The introduction of fees for graduate courses, and the problems caused by the chaotic introduction of the Bologna reform—which split the previous unitary four-year cycle into two separate cycles, creating three to four year degrees and one to two year Masters—became the subject of the first wave of protests, in the spring of 2008. That autumn a second wave of protests began, culminating with the 5 November demonstrations in Zagreb and Pula. A single demand was formed during the preparations for the protest—fully publicly financed education at all levels, accessible to all (at this time around 60 per cent students in Croatia were paying some kind of tuition). Academic bureaucrats and even the political elite subsequently accepted the idea, at least nominally; thus in 2010 both presidential candidates had to publicly support free education.

That same year, students also mobilised around an issue not directly connected with the student population but of wider social importance—Croatia’s accession to NATO. An initiative begun by students in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS) collected 125,000 signatures for a referendum on Croatia’s accession to NATO; the students also helped to organise an anti-NATO protest during George W. Bush’s visit to Zagreb.

The third phase of the student movement started with the spring occupation of FHSS, in April/May 2009, which resulted in the occupation of about twenty university faculties in eight Croatian towns—one of the biggest European student protests of the year. The students created a self-organised direct democracy implemented at FHSS in the form of plenums (plenary/general assemblies) and working groups, with the student representative system completely abandoned. Other methods included depersonalisation and the refusal to individualise the students (with the aim of putting the emphasis on the demand and not on individuals) and the refusal to negotiate or compromise.

The end of the first wave of occupations was interpreted by some as the unavoidable end of a singular event, a kind of contemporary Croatian 1968, likely to be equally utopian and unsuccessful. But the end of the occupations did not mean the end of the struggle. By mid-2009 the economic crisis in Croatia had worsened, and workers and farmers started to organise their own protests. The fourth phase of the student movement was linked in solidarity with other sectors in society. Shortly after their occupation of the FHSS, the students supported a farmers’ protest (as shown in Encounter, a documentary film by Igor Bezinović) in the autumn of 2009. The students’ co-operation with the farmers resulted in the first farmers’ plenum, which took place at FHSS, during the protests against falling milk prices. Meanwhile the university occupation continued in ten faculties across four towns.

Another student issue was introduced at this time—opposition to the proposed Universities Act, a draft of which was leaked to the public by the students, and which intended to curb university autonomy and introduce further commercialisation. When the bill was officially presented, it was almost unanimously rejected by the academic community.

The fifth phase of the students’ movement began at the start of 2010, and was characterised by direct co-operation with other protesting social groups, primarily workers, at a time when workers’ strikes, factory occupations and protests across the country were becoming increasingly radical. Communications took place via the direct democracy working group, which has since grown into a country-wide platform. The student movement also took part in the fight against privatisation of public space in Zagreb together with civil society organisations like the ‘Right to the City’ movement.

The activities related to free education also continued. On 30 March 2010 another FHSS student protest was organised using the ‘popular front’ method, and uniting with students from other faculties. The direct result was approval for the third consecutive year of free graduate courses, as well as the abolition of fees for all undergraduates in their first year of studies.

The end of 2010 saw the rise of an academics’ initiative called Academic Solidarity, which formed in response to the proposed Universities Act and the commercialisation of higher education and science in general. On the fringes of the student movement, a left-wing anti-EU initiative was also formed in the end of 2010 (Croatia’s accession to the EU is scheduled for 2013). In March 2011 both the student movement and Academic Solidarity joined the large anti-government protest in Croatia, with the 10,000 strong protests in Zagreb spearheaded by the student movement’s anti-capitalist and anti-EU banners.

Academic Solidarity, a union which grew out of the academics’ initiative, was formed in March 2011. It is the first official direct democratic (non-hierarchical) union in Croatia, with its members coming not only from within the ranks of academic workers but also students and the unemployed. The union has gained support within the Croatian academic community to the three proposed neo-liberal laws. Thus in 2011, even the university provosts and the otherwise quite conservative members of Croatian Academy of Science and Arts spoke openly against privatisation and commercialisation of higher education and science.

During the first wave of university occupations, the students succeeded in formulating the first serious public critique of not only the commercialisation of education but of neo-liberal capitalism and liberal democracy in general. As a result, the very word neo-liberalism became widely used in Croatian public discourse; today the term is pejorative, and usually even avoided by neo-liberals themselves. Additionally, public discourse has shifted to the Left. While Croatia is not a significant country in the world context, radical activists from around the world could perhaps learn something from these events. It is possible to rise against the neo-liberal status quo, and radical opposition can appear in most unexpected places, often due to the initiative of just a few activists. The student occupations also shows that it is possible fight the system in one sector, while having the wider scope in sight at the same time, and that radicalisation and ideological consolidation can be achieved only through direct action.

Author: Mate Kapović is assistant professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is also an activist involved in several political initiatives. Ruža Lukšić helped in the translation of this text.

The policy influence of the organised consumer movement peaked in the decade from the mid-1980s, when access to the policy table was provided for the first time under Labor governments federally and in several states. In that period both peak and disease-oriented health consumer groups received increased funding from governments and were integrated into mainstream policy processes. These gains, however, came at a price: in exchange for recognition as legitimate policy actors they came under mounting pressure to moderate their activist role and to exclude systemic critique. One of the major sources of pressure on health policy actors was the New Public Management (NPM) reform program, based on neo-liberal ideology. By defining health care provision as a market exchange, with ‘choice’ as the central value, neo-liberal ideology limited the role of health consumer groups to protecting consumer interests in that exchange.

Assured access to the policy table, we believe, weakened the ability of such groups to autonomously mobilise critical patient, carer and community opinion. While ‘mainstreaming’ purported to enhance consumer engagement among service providers and policy makers, it reduced such engagement to ascertaining the views and experiences of services users, with users conceived of as individual consumers with, as Judith Gregory puts it, ‘rights to information, access, choice, and redress’. In the following article we sketch the metamorphosis of health politics in Australia from social movement activism to the co-option of ‘consumers’ as marginal actors within the policy mainstream. We use the work of John Alford and John Dryzek to explore how this transformation took place.

John Alford’s influential model explains the health care policy contest in terms of competing ‘structural interests’—the professional monopolists, the corporate rationalisers and the community interest—where typically the community interest comes to be suppressed. John Dryzek, observing relationships between governments and social movements, sees that actors based in civil society ‘sometimes face a choice between action in the public sphere and action within the state’. Where the state seeks to exclude social interests, groups have no choice but to mobilise autonomously outside the state. But where the state takes an inclusive approach and permeates civil society, as in Australia, they have a choice to act inside or outside the state. But acting inside the state does not necessarily ensure advancement of the aims of a social movement, or indeed broader democratic objectives. ‘Benign inclusion’ through co-operative policy-making mechanisms furthers these aims only if two conditions hold: ‘a group’s defining concern must be capable of assimilation to an established or emerging state imperative [and] civil society’s discursive capacities must not be unduly depleted by the group’s entry into the state’. Where a social movement cannot link in with a state imperative, its inclusion into the state is likely to be largely symbolic and ultimately detrimental to the vitality of civil society.

