Tim Jackson asks, through a critique of the core commitments of society to economic growth, how it might be possible to build a sustainable economy that can avoid climate catastrophe. Among a large range of concerns, he pursues this question by asking how we might come to radically different concepts of ‘flourishing’ for individuals and communities, notions of flourishing that contrast with those offered by the apparently limitless consumption lifestyles of contemporary global social institutions. His portrayal of the utter disaster that awaits us if we proceed down the road of what is now called ‘Recovery’ is comprehensive and disturbing. He knows any answer will take time and emerge out of practical endeavour, but a visceral need to commence a process urgently is in the foreground of his thinking. For those who attended, this is where it is at.

In Perth in the same week our leading mineral entrepreneurs led demonstrations against a resource tax proposed by Kevin Rudd, a tax that would be used to help reduce government deficits resulting from the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and related stimulus programs introduced to ensure Recovery. Neither the entrepreneurs nor any of our political leaders—other than Bob Brown—would seem to be on the same planet as Jackson’s Melbourne audience. At the centre of their political and entrepreneurial concerns is the pursuit of economic growth and profit—and more generally the core assumption that expansion is good—the same way of life that Tim Jackson convincingly tells us is doomed and can have no medium-term future. Rather, the official political debate in Australia, excitedly promoted by the media, is a stoush between combatants over the distribution of the spoils from toxic economic expansion. What might be sustainable over time could not be further from their thoughts.

The tunnel vision that characterises mainstream Australia takes a different form in Europe and the United States, where Recovery is far from certain. In Australia the dependence on China, and to a lesser extent India, is stark and anxiety provoking, but for the time being makes Australia look ordered and relatively prosperous. In Europe and the United States the levels of state indebtedness has flown out of control. Arguably such indebtedness can be managed over time with a regime of economic growth. But in our times at best this could only be a solution at great cost. The powerful states of the capitalist heartlands stand vulnerable and could not sustain themselves in the face of another shock. But we have entered an era where shocks are the order of the day.

The shock of debt crisis in Greece in past months is one kind of experience. The Greek government was forced by the institutions of the EU and the IMF to slash welfare, public spending and workers conditions generally to reduce deficits and maintain EU membership. This association of Greece and the EU had mostly generated positive consumption benefits until the crash. Suddenly in the aftermath of the GFC expansion and consumption growth had inverted into debt, unemployment and the collapse of social security. The resulting turmoil on the streets made headlines around the world. But one would be hard put to portray these events as those of a public seeking to live another way. No doubt there are sectors of the Greek polity that would take up this concern. And there are other features of the situation in Greece that are quite specific. Nevertheless expressions of consumer frustration were to the fore in these events.

Where people have been drawn into the world of the consumer oriented to commodities and have lost their sense of mutuality with others—or think mutuality can be found on Facebook—they respond in ways consistent with that hyper-individual formation. We can expect similar responses over the coming period in many a city in the West. As Mark Lilla argues in The New York Review of Books (May–June 2010) in a discussion of the rise of the ‘Tea Party Jacobins’, there is a new populism at large. Quite unlike the populisms of the past, it is based in the new individualism which is constituted in the experience of the consumption lifestyle.

But the loss of mutuality is more complex than this. ‘Facebook mutuality’ is real but it cannot distinguish between technologically facilitated presence and presence based in place, the senses and tangibility. And this distinction lies at the core of the emerging ‘two worlds’. For the importance of locality, regional economy, generational knowledge of others, together with the critique of the global transport of people and commodities, compose some core elements of the emerging critique of global development. To see this as an advocacy of a return to forms of domination and hierarchy embedded in history—a return, say, to an aristocratic conservatism—is to misunderstand the nature of the contradiction that now faces us, one that has been discussed for many years in Arena Magazine and Arena Journal.

On the other side of the world another drama is shockingly underlining the contradictions of our times—the massive eruption of oil 1500 metres below the surface of the ocean off the coast of Louisiana. Far larger than the Exxon-Valdez spill and still not controlled, it will foul the fisheries and the coastline of the immediate East Coast—possibly much of the East Coast—of the United States. Ways of life and pristine environment will be ruined on a monumental scale. Various causes have been identified: corruption and cost-saving inside the corporations, poor technology and inadequate regulation. But most parties, and especially the media, ignore the dependence of the global economy and way of life intimately, in endless detail on oil—from transport to food, from packaging to building. If high tech frames the global Behemoth, oil plays a central role in its growth. For at least ten years it has been known that our world of cheap energy is coming to an end. Dogmatic deniers aside, those who have investigated its future availability come up with the same answer: it has no future. Heedless, a way of life desperate to maintain itself nevertheless launches into dangerous exploration in the deep sea, with what many see as predictable outcomes. One scientific commentator, feeling compelled perhaps to step outside his disciplinary strictures, declared we have opened mythological doors and that nature is now releasing its dark, uncontrollable underside. This is by no means the only underside of the global juggernaut.

While President Obama is signalling (unconvincingly) that the oil spill marks the end of US dependence on fossil fuels, barely believably but illustrative of the social divisions that are emerging, others in the eastern states of the United States are seeking to put aside the temporary ban on off-shore oil drilling because it is causing unemployment in the industry.

Two social worlds are forming. There are many spectators for the time being, but enough people now know that global development is calling into being the stuff of collective nightmares.

Capitalism has encountered a number of social and cultural movements that sought to block its general development. There was Romanticism in the early and mid 19th century, socialism in the mid and late 19th century through well into the 20th century, fascism and Nazism in the early 20th century, and the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It adds little to say that they all failed, but all have nevertheless had effects and continue to influence social thought. They all have to be learnt from in one way or another.

In these instances there would have been no movements of substance without a ferment developing in the universities and institutions of learning. Leading through broad debates about cultural choices, the universities made a crucial contribution to practical transformation. Are there signs of a ferment in the universities emerging today?

The first thing to say is that Tim Jackson is himself a sign of an emerging challenge within the institutions. That he bridges the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences is important. But, to be precise, he comes out of the ecological sciences, where a ferment that has been developing over decades. This gathering ferment in the first instance is not especially socially oriented. Rather it expresses profound dismay at the implications of what has been discovered about the environment and climate change under the impact of growth-oriented Homo sapiens.

The second thing to say is that while this could support a more general ferment in the arts, humanities and social sciences, it has not done so as yet. It may be bubbling away and could well suddenly take form. One can readily advocate such because it is hard to see how there will be a sufficiently challenging social movement without such a development responding to the rising concerns of the general population.

The third thing to say is that our universities have changed compared to the past and that this change is almost certainly at the centre of contemporary quietism in the face of fundamental challenges. (In this issue of Arena Magazine see Rod Beecham and Simon Cooper for a discussion of some of the issues.) During the upheavals of the 1960s, especially in the United States, the humanities and social sciences were outspoken while in the background the hard sciences—or, more accurately, their practical derivative the techno-sciences—together with university authorities were quietly developing relations with industry and government—with capital. This relationship was founded in the new cornucopia that was promised in and emerging from the techno-scientific revolution. Two generations on, it is this relationship that typifies the university. In other words the university as institution has become a central player with capital in the practical development of the global economy and culture—to the point where capitalism per se is no longer an adequate description of contemporary society. The endless cornucopia of material goods and individual lifestyles that lies at the heart of the contemporary crisis is, unlike any earlier social crisis, closely interwoven with the university, and with this shift there has been an inversion of institutional traditions and relations of power and influence.

