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?

For the present, only a few seriously entertain the second possibility, even though their numbers are steadily increasing. Many more only sense the emergence of a period of farreaching change. While this sense of a future is typically expressed through a wide range of activities within the green range of possibilities, they are frequently given more focus today by the prospect of climate change. For the most part they are framed by the notion of sustainability — the maintenance of basically normal expectations but by different means. Again, there is a small minority who, as they sense the emergence of changes, which could be overwhelming, respond in a geo-political register.

The recent public statement by Malcolm Fraser, Generals Gration and Sanderson, Barry Jones too — figures with different political and professional histories — fall into the latter category. Along with a wider group of prominent Australians, they have responded to the mortal danger of nuclear proliferation. Aware that nuclear weapons have been in the forefront of fundamental changes in relations between nation-states, they recognise that the further proliferation of nuclear weapons now is set within changing circumstances. The conjunction of climate change and the latent conflicts stirred or amplified by extreme economic stress might precipitate scarcely imaginable devastation.

It is by no means evident that Fraser and co-authors of the statement see nuclear energy itself as inherently problematical. Even if they were to agree that it is one more example of a profound shift in the way we conduct our interchange with the natural world, it is probable that most of this group would still view it as contributing to economic growth, with the added qualification that it calls for rigorous control.

Nevertheless, this public statement on this particular issue is significant — a small sign of a growing awareness that the scope and reconstititive power of the technosciences now strike at the heart of the prospects of living beings on planet earth.

It is of special interest that this group of prominent Australians was responding to Obama’s turnaround, not only on proliferation but also on the need to eliminate the vast stockpiles of nuclear weaponry. Could it beings then that he is aware, as the end of the short American century approaches, that a global redistribution of levels of consumption is likely to gather pace? Quite apart from climate change and economic crisis, that shift alone is likely to alter the lines of political and cultural division that we have too readily come to take for granted.

When, close in the wake of Prime Minister Rudd’s call for a ban on all nuclear weapons, Obama’s initiative became the context in which Malcolm Fraser and others issued their statement, we can assume that one of their objectives was to emphasise that this issue should be seen as beyond any narrowness of party politics. But that did not ensure that their words gained any lasting public attention. Indeed, as the issue of climate change so clearly illustrates, even when the public is far ahead of government in their willingness to act upon fundamental ethical issues, that by no means guarantees that their voices can prevail in circles of government. Increasingly, our forms of government, our mainstream media as well, stand in the way of effective representation.

Unlike climate change the issue of nuclear proliferation is far from the centre of contemporary public awareness. Forty years ago, when the memory of Hiroshima was still vivid and the confrontation of rival systems raised the prospect of mutually assured destruction, the situation was very different. At that time just one single expression of the new-found engagement of the technosciences with the natural world could raise the spectre of what E. P. Thompson termed ‘exterminism’, the process of the self-destruction of a species.

There is no reason to believe that Fraser and others were raising the more general issue of the technoscientific reconstitution of the world when they spoke out on the particular issue of nuclear proliferation. It is unlikely that more than one or two among their number had given any sustained attention to the obvious reality that a whole series of technosciences now deliver the power to terminate the distinctive form of life of our species.

The basic issue cannot be represented by nuclear weapons alone. It entails technoscientific powers more generally, as they proliferate within political systems, which offer no effective representation of how their significance should be interpreted. If we are to speak of a transition to a different epoch it is this issue — the process of reconstituting our mode of interchange with the natural world — which should be the main focus of attention.

Nuclear technology offers powers of reconstituting the physical world; genetic technology offers the same in relation to living beings; digital technology offers to dissolve knowledge in data or information. All of these powers might well be celebrated if their significance could be more effectively interpreted, but for the present they are instruments. They feed into an orientation towards growth and, with that, contribute to a pervasive myopia: a conviction that assumes that we are still engaged in the conquest of nature and progressively casting aside limitations to our freedom. Is it possible that this is an illusion and that for the present the technosciences facilitate our being overwhelmed by markets which, rather than contributing to these ends, carry us towards the dissolution of life-settings.

Certainly a historical movement is gradually emerging that senses and moves towards a different order of living. But sensing is not comprehending. Nevertheless, for the present and in spite of that limitation, the movements at the grassroots are ahead of any mass public stand by the intellectual and professional groupings.

Half a Step with Kevin Rudd
Perhaps Kevin Rudd was sensing, rather than seriously entertaining, a more far-reaching transformation than even an unprecedented, but ‘merely economic’, crisis could convey when he opened his recent essay in The Monthly in a portentous vein.

From time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place.

It was as if, in invoking the language of the passage of epochs, Rudd the politician was about to reposition himself as the philosopher statesman and was actually contemplating the prospect of historical transformation. Instead, he came up with a damp squib. An epoch in Rudd’s dictionary is a period of thirty years or so, and in any case it does not relate to comprehensive change but just to a major economic hiccup: one, this time around, building up into a full-bodied neoliberal belch.

Basically Rudd’s answer is more of the same, a return to rapid growth only, under Labor, with more active regulation of the economy. Of course, within the limits of contemporary politics, Kevin Rudd does impress his public as morally serious to an unusual degree, as wishing to be a man of his word. The issue we are raising relates far less to his character than it does to his understanding. And given the pressures and expediencies of political life that includes any honesty of purpose, as at the time of his election, being undermined by the logic of events (one thinks not only of climate change, but also of guarantees apparently given to unions on their right to protect working conditions).

No Way for a Third Way?
In the mainstream media, understanding the meltdown is ceasing to be a contentious issue. Certainly a hard core of resistance is maintained within the Murdoch regime, but otherwise the doctrine of minimal government and ‘let the market rule’ is off the agenda. Social democracy and the ‘third way’ is back, but with a difference. Now the boundaries have closed in. There is no longer a middle way as if between capitalism and socialism, rather only within the terms of two versions of capitalist dominance: between ‘let the market rule’ with minimum regulation and the recognition that regulation is indispensable. Within the mainstream it is clear that the latter has prevailed.

The picture is different among the more searching print periodicals (still mainly based in Victoria), as it is among their online counterparts, with the exception of The Monthly which, even if its editorial inclination included major reservations, has at the time of writing temporally gagged itself by editorial board chairman Robert Manne’s surprisingly supportive endorsement of most of the basic positions of Kevin Rudd’s manifesto. Latterly, it should be added, a series of international figures have commented on the Prime Minister’s article. Without exception they respond within the general frame of economic regulation and recovery.