Health Activism of the 1960s and 1970s

The struggle for universal health insurance provided a central focus for health activist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Medibank was introduced by the Whitlam government in 1975 following ferocious conflicts with the conservative Opposition, supported by the Australian Medical Association (AMA). Medibank marked a watershed in Australian health policy. Universality and equity in health care became explicit policy objectives for the first time. As Dick Scotton and Christine Macdonald note, this program enhanced the power of the Commonwealth relative to the states over health policy and weakened ‘the veto power of organised medicine in general, and the AMA in particular, over the structure of the health system’. However the hope that breaking the monopoly power of the medical profession through Medibank would mark an increase in community influence was soon shown to be ill founded. The Fraser government dismantled Medibank through a series of incremental changes, culminating in the removal of the universal right to free hospital care. The power had shifted significantly to the state.

Medibank’s successor, Medicare, was introduced by the Hawke Labor government in 1984. On the face of it the re-introduction of universal health insurance appeared to be an expression of social democratic ideology premised on a conception of consumers as citizens. But this was also the period in which the NPM was making powerful inroads into Australian public administration, driving Labor governments to compromise commitments to democratic participation implicit in health and other social policy measures. Indeed Labor governments at federal and state levels were the principal drivers of a wave of public sector changes in the 1980s and 1990s underpinned by neo-liberal ideology. The NPM focus on rationality, outcomes, performance measures and customer satisfaction was consistent with a conception of the consumer as a market actor exercising individual choice. As described by Meredith Carter and Debra O’Connor, the opening up of the health services system to consumer representatives from the mid-1980s was ‘predicated on the view that a level of consumer participation is necessary to ensure appropriate services and products are available in the marketplace…and to ensure informed consumer choice as to which services and products best suit the treatment needs experienced by individuals’.

In Australia as elsewhere health consumer groups first formed around particular illnesses, with a focus on assisting patients and their families. A broader consumer organisation, the Australian Consumers’ Association (today named CHOICE), which also contributed to the organisation of health consumers, was formed in 1959. As RobIrvine notes, self-help activism and critiques of traditional medical authority gained momentum in the 1970s at the same time as the ‘health consumer’ emerged as ‘a central organising principle and figure of speech’. In this period, reform groups and activists for the rights of women and the physically and mentally disabled campaigned vigorously to change norms, practices and power relationships. The rise of the new, more radical forms of health activism was intertwined with Labor’s democratic reform aspirations and, as emphasised, the ongoing mobilisation for universal health insurance.

Active community participation was advanced by the Whitlam government through the creation of the Hospitals and Health Services Commission. The adoption of the recommendations of the Commission resulted in the extension of Commonwealth primary care funding to community-managed health centres, community nurses, regional geriatric and rehabilitation teams, day hospitals, community mental health services, women’s health centres and Aboriginal medical services. Perhaps peripheral when measured against mainstream health services, one significant result of these reforms was the emergence of a new sector of local and regional institutions supported by politicised health professionals and activists wedded to the ideas and practices of community health.

Until the mid-1980s at least there was a close relationship between the community health movement and incipient health consumer organisations. In Victoria, health and consumer activists from organisations such as the People’s Health Collective, the Health Left and Health Feedback Study Groups, Community Health Action and Information Network, the Medibank Action Coalition, the Workers Health Action Group, Women in Industry, Contraception and Health, Women’s Repetition Injury Support Team, the Women’s Health Resource Collective and Workers Health Action, came together in the early 1980s in defence of the community health program and Medibank. In 1984 the Health Issues Centre, which today still operates as the de facto Victorian peak body for health consumer research and advocacy, emerged from this network of activists.

In the central conflict over universal health insurance, consumer groups were the natural allies of reform advocates like the Australian Consumers’ Association, the Australian Council of Social Services and the Doctors’ Reform Society. In turn, the Whitlam government made the health policy system increasingly accessible to such groups. The Fraser government held back their entry into the mainstream but the process recommenced with Labor’s return to federal office in 1983 and around the same time in several of the states. The culmination of this development was the establishment in 1987 of a peak organisation, the Consumers Health Forum of Australia (CHF).

Consumer Health Forum

The government’s intention, as set down in a 1985 Department of Health document was for a consumers’ health forum to be established as ‘a coalition of community and consumer groups’ to provide ‘a “community voice” on health issues’, with the aim of balancing the influence of well-organised professional and industry groups. It was to be funded by the Department but to operate as an independent, separate, incorporated body. Today the CHF’s membership encompasses most health consumer groups of significance, including peak organisations in each state. With around fifteen full-time staff, it is engaged in submission writing, workshops and educational initiatives, policy advocacy, and the publication of newsletters and other publications. Importantly, it nominates consumer representatives to more than 150 government, industry, research and professional committees.

The historically blurred lines between the Australian Labor Party and community activism for universal health insurance, social equity and a more participatory democracy made the 1980s, when Labor formed government federally and in several of the states, a period favorable to the inclusion of consumer groups in health policy. The CHF was established as the voice of the community with a particular commitment to preventative and public health and was seen as an influence that could to some extent counter the power of the medical profession. Yet, as a government funded entity, it was from the very outset absorbed into mainstream policy processes and its independence and critical role was muted.

As noted, the policy influence of the CHF peaked in its first decade, a period of Labor governments committed to NPM reforms. As Stephanie Short points out, the CHF’s channelling of government funding to consumer and community organisations for autonomous research formed the ‘high water mark in terms of community participation in the health policy process’. This program ceased in 1992 when conditions were tightened for peak health and community organisations. The government funding the CHF continued to receive was increasingly targeted to closely audited consultative projects directed towards government ends rather than autonomous community development.

The health consumer movement today presents a relatively cohesive structure through peak bodies at the state level and the national leadership exercised by the CHF. We have only fragmentary knowledge of the dynamics of the several hundred local and state-based groups, which make up the greater part of health consumer activities, and the extent to which they exercise influence in health policy. But the formal consumer presence within the policy system through organisations such as the CHF does not seem to be sustained by vigorous or resourceful mobilisation of large numbers of patients and carers, nor is there a sense of a new generation of activists following on strongly from those of the 1970s and 1980s. There is no sense of consumer organisations contributing a strong and distinct voice in the public debate on health reform. Disease-oriented groups provide much needed services and support for their particular constituencies, but typically officials and volunteers are preoccupied with issues of funding and organisational survival through government project grants and pharmaceutical industry funding.