Every academic working in a university today knows in intimate detail what this has meant for the institution and how it impacts on them as thinkers. It does not mean that they are necessarily contained as individuals by this development but practically speaking, to this time, this has been the collective effect. Tim Jackson will testify to the way this has worked to encourage silence. Until there is a ferment that begins to target this core developmental relationship it will be especially difficult to agitate for a different cultural and economic course into the future.

If there are signs of two worlds developing on the cultural stage, they have not yet taken a mature form within the universities. The need could hardly be more pressing.

John Hinkson

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Caddick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure, the departure of Howard had left the Liberal Party bereft of a leader who, unlike Turnbull, could listen to his backbenchers and still take the strong stance, aggressively welding his team together (the success of his wedge politics creating a cast of near-acolytes). But what might have seemed some kind of rudderless chaos for a while after the election was only the beginning of a much larger fracturing. Turnbull has gone down not merely exposing the cracks but forcing the ugly duckling out through them and into the bright light of day.

As the immediate politics of the situation played out, there were in fact few choices. Even though Joe Hockey’s idea of repackaging climate change policy as a matter of conscience seemed to fit the political mood—faith-based policy, policy on the basis of belief, not ‘rationality’ or pragmatism—it was a sign of policy weakness, as well as possibly meaning defeat for the conservative push. With the dandyish Kevin Andrews having warmed up the audience, the ‘hairy-chested’ Howard-man-man Abbott was the true heir apparent. Addicted to getting their way, impassioned about the role of markets yet hunkering down round some notion of a base culture that would provide the ‘values’ by which to live, galvanised, still, around a border politics fuelled by and fuelling fear, the conservatives recognised their man and best bet for market differentiation vis-a-vis Rudd’s moderated neo-liberalism.

Around half the parliamentary Liberal Party now looks to Abbott to aggressively pursue their climate change scepticism, a stance taken seriously nowhere in the world except the fundamentalist Bible Belt of the United States and Australia. What the other half of the Liberal Party will do is not clear. Playing politics around such a basic division, winning the numbers just either side of a fifty-fifty split on ‘matters of belief’ seems impossible for a party needing to set stable policy directions. One can’t see the party being purged of its conservatives by its liberals: the latter aren’t as good at the politics as the party Right; they were, after all, seduced by Howard, losing any moral high ground they might have occupied, and they may no longer have any ‘pull’ in the community anyway around any residual Deakinite individualism which some might wish to resuscitate. Howard and the neo-liberal market effectively trashed that tradition, but also, the electorate may be unable to understand the difference implied by this image of the true liberal or be unlikely to take it seriously as either ethical or very different from the on-the-ground individualism offered by Rudd. Whatever the liberal critique of corporatist forms of government and their suppression of strong individual moralities, which has to be given some credence in history, the guiding concern in the outlook of all the major political currents remains the individual’s relation to the market, and in the present context most people live that as the power they feel when they make an individual consumer choice.

George Monbiot is pretty effectively arguing in the Copenhagen context that the political world will split in future between the ‘restrainers’ and the ‘enlargers’; another death knell for left and right social and terminological divisions hailing from the 19th century. But the question goes also to an understanding of the individual and the nature of the social: why restrain? On what basis might we restrain? What benefits and pleasures might ‘restraining’ bring? It is not ‘just’ a question of possibly saving the planet, but of how and why our ‘humanity’ requires whatever it is the notion ‘restraint’ might be straining to signify. Is it really just ‘restraint’ that we should be aiming for? Certainly its justification should not be mere survival, nor should it signify mere sustainability. Let’s hope it doesn’t suggest a social technology to make us behave better environmentally. Let’s hope, rather, that it involves a better knowledge of ourselves qua human beings: a better knowledge of the relation we need to constitute vis-a-vis the natural world and ‘others’ of all kinds if we are to remain within the bounds of what we define as necessary to our humanity. Unfortunately, ‘restraint’ remains within the orbit of a market-dominated paradigm—where what we must give up is what we might otherwise want, or be called to want. The point is to get to that place where not only do we not want it, but it is no longer a question because a fullness of living and being emanates from elsewhere.

This is to move way too quickly beyond the woes of the Liberal Party, but the enormous gulf represented even in these few paragraphs on the politics of reaction, on the one hand, and a possible opening to something very new, on the other, only underlines the moment we have arrived at. As the small island nations are making clear at Copenhagen, as the demonstrators led by Mary Robinson have been impressing, as the science has been making clear for a long time, fundamental choices are at stake. The Liberals’ conniptions, and ultimately reactionary choice of leader and orientation, point to the significant dangers that accompany periods of social threat, even when the lineaments of change have been evident for decades; even when it has been pointed out many times that it is neo-liberalism and the market under post modern conditions that have sown the seeds of destruction of the very social practices their loudest proponents wish to protect.

Eric Hobsbawn, in Age of Extremes, describes a fundamental shift that took place between the first and second world wars. While the First World War was the first modern war—total and technologised—it was as if no one really understood the powers that fed it. Leaders, and the people, still believed that an end to war would mean a return to what had been before. At war’s end the relative peace of the previous near century, remarkable prosperity and relatively settled social arrangements were what people harked back to; world war was an aberration, never to happen again. Yet radical cultural change had been filtering into pre-consciousness through the prescient art movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just as science and industry were merging in novel ways in the first flowering of the techno-scientific paradigm (the successes of industrial chemistry and the German laboratory system). The period harked back to during the war had already been in flux. Abstract society, predicated upon a new sense of ungroundedness and a culture much less restrained by natural limits, had been felt, sometimes celebrated, certainly artistically and scientifically explored, just as fantasies of stability and rational achievement seemed to promise a return, rather than allow that the conditions of existence had actually shifted under the feet of the classes, bourgeois and working alike.

It would take another twenty years after the First World War, twenty years of preparation for war, worldwide depression, and war against Nazi reaction, for a shift in perspective facing towards the future rather than the past. For Hobsbawn, this ‘post-war consensus’ around Keynesian economics and the welfare state (broadly understood), seems to have been a period of realignment, of system catch-up, so that a more thorough, and perhaps more self-conscious modernity might emerge cognisant of the profound changes not only wrought by war but by the social and technological forces that had shaped it.