Otherwise the print periodicals — we have in mind mainly Overland, Dissent and their editors — while actively critical of Rudd’s inertness on basic issues relating to climate change, give few hints that we may be passing into a period of genuinely epochal transformation. While key contributions to these publications are especially critical of the Rudd government’s inertness on climate change, it is as if they lack access to any critical standpoint that might frame a perspective that actually breaks out of the limits of the ‘third way’. Their contributions do not discuss the way the neo-liberal surge of growth was empowered by a radically newfound conjunction: the historically new level of technological capability feeding into the continuing commitment to economic growth. Unlike Malcolm Fraser and co-authors, they do not even tiptoe towards the prospect that unprecedented technological changes may have far more to do with the future of our species than the recent oscillations of the capitalist market.

Hence, while the contributors to these periodicals respond to public dissatisfaction across a whole range of particular issues, they present no effective demand for a basic policy shift. The sense of a future is still shuttered within both old and new ‘third way’ prescriptions. That is, prescriptions that seek to combine a moral concern for the public good — expressed especially in dedication to public control of basic infrastructure — but these same objectives are short-circuited by an inability to confront the privatising impulse of open-ended growth.

Kenneth Davidson, as well as being a long-standing senior writer with The Age is also an editor of the quarterly Dissent. As a long-standing Keynesian, Davidson has maintained a critique of the excesses of neo-liberal privatisation for many years. In more recent years, far from simply accepting the social democratic compromises within official Labor, he has maintained an energetic critique. It has focused on Victorian State Government policies, especially on transport and climate change. In the latter context water policy has been a specialty. In creative and well-informed articles he has frequently had the state government ‘on the back foot’. Nevertheless, the general import of his arguments is to make capitalism sustainable. As an independent thinker and activist he is a maverick of the ‘third way’, one who has done much to draw public attention to the prospect that in Victoria ‘third way’ ‘commitment’ to the common good may include the full privatisation of water supplies! As the co-editor of Dissent, Davidson is not one who sees the contemporary meltdown as the harbinger of an historical transformation reaching far beyond the limits of any economic crisis of capitalism. Before that could occur Davidson, like so many others, would need to move beyond the limitations imposed by the philosophical orientations of both classical and neo-classical economics: an undertaking of quite pivotal importance for the politics of an emerging crisis of existence, as distinct from the more limited crises of conventional politics or economics.

Much the same general picture holds for the long-standing quarterly Overland, which, for more than half a century has been a distinctive voice of the independent cultural Left in Australia. The current issue carries two major articles responding to the economic crisis: a lead article by Bob Ellis — a speech writer for Bob Hawke and many others — followed by a more generally framed contribution by Raewyn Connell that moves toward the general observation that in Australia no group or force ‘has worked out how to gain a major purchase in the neo-liberal state or the neo-liberal economy’. Connell goes on to ask how in the unique situation of this particular crisis ‘we can compose a strategy of social change that is workable, can find popular support and that has the prospect of changing institutional structures’. Unfortunately, Connell’s far more searching article is in the shadow of the Bob Ellis piece, which, while vigorously muscular in tone, is decidedly timid in its resort to the ‘third way’ of the 1970s. While Ellis is an engaging writer with an ear remarkably sensitive to public disappointment and able to stir readers again on issues such as the ‘unstoppable anorexia of the universities’, he does not engage with the underlying issues of the present. As is so often the case, he concentrates on critique of neo-liberal policy. Given that straightjacket, welcome and urgent as this critique may be, he fills the gap by vigorously beating the drum on climate change.

Connell is far closer to the underlying preoccupations of this essay when, in concluding remarks, she notes: ‘the crisis behind the crisis, the issues that surround the meltdown, are as dire as those faced by the generation that met depression, fascism and global war’. A totally acceptable general conclusion, but what more, specifically, is that more basic crisis behind the economic meltdown? While seeking a new vision Connell is acutely aware of the difficulties facing that undertaking.

Many readers will recall that in his book Beyond Right and Left another active contributor to ‘third way’ political discussion, David McKnight, seeks to provide just the vision that might respond to such a crisis. Yet far from acknowledging the emergence of an historical transformation, which will break the continuity of the traditions of the capitalist era, McKnight seeks to combine the perspectives grounded in liberalism, socialism and conservatism with the impetus of new social movements. In a broad sense of a ‘third way’ (which distances his standpoint from any glib identification with Blairite policies) McKnight regards the capitalist market as an inescapable attribute of any contemporary economy. Locked into that attitude he too sees climate change as the rallying point around which the new-liberal recommitment to ‘let the market rule’ may be regulated by a state which has moved ‘beyond Right and Left’.

Beyond the Limits of Economic Crisis
McKnight is relatively accommodating to Rudd’s version of the ‘third way’ and that attitude has become more fixed following government responses to the meltdown. His attitude of market inevitability guarantees that his hopes of moving ‘beyond Right and Left’ remain within ‘third way’ perspectives. This pacifying phrase indeed is a distinct misnomer since the capitalist dynamic, which it purports to regulate, is by far the more important influence upon any middle way. Nevertheless our purpose here is not to simply dismiss a regulated capitalism. The key issue is to ask whether the objective of that regulation is to direct the capitalist impulse so that it contributes to the emergence of a different order of social life. It is our belief that any re-direction for regulation so that it contributes to a basic transition is inconceivable unless the framework of discussion and practical effort moves out beyond any exclusive concern with the current economic crisis. It needs to answer questions about how the surge of the last thirty years or so radically accelerated the more modest growth process that prevailed in the decades prior to the leap towards full-blooded globalisation. Complementing that, it needs to ask questions about just how this surge gripped imagination and aspiration. If masses of people willingly locked on to market-imposed shackles, just how did what was taken to be open-ended development become a given fact of social reality that tended to exclude serious consideration of alternatives? In past issues of this magazine we have suggested that answers to questions such as these will not be found by any too narrow a focus on the economy. On the contrary, the key is the historical transformation of our relation to that world so that open-ended growth no longer points towards the end of our species.