Yet, while the capacity to mobilise autonomously appears to have been largely drained from the sector, the notion of ‘consumer engagement’ has evolved into a principal objective in health policy at all levels. But most initiatives that come under this heading are oriented towards individual service users or citizens, and the role of consumer organisations tends to be peripheral at best. Typically their contribution is to provide representatives for committees and working groups and to advise on government activities, such as the trials of deliberative democracy in health policy planning implemented in Western Australia between 2001 and 2005.

To illustrate this trajectory from vigorous social movement activism to inclusion into the state we proceed to describe the role of the CHF in Australian national medicines policy.

Over more than twenty years the CHF and other consumer groups have issued a stream of reports, proposals, policy papers and submissions on matters relating to medicines. These include advertising codes and standards; pharmacy practices and product information for consumers; quality use of medicines; and regulatory, access and affordability issues associated with the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), Australia’s tax-financed medicines insurance program.

Medicines Policy

Consumers are represented on most regulatory committees and working groups in the medicines sector. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC), which recommends to the Minister for Health which medicines should be included on the PBS and the conditions for their listing, is the central node of the regulatory system. Membership of this committee would seem to suggest a degree of real influence. Yet, constrained by confidentiality requirements, consumer representatives on this and other committees are to all intents and purposes co-opted as marginal players into a highly complex regulatory system. Positively, the knowledge gained from participation in regulatory and advisory committees ensures the availability of expertise within the consumer movement, but only a small number of activists are engaged with medicines regulation in an ongoing basis. Consumer organisations are excluded from the quasi-secret meetings between government and the pharmaceutical industry where deliberation occurs on major policy issues.

When health consumer activists first made medicines policy a key focus of their activities in the 1980s, they encountered a great deal of suspicion on the part of the medical profession, pharmacy retailers and the pharmaceutical industry. But aversion gradually gave way to acceptance of a legitimate role for consumer groups in this policy sector. The dominant actors each recognised that participation by consumer groups in the policy process provided opportunities for new alliances. The formation of the CHF brought forth a credible voice in support of the government on critical aspects of the reform agenda. In John Alford’s terms, incorporation of the previously excluded community interest strengthened the position of the corporate rationalisers. In particular, the pursuit of PBS efficiencies, notably the introduction of cost effectiveness as a condition for the government subsidy, was compatible with the social equity and ‘rational medicines policy’ program of the consumer movement. Similarly there was the beginning of more cooperative relations between consumer groups and the pharmaceutical industry. This relationship was subsequently deepened through, for example, consumer representation on the industry committee that oversees adherence to a code of conduct for the ethical marketing and promotion of prescription pharmaceuticals. Today several pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, are ‘corporate members’ of the CHF.

The inclusion of the CHF into a set of ‘partnerships’, within constraints laid down by the pharmaceutical industry and the government, is most evident in the development of Australia’s ‘national medicines policy’. The notion of a national medicines policy derives from the World Health Assembly and the World Health Organization, in particular its Action Programme on Essential Drugs established in 1981. It was envisaged that health policy in all countries would aim to provide the population with access to appropriately prescribed, safe, effective and affordable medicines.

Australia’s health ministers in 1988 adopted a series of general health policy targets in the document Health for all Australians. This was followed by the Health Ministers’ establishment of the Health Targets and Implementation (Health for All) Committee. The CHF became a co-opted member of this committee and was central in ensuring the committee recommendation that a comprehensive medicinal drugs policy be adopted. The inclusion of the consumer movement in this process was partly in recognition of the intellectual and advocacy work for a national medicines policy undertaken by the CHF. A model had been presented in a 1988 CHF discussion paper, co-authored by academic John Braithwaite. Circulated to all relevant interest groups and obtaining support from many sources, the discussions triggered by the CHF initiatives paved the way for the de facto adoption around 1994–1995 of a national medicines policy.

The concept of a national medicines policy has since proven a durable de facto policy framework and a reference point for lobbying by all stakeholders. It encompasses four ‘arms’: timely access to the medicines that Australians need, at a cost that individuals and the community can afford (provided through the PBS); medicines that meet appropriate standards of quality, safety and efficacy; quality use of medicines; and maintenance of a responsible and viable medicines industry. The consumer sector has been a particularly prominent driver of initiatives to meet the third of these objectives, quality use of medicines (QUM).

The limits on the influence of the consumer movement are also discernible in this analysis. Participation in a wide range of co-operative arrangements has not strengthened the capacity and inclination of health consumer groups to mobilise autonomously for democratisation of health services and policy. The national medicines policy was not achieved principally as a result of CHF lobbying, and much less through the mobilisation of its member organisations and supporters. For the pharmaceutical industry the national medicines policy process, as noted, provided the opportunity to gain acceptance for the objective of a ‘viable pharmaceutical industry’, with implications for the operation of PBS pricing arrangements. That the initial misgivings of industry about the national medicines policy could be overcome is due to the convergence of industry and government interests. In short, although the consumer movement has won an established place in this policy arena, the limited influence it has gained does not pose a challenge to the power of the dominant actors.

State Imperatives and Structural Interests

While no theory provides a full explanation of the metamorphoses of the role of health consumer groups, we believe Alford’s ‘structural interest’ analysis and Dryzek’s concept of ‘state imperatives’ shed light on them. The influence of community and consumer groups in health policy has varied with the objectives pursued, at different times, by the ‘corporate rationalisers’, but also with the broader ‘state imperatives’ of the government of the day. As activist groups born of the wider social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, these organisations have continued to lend vital support to the Labor party in the perennial political contest over universal health insurance. The establishment of Medibank, which weakened the monopoly power of the medical profession, was a limited measure of their success in mitigating the medical dominance of health policy and practice and in opening the door, to some extent, to democratic participation in health policy. Their accessing of the power of the state, however, exposed consumer groups to the forces driving and constraining that power.

When corporate rationalisers in periods of Labor government were concerned with the state’s legitimation imperative of popular support for health services reform, the democratising efforts of activist groups were encouraged and their policy role embraced. But when governments shifted to a focus on efficiency and economic and managerial objectives rather than democracy, community activist groups came under pressure to redefine their role more narrowly in accordance with neo-liberal and managerialist paradigms. Having long accepted their designation as ‘consumer groups’, they tempered their commitment to radical reform of the health system in favour of participation in the mainstream policy process.

