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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.