Of course, that consensus was exactly what neo-liberalism rose up against later in the century, just as the second surge of techno-scientific success supercharged the economy and produced unheard of material prosperity both in the West and beyond. We also know now that the forces and politics of material abundance, and more recently decadence, depended on environmental conditions and resources that make the ‘necessity’ of modernity and its heirs (‘necessity’ as understood in all the varieties of modernist Progress-based social theory, including Marxism) highly questionable. Taken to the brink by the latest techno-scientific surge, carried in the subject form of the hyper-individuated consumer, on the one hand, and the networked agent, on the other, the world is in fact in a very different circumstance than that described by Hobsbawn as the thirty year 20th-century war period. The need to face up to the conditions both of our humanity and a future no longer dependent on the rape of the earth presents a far greater challenge. But just as Hobsbawn outlines, with considerable delicacy, the commitments and hopes of the different groupings influential at that time, we face a period of system mismatch and cultural misunderstanding, of disorientation as the forces in play work their way through social life, and the possibility of grasping their meaning remains, as always, difficult—only to be realised within a protracted process of transformation.

The overall narrative to which Pusey, and then others, referred was first and foremost about recovering the Australia nation.  This would have to be the shell for any appeal to Australians, but now turned away from Howards ‘paranoid’ version to a softer nationalism, which could be grown naturally enough upon the bedrock of who we Australians really are.  Pusey’s descriptors included ‘secular’, ‘sharing’, ‘national’ and ‘practical’.  We are at heart, he said, Benthamites – utilitarians, not taken with theoretical or spiritual claims or absolute values, a common sense people with, it would seem, a modest self-interest that had been perverted by neo-liberalism.  In relation to climate change, a cornerstone issue for this future politics, the message must not be overwhleming.  The ‘urgent present’ of current campaigning must be re-narrativised in ‘lived time’ drawing on our ‘historical past’.  Constructing recognisable stories about ourselves that draw on those distinctive traits, we will be able to see ourselves as agents with a collective story at stake.

Overall the conference, over two days, was stimulating.  Not every paper-giver was as upbeat about the possibilties, with Green activists of different organisational alleigances more or less depressed by the hugeness, if not impossibility, of the task ahead.  But the obvious fact of people being engaged, and so many of them being young, was testimony to sense abroad that politics is again on the agenda.  Indeed, it is everywhere being discussed how we might reform our democracies, re-orientate markets, change values.  The emerging ferment is evident in the pages of this issue of Arena Magazine, living by its brief as an arena of a broad Left.  On the one hand, Tom Nairn positively assesses Rudd’s new social democracy from the vantage point of a dismal showing by British Labour, while Guy Rundle, on the other, sees Rudd as a ‘far from emancipatory’ micromanager of comtemporary life.  Andrew Thackrah discusses an influential new British book on climate change strategies and new possibilities for the citizen, as opposed to the consumer, while Russell Marks, countering the ‘racist’ accusation in relation to Indian student attacks, draws on some of the ‘new nationalism’ arguments put at the Deakin conference.  Alternatively, in a virtual how-to build your own, Race Mathews argues for a different tradition of worker co-operatives, while Ted Trainer and John Martin posit a ‘simpler way’ with a rural or close-to-nature orientation, as a kind of lived transitional practice.

The Deakin conference wasn’t nearly so broad a church.  There was a strong sense of an already forming policy orientation, and this has been evident since in The Australian‘s series ‘What’s Left?’.  Also led off by David Mcknight, it has had contributions from a range of writer activists, unionists, and politicians, with Robert Manne providing a broad politico-philosophical framework, also championing the new social democracy idea, as already clear in his writings in The Monthly since Rudd’s essay in that publication in March this year.  No new party is being suggested by this loosely associated group, so it would seem that the task may be to create a think tank or develop a forum that will provide tapped-in ideas and create a culture of new thinking to bolster Labor’s efforts, especially in relation to climate change.

But the rush to policy around a notion of ‘values’ is only partly reassuring, while the rush to confirm the said national trait of utilitarian (no theory, optional spirit and plain practical common sense) is not at all.  While Pusey’s observations may be empirically based, one couldn’t help wondering about both the religion that was once – not so long ago – a common feature of Anglo-Celtic Australian life (when spirit and moral absolute matched), and the many faith-based communities that have come to reside in Australia since the Anglo-Celt’s great secularisation.  And quite apart from this, given that the values and ideals evinced in the long period of neo-liberal ascendancy appeared to have their own transcendent quality, and given that utilitarianism may be a key undergirding of neo-liberal common sense, references back to some typical Benthamite Australian, rather than a break into something actually new, seems likely to be a hollow echo of a need rather than a meaning-laden call to change.

Robert Manne’s framing piece in the ‘What’s Left?’ series provides a larger canvas for this discussion of value and of theory, where some seem to think values can be egged into reality and theory dispenses with because all good people already know the answers.  Manne commences with the French Revolution and the values of liberty and equality (he neglects fraternity) which, he says, set the whole liberal ball rolling and around which the dominant perversions of 20th-century politics were played out: communism in its pursuit of equality denying liberty, and Nazism in its communalist fantasy denying equality on the basis of racialist ideology.  As the century proceeds, the two men left standing – social democracy and neo-liberalism – remain committed essentially to liberty, though of different ilks, with very different outcomes for the question of equality.  All the same, rejecting extremes of earlier communalist fantasies, and now in the death throes of neo-liberalism, those two values, liberty and equality, remain the pole stars of true democracy, indeed ‘social democracy’.

Social democracy in this view is social liberalism, not democratic socialism, and capitalism is simply not a target.  Neo-liberalism certainly is, but the competitive basis of capitalism itself, the forms of utilitarianism it has spawned, its fundamental counter to substantive equality, and indeed its denial of freedom of many peoples in many parts of the world, is simply left out of the equation.  In fact in this key article in a series called ‘What’s Left?’, which is an historical survey, albeit brief, of the key moments of Western political history, and now the key issues of the day, no mention whatsoever is made of ‘capitalism’.

This is intriguing.  The first thing to observe is that Manne is a political theorist, not in any way a social theorist.  The form of society, the means by which people are integrated into the collective life of a social form, the way culture constitutes us historically as significantly different different types of people over time – picket fence individualists (normalised subjects) in modernity, transgressive boundary-crossers (autononous actors) in postmodernity – is not on his radar.  And so any understanding of how these culturqal forms, embedded in deep structures of social and individual experience, underpin and play out in relation tot he valeus of the time and questions of the day is mightily restricted.

Those people with left histories now hopping on board this social democratic train may be deeply contrite about the role played by communism in the radical denial of both liberty and equality in actually existing socialism, and desperate for action in the face of climate change, but they may also be indulging others in writing a very partial history of the modern period.  The values of liberty and equality in Manne’s piece are themselves disconnected from their roots in the rise of modern capitalism and the form of life and power it implied; just as left struggles for 100 years are given no mooring in the depredations of extreme class conditions under domestic capitalism or colonial oppression; just as contemporary assumption about what individuals desire and feel they deserve seem to be denied specific analysis, perhaps for fear, ironically, of our utilitarian bent being upset by ‘too much theory’ and the expectation that good people will simply respond to good values.