Consumer groups have continued to play a role in preserving an important democratic achievement: universal health insurance. They can also boast significant achievements in representing consumer interests on many other issues, including in relation to the national medicines policy. But we cannot fail to observe the negative effects on the autonomy and vitality of such groups of having gained entry into the state and a degree of influence, albeit severely constrained, on government policy. Co-option, while assuring entry to the policy mainstream, marginalises their capacity for mobilising health services users, and citizens more broadly.

This is an edited and abbreviated version of a chapter in Lofgren, H. & E. de Leeuw & M. Leahy (eds) Democratising Health: Consumer Groups in the Policy Process (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2011). This book examines the role of consumer organisations in health policy across a number of countries in Europe, North America and Asia. For more information, contact hans.lofgren@deakin.edu.au

Bibliography

Alford, R. R., Health Care Politics: Ideological and Interest Group Barriers to Reform, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1975.

Baldry, E., The Development of the Health Consumer Movement and its Effect on Value Changes and Health Policy in Australia, PhD thesis, School of Health Services Management, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 1992.

Carter, M. and D. O’Connor, ‘Consumers and Health Policy Reform’, in P. Liamputtong and H. Gardner (eds), Health, Social Change and Communities, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 22–37.

Department of Health, The Review of Community Participation in the Commonwealth Department of Health: Final Report, Department of Health, Canberra, 1985.

Dryzek, J. S., Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.

Gregory, J., Conceptualising Consumer Engagement: A Review of the Literature, Working Paper 1 (Revised), Australian Institute of Health Policy Studies, Melbourne, 2007.

Harvey, K. and M. Murray Hodge, ‘Australian Medicinal Drug Policy’, in H. Gardner (ed.), The Politics of Health: The Australian Experience, C. Livingstone, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 238–283.

Irvine, R. ‘Fabricating “Health Consumers” in Health Care Politics’, in S. Henderson and A. Peterson (eds), Consuming Health: The Commodification of Health Care, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 31–46.

Murray, M., ‘Australian National Drug Policies: Facilitating or Fragmenting Health?’, Development Dialogue, no. 1, 1995, pp. 148–192.

Scotton, R. B. and C. R. Macdonald, The Making of Medibank, School of Health Services Management, University of New South Wales, Kensington, 1993.

Short, S., ‘Community Activism in the Health Policy Process: The Case of the Consumers Health Forum of Australia 1987–96’, in A. Yeatman (ed.), Activism and the Policy Process, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1998, pp. 122–145.

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Caddick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

While some of the contributors to Dear Mr Rudd attended the Canberra meeting this was no guarantee that the prime ministerial ear was turned in their direction. When the publication of these essays was announced the Prime Minister was quick to say that if this group, in particular, now thought they might have special access, ‘they had elected the wrong guy’. That reservation is less likely to relate to the Chairman of the G8. As this article will argue, higher education is now quite central to a bipartisan understanding of the future prospects of the Australian economy. How its role should enter public discussion, however, is itself a debatable issue, one which has not been canvassed in the lead-up to this event.

The Arena editors have long argued that while scholars should contribute to democratic debate, the university, as an institution, should stand at arm’s length from particular political alignments. This is particularly the case when party policies appear to converge. If Australians are not to march half blindly into their future, there must be a basic questioning of open-ended growth as a central plank of the current convergence of policies. The unintended consequences of ignoring that issue could have devastating implications for the future of Australian democracy.

The first sections of this article outline the way the unintended effects of neo-liberal economic assumptions could contribute to that outcome. The later sections discuss the problematic engagement of universities with government policies.

Just how open to democratic process the Canberra meeting was, remains full of ambiguity. While at least in the short term one should welcome such initiatives, the populist hoopla which announced this one was in some tension with the top-down control of the selection process. Even so, the whole event may well have helped to consolidate the step back from the creeping authoritarianism of the Coalition’s version of neo-liberalism. Among a minority it may even stimulate the reflection that, while Rudd is espousing a softer approach to the neo-liberal endorsement of open-ended growth, his basic economic policies are continuous with those of the Coalition. In short, unless Labor can dig far deeper into the particular conjunction of circumstances that produced the neo-liberal infatuation with ‘market rules’, no reform of particular policies can guarantee Australia’s future.

This underlying issue had no clear place on the agenda of the recent meeting in Canberra. To have placed it there would have been to question the growth and development fixations of the new government. Nevertheless, any move towards stirring up the public realm, even to the degree meetings such as this might achieve, just could lead to unintended consequences.

Unintended Consequences

Unintended consequences. No, we don’t know half of what we are often ready to think we do and the consequences of our actions can cut both ways. Friedrich Hayek, as patriarch of neo-liberalism, was within a tradition that made that a central theme. But the way he did so distinguished between two sources of unintended consequences. For him the effects of participation in the market can turn out to be more satisfying than was anticipated even if they were in no sense intended. On the other hand, as he also affirmed, if we seek to plan for public well-being, unintended consequences can be devastating.

In Hayek’s neo-liberal philosophy the doctrine of unintended consequences is first turned towards the economy. Let the self-interest of those engaged in the market — as entrepreneurs or those selling their labour power — run free, and over time the unplanned consequence of the interplay of individual interests will be an overall increase in common well-being. So runs the central doctrine of ‘let the market rule’. None of the self-interested participants actually planned a contribution to the common good but a ‘hidden hand’ ensured that it happened anyway — it was an unintended consequence. On the other hand, so Hayek argued, if well-intentioned people seek to moderate the often harsh consequences of market activity the results are not likely to be an enduring welfare state. Quite the contrary. A second unintended consequence is likely to ensue: the intervention is likely to introduce a devastating loss of freedom. The planning of welfare can be the thin end of the wedge in the transition to a totalitarian social order.

The policies Howard pursued on work choices were a recent example of policies stemming from Hayek’s doctrine, but there is little to suggest that the ex-prime minister actually grasped the way Hayek’s particular view of freedom might come to contribute to neo-authoritarian outcomes. Hayek’s contributions to economic theory were integral with a tradition with deep roots. It builds on Adam Smith’s earlier doctrine of the ‘hidden hand’ of the market (its unintended contribution to the common good), and Hayek goes out of his way to emphasise the ties of his own approach to Adam Smith’s precursor Bernard de Mandeville. As a defence of private greed de Mandeville’s early eighteenth-century work, Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices; Publick Benefits, created a scandal, an odd response, it would seem now, when greed has become even more deeply ingrained.