Climate change is widely taken to be the general underlying cause of our present dilemmas. It is not. While crucially significant, it is nevertheless one particular consequence of our radically altered mode of interchange with the natural world, and too narrow a focus on it alone can mask the more basic shift in the conditions of our relation to that world.

As a looming consequence of a more general historical transformation, of which both the surge in growth and the widespread neo-liberal delusions integral with it are symptoms, climate change is only the first among a series of crises likely to emerge if we cannot bring ourselves to change our present way of taking hold. Most importantly, just as climate directly impinges on our bodies and our senses, it also directly affects the elementary means of life. Quite inescapably, it stirs recognition of the way the uninhibited growth of the market can reach a point where it ceases to contribute to public well-being. Whatever its status as a consequence of more basic processes, the experience of climate change is the most significant current point of entry to passage beyond the ‘third way’. And clearly the more enquiring branches of the ‘third way’ approaches can bring pressure to bear on governments. They can begin to press them to direct market impulses towards institutional reconstruction.

How then, in the most general terms, should we characterise the shift that, with its radically different possible outcomes, is drawing us into the process of transformation? Beyond that, how in an equally general way might we illustrate it in terms that, once stated, can scarcely be denied? And finally, what might be the broad contours of an approach that begins to chart and to practise the work of transition?

Reconstituting the World?
Half of the evidence of this shift is all about us: the facts. The technological revolution, the knowledge society, the age of information. The other half — their critical interpretation — is nowhere to be seen. It is excluded from mainstream consideration by the momentum of change and the short-term exclusion of alternatives that it promotes. Yet that momentum too relates to another fact: the shifting of the ground upon which all of the just mentioned ‘undeniable facts’ operate.

All of the undeniable facts — and it is important to recognise the comprehensiveness of their claims — operate within a profoundly taken-for-granted relation to the natural world. It is a relation that assumes its utility for us and is often picked up in the catch phrase ‘the conquest of nature’. Utility, use for, conquest: all these terms now demand reassessment.

Prior to a gradual movement to reinterpret our relation to the natural world, which began to take definite shape in the scientific revolution of the 16th century, we dwelt in a given world of Nature, which, in its eternal cycles, sustained our being. The scientific revolution of the 16th century, as it fed into a more general sense of enlightenment, began to change all that. By way of the rational interpretation of what was devoutly seen as the imprint of the Hand of God in nature, Galileo de-centred the earth as the eternal setting of our being. While he gained home imprisonment as his reward, from those who were so secure in their faith that they already knew the truth, Isaac Newton, who explained the given tendency of things to move downwards by the law of gravity, became Master of the Royal Mint.

A prophetic appointment, one might say, as the rational power to know the world differently joined with the practical movement to relate to it differently. Interpretive rationality, mainly in the form of a religious expression of the impulse to place humankind in an intelligible reality, was crossing over; rationality, which had once fired the questionings of Galileo and Newton, was crossing over to constitute the fixed end of human activity. It was no longer enough to acknowledge the bounties and perils of the natural world as the frame of our being. The point now was to acknowledge a different truth: to exploit and conquer the earth as a resource. A different truth: the object now for instrumental rationality was expressed by trade, by mercantile activity, by enclosures in the name of profit and productivity, by colonisation.

But does this series include globalisation as well, is there an ambiguity emerging so that the answer is both yes and no?

Whatever the answer to that final question, we may readily assert that in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, emergent capitalism took hold of our changing relations to the natural world. Rational reconstruction of the division of labour and tools of labour fed into the encompassing expectation of a progress being integrally associated with growth. Up until now.

Trajectories of Transformation
In all the foregoing we have sought to lead up to the gradual disclosure, within the flux of contemporary reality, of a fundamental issue. The financial meltdown is an actuality, so too is the more basic process of economic crisis, yet both of them are symptomatic.

They are consequences, from the standpoint of this statement, of an ongoing transformation wherein the primacy of direct labour (including its mechanised modes) in our interchange with the natural world is being superseded by the primacy of technoscientifically mediated processes. Just because this is an epochal transformation it is not readily comprehended by governments. Indeed, its initial effect is radically to supercharge the conquest of the natural world. From that there follows on consumerist euphoria wherein conquest can appear as open ended and the pursuit of individual interest the consummation of freedom.

That is, until this overall process encounters a natural limit, as well as a limit of our species type — a biosocial limit. Gradually then a contradiction emerges, not between Right and Left, but even as that distinction changes, across a more fundamental division between those who are hell-bent to maintain the trajectory of the conquest of nature and those who recognise that via a whole series of potential crises that trajectory, unless it is radically qualified, points toward the end of human being.

A contradiction of this scope reaches into the roots of our culture. It is not a class contradiction, although it is integrally related to class interests: it is better described as a cultural contradiction or, for those who prefer a different terminology, as an ontological contradiction. It is not one that calls for a revolution but rather for a revolutionary transformation conducted across a protracted period by way of a transitional practice. That is a practice of deeds, complemented by an ethic of the common good, rather than by the fixations of growth. It is a practice, inseparable from an ethic, which now, within the contradictory social framework emerging from modernity, is increasingly aware of its multiple roots in the social forms of successive modes of engagement with the natural world. To implement and to state that emergent ethic now entails a bridging between two modes of practical life in their constitutive engagement with the natural world. To forge a unity between the quasi-spontaneous response of a whole spectrum of green movements with a more abstracted intellectual culture cannot be other than a difficult and protracted process. Especially among the intellectually related groupings, it calls for a reorientation. That is, a reversal that restores the priority of interpretation: a break out from its present subjection within the takenfor- granted perspectives directing the technosciences.