There’s no doubting that politically a break into new consciousness has to be made, and that it will be in part arbitrary.  Fear, logic or intuition: a break has to be made from the claims and chains on consciousness that the form of society has over our being (which is never total).  But we must not shy away from a deep account  of the nature of that being, which is always historically re-constituted, and which can help to account for the difficulties in carrying through good programs on the basis of good values that others don’t share, or not yet.  Narratives are one thing, but structural accounts of the specific nature of contemporary social forms offer the more solid ground for working those narratives out.  In this case, while a certain practical attitude may define something about Australian life and national culture, the idea that some past good Australianness can be dug up and appealed to, as if our goodness was simply perverted by ‘neo-liberalism’, is likely to miss the constitutional commitment both of Rudd and the population to a utilitarianism now fed by the expectations of a post-modern market and high-tech solutions to our myriad problems.  If Manne could not name capitalism in his short history, resting entirely on a notion of neo-liberalism to do his work, this must be because it is seen primarily as a political philosophy, which has engineered a system, rather than an efflorescence of deep trends in the meshing of intellectual technique and capitalist development over centuries.

But Leser also neatly put the two sides of what he could only presume was Garrett’s dilemma: the desire to act and bring about ‘real’ change means having to do what politicians do: work with what they’ve got, the art of the possible. He notes the competing pressures on Garrett — the controversies and decisions he inherited, the legal constraints under which he operates, the legitimate competition of different interests, and so on, against Garrett’s putative, ‘real’ values. It all sounds reasonable. Garrett himself actually gives nothing away, repeating the well-rehearsed line about now being a member of the ALP and government, and being bound by the rules of Party and Cabinet. He says nothing about the ethics of his situation or his conscience, or the alternative choices he might have made. No doubt staying mum on this point is advisable talking to the media, but the lack of moral seriousness in the answer can only make him pathetic.

Perhaps the more interesting reference in this personalised vignette is to the larger dilemma in which so many people find themselves today. Their relationship to the given political process may be exemplified in the inadequacies of Garrett’s situation. Garrett wants to ‘really do something’, so he chooses a parliamentary party that has ‘real’ power. He is ‘forced’ to as no amount of back-biting from the sidelines can, in the normal course of things, really carry through specific change. We too must vote; and it makes sense that we channel our opinions and values through to the organ of our choosing, and ultimately to government (whether ‘our party’ wins or loses), as the institutional endpoint of our multiple deliberations.

In a parliamentary democracy, we at some level accept that constraints on our personal views will operate, and we in part accept that as the cost of ‘civilised’ or ‘tolerant’ society. Change, when it is indicated in our political choices, will move relatively slowly. When revolution was in the air, social democracy or social forms of liberalism coined the notion ‘gradualism’. Progressive change, even socialistic in its intentions, would move at a pace that was non-destructive, and, in an important sense, processually democratic. (Of course the ‘democratic’ part of liberal democracy would never have come into being if it had not been for revolution, or at least mass extra-parliamentary action — either as motor of specific institutional changes, like male and later female suffrage, or as instrument of fear in the hearts of the respectable middle classes whose consciences, under pressure, could be pricked towards instituting ‘social policy’.)

The tragedy is that Garrett seems unable, actually, to get anything more ‘done’ than if he was still protesting from the sidelines. His options, if he is in fact still Green at heart, are radically locked up. Similarly, while we voted Labor because Mr Rudd promised real action on the looming emergency of climate change, we are locked into a crippled political process. Rather than a policy that makes a real contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions, we have the cruel joke of the ETS, which promises to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, while providing discounts and loopholes to industries of the worst carbon-emitting kind. We want action, but in some way unbeknown to us as ordinary voters, government is radically beholden to interests beyond our democratic control. How could Garrett, and how could we, not know this?

Well, we always did, in the sense of the balancing of interests as per the description above of some ideal liberal or social liberal consensus around progress through moderate change. And yet, there is more to it than this. Something has shifted practically in that paradigm of political interaction and appeals to it may now be either merely nostalgic or deceptive. Is this why, sickening as it may be, many people now feel in their gut that something is going to have to give?

* * *

Recently, older statesmen of the Labor Party John Cain and Race Matthews in Victoria, and John Button previously, lamented the widespread practice of Labor Party branch stacking. It is corrupt, yes, but more importantly, it is crippling of the democratic process as they once knew it to exist within the Party. The possibility of bottom-up policy making that genuine membership in local branches might once have meant — a connection of the Party to real people with real concerns and views — is virtually dead. The Party is a media confection for infrequent, highly individuated voters on the one hand, and a grinding political machine on the other. In the former case there is management of voter perception; in the latter the management of powerful sectoral interests. Beware the disconnect is never allowed to surface!

The mediation of interests that Garrett and other ministers are involved in is different. That earlier democratic model of competing interests, as in individuals from different social bases meeting at the ballot box to vote for parties with roots in lived social formations, is long gone. While the Marxist Left never swallowed the assumption of fairness in the liberal-democratic description, and social democrats were prepared to go along with it for peace and security, and real material gain for working people, the institutional structures nevertheless had some meaning and purchase in reality. When the old, if submerged class model broadened to take account of the raft of new social movement issues and identities, life was breathed into a reformed Labor and, for a short time, the model again proffered practical outcomes that accorded with aspirations for change.

But of course, with the emergence proper of neo-liberalism things changed, fundamentally.

We are used now to saying that the political spectrum has shifted to the Right, that Left and Right have merged (and that there is such a thing as a radical Centre, see Geoff Sharp in this issue), but this could not be but for a common understanding among the old parties of ‘Left’ and ’Right’ that the modus operandi of government itself has shifted. That is, it is not just a matter of values having shifted as so many letters to the editor tend to suggest, as important as ideas and values are, but also of the structures that institute or give them body and, in certain respects, now have a life of their own. What one may now be ‘democratic about’ has shifted because the range of ‘legitimate’ issues has changed, but also because what is ‘legitimate’ has institutional bases that direct and constrain. False hope, which resides in a mismatch of implicit understandings and changed circumstances, is part of the ‘disconnect’, mentioned above, that political parties and government must manage.

When we are not living in a fool’s paradise in that part of our brain that says we inhabit a democracy, that part of our (historical) pre-consciousness that still takes democracy for granted, we also know that neo-liberalism has dispensed with the venerable ethic of public service as such; that the executive has become highly ‘politicised’; that lobby groups now wield tremendous power; that governments act to produce ‘results’; that leadership is dead; that management is the name of the game. A great deal more work needs to be done to examine just what the institution of an entrepreneurial ethic in the machinery of government means practically, but it seems to be the meeting of entrepreneurialism with management to that end that defines the mood and limit of our ‘democracy’.

* * *

In the end, the respectable middle classes of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t, in that century, have to worry about revolution from below, at least not from the ‘lower classes’. The revolution came from the Right, not the Left. And yet again, while this is true in some obvious sense, it does not at all grasp the conditions of the emergence of neo-liberalism as ideology and form of government, or the continuing importance of those conditions for a more self-conscious politics of change today. These intimations of post-modernity have certainly emerged from below.

When Jürgen Habermas warned against technocractic government 40 years ago, it wasn’t the ‘nanny state’ as such that concerned him. He saw an ossification of the social democratic model, which had come to depend on a soulless machinery for carving up the ‘social product’; a political system dedicated merely to ‘redistribution’, the sine qua non of politics and government in the post-war years. This dying political form was running up against the emerging values of the new social movements and the re-patterning of life they foretold: a ‘new grammar of life’; anti-rationalistic and, potentially as he meant it, open to discourse in the fullest sense of ethical and political contestation and communion. It was a politics as politics should be — about the ‘good life’: about how we wanted to live.