Hayek’s foundation text, The Road to Serfdom, is marked by a pervasive totalitarian anxiety. Nominally he was expressing his dismay at the surge towards welfarist democracy in the United Kingdom in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, but just a little in the background of his ruminations on welfarist planning was the massive figure of the Soviet Union. Its exemplary defeat of Nazi Germany contributed to the continuing credibility of the hopes for the common good stirred by that purportedly socialist but profoundly ambiguous regime.

As the conflict between the two systems triggered the Cold War, Hayek played a significant role in elaborating the economic philosophy that eventually sidelined Keynesian welfarism as it framed the neo-liberal surge of recent decades. It is now well known that in due course a series of national leaders — Thatcher and Reagan, John Howard too, had become devotees of Hayek’s particular definition of freedom.

That is, of freedom with a special twist — negative freedom — the freedom of the interplay of self-interested individuals negated only by the role of the law as guarantor of that free play. The implication is that public policy should be ‘negative’ as well — non-interventionist. The broad spectrum of institutions should be constituted so that the market provides the guiding principle for the conduct of their affairs. Clearly this is in some contrast to non-Hayekian and more ethically purposive conceptions of institutional arrangements conceived as outside the direct reach of the market. Obviously, within a morally purposive approach every institution had to take account of the costs of its activities but objectives that were relatively independent of market principles guided what they were about. The shift associated with the market reaching out to far more directly encompass other spheres of life has meant that the market principle moves to the forefront of institutional concerns while cost accountability becomes the criterion for their more detailed operations.

Framing this shift, as it gradually pervades every institution, is the neo-liberal imperative of growth and the widespread belief that growth is the condition for expanded freedom and the self-development of individuals. The profound appeal of this belief depends upon that same assumption of the centrality of self-interest that grounds the whole neo-liberal project. As it expands in its reach to encompass more general norms of conduct, it screens out the deeper reality that individual interests are always constrained by the need to consider the well-being of others. While arguments about the ‘hidden hand’ may readily obscure that underlying reality in periods of growth, they are even more likely to do so when a deep sense of the realisation of new freedoms turns public attention away from the possibilities of unintended consequences.

Conquest or Reconstitution?

Even as expanding productivity continues to sustain the public enchantment with growth as a condition of freedom, a contrary reality begins to intrude. Are we reaching the limits of that conquest of nature of which capitalism has been seen as the most active expression? While the conditions of that end point reach back into the earlier history of capitalism, I am suggesting that the special surge in productivity of recent decades is not primarily grounded in capitalist enterprise at all. That impulse now works in conjunction with the constitutive and reconstitutive power of the technosciences as these tap into the more deeply grounded hopes of individual and social well-being. Hence, continuing to speak as if ‘capitalism’ and a global, as well as the institutional expansion of its market, is the main agent of change, may become highly questionable. What once was obvious may turn into a misrepresentation.

When left unrevised, the notion of ‘capitalist’ agency for the hopes of expanded freedom obscures the reality that the institutional framework which served as a prominent carrier of those hopes is itself being transformed. It, along with the particular imprint it contributed to the notion of human nature, is being reconstituted within the current trajectory of the technosciences. This issue was broached in an earlier essay (‘From Here to Eternity’,  Arena Magazine 88 and 89) which noted that the conjunction of the technosciences with capital is not only expressed in a surge of productivity.  New technologies, whether supporting information processing or by contributing to new modes of social interchange, have profound effects. They remake the social world so as to enhance the individual’s sense of creative agency and extended freedom.

Of central importance within this unprecedented break in social continuity, is the way the market extends its reach so as to reconstruct a whole range of institutions. Market criteria become the measure both of the overall role of an institution and the peformance of its participants. Economic performance begins to supersede purposes which previously had maintained their own integrity at arm’s length from the market. This shift may be readily observed, whether one turns to the care of children, the support of the aged, the redirection of sporting organisations or even to the role universities as centres of research and the elaboration of meanings.

The comprehensiveness of this shift and the rhetoric of individual freedom which helps to sustain it both contribute to the deferral of any sustained consideration of whether what is taken to be an open-ended process of growth is in fact producing its own limit. How would that limit be recognised: by climate change, by unrestrained consumption of the earth’s resources, by unsustainable population growth or even through the transformation of the biological conditions of human nature? Such questions invite a return to Hayek’s own central precept. Is the neo-liberal prospect to which he contributed also the carrier of an unintended consequence, one seldom envisaged by those gripped by the spirit of the Enlightenment?

Negative Freedom and Higher Education

Although this new reality has been slow to come into focus, a basic impetus for the neo-liberal project is now provided by higher education institutions. They deserve special attention as an example of the penetration of market principles into a sphere which was once only indirectly influenced by them. Even though ‘the idea of the university’ as a quasi-independent institution never established more than a tenuous hold, in Australia, it nevertheless contributed to the humanist ideal of the disinterested pursuit of the common good. That ethic was reinforced by way of the professions while, in a broader perspective, the quasi-autonomous relation of the universities to the policies of the state allowed a significant, even if restricted scope, for the discussion of different conceptions of public well-being and the role of government.

The scope for discussion of alternative philosophies and policies was underpinned by the differences among a wide range of groupings — especially those of religion and politics — within the broader community.

The argument I propose to mention here is that while scope for such interchange still retains elements of its vigour and relevance, its longer term prospects are seriously in question. In effect the norms of public life are being increasingly dominated by the self-interested individualism propagated by the extended reach of the market. Moreover, this is abundantly clear within the terms of higher education policy as it now takes in the convergence between political programs as a guide.

A convergence between the policies of right and left trends in Australian politics was first illustrated as the Cold War drew to a close. It was as if the generations of struggle in the name of the political freedoms of the liberal tradition within capitalism had been suppressing awareness that a more extended freedom, grounded in a surge of prosperity, was now available.

While long in preparation at least in Australia, the conditions of this new perspective were publicly declared by John Dawkins as Minister for Education, Training and Employment. As Prime Minister Hawke was moving towards a convergence between Right and Left in political life, he launched the Accord between the interests of working people and capital. Dawkins in turn was gripped by a closely related awareness: that the new energies of the technological revolution foreshadowed profound changes.

In 1987 the Minister asserted that:

More clearly than at any time in our history Australia is now an integral part of the international community. The barriers to contact, communication and trade generated in the past by our remoteness have been removed over the last quarter of a century as cultural, technological and economic revolutions have swept the globe (Higher Education: a Policy Discussion Paper, 1987, p. iii).

Dawkins went on to emphasise that while all sectors and levels of the Australian community would be affected, ‘The education sector in our higher education system in particular must play a leading role in promoting these changes’.