Conclusion
Deeds, practices, commitment to the common good. This conjunction, pursued with the unswerving certainty of those who know the truth, led directly to the moral ignominy of ‘actually existing socialism’. Ideals grounded within the limitations of existing theories of life and society were not enough. Now, certainty lives on but within a different order of deeds as the institutional order of the market sustains the certitudes of growth and consumption. The forgoing pages, couched as they are in general terms, are both a statement of future policy and a resolution. They seek to spell out some of the parameters within which, in future publications the editors hope to explore and contribute to the emergence of a transitional practice. That is, a practice of social life which, moving beyond the fetishes of growth and consumption, seeks to build an institutional frame work that sustains human life within an ethic of equality and the common good.

arena publications editors Geoff Sharp, Nonie Sharp, John Hinkson, Paul James, Alison Caddick, Simon Cooper

Nevertheless, the background concerns about a natural world that can no longer be taken for granted continue to gain momentum. While the significance of empirical evidence is never straightforward, massive transformations in the broader environment, like the dramatic collapse of the Arctic ice-sheets, in place for millions of years, have an immediacy of meaning compelling for many people. Many scientists agree. Similarly, the increasing occurrence of extreme events such as the recent Victorian bushfires are calling into being a new awareness of what the world and Australia may face over coming decades. The likelihood that developments such as these will have significant, if not entirely predictable, consequences for our future world generates deep foreboding. If the global financial collapse disturbs our sense of certainty, climate change now eats away at the grounds of our being.

In 2007 the Rudd Labour government was elected on a platform that contradicted the denialist stand of John Howard. No one could really know at the time what this commitment meant. The term ‘climate change’ does exist as media rhetoric, requiring little substantial understanding of the phenomenon, and we know that Kevin Rudd does know how to manage the media. But even if it were so that a serious understanding of the phenomenon supported the policy shift, this could only ever be a starting point. After all, serious concern can issue in a superficial view that a new mix of policies will quickly restore balance. Isn’t it so that if we focus our intelligence and our technical resources any problem can be managed?

The larger question, usually ignored, has always been how climate change relates to social assumptions. This is not merely a matter of assumptions about energy, as important as they are. The relevant distinction is between processes that can be manipulated through policy responses and those that work at the deeper level of our core assumptions about social life. While there is no doubt that policy is important, it is also limited, especially if it ignores a fundamental change in the conditions of policy formation.

A focus on assumptions that might lead in the direction of destructive climate change must reach down into the cultural assumptions that we feel, but barely ‘know’. Where these assumptions are ignored or merely re-shaped a little within a broad approach to social life that goes unquestioned — the use, say, of solar rather than gas heating, electric rather than oil-fueled cars — climate change is being treated merely as a phenomenon that requires technical change: lifestyle modifications, limited costs and new policies. It will be argued that this approach will be disastrous in a number of ways, especially in seeming to respond to the ‘problem’, easing public anxiety while locking society into a deepening crisis. Even the understandable tendency to turn the debate into a consideration of whether we should aim for 350, 450 or 550 ppm of carbon in the biosphere — a matter that surely must have an answer — easily and usually deflects the debate into a series of technical strategies that leaves untouched the realm of deep-rooted assumptions about our mode of life which it has now become imperative to question. The question of ‘What is to be done’ is pursued within the terms of the society that we have; not only is large-scale social change off the agenda, the type of society that we have is not brought into the foreground.

This absence of social interpretation is a familiar tendency in environmental writing. The question of the social conditions of environmental destruction is hardly ever raised. We must of course be grateful for the insights environmentalists and scientists continue to bring to the climate change question but this does not preclude coming to terms with the limits of current perspectives. The tendency is to concentrate on what is happening in ‘nature’ and not on how social assumptions structure our relations with it. Examples of this treatment of assumptions could easily be multiplied. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse the social only appears in the broad brush-stroke sense of ‘society’ making choices. Because there is nothing distinctive about the social assumptions that lead to the choices; those choices are, implicitly, forms of stupidity or mistakes. In George Monbiot’s Heat, a non-specific notion of ‘society’ is at work in those choices that encourage air travel — a choice that from the standpoint of global emissions is disastrous. But what is the distinctive nature of such a society, why does it so privilege air travel, both taking it for granted and treating it as essential? This level of understanding is typically ignored in environmental perspectives and this absence has the unintended effect of privileging policy and technological solutions over deeper cultural and social institutional solutions. Given the significance of climate change this hiatus predictably will have tragic effects.

Three recent publications illustrate different implications of this tendency to neglect the social world most people too readily take as given. They are Ross Garnaut’s The Garnaut Climate Change Review, David Spratt and Philip Sutton’s Climate Code Red and Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. Anyone who reads these books will learn from them. They contain a diversity of important information and reflect the maturing of empirical research and debate about climate change over the last five years. But they also contain a level of assumption — one deficient in understanding — that they also share. Arguably, such assumptions lie at the heart of barriers to significant action to combat climate change today.

The Garnaut Report is a report to government. It represents an enormous effort that combines an exhaustive compendium of various developments relating to climate change with modelling for different policy possibilities. It is by definition a policy document, addressed to Kevin Rudd and the Labor government in Canberra. It has been widely criticised by environmentalists and others, especially when the Rudd government adopted a minimalist response with respect to the level of emissions reduction by 2020. The basis for this policy was laid at the feet of the Garnaut Report, although it would be unfair to suggest that this is what Garnaut had intended.

Garnaut’s passion is not at issue. The Report shows every sign of being written by a person determined to take the immensity of the climate challenge seriously. It takes up a great variety of developments now discussed in environmental circles and is both informative and well-informed. However, given it is infused with a belief that all the necessary choices can be made through the policy realm and that these will make the difference that matters, it ignores the underlying conditions of policy formation. Hence it collapses into a series of compromises that indicate its broad, unreflective commitment to the contemporary global order. It is structured around a contradiction. All of its policy proposals to tackle climate change occur within the parameters of neo-liberal globalisation. This is a direct consequence of treating climate change as a straight-forward policy issue that assumes that a series of strategies — even radical strategies — will constitute an adequate response. Many people from various standpoints have been highly critical of Garnaut, but no one has really discussed how his given framework, with its focus on policy, shapes what it discusses and proposes.

The problem with Garnaut’s (and with Rudd’s) emission trading scheme (ETS) generally is its central belief: that neo-liberal globalisation is capable of sufficient adjustment to turn climate change around. For Rudd and his many supporters (for example, David McKnight), this is simply another case of the need for government intervention in an instance of market failure, not unlike what is needed to handle the global financial crisis. Rather than accept this view as a rejection of neo-liberalism, it will be argued that this is in fact a massive contradiction: the core institution that is called upon to respond to climate change by sending out appropriate ‘signals’ — the market — is actually the main driver of the climate change crisis. Garnaut’s focus is upon the level of emissions and what policy strategies can be adopted to reduce them and bring them under control. But if the explicit signals to reduce emissions are promulgated by the market, an institution in its present form that calls out by its very structure further consumption of resources and expansive lifestyles, he has settled for a ‘solution’ that will predictably fail. No doubt, some worthwhile changes may be possible, but they will not be the main story. Amazingly, even a crash program to renew power generation via renewable energy has been put aside. This is to be left to ETS modifications to the market, the market as dominant institution being non-negotiable.