The pity was, the new social movements themselves were never creatures ex nihilo. While they represented a new politics, they could not see that they were the children of the same social conditions that would open out to neo-liberal victory, which would work its way through the institutions and lead to democratic impasse. They were unconscious of their roots in postwar growth (and their contribution to its generation in high-tech capitalism), which would later become a conscious mantra and lie at the base of our newly ‘unconscious’ political form. Our culture of entrepreneurialism, in which democratic ‘leadership’ is reduced to muscular action on the one hand (think Brumby on planning decisions or water policy, or Macklin on the Intervention — see Inga Ting’s and Melinda Hinkson’s articles in this issue), and the tightest technocratic management on the other (think Rudd and Garrett), is one political expression of the freedoms bought by growth and carried forward through the extreme individualism afforded by high-tech growth that sees the world, and thus politics, as embellishment of the self (see Mark Furlong’s article in this issue).

If we now find it difficult to wean ourselves off growth and all it entails as we surely must, both ethically and for survival’s sake, let’s hope that a culture of opposition this time round is conscious of the stakes, especially through an examination of the conditions of its own formation. Politics is never most basically the preserve of values; values do not emerge ex nihilo; all references to pendulums swinging are a-historical; politics without an analysis of culture and the formation of its underpinning institutions is empty.

However, and crucially, a common thread of interpretation has been present throughout. More or less evident in the arena of views presented in our pages, Arena editors have been intent on coming to grips with the features of ‘late capitalism’ or, as we prefer, the form of life engendered in the ambiguous conjunction of the life-changing technosciences with capitalist development. As reiterated in the following editorial statement, and as in Geoff Sharp’s essay in this issue, just what a left practice might be today, whether an adequately oppositional approach can even be fully expressed in these terms, is a central, ongoing question as our culture and its range of institutions undergo such massive changes as evident over the past several decades, and especially the last.

In 1992, having spent a good part of the 80s attempting to come to grips with the momentous changes just beginning within the universities — both institutionally and in the rise to prominence of various forms of post-linguistic-turn analysis — the Arena editors launched Arena Magazine and Arena Journal. The split was intended to cater to two facets of a responsibility the editors felt at that time. The new Arena Magazine would provide a place for fairly immediate commentary in a bimonthly format on Australian politics, society and culture, in various styles of writing and artistic representation, with commentary also on key international issues. After two decades of the Arena co-operative printing its own publication on letterpress technology, the magazine, printed in our Melbourne printery on offset presses, allowed much greater flexibility of layout and visual presentation. Arena Journal became the place for scholarly analysis dedicated to working through the deeper interpretive issues that were emerging in the period of globalisation and its neo-liberal political formations.

Since the launch of Arena Magazine in 1992 there have been a number of editors and editorial teams that have worked far beyond the call of duty to bring out a bi-monthly, with no external funding, essentially on a volunteer basis. The present editors wish to acknowledge their tremendous commitment, hard work and creativity. The magazine has also depended on the advice and assistance of Board members, consulting editors and interstate editors over the years and on a large group of friends and volunteers who attend our mail-outs. We also wish to thank our contributors, both writers and artists, who go unpaid, and whose generosity, through the free publication of their work, is fully appreciated.

With the launch of the present issue, a number of changes have been set in train. We bring Arena Magazine no. 100 to you in a new design, thanks to the generous creative contribution of two young colleagues who make up Hypergraphia, and the new look and feel of a now properly ‘green’ magazine, through the good advice and expert printing of Arena Printing, now a fully FSC-accredited green printer.

In 2009, with this 100th issue, the new-look Arena Magazine intends to continue Arena’s long-time commitment to interpreting the contemporary culture and pointing to possibilities for change. But we also see something new in the present. As our colleague Leunig suggests, there are cracks opening up everywhere. What other reality might they reveal? At first perhaps many more horrors than we have been prepared to see in our comfortable Western worlds; and then perhaps paths to other places, more considered values, a sense of who and what ‘human being’ is and should be, what the real enemies are to a decent life and meaning for all? These and other themes are taken up in abundance in this issue of Arena Magazine.

To help Arena Magazine in the coming period, become a subscriber, give a friend a gift subscription, contribute to our appeal for funds.

First published in Arena Magazine, issue 100.

There was trouble everywhere with words in this terrible experience. The existential terror, such awe-struck horror: they are visceral and bodied; description failed many a correspondent, while their wavering, or panicked voices conveyed the truth of it.

But ‘mother nature’ especially seemed all wrong, even in the mouths of those who used the idea. The usage carried a fatalistic sense of the force involved — like the capriciousness of older gods — and yet the old chaps who referred to her on TV or radio seemed really to want to embrace her too, to feel the love of the bush that had been reciprocated to them as they had lived in it and experienced her benevolence.

‘Mother nature’ for us today just doesn’t seem to sit well with the ‘fiery chariot’ image. Overall, if the term is used at all, she seems to be softer and giving: the font of life rather than the screaming fury. It seemed the reference points and contrasts were all at sixes and sevens. Many people did not want to believe that the bush they loved could have done what it did, even if some level of dangerousness was accepted by most. It was disbelief that the world could transform ‘just like that’, ‘before their very eyes’, into total, unforgiving, inhuman chaos where none of one’s dearest assumptions might hold.

Various essais at common sense have been made by commentators, and almost everything coming from the mouths of politicians and people on the ground seems to be pressing in the direction of a full recovery of it. That is, where the language used can assume a community of meaning; where the dreadful is shared in communal mourning, and yet is set aside for the common good; where gutsy determination kicks in to rebuild, to recommit, to move on, but not move out. It does indeed fit with everything we have ever been taught about determination, will and spirit.

But there is something that is also disturbing about this emerging push. Not only does this kind of practical common sense appear as an essential prop to some kind of recovery for individuals, families and communities, the language of blame and responsibility too builds on recognisable ‘figures’ around which positions and action, a mighty salve, can be taken. Premier Brumby has right from the start offered an open, broad-ranging Royal Commission that will leave no stone unturned, and his statement of a non-political interest in this pursuit of the truth is wholly appropriate to the nature of the disaster. And yet one fears that not only will immediately practical questions like burning off, building materials and warning systems fulfill much the same function as the Australian will to get up off the ground and start again, but that a blame game around systems of command, the rooting out of arsonists (ideal for pre-emptive profiling), and the demonising of ‘environmentalists’ around prescribed burning could take centre stage.

The last is highly ironical, on several counts. First, the contrast of farmers and ‘ordinary folk’, many of them the suburban dwellers in country areas, with ‘environmentalists’ cannot do the work some wish it to. On the question of prescribed burning, the really hot issue here, there seems to be widely differing points of view among environmentalists themselves. Some do seem to have held back the hand of government in undertaking to prescribe burn to the government’s own recommended levels; others argue for it vehemently as a reproduction of the form of ‘land management’ practised by Aborigines over forty thousand years. In any case, many who argue against it are not just romanticising the bush, as some would have it (not least Miranda Devine, who thinks they should all be lynched), but give (non-aesthetic) reasons related to real underlying land degradation and future burn potential for not doing so.