Twenty years on the Rudd Government has picked up the ball and a conjunction of a vice-chancellor and a prime minister in chairing the Canberra consultation could well be taken as confirmation of Dawkins’ affirmation that the higher education system ‘must play a leading role’. But twenty years on one might ask whether its leading figures have reflected sufficiently upon the direction of that leadership. The available evidence suggests they have not.

The New Paradigm

When addressing the National Press Club in June 2007, Glyn Davis based his remarks upon Seizing the Opportunities, a document subtitled as ‘A Group of Eight Policy Discussion Paper’. With a confident awareness of the pivotal role of the higher education system its first line introduces its sweeping scope. ‘This paper concerns Australia’s future and the well-being of the Australian Community.’ In its Foreword the paper seeks to move on from the Dawkins agenda. Its reworking of the higher education system ‘can no longer underpin an internationally competitive Australia’. Yet the difference is one of tactics rather than strategy. When the Hawke government sought to move on beyond the class antagonisms of classical capitalism by launching the Accord, there was no full grasp of the implications of the revolution that had inspired Dawkins. There was no developed sense of the way increasing prosperity would allow the market principle to permeate institutions that previously had stood at arm’s length from the economy. The revolution that had inspired Dawkins had yet to manifest its scope.

The eight vice-chancellors comprising the G8 are faced with a less challenging situation. They do not see their task as launching a Dawkins-style revolution. Rather it is one of continuing the turn towards ‘market rules’ in different circumstances. Moving on from the Dawkins era they recognise an extended accord as displayed in the ‘renewed bipartisan interest in higher education’ (Seizing the Opportunities, p. 1). The G8 vice-chancellors in fact recognise five bipartisan convergences defining the new situation. Outstanding within this list is the statement that: ‘Both sides are looking more to market mechanisms to shape a responsive and diverse system of high-quality and high standards’.

These references to the G8’s policy discussion paper cannot be extended in this context to a consideration of the seventy pages in which they elaborate the perspective, but the basic standpoint is clear enough. It provides the perspective for future policy. In the present context one illustration of the basic framing of the diversity the new policies are intended to introduce will have to suffice.

Knowledge in the Melbourne Model

It would be interesting to know whether any of the members of G8 question the proposition that throughout the history of our civilisation interpretation has been a primary aspect of knowledge. Clearly interpretations have always had their practical uses. Their ‘instrumental’ potential, whether in defining government policies or in ethical framing, could also help to close down the elaboration of alternatives. While the Melbourne Model as one example of projected reforms of higher education does suggest that broadly conceived undergraduate courses will frame postgraduate specialisations, there are noticeable omissions in its overall conception. No doubt it is still a model that will undergo further development, but at least at this stage there have been no clear signs of a collegial framework wherein the overall significance of open-ended growth is to be discussed. That absence is confirmed by the way the contribution of the technosciences to that growth process is envisaged. As the accompanying boxed digest of the approach to ‘knowledge transfer’ conveys them, the assumptions that underpin the Melbourne Model tend to foreclose the consideration of alternatives.

One clear sign of that effect was the recent appointment of a philosopher as inaugural Knowledge Transfer Fellow. That after the briefest span of time he then became Philosopher-in-Residence in the School of Business may appear to speak for itself. Nevertheless circumstances do change and with that, meanings — in schools of business as well as elsewhere. Perhaps there is some reason to be gratified that those who initiated these moves recognised that basic issues of philosophical import could be associated with knowledge transfer. Nevertheless, that response must be qualified. Given the declared micro-economic orientation of the G8, one may readily anticipate that only the narrowest conception of a philosophical approach could lead to it being placed within the administrative context of knowledge transfer. The absence of any more broadly conceived public account suggests that the market-directed perspectives of the ‘higher educational’ institutions have imprinted the meaning of the knowledge to be transferred in an excessively techno-instrumental mode.

The underlying problem is that current developments in the technosciences, and to a degree in the humanities as well, still go forward within the humanist perspective of the ‘conquest of nature’. A deeply ingrained assumption still persists that this project can continue to open up freedom from the limitations of the biological and social conditions of our lives. Yet there is abundant evidence that, while these same conditions can no longer be simply taken for granted, there is intense resistance to accepting the implications of that shift.

If indeed the prospect has emerged of passing beyond the conquest of nature and towards its reconstitution, the perennial questions of philosophy are placed in doubt. The place of the philosopher in ‘higher education’ and the way philosophy itself is conceived can no longer be simply left in abeyance. The need is more pressing for an institutional setting which frames its activities within the traditional ‘idea of the university’. If that initiative is not to be expected from the G8 in the immediate future, any lethargy is likely to relate to an inability to recognise that their definition of knowledge as such is constructed with a distinct bias.

As indicated earlier, there is a resistance to any adequate recognition of the increasing import of that bias. In effect, as a resistance it is also a denial of the transcendental quality of a faith that the ‘conquest of nature’ can best contribute to the dilemmas of human existence. As many have suggested, it may be that only a practical confrontation with the consequences of current policies can shake the convictions of that order.

Climate change is obviously at the forefront of those encroaching consequences but, as noted in a previous article (‘Climate Change is Not the Basic Issue’, Arena Magazine 93), this is only the most prominent among a whole cluster of consequences associated with the present way of living.

From a philosophical perspective, any shift in ontology occasioned by reconstitution must have consequences for epistemology, as the theory of the knowledge of the meaning of human life.  While this is highbrow terminology, it should not conceal the fact that the ‘meaning of our lives’ refers to the lives of the common people. In direct experience they too encounter ‘philosophical problems’. Within the ‘idea of the university’ the scholars have the responsibility and the privilege of contributing to liveable answers for us all.

The convergence of political policies is certainly unmistakeable. The argument I have set out in this essay is not intended to question the import of the technosciences as such, but it does question many of the consequences of their orientation. One cannot rule out the possibility that, as the overall meaning of these consequences work their way into fuller public awareness, the assumption of ‘market rules’ will be far more actively questioned — even increasingly within business circles. Such a development would be integral with the growth of a new political division in relation to which the current convergence would lose its power to direct policy. Key figures within the G8 might consider how that prospect should figure in their next discussion paper.

In present circumstances the issue of why both the general public, as well as many leading figures, are so slow to respond to the consequences of our way of living is a problem in its own right. Could it be that the resistance lies in confronting a paradox which for the present is ‘beyond imagination’? That, too, is a philosophically relevant question which has yet to come into focus among those directing the Melbourne Model. If that situation is to change then the primary orientation of knowledge to the economy will need to undergo a step-by-step revision. Whether that is likely to occur within a higher educational institution must remain an open question. At least it would be a sign of return of the relation to society carried by the ‘idea of the university’ if the vice-chancellor stood one step back from direct involvement in a politics of convergence resting upon foundations of open-ended growth.