In part this can be understood as a consequence of Garnaut’s own contradictory beliefs. On the one hand, he is deeply concerned about and committed to a significant reduction of greenhouse emissions; on the other, he is a significant architect of the global order through his practical advocacy of institutions devoted to global free trade, in turn legitimised by the pursuit of global growth through expansionist trade. In his book Heat, George Monbiot convincingly argues that the growth of global travel is inconsistent with any serious attempt to control emissions. But he fails to come to terms with how this is an implicit critique of the global order itself. And he does not generalise his work on air and shipping travel to the world of trade. But it is able to be generalised and it amounts to a significant critique of the core institutions of the globalisation process.

Trade and travel on varying scales are activities that have been typical of most societies throughout history. However, under conditions of contemporary globalisation, trade and travel take on qualities that do not compare with past circumstances. They become key institutional expressions of a society that has fundamentally changed its structure: a change in balance from social relations that are predominantly local and face to face to a new social principle where relations maintained at a distance better typify its core qualities. Other technological supports to these social relations where the other person is largely unavailable at a face-to-face level — such as computerised communications and the media generally — are also crucial institutional spheres in such societies. But the social institutions associated with trade and travel are perhaps the clearest illustrations of how social assumptions bear on climate change.

There are serious questions about how trade (or travel) can occur on anything like the scale required in a radically globalised society in the future simply because of the growing shortages of fuel needed to sustain it. But quite apart from that, trade — the lifeblood of an order that expands through global exchange — is a symbol of practical activity that feeds global emissions. No doubt many put their faith in the magic of a technological solution, and this can never be entirely ruled out. But it is a hope that resembles past hopes of a perpetual motion machine. In clinging to this hope there is a refusal to consider the proposition that the social assumptions that drive society towards globalisation are core problems leading to destructive climate change.

There are many reasons for questions around social assumptions in destructive climate change being ignored. For a start, the critique of capitalism from a social standpoint has typically addressed social assumptions as set within class relations. Such approaches have never offered much insight into relations with nature and the environment. This is to say that social interpretation, like practical capitalism, has taken relations with nature for granted. Nature is always implicitly ‘there’ to serve social needs. But this attitude is no longer viable. Society not only ravages what is left of nature but, crucially, also treats it as radically malleable — as able to be reconstituted by scientific technique.

The assumptions inherent in neo-liberal thought that bear on nature and the environment are now widely assumed and are not easily put a side. As is all too evident in the work of that key figure of neo-liberal thought, F. A. Hayek, the central tenets of the contemporary order, supported by the market, are rampant individualism and growth. The glorification of expansion — not only of economy, but also population — is a central legitimation of the neo-liberal idea. Supported by a ‘spontaneous’ background structure — the market — and recently supercharged by high technology, neo-liberalism has unleashed a growth machine that consumes and transforms the world around us. While temporarily constrained by a global financial crisis it is, short of a basic and radical challenge, seen to be the only trajectory available to any process of renewal. Rudd’s response to the neo-liberal global financial crisis, to pose government as an indispensible sector in addition to the market, is of little help. It takes on board neo-liberalism’s own self-understanding which poses the choice between market and state as the crucial, defining issue. His ‘radical’ move is to simply seek a ‘balance’. While a role for government in social affairs is not at issue, Rudd’s response lacks insight into the social processes that bring neo-liberalism into being, as well as how it affects social relations. Nor will any technological strategy be capable of challenging this complex of neo-liberal commitments. It is the main social trajectory, and how it is situated within people’s assumptions, which is the question.

In these circumstances, the consequences for the environment of ignoring social assumptions are beyond calculation. There can be no serious response to climate change without a serious response to what counts as development: the endless elaboration of strategies of social expansion that typify what is called globalisation. Climate change as a policy response needs to be displaced by a response that bites more deeply into what we assume and how we act as social beings.

The recent book by David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red, is highly critical of the Garnaut Report as well as Rudd’s policies. It is a much more political book than Garnaut’s could ever be. In fact it is a mixture of argument about the latest developments in climate change and arguments about how to turn climate change perspectives into a handbook for political activism. Like Garnaut, but in a more focused and economical way, it contains many discussions of practical developments in environmental thinking and analysis that a reader can learn from and even be inspired by. It is infused with a sense of desperation about lack of action on climate change, which would be shared by many people knowledgeable about the findings of climate science. But it takes this desperation into territory that, while understandable, is ultimately wrongheaded and even counterproductive.

The organising idea of the book is the concept of the ‘state of emergency’. As I understand it, this idea as related to climate change first came from James Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia, where he argues that the situation of the world, combining climate change with various other environmental concerns, is such that an emergency in the form of a war economy is justified and necessary. As a way of signifying the seriousness of the state of the world this seemed like a justifiable strategy to focus people’s attention — to jolt them out of normality. Spratt and Sutton take this idea up with zeal, showing how a political emergency could work as a practical response to the challenge of climate change. While Kevin Rudd would certainly disagree with this one-eyed emphasis upon state action because he seeks a balance between state and market, Spratt and Sutton’s proposal shares with Rudd the idea that the proper focus of practical action lies between the institutions of state and the market. This is a consequence, as was argued in relation to Garnaut, of climate change basically being a policy issue that leaves way of life questions unexplored — although the idea of a more powerful state is an important addition in the case of Climate Code Red.

This emphasis has the consequence of turning climate change responses into political strategies of a rather narrow kind. The whole idea of the political emergency has a long history, one which, as in conditions of war, can readily set in place processes that lack empathy for others and respect for democratic rights. It assumes that the process of renewal is largely known and only requires right action. That the crisis may require a more complex consideration of assumed cultural attitudes and social expectations does not really fit the method. It is true that we have an emergency. It does not follow that we need a political emergency. It is true that if our politicians continue to mouth rhetoric and do nothing of any real substance they may call into being a political emergency. But the hard work lies elsewhere.