Second, it is hard to believe that Australians’ popular love affair with the bush, which has seen not only the building of isolated eyries in remote, bush-surrounded locations but also the building of suburbia on the edge of state forests in recent years, has not been at least in part inspired by the trickling down of an environmental consciousness, even if some whose lives have been shaped by it effect to despise it. Environmentalism has, after all (for good or for ill is not readily answered when fires like these hit), reformed and broadened White Australia’s historical attitude to the perception of its home as ‘alien’.

Third, while all this practical talk goes on about a world in which we can control the impact of fire, where we call on tried and true values to do with spirit and will and ingenuity to ‘rebuild’, it is deeply ironical that much broader, deeper issues of climate change in all likelihood fuelled the fires, and their provenance is only known through a form of knowledge and related political consciousness that sees the world in its vast interconnections. We were warned. We have been thoroughly warned, and it wasn’t our practically oriented governments, farmers or suburbanite tree-changers who told us. In the best and the dumbest of Australianisms, commentators and victims who have been telling government not to ‘buggerise around’ with issues like climate change (alas, Germaine Greer did just this) and to ‘put people first’ (overwhelmingly the attitude of every newspaper and media outlet in the immediate aftermath of the fires) have conveyed a willingness to tarry with outmoded outlooks on our connection to Earth, which essentially wish to remain blind to what is happening.

How will climate change be built into the Brumby government’s Royal Commission? This is a crucial question, and surely it must be part of the Commission’s remit. The Greens must push for this aspect of the investigation to be fully considered; to be taken seriously as the real backdrop to any more practical or immediate solutions to the mere phenomenon of fire.

Of course, not even the best of broad-ranging Royal Commissions is likely to take the further step recommended in this issue of Arena Magazine by John Hinkson and Del Weston. Writing on climate change and responses to it — the Rudd government’s hopelessly inadequate carbon trading scheme and recent interventions in the public arena by environmental writers — they argue for a reconsideration of the deepest kind of our way of life and the structures that support it. Without a reconsideration of our assumptions of what makes for the good life, a moral life vis-à-vis human and non-human others, quite apart from the question of planetary survival, we are doomed to remain in the grip of an immoral system: an amoral system of production and distribution, and a structured system of assumptions that understands itself as virtuous, but which has long ceased to examine its sources and its limitations.

Of course I am talking about the neo-liberal market and the consumption values that keep it afloat. But even the ideas of ‘will’ and ‘spirit’, and the comforting notion that ‘ingenuity’ or the practical attitude will get us out of any mess, seem false and shaky at present. Are they really ideals, or are they a mirage? Are they perhaps no more than the deep constructs of our own sense of self-esteem, the last defence of a way of life against furies none wish to face up to? So what if there is ‘human spirit’, a comforting term used massively in recent weeks, if it is blind?

When ‘Nature’ first made its appearance in the cultural history of the West, it was an idea set apart from ‘Culture’. It had connotations of female capriciousness that carried on earlier notions of a female nature, but it had a still stronger derogatory and destructive implication, as historians of science know well. It was conceived as a great passive resource to be mined and plumbed in the service of a rationality devoted to transparent knowledge and practical control. Strangely, today, even ‘nature’, let alone ‘mother nature’, is an archaic idea. As nature has been de-sexed over the recent centuries of Western development, the whole paradigm of control has moved towards a different paradigm of scientific rationality, which as John Hinkson points out in the article mentioned above, has made neo-liberalism what it is: a supercharged growth machine that not only eats up Earth but poisons her as well. Today, she is not only conquered but, as a mere object for the transformational consciousness of the high sciences, it is on the verge of becoming unrecognisable to us all, if only we could see.

These may seem like big leaps — between markets and fires, Western consciousness and a desire just to get on with life. But they are rich seams for exploring where we come from as a people and a culture, and while Royal Commissions must focus on many practical questions, we can always hope that a philosophical restatement of who we are in relation to the bush, and the larger systems of life that offer it to us, may be considered as a crucial guide for real change.

Alison Caddick

We are just about at the end of the process which placed heavy requirements on building design, and as recently reported, small-scale operators of nursing homes have been closing their doors in droves, unable to meet government requirements and make any kind of profit in the operations they have typically run. In their place, brand spanking new operators have been picking up the slack, offering four star accommodation and efficiency and, the government hopes, excellence in risk management, which includes the management of publicity debacles, the original trigger for Bishop’s policy realignments.

Of course, taking on this problem of risk management opened the door to the Liberal and National parties’ traditional allies — entrepreneurs more than willing to move into new areas of profitability — and an emerging neo-liberal culture of ‘small-state’ solutions: privatisation, commercial exploitation of the service sector and of familial roles, and large-scale corporatisation, with some degree of exposure to world financial markets. Think of ABC Learning’s cutesy teddy bear and higgledy-piggledy ABC block branding (obfuscating?) that multinational conglomerate and you will find some parallels in the branding of some new aged care facilities.

It cannot be denied that in the early days of Bronwyn Bishop there was a class of shonky small-scale operator running substandard nursing homes catering to the poor and abandoned. But on that proper concern has grown not just a solution to a manifest problem, but a comprehensive structure of services oriented in a distinctive way. On the ground — beside the beds and in the sunrooms of nursing homes and hostels — against certain ‘instincts’ of caring (empathy, particularistic relationships and, dare one say, unconditional love) that many care staff and nurses might have, the counter-tendencies of efficiency, profit and risk management have insinuated themselves. Risk management alone conjures up, and indeed does refer to, the existence of a whole culture of caution and managerial intervention in what would otherwise be more spontaneously real relationships between elderly people and care staff who look after them.

Ten years ago some church-run facilities were busy introducing a then thought-to-be excellent model of care: small-scale — say, 36 beds — homelike and personalised circumstances in which regular (not overwhelmingly agency) staff were encouraged and were able, by virtue of the conditions, to give personal attention to people they considered meaningful individuals. Today, the 90-bed institution is the industry standard, as supported by government and prevalent across the sector, with constant mutterings that really only 140-bed institutions are profitable. In turn, to make sure that these large institutions still deliver something like homely care rather than merely efficient nursing, government must encourage large operators to mimic small-scale operations by ‘retrofitting’ homelike physical and psychological conditions, an add-on, which is all they can really be when the basic structure is technocratic and commodified.

In child care, Anne Manne has referred to a process of ‘McDonaldisation’ — US sociologist George Ritzer’s term for a process common across all the contemporary institutions, including education, where what you actually get is not much more than the empty sign of the thing you think you’re getting when the brand appeals to you. Quality, depth, good food, real care, an education: they are all sacrificed to the processes required to make a dollar, while your aspirations are actively managed against imagined lifestyle needs. The McDonaldisation thesis is the classic combination of the Marxist-inspired observation of commodification and the Weberian observation of forms of ‘bureaucracy’, or the science of managing processes to achieve efficiency: purposive rather than substantive rationality (a preoccupation with means rather than ends), although this comes with the bonus today of the magic wrought by the communications revolution and the receptivity of individuals to its messages — here, that care can be bought and that nothing is lost in the process.

