ‘real’ information needed to break the conspirators’ system, which in turn is entirely dependent on the power on the techno-scientific, that is, the computer and the internet.

One can completely understand why so many people are beginning to hail Assange as a culture hero: he hates duplicity and is suspicious of power, and in the face of retribution that could only have been anticipated right from the start, he is determined and personally brave. But beyond that the celebration is resonant because he appears to have harnessed the internet in ways that already confirm and compound a culture belief: that the internet offers a break both into a new world and into a better one. We see it offering ‘truth’ and ‘science’ here, for example. It also confirms and compounds a growing political sensibility, or two potentials of the one nihilistic political culture: in the face of an impregnable power not listening to and unaccountable to the population, we face either individualist anarchist actions that promise to pierce that power, or continued deep apathy about politics and the potential for change, which is embedded in our culture’s bleak sense that (oppressive) power is everywhere.

But do all of Assange’s supporters really understand the world they live in through the framework of the network that is his fundamental viewpoint? And just what does this viewpoint bequeath in terms of a vision of society, the person and the moral life? Unless the network is relativised against whole realms of complex social intercourse, it tends to flatten a view of the social and sees politics in the thinnest of terms. Of course some do grasp Assange’s challenge in the way he intends: not just to this political ‘centre’ or to that one, against this ideology or that, but against both a centred society as such, and against interpretative institutions in general. At least this is one promise of the internet: radical transparency and a decentring of society—as it is often celebrated and in some respects is experienced by all of us when we sit down at the computer. There is no question that the internet facilitates new lines of interconnection that bypass old centres of (different kinds of) power: nation-states and universities, for example.

But why the form should be seen as innocent―as providing transparent, ‘scientific’, or necessarily liberatory ‘information’ untainted by culture or ideology is another thing entirely. And why a model of relationships built on information should encompass our understanding of knowledge or of politics is disturbing. For one it says nothing of the larger social complexes that inform contemporary politics; it certainly does not necessarily offer a critique of capitalism or its contemporary techno-scientific variant, and may only issue in bold but highly individuated acts of disobedience. In particular, it cannot offer any insight into its own formation, by which I do not mean its rational construction as a tool and technology (mathematical, engineered), but as a socio-cultural form that has emerged within the techno-scientific university and is itself intimately associated through the work of the intellectually trained with a new kind of hyper-individualist sociality and as switch-key of a super-charged capitalism.

As the world moves into what seems to be a political phase of response to the GFC, where labour parties are de-legitimised as mere clones of neo-liberal conservative parties and conservative parties bring out big guns to rein in spending; where students may again be taking to the streets; and in general where the political, social and environmental prospects for the future are radically unclear―interventions like Wikileaks’ will combine with a growing sentiment that ‘power’ in general must be taken down. The trouble is we need interpretation (rather than mere information) more than ever, indeed to identify exactly what this ‘power’ consists in―which is a question that was answered before being asked by Assange and others who see it through the lens of information and conspiracy.

Alison Caddick

On reflection many will realise that this overall orientation masks a deep-seated ambiguity. To grasp how this works requires an appreciation of the role played by cultural blindness in the way people usually think about social conflicts.

In Afghanistan (and Iraq before it) Australians have exhibited a blindness not dissimilar to that involved in the interventions by Australia and other Western colonial countries in the Middle East after the break-up of the Ottoman empire (Gallipoli included). Today, though, there is something new: the culture we take for granted and wish others to adopt is now far more clearly a poisoned chalice (if left unexamined its assumptions will lead to consequences far beyond the legacy of colonialism).

Typically, the role of social, ethnic and religious bonding grounded in the deep history of other cultures is absent in the thinking of the West and its agents. The people being opposed can then be regarded as no more than troublesome social atoms or alien evil gangs who need to be ‘dealt with’. They are beyond being understood. Often they are thought to be sub-human and not worth being understood, unless, that is, they agree with us. Even then those who do accept our ways are usually regarded as the flotsam of war and conquest, grist for the mill of Western cultural superiority. These populations may even be considered ungrateful, not appreciating our helping them to enter the democratic world. Certainly it is beyond most Westerners to understand today how offers of democracy are really much more than this: there is a widespread incapacity to grasp the social assumptions that are embedded in our ‘gifts’.

With this in mind, the debate in the Australian parliament has been morbidly interesting. With the Greens’ welcome insistence that this debate be held, we can now see why there was no earlier one. Rather than dig into the meanings of the cultures we are seeking to transform, or clarify our strategies and consider opposing ones, our parliamentary leaders and their supporters think debate requires no more than a presentation, a performance that dazzles. In this they reflect other expressions of a widespread incapacity to genuinely reflect on our actions and values.