Climate change must have a politics, but one that captures the distinctive qualities grounded in what we have previously assumed in our relations with nature. Those qualities are cultural, in the sense of deep assumptions leading us on to a variety of (unintended) practical outcomes. To focus on the complex of commitments within neo-liberalism may allow a little more insight into how we have been drawn into a development nightmare, but to do so it is necessary to go beyond neoliberalism’s self-understanding. For it has no insight into how even Hayek’s recommendations have come to have new meanings under the influence of a cultural revolution that has made our globalised world and drawn society down a blind alley or, perhaps more to the point, onto an unsustainable developmental path.

But this unsustainability has a much larger frame of reference than environmental processes. Whether responding to climate change, resource shortages, food shortages, overpopulation or the global financial crisis — the list is near endless — it is essential to come to terms with a new social force in the world. Neo-liberalism captures some of this social complex, but the way society and the market have been transformed over the last twenty-five years requires a deeper understanding than the reference points celebrated by adherents of neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal market is actually a ‘hyper-market’ when compared with the one with which Adam Smith was familiar. There would be no globalisation, no global financial revolution, no global financial melt-down, no Margaret Thatcher or John Howard without the social process that has issued in various technologies such as the silicon chip and the communications revolution more generally. This social process is typically treated as though it were a natural phenomenon, simply taken as fact; as just ‘being there’. But to leave it there is to ignore the distinctive qualities of global culture and related social forces.

There will be no comprehensive understanding of the kind of society that has taken shape since the early 1980s without a grasp of the emergent role of intellectual practice that issued in the high-tech revolution. For the first time in history the intellectual practices shaping the high sciences have engendered a practical revolution in core social relations, productive economy and culture that has changed the relation of society to nature fundamentally. This relation is now a more abstract one because high technology supports new forms of relations mediated by technology and thereby the emergence of a radical extension of sociality, an enormous expansion of social relations with little reference to place — the global. Without this radically enhanced sphere largely ‘situated’ in cyberspace, there would be no experiments in global finance and expanded levels of growth. Nor would there be that overwhelming sense of omnipotence vis-à-vis all prior societies that is so typical of global culture. And climate change, while issuing from forces with a longer history, would not be running haywire at nearly the same rate. Nor would science be contemplating projects to respond to climate change that threaten to carry us into a post-human world.

There are two broad responses to climate change apart, that is, from trying to deny it. The first and most common response is to find ways of reducing global emissions. But there is another approach that is now being taken seriously in various circles that arises from a view that the world cannot easily pull back from disaster in coming decades and that to avoid these it will be necessary to geo-engineer Earth.

This possibility is forthrightly discussed in Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. This book too is environmentally well-informed. It constructs scenarios of possible futures for different parts of the world if no serious response to climate change emerges very quickly. Needless to say, the scenarios are grim. If it is thought that we are already experiencing a global refugee crisis, read Dyer’s account of the abandonment of southern Europe by European culture, because lands around the equator have become intolerable under the influence of rising temperatures, and their displacement by desperate peoples from Africa. Or if China seems all-powerful because of recent levels of economic growth, read his account of the decimation of the core productive lands of middle-China within decades, with consequences so dire one feels real reluctance to reproduce them in print. It is a fine line, but perhaps some things are better left to the imagination.

It is the attitude of Dyer towards geo-engineering Earth that I wish to place most emphasis on because it raises key contradictions inherent in the present crisis. Geoengineering is about various practical ways in which science might protect the Earth from the consequences of excessive carbon, for example, projecting large quantities of sulphates into the atmosphere to shade the planet. But the larger point is that the high sciences are now taking on this strategy as a project. The argument in this essay has been that environmental writing should not ignore the social assumptions that lie behind climate change; that social assumptions are major causes of climate change outcomes. In the case of geo-engineering the issues are somewhat different. Here it is a question of how climate change may call out the massive powers of high technology to generate a response to it.

Dyer has come to the conclusion that geo-engineering in one form or another is required for us to survive the next few decades. Here there is considerable agreement with a range of commentators that we do indeed face an emergency. Dyer also shares with Spratt and Hutton the view that society is already engaged in geo-engineering by emitting carbon on a scale that is shaping and transforming the Earth. But this use of the term geo-engineering normalises its meanings, suggesting that unintentional causes and the highly intentional act of bringing planetary-scale high-tech solutions into play are one and the same.

To go down this road of geo-engineering in today’s world requires a shift from climatology to general science or physics. It requires a shift from a practical science that transforms particular matters on Earth in a manner consistent with its conquest, to taking Earth as its object with a view to re-constituting it (as Geoff Sharp argued in ‘There are Limits to the Unexamined Life’, Arena Magazine no. 98). This is the project of the high sciences, one first initiated in the splitting of the atom and the making of the Atomic Bomb. Now the full range of high technologies shape new worlds as a matter of course, while humanity loses touch with its place in the world. The re-constitution of the species, the concern of bio-technology, will be matched by the project of geo-engineering Earth. In both cases the sciences will draw on massive forces never before available to humanity and the dangers of moving into a post-human realm devoid of all familiar reference points presses ever closer. If the fears called into being by climate change point to the end of our taken-for-granted Holocene world, what irony if our social responses ensure that outcome.

The global institutions that make up the neo-liberal world represent one of the choices possible after that fundamental shift that ushered in the world of high technology. This particular choice harnessed high-tech to the world of capitalism and as such opened up the possibilities of a post-capitalist order (in the sense used by Geoff Sharp, Arena Magazine 98) that no longer restricts humanity and the Earth to given limitations. This is a world that can only continue in a post-human form, together with a geo-engineered climate.

A world that accepts the high-tech revolution but also works within the limitations of the species and responds to climate change by preserving the natural world is possible. It could be both diverse and complex and in turn would be constrained by a reflexive knowledge of social assumptions. It will need to be more circumspect than what we associate with radical globalisation, with a greater emphasis on local cultures and modest ways of living. The social and individual excitements of expansionist culture and economy will be displaced by the real and concrete joys (as well as hatreds) of social relations significantly grounded in the face to face. When combined with technologies that are emission-free, the real challenge to climate change will have begun.

The books referred to in this essay are: Ross Garnaut, The Garnaut Climate Change Review (Cambridge University Press, Australia, 2008); David Spratt and Philip Hutton, Climate Code Red, The Case for Emergency Action (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008); and Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008).

