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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Caddick

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.

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.