Media debates and media celebrity are key examples of this incapacity. Even more disturbingly, media-style performance resonates with changes in the academy, where the process of listening, thinking and mutual exchange around core assumptions that may be interrogated and defended at face-to-face conferences has been displaced by personal performances, which are the end of the story. The assumption that ideas need to be challenged and worked out in social interchange is now in default. University media campaigns like Melbourne University’s, to ‘Dream Large’ within the spirit of entrenched assumptions, stands in place of philosophically searching inquiry concerning the changing institutional arrangements of social life.

Increasingly, parliamentary discussion is marked by narrow, self-referential thinking. At the heart of this crisis of debate, speakers and listeners seem to have nothing to learn from each other. This is a self-defeating approach for any culture and polity seeking to renew itself while confronting a deep-seated crisis.

Instead of a searching discussion of Australia’s forces in Afghanistan, we circulate and re-circulate narratives that simply drive the ‘need’ to be there. The primary rationale, which framed both leaders’ and just about everyone else’s speeches, is the need to defeat terrorism, even though it does not take much thought to understand that terror is never defeated head on. After all, terror usually has an underlying context. And if the same background issues that generate terror remain, terror will return in one form or another. The Western strategy to transform that background is to promote democracy and other Western institutions, including the neoliberal market.

Yet it is clear enough that in Afghanistan and other places in the Middle East the West is the background issue for many people. As a few commentators have pointed out, far from providing security in Afghanistan the presence of Western forces ensures its absence, as was the case in Iraq and the emergence of the insurgency, and with decades of uncritical US support for the state of Israel, giving rise to the intifada. Given the history of Western relations with Arab and Muslim peoples for the last half-century, and of course for much longer, such attitudes are not going to change for at least a generation. For any prudent Western leader this should in itself be enough to lead them to look for ways other than warfare to achieve their ends, or to reassess the ends themselves.

Instead we soldier on; we do not give up easily; resilience is the name of the game. Of course resilience is to be valued, but without the capacity to take on board how others see their place in the world and then make in-depth judgements, it can become a tragic flaw and be utterly counter-productive. It does not say much to observe that the West’s grand conceit is beginning to falter. Even commentators from the Right such as Greg Sheridan in The Australian are now realising that it will not work; that the West should pull back (in his argument, to preserve some possibility of the United States staying in Asia to balance the rise of China). For Sheridan it is Pakistan that has made Afghanistan unworkable. There is no doubt that even before the recent floods Pakistan was a powder keg, but that is only one element in the West’s failed strategy. These issues, however, do not seem to have an impact on the political warriors in Canberra: they will corral their vision to focus on ‘terrorism in one country’, as if the West has nothing to do with the insecurity besetting the world.

To penetrate this closed circle of ideas it is necessary to dig into the core project of the United States in the Middle East. This is no longer spoken of directly, not since the demise of the Iraq occupation, but it remains an underlying preoccupation. The aim is to create ‘jewels’ of freedom and democratic process throughout the Middle East, with the view of transforming Islam into a member and supporter of the West. We—Australia accepts its role in this massive campaign—will assist Islam to modernise on our terms. This is the grand strategy—not merely to fight terrorism but to remake Islam in our image. Afghanistan cannot be understood outside this broader range of reference points, points no one wants to discuss any more. Why talk when ingrained assumptions provide the answers? Above all, this mindset ignores the main forces producing world insecurity. The West carries gifts of a more gentle culture and democratic interchange in social affairs, which key thinkers like Adam Smith associated with the rise of the market. But whatever the truth of that in Smith’s own time, today cultural assumptions largely left unquestioned in his day contribute to an emerging, worldwide crisis. When things go wrong that shock us—be it to do with war, as in Afghanistan, or the economy, as in the GFC—we tend to attribute such events to individuals and surface forces. We find it hard to see that they are a consequence of institutional change. And not being able to see allows us our aura of ‘innocence’.

Our way of living has radically moved on from the world of Adam Smith. If his was the world of capitalism, ours is of a different order. It is capitalism radically enhanced by a revolution in technology, set in train by the techno-sciences in the new academy. This revolution makes possible a whole range of developments that seem unrelated: a new individuality, radically distanced from family and community; the rise of global markets; an assault on the limits of nature; the genius of the pilot-less weapon now striking Pakistan and Afghanistan and producing such contradictory results. In this more abstracted world, community no longer requires face-to-face interaction, bank loans are no longer sourced to knowable people, biotechnology celebrates the possibilities of an endlessly malleable self, warfare is universalised with the prospect of displacing face-to-face combat.

This is a radical culture that takes nothing for granted except the means of its own techno-transformation. This is the true background to ‘democratisation’ and it is not only blind to cultures constituted in very different social relationships, where the face to face remains a primary cultural form, it is actively hostile towards them. It is here, in this change, that we can source the true core of the insecurity that typifies our world. It is this gift, with its attendant social assumptions, that we carry in ‘innocence’ to the peoples of the non-Western world, and we are shocked when they do not take the opportunity to accept it. Rather than persisting with this futile quest the West needs to turn its attention to the reconstruction of its own way of living before it overwhelms us all.

John Hinkson

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