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

This may seem unfair in relation to climate change. Rudd has set in place a developmental process focusing on significant goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases and processes of emission control. But even in relation to climate change it has developed a policy that amounts to nothing more than an administrative tool. Formed in the campaign to defeat Howard, and influenced by opinion polls that in no way reflect the reality of the on-the-ground costs of responding to climate change, it attends to the global threat as merely an aspect of normal governance.

The political effort is to normalise climate change: both in terms of policy and in the minds of voters. Whether our way of life might contribute to climate change, and what might count as a serious response at this level of thinking and action is marginalised because administration looks after an assumed way of life. The Garnaut Report is already being placed in cotton wool. Garnaut has made it clear that his investigations require responses more radical than ever before contemplated. Rudd now responds that Garnaut will merely be one of the sources government will consider.

The Limits of the Administered State

 
But what if the responses required go far beyond normal administration? The current debate on oil pricing is perhaps a guide as to how this will be handled.

All of the main elements of the oil price crisis have been coming to the surface for years. The four elements are: background problems associated with producing a finite resource (recent reports argue that in 2007 oil exports actually fell); destabilisation of states and regions that produce oil, usually caused by Western pressures and assumptions; the rise of developing states and their rapidly expanding consumption needs; and profligate consumption by the West to satisfy grossly excessive ways of living and producing. The only new aspect – a fifth element affecting prices – is speculation; but rather than march speculators around in handcuffs we should ask what else could be expected given the first four fundamentals of this volatile situation. Rather than begin a process of debate and education that addresses these elements forthrightly as fundamental questions about life expectations, the Rudd government settles for an utterly limp set of childish proposals: a fair market price scheme; a threat to pull OPEC into line by means of the blow-torch, and contradictory appeals to OPEC to consider our car drivers.

Administrative strategies that suggest all is well, except for a few hiccups, are matched in other areas of government. The neo-assimilationist assumptions of the Northern Territory intervention into Aboriginal communities, instigated by John Howard, retain a surprising degree of appeal for the Rudd administration. It seems to fit its general approach to political affairs. In this view sexual abuse, the distribution of pornography and drugs, individual health and problems of everyday life are matters calling for good administration. They certainly call out a ‘moral’ reaction, often populist and lazy, but administration remains the answer – an attempt to go beyond Left and Right, in the limited sense of bi-partisan strategy. The intervention appears to be gaining momentum and may even be generalised outside of Indigenous issues, once again encouraged by newspaper campaigns. If children are not being properly cared for or, more generally, if there appears to be a moral hazard (as the market economists would call it), government must intervene. Will this prove the claim that the Northern Territory intervention is not racist?

At first glance these new interventions seem similar to previous forms of welfare (the Leviathan state concerned for its citizens), but there is a new momentum at work, one certainly not uncovered by any newspaper campaign.

The administrative approach to climate change, to the politics of oil and to interventions in the remnants of communal life have two things in common: they all are ‘beyond Left and Right’; they all take contemporary society and its way of life for granted. We don’t have to refer to the ‘good old times’ of a familiar capitalism to recognise that economy and society have been fundamentally transformed. The old adage that capitalism always changes allows us to avoid the reality that neo-liberal globalisation is not simply ‘capitalism’; and that this emergent form brings with it problems never before faced by human communities. In particular, the high technologies amplify and transform aspects of life once protected from the market. Today, inflated expectations of the self, even the denial that there is a self, the new role of the university, the assault upon nature, the market in its global form, the possibilities of techno-embodiment, the infinite wants of the consumer, all appear to confirm that the possibilities are limitless. High-tech processes amplify our world and draw us away from any notion that it might be finite.

In respect of families, and what Rudd has begun to call ‘little children’, we can see the effects of high-technologies in the thinning out of the social fabric. The multi-faceted media that accompany the globalisation of social life radically undermine community-based and generation-based settings. Relatively rich face-to-face local and neighbourhood social relations are thinned out and displaced by technological mediums, putting in their place conditions that underpin both moral panics and interventions. These moral panics do not simply arise out of media campaigns. They have a basis in the new social order now administered in the name of a politics beyond Left and Right.

Ignoring these processes of social transformation allows the question of how we should live also to be avoided. Gradually new circumstances of life have been set in place that undermine community settings. Problems of community and family can then be taken up simply as empirical realities needing an administrative response. The same can be said for the problem of oil prices as well as climate change. But taken simply as an empirical fact, the anger in the community about oil pricing can have only one ‘rational’ outcome: growing conflict potentially leading to neo-imperial ‘adventures’. Indeed new sites of international conflict could be said to be the only likely outcome unless the fundamental issues can be properly addressed.

To treat oil pricing as an empirical or technical problem ignores how neo-liberal globalisation affects the felt needs of individuals. As it breaks apart the social world of local communities and sets them in motion as global social connections without limit, excessive consumption demands are naturalised. Crucially, finite oil symbolises to us how neo-liberal globalisation demands a world of infinite need and striving, one embodied in global trade and ever-expanding demands on global transport, a world that will never be satisfied. And what can be said about oil can be multiplied many times over in relation to climate change. Market-based emission schemes seek to protect and conceal the society they implicitly support. They seek to shift production into more acceptable directions while preserving the world of economic growth and global free trade, the very world that will eternally call into being excessive demand and must itself be restructured.

Neo-liberal globalisation is now encountering a world that it believes should not exist: the finite world. The strategy of turning all problems into administrative problems conceals from view the need to reconstruct societies across the board by re-invigorating regionalised production and distribution, as well as regional communities. Rudd is fond of claiming that we must face the costs of emission controls now rather than later. But it is the many questions implicit in this more basic restructuring that has to be addressed, now.

 John Hinkson is an Arena publications editor.

Gerard Henderson, one of our local clear thinkers, is both illustrative and to the point. ‘[T]here is little governments can do about the process of globalisation. People want to trade and people want to move … it is almost impossible to resist such developments.’ He goes on: ‘For a small trading nation like Australia, there is no alternative … A country with the population size and economic might of the US might be able to take a stand against aspects of globalisation. Likewise, possibly, the European Union. But not 19 million strong Australia.’ Then comes the clincher: ‘Not without a significant decline in living standards.’