The collapse of ABC Learning of course points to a somewhat different experience in terms of the transformation of care — largely a system of state-backed community care — into big business. Here there was no long-term plan and slow increment, but rather an in-yourface hand-over virtually of a whole sector to an entrepreneur without any background and, we might guess, no real interest in the thousands of small children placed in his ultimate care. He certainly had an interest in making money, as did the company’s board members, several of whom were ex-politicians, at various levels of government, of Liberal-National Party ilk. In the context of neo-liberalism’s rapid ascendancy under John Howard, any opposition was muted. Anyone pointing out that child care may not be conducive to full marketisation, or at all, was pretty much thought of as a crank or dinosaur.

It’s only now that an end-point has been reached that pro-state and/or ‘pro-care’ criticisms are being listened to, but even then not very avidly by government, it would seem. If the demise of ABC Learning has shown anything so far (just what set of solutions the government will ultimately put in place is yet to be announced) it is that the Rudd/Gillard government’s first reaction remains the privatisation of child care. Despite months of warning of trouble at ABC, and plenty of time in opposition to devise a preferred structure for child care provision better suited to the needs of children than Eddy Groves’ little red ego (remember the Ferrari), it waited for the collapse and then turned first to the private sector to buy up what of the empire remained financially viable. ‘Extreme capitalism’ may now be Rudd’s trademark critique of what has led to the financial collapse, but capitalism all the same is OK for children’s services, as it is increasingly in aged care. Under Rudd neoliberalism may have a kinder face, but there is certainly no basic revolution here in social thinking about the market or how people might otherwise organise their circumstances, or create new ones, to care for those they love.

Marketisation, and the turning of care into a technical problem to be solved at a system level, tends always to deny the social relational nature, and indeed the depth of the relation as it is carried in face-to-face and embodied relations, that comes into play in caring for another human being. We know that this embodied fullness is part of what makes the care of the very incapacitated an intolerable burden for many people. We know that this is both the joy and the burden of children! Everyone needs relief in circumstances they can’t manage personally; and it may also be of great benefit to the aged mother or the toddler to get a break from the pressure cooker situation of intense familial relations. The question is, what is the best arrangement for doing so, and can the market and its alliance with the science of management be depended upon for real care and concern for dependants?

It’s not that we haven’t had a mixed economy around various forms of care for centuries; and even the hideous penitentiaries of the 19th century — the archetype for modern institutions generally — went part way to marketising care, as do public hospitals and education systems when they employ and pay salaries to private individuals as a system’s labour force. But forms of state-based responsibility for care were not principally of or in a market; and at least in theory the chance for democratic intervention through political processes in the orientation of the institutions, together with mixed arrangements in a sphere that could be called civil society, were possible. In theory, these are checks against the market’s depredating tendencies toward treating people as things, and the attitude of risk management within managerial structures that tends to remove common sense caring from the repertoire of ‘professionals’.

In child care under the Whitlam government (the remnants of which remained when Howard came to power) local community groups and local governments formed cooperative arrangements for some forms of child care or tapped into age-old neighbourhood-type arrangements to employ local mothers and grandmothers in Family Day Care. The state played a key role in establishing the system, but it also tapped into a certain cultural vein at the time, which was about participation and local action and, overall, the idea that ‘small is beautiful’. Child care was not an entirely new arrangement — crèches and day centres had existed for a long time, but there were few, and in the context of women entering the workforce in larger numbers, especially middle-class women, mass child care came to require a broad-based approach to provision. From Balwyn to Sunshine in Melbourne, middle-class and working-class mothers and fathers together with other local women banded together, employed each other as well as trained staff, and in the main ran effective day care centres, with the support of informed community and local government workers with expertise in the area.

Part of the small is beautiful ethos was a reaction against all the modern institutions. In practice, ‘small is beautiful’ required hands-on involvement in the running of services, local political action and local investment, monetary and psychological, at the level of the neighbourhood. While nursing homes were run on a very different basis, with government partially funding nongovernment, often religious organisations, and small-scale private nursing homes operating locally, both the size of operations and their accessibility within communities were somewhat similar to that of child care. Close-to-home accessibility, embodied care and face-to-face recognition among a community of families using a facility were either explicit goals or a practical effect given the scale and type of care provided. Voluntary effort and communal identification were key aspects of this model.

This kind of model where parents are informed and practically concerned in the running of centres looking after their own children, or, for that matter, aged care facilities looking after one’s parents, must have benefits for everyone concerned — the child or elderly person, the mother/father/partner/son/daughter, and even the staff, who may more fully engage with the child or older person if the regimes of efficiency and risk management are allowed to dissipate in favour of an ethical shift that values the whole person. One wonders whether such participation and self-management would be as fully taken up today as it once, however briefly, was in the 1970s. Parents continue to be active on boards of management of some children’s services, including kindergartens and day care centres, but this is not the case in aged care, where commercialisation is extensive and where, even in the case of non-government services, the size and complexity of operations is at such a scale that it militates against non-professional involvement. Whether public participation in services would be welcome, and whether ordinary people would still wish to participate in the way they once did, is unclear.

The problem of the attitude of care being undervalued in modern western society is unlikely to have been solved by turning it into a source of profit making and object of managerial expertise. The question of how services see themselves as providers is crucial. If an overarching ethical attitude guides the care they provide, there may be something of a countervailing force against those depredating tendencies mentioned above. But even then, as in the case of non-profit organisations which have also been forced into large-scale service provision, the battle to remain true to one’s ideals is difficult. Perhaps this points to the proposition that a value or ideal is not sufficient in and of itself. In the face of the re-emergence of the large institution, we might better argue not merely for an ethic of care but see that any such ethic is socially constituted, and crucially underpinned by a realm of human-scale, face-toface and embodied relations.

Alison Caddick

* This piece of writing is dedicated to Lorraine Walters, who cared for my mother and many others beyond the requirements of efficiency, and whose presence added the intangible, but wholly tangible, element of love to the care provided in the modest nursing home she managed before her untimely death.

The effects of this orientation towards the market go far beyond the diminution of the role of the state in economy and society. While success has eluded the market in the privatisation of air, as some market theorists advocated (the major market effect has rather been to treat the biosphere and our oceans as commons to be taken for granted as dumping grounds), it has had greater success in shifting the ethic of intellectual inquiry towards selfinterest and the profit motive. This has left the university in a depleted state. Its once proud traditions, grounded in relations of inquiry that supported the free circulation of ideas, are not beyond retrieval, but they are a fading memory. This same market has also made over family and community institutions, emptying their reciprocal, noncommodified processes of that substance which gave them a basis outside of market forces.