Geoff Sharp is General Editor of Arena publications.

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer at the University of Melbourne calls for some explanation. As a key element of a revised conception of what the university is about it is important to recognise that the current approach — summarised by the initials KT — redefines knowledge as such. With a strong bias towards the role of the technosciences, it tends to screen out any active place for knowledge as interpretation of the meaning of our lives and how we might conduct them. For the present, KT simply assumes that an acceptable way of living depends upon economic growth and that technosciences must now serve that end. The possibility that they might assist the exploration of a different way of living in which the economic primacy of growth is intentionally limited.

The vice-chancellors of the eight leading universities — the G8 — assert with good reason, that received approaches to university policy have become redundant. A different situation calls for ‘a new policy paradigm’ (Seizing the Opportunities,  p. 1).

At the University of Melbourne, a more active response to the demands of the market was in preparation long before the present vice-chancellor was appointed. Under his leadership it gathered momentum within the Growing Esteem Strategy. Teaching and learning, research as well, were to be coordinated, with KT as the lynch pin. The university’s publicity is not backward on this. Try looking up ‘knowledge transfer’ on its website and you will get the picture. It notes that ‘The most recognisable form is the transfer of technology’ for commercial purposes but goes on to add that ‘there are numerous other examples which are not directly commercial’. True enough, but the framing conception is economic growth. The presentation of ‘knowledge transfer’ is saturated with the language of commerce, with ‘intellectual capital’ its underlying motif.

This particular view of the quest for ‘growing esteem’ falls within the administrative scope of a deputy vice-chancellor with considerable experience in ‘brand positioning and knowledge transfer’. With a background in nanotechnology and the holder of twenty patents, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor is no doubt a well-intentioned person of outstanding ability. That is not in question. It is the blinkered focus of university policy that calls for more public discussion.

Knowledge transfer can have various orientations, to economic growth, or to developing a way of living that recognises that ‘the question concerning technology’ need not necessarily be tied to growth. It might equally be tied to viability in a time when growth is threatening to undermine the conditions of human existence. Readers of the G8 policy paper will look in vain for even-handed attention to knowledge transfer in that domain.

But what constitutes a serious response can’t be taken for granted. The issue did not even ‘make the cut’ at the 2020 summit in Canberra. The response of the IMF and World Bank, largely ignored by its member countries, has been to seek aid for the poor. While it seems that urgent aid must indeed be given, this could only be an adequate response if shortages and pricing problems had been caused by short-term events. But there are good reasons to see this situation as the product of a deeper, structural shift.

There have been warnings for decades that food shortages were a real prospect because of population growth and a growing shortage of agricultural land and water. They were either ignored or brushed aside as gloom and doom accounts that ignored the developmental growth prospects of the new global order. But the situation has now become much more complicated. The present crisis, which includes the issues of population growth, land and water, is also related to a complex of other developments, especially the dual forces of climate change and growing shortages of oil and gas. These lend a more serious element to attempts to interpret food shortages. But even these actually give, at best, partial insights. For as is evident in all of the recent newspaper reports on food riots, these matters are at best taken up simply as policy issues.

Policy, of course, cannot be ignored. It is a crucial way to bring an idea or a perspective into practical reality. But policy and ideas can also conceal broader assumptions. For example, at the 2020 summit it was clear that all the ideas to be considered were set within definite parameters: they all assumed the broad continuation of global neo-liberalism. Every idea and policy assumes something, so in itself this is to be expected. But the problem with the 2020 summit was that this was an assumption that could not be questioned. Today, this is much more than a mistake or a flaw in the policy-making process: it goes to the very basis of the validity of any perspective on the future.

Accounts of the food riots elaborated simply in terms of empirical facts with limited connections made to rising oil prices or problems with availability of water, serve a particular broad political purpose: to close off discussion of deeper structural and ethical questions.

It is not possible to consider food production properly today without considering the dominance of the global market in both the production and distribution of food. Food is a global phenomenon. Apart from other things, this means that local food production has been systematically discouraged for decades in favour of the (temporarily) cheaper, ‘factory’ produced or agri-business global product. The key to understanding today’s food riots is to see that water shortages, shortage of land, population growth, climate change and peak oil are all related to the emergent society that continues to call these problems into existence, with ever expanding force. This society — or more to the point, the way of life — has almost entirely displaced the socialist idea, and even moved beyond the constraints of an older capitalist form, to emphasise growth and development at all costs, through its new high-tech capacities to transcend nature. It will take much more than a policy to address the people’s unconscious commitment to this way of life structured around commodity consumption and individual global lifestyles.

Food riots are better understood as a symptom of a broader crisis — the coming apart of this global strategy. This is evident in climate change directly, as drought and higher temperatures affect both land and sea. And this intersects with the growing pressure on oil supply, for the moment reflected in higher pricing. In turn, higher pricing of oil and gas flows on to put upward pressure on fertiliser costs and food prices. In the meantime, the availability of land for food production comes under the dual pressures of deteriorating climate and the switching of land use to the production of bio-fuels to sustain western consumption patterns, including global travel and global trade.

If this is now emerging as a systemic crisis, what will happen when oil and gas production goes into decline in the near future? These are not isolated events, they are structural and can be read as the tip of the iceberg of the melt-down of neo-liberalism’s untenable social order. To merely argue for aid as a response to food riots is simultaneously to defend that social order.

John Hinkson is an Arena Publications editor

Launched prior to Christmas, the ‘Respect’ campaign has three major features: an attack on incivility in everyday life and a perceived epidemic of street crime; a reclaiming of patriotic values in a modernised form, as a celebration of ‘Britishness’ (this latter has been given to Chancellor Gordon Brown to run with, to emphasise the degree to which it is a shared project — Brown has said that he would like to see a Union Jack in every window and on every front lawn); and last but not least an increase in the coercive legal mechanisms designed to enforce this new civility. The now-famous ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) are to be extended and expanded, to the degree that it will now be possible to more or less run problem individuals or families out of town (even out of their own privately owned houses) and exclude them from their home and neighbourhood for a period of up to three months.

The campaign has been met with the enthusiastic support of sections of the tabloid media looking for a traditional values campaign — the Daily Express has adopted a nationwide ‘good manners’ crusade. The Blair government did not single-handedly elevate the concept of ‘respect’ to its current status, but its adoption of such has made it, for a time, the central motif by which social life is interpreted. When four teenage ‘happy slappers’ — gangs who go on random rampages of assault, filming the attacks on mobile phone cameras — were recently sentenced for the manslaughter of one of their victims, the media commentary was conducted almost exclusively through the medium of the ‘R’ word: why this loss of respect; how can respect be regained, and so on and so on.