Gerard Henderson has much support for his position. He certainly won’t be contradicted by the economic experts who regard the protestors as quite insane. Nor will he find resistance from Third Way thinkers — Tony Blair or Anthony Giddens for instance — who assume there is no alternative to globalisation as we have known it.

Yet with such a strong version of reality on the side of the global economy why have the protests gained such support? And in taking up this question it should be kept in mind that the WTO protests do have a larger picture with a definite momentum. This can be illustrated by reference to world-wide phenomena, but there is more than sufficient local material to make the point. Take for a start the meteoric rise and fall of One Nation, a party which rode the wave of deep resentment towards global restructuring and had mainstream politicians in fear of the political abyss. And as the political fortunes of One Nation sank like a stone, the forces of protest renewed themselves. They removed the most powerful politician in Australia, Jeff Kennett, and now John Howard is in their sights. Don’t talk to this embattled sector about the high living standards offered by globalisation.

What Gerard Henderson and others assume is that while there is pain, disruption, even loss of livelihood, there is no choice. Globalisation is just one of those tragedies of economic development, like the industrial revolution. Some people get hurt, but the greater good emerges given time.

In the face of this common sense those who protest against it have little to say that can shake it. They know they are against it. They know they are increasingly shut out of the core practices of social life and are, at best, being managed as problems. But to shake the common sense view and shape politics in a definite direction requires much more: a perspective which can locate how it is that globalisation has these effects, and which can then be drawn upon to develop social policy in a plausible alternative direction.

It is here, of course, that commentators like Gerard Henderson win hands down, for the moment. They win because there are no self-evident plausible alternatives, a situation the Left is reluctant to face. Certainly the socialist utopia has no credibility, and the implication of most commentators that to reject globalisation is to reject modernity in favour of a village level of development rings true for too many.

A policy which can cut through conventional globalisation needs an awareness of what is unique to global culture and economy: its capacity, through the combination of the market with the full range of high technologies, to render most, if not all, of social reality as elements of a market calculus. This universality, this capacity to reduce all particulars to a general value, laid the ground for what the economic rationalists called the ‘level playing field’. It was the renewed power of this market which has swept aside public institutions since the early 1980s.

At the same time it is this very universality of global culture, mediated as it is by the various high-tech media forms, which undermines all particular relations and institutions. What is a strength is also a weakness. While globalisation claims to re-assert the local, it nevertheless undermines diverse expressions of culture or economy based on particular social relations. Thus the emphasis on the ‘local’ in the global/local divide is more an expression of need and of loss than a practical reality with institutional force. And it is this structural process which gives the lie to the implicit hope in writers such as Gerard Henderson that things will balance out over time.

Neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx faced such a bleak reality. Prior to ‘their’ market lay a community structure they assumed and built on. Here Smith found the basis for an ethics, while Marx found the basis for a politics. And these structures were composed of particular social relations — this family, that community, ‘our’ history.

In other words today’s global market is by no means merely a market. The fusion of the market with the new powers of high technology allows it to combine economy and culture in a new way. The nineteenth century could be characterised as having boundaries between the market and cultural contexts — a prior community — which was its foundation. These particularistic cultural settings had the effect of limiting the reach of the market because they co-existed with it. They limited the ‘freedom’ of that market.

The postmodern market, on the other hand, reaches into and reshapes those social forces which Smith and Marx took for granted. It is this background force which allows Gerard Henderson to speak with such confidence, even though he has no grasp of its special powers. He has history on his side, he might well conclude.

Yet just as the share market today experiences jitters even as it celebrates its latest triumph, he has no reason to feel too confident. A social order built on the global market is inherently unstable, as evidenced in processes which systematically destroy all local institutions and social relations. And its savagery towards stable work is legendary. Even in the heart of the booming techno-sector no job has security, as 16,000 Telstra employees have just discovered. Hence the ‘irrational’ vehement opposition to — and bitterness towards — the global way. Yet instability will not in itself turn the tide. It is the emergence of a social idea able to contain the global market which is the crucial matter. Such an idea combined with a social determination to make the idea practical would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.

The novelty of our situation lies with this special power of the global market over us: firstly the sheer power of its apparatus to devour and shape all social relations; secondly the widespread belief, shared by protestors, economists and Gerard Henderson alike, that there can only be one market structure in social affairs. These two aspects join to close off social policies which could contain and manage globalisation.

In fact there have been many types of exchange historically. Some have coexisted with others for long periods of time. For example reciprocal exchange, which does not rely on the money form, is as old as human society. Its structures today still make a crucial mark on the formation of selves in co-operative relations with others, although increasingly they are truncated. With the economic market itself there are also important distinctions to be made. In his investigation of the meanings of the market, Marx emphasised the universality of its medium of exchange. This is a crucial insight but it can be overstated. Postmodern globalisation allows us to see this is a relative question. Some markets are regional. Their sphere of exchange is regional and hence they depend upon particular individuals and communities. Such markets emerged in the first instance around restricted mediums of exchange. Others have a more universal character but still are particular to a nation. These obviously contrast with global markets.

If reciprocal exchange has managed to co-exist with markets before the emergence of the global market, the same cannot be said for money markets. The policy problem is that our only experience of market exchange has been through one dominant form of exchange. Once there were regional markets. We know them only as traces within the national market. In the year 2000 it is now possible to tell a similar story about the national market. Now it ‘survives’ as it can within the logic of the global market. What most people assume is that there should only be one form of market exchange. And notably, today, that is the global logic of info-money.

A choice between a global market and a national market has little to recommend it. The choice is too stark and is not viable. But in the face of an all-consuming global market the co-existence of other market structures as well as reciprocal exchange which better preserve particular social relations and regional identities is a choice which is non-negotiable. Only then would the space for cultural choice open up and allow sectors within our economy which are not at the mercy of the global market. Then global diversity would mean something. The social policy question becomes one of how to have at least two markets which co-exist, employing mutually exclusive mechanisms.

It would be novel historically, and test the social and practical imagination of us all. But it is an alternative to what we have come to know as ‘globalisation’. Could this become one of the social policy issues at the World Economic Forum which is to be held at Crown Casino, Melbourne on 11–13 September, 2000?

An extended version of this editorial can be found in Arena Journal No. 14