While no one knows how far the current plunge of financial and capital markets will go, there can be no doubting the seriousness of the crisis on Wall Street and in global financial markets. Nor can it be doubted that it will reach significantly into the economy proper. How far that may go depends very much on leadership and political judgement. But this very special neo-liberal market, composed of computerised techniques and global satellite communications, together with an ever-expanding range of engineered financial instruments, has allowed twenty-five years of enhanced leverage of debt. This alone will call out massive contractions now that the worm has turned. It is not merely the fact that the cheap debt that allowed business and individuals to fund projects on a grand scale over the past decade has disappeared. Far more seriously, the availability of credit for everyday working capital and other transactions can no longer be assumed to be available, not even to a state like California. If this situation is unable to be corrected it is likely to be a prelude to a more encompassing social collapse affecting all the institutions.

For a generation now the rule of the market has been taken for granted by a growing proportion of the general and educated public. It was supported by the work of philosophers like F. A. Hayek who, although seeing an irreducible contribution made by the family, denied primacy to any ethics beyond that sustained by the market. It was as though the market became the only defensible social institution. Yet after the Wall Street bailout there is little doubt that this same neo-liberal global market, so central to all levels of contemporary social, economic and cultural affairs, and the major prop for neo-liberal ideology, now faces the most profound challenge to market organisation since the Great Depression. Arguably, this neo-liberal market, even if not the market as such, is in its death throes. It is a failure so significant that it may well turn out to be definitive in terms of the demise of the United States as a superpower.

The enhanced credit leverage of the global market supported a bubble in asset values. Cheap and seemingly endless debt translated into excess. But the demise of this easy money is more than a typical burst of the market bubble as found in the history of the last 400 years. The way in which the neo-liberal market has failed will leave investors and the public wary for many years to come — not merely of the consequences of a bust, but something far more damaging. What we are witnessing is not the result of a series of mistakes, such as subprime lending and excessive borrowing. The core issue is not even evoked by Kevin Rudd’s term ‘extreme capitalism’ because it relies too strongly on a notion of individual weakness (greed).

Rather, it is the composition of the global market as a system which has come into disrepute. The issue is not merely a matter of this or that category of lender losing financial credibility, but is rather a function of the global market as a set of practical circumstances. Financial engineering through the market removes identifiable obligations so far from actual lenders and borrowers that we cannot know who owes money to whom. It becomes impossible to evaluate financial standing. It is a system that builds into its structure a tendency towards poor credit evaluation, a tendency that eventually issued in the subprime crisis. This is a crisis of the financial system as a system, one that will prevent a return to anything resembling the system before the bailout, related guarantees and government buy outs.

There have been many significant economic commentaries in the last year on the meaning of the collapse of capital markets, culminating in the October 2008 crash. However, most commentators have been silent for the past twenty years about the structure of the new financial markets and their special vulnerabilities since their emergence in the 1980s. It is relatively easy once the dominos begin to fall to piece together the dynamics of an unfolding situation. Acceptance of any critique in the face of an ascendant orthodoxy was a very different matter.

Nevertheless, there have been some critiques, none more impressive than Peter Warburton’s Debt and Delusion (1999). It identified precisely the attraction to central bankers of the new financial markets. In particular, Warburton argued how the de-regulation of financial structures created new forms of debt via investment banks (like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers) that bypassed the conventional banking structures and, among other things, helped to control general inflation for twenty years while financing excessive government budget deficits in many parts of the world. In a short time, general inflation had become a thing of the ‘past’, an achievement of neoliberalism, while asset inflation, promoted by the new forms of debt, came to be seen as an acceptable form of alternative income. This led to practices such as the constant re-valuation of housing in order to borrow against, and live off, the enhanced values. This process gained positive recognition as a new wealth phenomenon by Alan Greenspan. In other words the benefits felt in terms of lower general inflation led to turning a blind eye to asset inflation and to the deterioration of credit evaluation which accompanied the new financial markets. What would normally have been regarded as practices especially in need of regulation — hedging, options and non-bank financial instruments — were allowed to multiply to the point where they came to be so dominant they were beyond the control of central bankers. This was the fateful pact between central bankers and the financial markets born in the 1980s.

There is much to be admired in the way Warburton predicted this ‘capacity to transmit violent financial disturbances to [every citizen as well as to] communities, regions and entire nations’ via a massive potential collapse of derivatives markets. However, as an economic critique even it is largely blind to the larger forces that framed the emergence of the new financial markets. These markets, whose trade-mark has been to construct debt that concealed those responsible for it while generating ‘instruments’ radically distant from the familiar everyday world, do not engage in such processes arbitrarily. Rather, such practices and markets reflect a more general principle now at work in global society as a whole: the loss of tangibility in our relations with others, as the face-to-face community of persons is significantly displaced by relations that predominantly work at a distance. In short, there has been a gradual emergence of a world that abstracts us from the settings of our common humanity.

While all markets have this effect to some degree, the global financial markets took this tendency to a new level. This is a crucial matter if the way these markets construct their own self-referential world set far apart from the world of ordinary people is to be understood. Firstly, they did this in their own right because they rely upon the computer, the internet and global communications generally to build their structures. Secondly, this was an aspect of a larger process whereby the whole of contempary society has been substantially displaced by a global order constituted in the new forms of communication and production made possible by high technology. That is, the financial revolution is situated within a larger social and cultural revolution. The silicon chip and computerisation, bio-technology, instant communications: these are products of a social revolution that has transformed society over the past thirty years. Global society is defined by a more abstracted way of being, the ‘knowledge’ society, mediated by the way that tertiary institutions have come into a special constitutive relation to society. The high sciences, via high technology, are re-shaping the human and natural world.

Financial engineering in global markets — the construction of instruments that few people can actually understand — corresponds to the engineering of nature in the pursuit of growth in global society. The indifference to others within global markets corresponds to the indifference to nature in a society removed from nature. All areas of society move away from communities composed in regions and known others towards an order constructed around constant global movement, pursuing the ‘liberations’ and instant gratifications offered by high technology. If the contradictions of financial markets that no longer work through tangible lenders and borrowers are now confronting us, this is only the tip of the iceberg of a new order of conflicts.

The crisis of the new financial markets immediately leads to the question of whether this is a pause in the momentum of capitalist growth, be it one year or ten, as most commentators would have it, or a more fundamental historical moment. Does it mark a new realisation of the limits of where the capitalist order can take us? At the very least it seems we are now entering a period of profound uncertainty that will include hardship for many, perhaps most of us. But it could also be a period of genuine possibility. We should keep in mind that the world is not only facing the limits of a now collapsed financial order but also the limits posed by a ravished nature, growing food and resource shortages and unsustainable levels of population. There are movements, however partial, that are seeking to move towards a more rounded life, more in touch with nature and those around them. The ‘food miles’ movement or alternative markets like farmers markets, are cases in point. No particular example is adequate to the task, but these tendencies have deep support; they could quickly take practical institutional shape in today’s circumstances. The need for a social order that entails a more modest demand upon nature and is able to regenerate dense regional social relations that stand in a viable relation to global interchange is an ideal to be pursued. If we are to avoid becoming merely spectators in a world dissolving before our eyes, the organisational stages and processes needed to move towards this ideal should be the subject of intense discussion and practical endeavour.

John Hinkson