Why ‘Respect’? Why now? The question can be answered at any number of levels, although each is expressive of the other. As a political gesture, ‘respect’ is both audacious and clever. It takes themes beloved of the conservative right, and thus serves the goal of retaining the tranche of Tory voters that the Blair New Labour picked up in 1997, and which it has pretty much held ever since as the Tories have stumbled through the political wilderness. Now that their new leader David Cameron has jettisoned much of the Thatcherite image and reconnected to the idea of ‘one nation’ Toryism, such voters have every reason to return to a party they reluctantly abandoned. Respect also connects — albeit it in a quintessentially daggy way — with a section of youth culture, for whom the notion and catchphrase of respect (despite Ali G’s satirical demolition of it) retains some cachet.

It is this notion of ‘respect’ — wannabee teenage gangstas demanding respec’ of each other — that connects back to the deeper ideological history of the notion. For ‘respect’ as a concept could be seen as a sort of degraded copy of the notion of ‘recognition’ that Francis Fukuyama reintroduced to mainstream political discourse in the 90s with his work The End of History and The Last Man , which was taken up on the centre-left in both the UK (by thinktanks such as Demos) and in Australia by writer-politicians such as Mark Latham and Lindsay Tanner. As Andy Blunden noted in these pages, the notion of ‘recognition’, both in Fukuyama and his followers, is a travesty of its original sense in the Hegelian tradition of social interdependence and selfhood, and ‘respect’ is an even greater departure from its critical content. In the ‘gangsta’ context it is an expression of its opposite — respec’ is demanded and gained not because of one’s status as a fellow citizen and social being, but because one is carrying a concealed weapon. The demand for respec’ is an expression of social breakdown and the rule of force. New Labour’s appropriation of it is intended to draw off some of the charge that such a gangsta ethic is acquiring in urban Britain , but it is to socially conservative ends.

The final context in which the ‘respect’ campaign is taking place is in the Blair government’s third-term tackling of two major institutional issues in British life: the education and health systems. Whatever the particular aims of these reforms, no one could deny that they are necessary. Indeed, it is a measure of the Blair government’s claim to being a genuine reforming government that it is willing to take on some of the hard tasks that the Thatcher–Major governments — for all their rhetoric — did not have the courage to tackle.

Despite piecemeal reforms, the NHS is still essentially the old-style nationalised socialist institution that it was when founded in the 1940s. Local NHS trusts provide services and then send the government the bill at the end of the year. This has created a magnificently generous and, for all the criticisms, reasonably effective health service, but also one that is going broke. It will be remembered that Nye Bevan, the architect of the original NHS, believed that the costs of the service would decline year-on-year as the backlog of ill-health was addressed. In an era where medical intervention is an ever-expanding field, health service costs vanish towards the infinite. Given that tax rises are politically out of the question, a greater degree of internal marketisation is inevitable. This is tricky, because the sense of universal health care as a right, rather than a rationable public good, is now deeply engrained in British life — which is why Thatcher never went near it.

In education the stakes are even higher, for Blair and his shrinking band of loyalists are determined to re-introduce both a greater degree of private education with the authorisation of fifty or so faith-based ‘academies’ across the country, and a granting of greater autonomy in the selection process to local schools. These proposals effectively overturn one of Labour’s deepest commitments: to the principle of comprehensive (i.e. general and area-based) schools as the bedrock of the education system, and a return to the differentiation based on grammar schools, state schools, and the great public schools (who sail on undisturbed, whatever happens). For British labour, comprehensivity was the core of its democratic socialism, the principle by which, over a generation, class privilege would be lessened. In the 50s, labour diarist Richard Crossman had given a thumbnail definition of socialism as ‘closing down the last f***ing grammar school’, and the new proposals have attracted explicit opposition from more than eighty Labour MPs — including hitherto stalwart loyalists such as deputy PM John Prescott. The Conservatives have pounced on this and cleverly endorsed the white paper on which the changes are predicated. This gives Blair the nightmare of taking to parliament an education bill that would pass only on the votes of the opposition. To withdraw it would then confirm to the middle ground of voters that new labour is old labour, and that the Tories are the ‘sensible centre’.

And it is in this dilemma that the strange character of contemporary UK politics can be seen. Labour’s ‘Respec’ campaign, a reclamation of national solidarity, is about filling the gap created by its final departure from the democratic socialist impetus of its post-war years. ‘Respec’ becomes not the building of a society in which people have genuine social recognition of each other, but one in which social inequality is accepted, and a sense of deference and national loyalty encouraged. Respect is a way of re-engineering a culture that has a feel and reality of aggressiveness, crime and violence greater than any other in western Europe — an everyday expression of frustration, desocialisation and lost entitlement, seeded in the Thatcher period, and unassuaged since.

To be fair to New Labour, it has made tremendous inroads into the worst of welfare and working poverty — but these have been hardly sufficient to make up for the tremendous rise in desire and expectation that character-ises this highly individualistic and accumulative culture. Crime, violence, an aggressive assertion of refusal — captured in its earliest phase in Martin Amis’s London Fields, and in its more recent form by SBS’s Shameless — is the cultural victory of proletarian Britain , which substitutes for economic and political defeat. Social and cultural control thus becomes paramount; hence the ‘respect’ campaign, and the raft of coercive measures to back it up.

The New Labour apparatchiks see themselves — with some justice — as being given the task of resocialising the UK after seventeen years of government by a Tory party that fantasised about introducing a ruthless free market without damaging community values. Measures such as ASBOs are widely popular, yet they are also the death by a thousand cuts — to habaeas corpus, to natural justice, to the presumption of innocence — of the liberal political order that is now pretty essential to defend.

What has occurred in the UK , however, especially with David Cameron’s recent remodelling of the Tories, is a genuine and total convergence of British politics. It is literally impossible to find any significant point of difference between the substantial institutional policies and beliefs of New Labour and the Conservatives. (Which is one reason why the latter remain lacklustre — in their heart of hearts they know they would not be able to do a better job than the current government.) Much anticipated, convergence is finally here, and it is strange spectacle, since vast numbers of people feel disenfranchised: the left, the poor, rural England , and genuine free-marketeers.

If the UK had any sort of proportional voting system, both major parties would split in two almost immediately; as it is they cling desperately together, hoping to fluke government. It looks like stability, but, compared to the ‘cool Britannia’ years of the mid-90s, it feels like stagnation, starting at the head and spreading downward. No wonder the government is trying to reintroduce respect, like fluoride into a water supply.

Guy Rundle is an Arena Publications Editor.