18/04/2018, 1st Edition
Articles:
- The Need for New Ideas
- The Uluru Statement from the Heart: Realising the Future through Recognition
- Federalism in Australia: Forming a New Collective Identity in Response to a New World
- The Decision to Write the Newspaper: Rejecting the Subversion of Mind to Market
- Postmodernism and the Internet
The Need for New Ideas
by Lloyd Hebert
The point has been made before, yet we in Australia seem not to have caught up, so it will be made once more. The world is changing. Trump was elected as president despite being written off by the political experts and pundits. The New York Times ran the headline ‘Donald Trump is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment.’ His election demonstrated that the facade of neoliberalism has cracked – everyday Americans, feeling the bite of 40 odd years of wage stagnation and declining standards of living,[1] rejected the status quo of free market economics and its champion, Hilary Clinton.
The 2016 Brexit vote was a stunning blow against EU neoliberal orthodoxy, and the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK general election confirmed that a pattern was, and is, afoot. Corbyn was decried as ‘unelectable’, and ‘Theresa May set for landslide in snap election’ was the headline of The Times the day after she announced the election. As with the US presidential election, the politicians and experts were again caught off guard as the Conservative party’s lead evaporated away and the result was a hung parliament. With Brexit, Trump and Corbyn, each were derided for flouting the neoliberal norm. Unregulated markets, free trade, and a shrinking social safety net had already been established as not only the best way to run society, but as the ‘natural’ order. The veneer of this ideology, however, had cracked in the face of the Global Financial Crisis and its unstable, gloomy aftermath.
This shift is no small event. As Professor of Economics William Mitchel argues, “The West is currently in the midst of an anti-establishment revolt of historic proportions.”[2] In the face of economic turmoil, violence and political instability in the Middle East (especially Syria), and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of desperate people fleeing this violence and instability, politics in Europe has polarised sharply. The French presidential election of 2017 saw a dramatic rise in the popularity of the left with La France Insoumise (Unbowed France) and its candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and alarmingly of the far-right National Front and its candidate Marine Le Pen. Extreme right politics are creeping back into the European mainstream in other countries, notably the Netherlands and Austria.
Europeans are concerned about immigration, national sovereignty, and the economy – terrain in which the political centre has lost credibility. Traditional social democratic parties are crumbling, as Mitchell and Fazi argue, due to “their embrace of neoliberalism and failure to offer a meaningful alternative to the status quo.” The left cannot uphold national autonomy – either because they are committed to upholding the European Union and the Eurozone, which undercuts state sovereignty, or because they wholesale reject the concept of national sovereignty as reactionary and inherently right wing. The far right has thus far thrived in this vacuum, being the main political force to express the concerns of everyday people in Europe about the economy, job security, national control over politics, and immigration. The spectre of the politics of racial exclusivity and of the far right is returning to Europe. But why does this political vacuum exist? Why is there not a vision of national sovereignty that is not tied up with racial and cultural exclusivity?
The political centre has long betrayed everyday citizens in the pursuit of GDP and of office. The promises of their economic expertise have rung hollow with the growth in wealth inequality and with the disaster of the GFC, and as such more and more people in Europe and America, as well as other places, are turning their backs on establishment politics. Meanwhile, as Mitchell and Fazi note, “the mainstream left […] continues to see it as its mission to save Europe from itself, by defending the European economic and integration process against the threat of neo-nationalism.” The above all fall more or less in the spectrum of neoliberal orthodoxy. Supposedly, the more a country is integrated into the world economy, the better, due to the increase in trade and economic activity. That this has actually led to a race to the bottom with wages, with the labour market thus swelling in size, and the cheapest labour being taken as the norm, has been ignored. It is also argued, at any rate, that countries cannot democratically control their interconnection with the global economy because their governments must run like households, strenuously avoiding budget deficits. The connection here is that governments need a tax base to maintain their spending, and any strong economic regulation will shrink the tax base, thus threatening the balance of the government’s budget as well as shrinking the economy. There is ‘no way out’, it seems. Rather there is, but we must break out of the prism of neoliberal ideology to find it. The far left, on the other hand, completely rejects nationalism, and thus any politics seriously embracing national sovereignty, as reactionary and right wing. A new internationalist order is upheld as the only option that doesn’t subject people as servants to the state. The problem is that this feeds powerfully into the neoliberal world order. By the wholesale rejection of nationalism or the idea of a national community, the whole world thus atomises and fragments itself before the world market, throwing away any hope of communities with autonomy and democratic control over themselves. The far right is thus left alone as the ‘defenders’ of the national community, in a position to hegemonize concerns over national control of politics, job security, wages, and immigration with a vicious narrative that strays far too close to the history of 1930s Europe. This situation reveals the need for new ideas – a way out of this quagmire where all the options are unacceptable.
William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi argue, in Reclaiming the State: A progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World, that governments are not necessarily trapped in the global economy, and that they can exercise democratic control over their respective economies. The conception of money is central to this possibility. The current way money is understood in neoliberal theory is a hold-over from the Breton-Woods system of gold convertibility (being able to trade in currency for gold) and fixed exchange rates. Under Breton-Woods governments were constrained in their spending because the value of currency was backed by an amount of gold held in reserve by the central bank. Moreover, government spending was constrained by the central bank’s requirement to maintain a fixed parity against a foreign currency. However, now with a floating exchange rate and fiat currency (currency that is not backed by precious metal reserves), the government, through the central bank, can issue currency by decree. This means that governments are fundamentally not like households; households use currency, government both use and issue currency. Governments can issue currency to cover their spending, and thus governments can exercise a large amount of democratic control over the economy, and nation states can always exercise fiscal policy to maintain their autonomy.
An objection that might be raised to this is that this would be a wildly inflationary road to pursue. Not only is this objection mistaken, but it misunderstands the nature of money. As Mitchell and Fazi note, “OMF (Over Monetary Financing, where the government issues bonds to the central bank, which buys these bonds with newly issued currency) does not carry any intrinsic inflationary risk: it is the government spending itself that carries a risk […] Indeed, all spending (private or public) is inflationary if it drives nominal aggregate spending faster than the real capacity of the economy to absorb it.” It is rather how the money is spent, and whether the spending outstrips the productive capacity of the economy, that carries the inflationary risk.
Yet there is a qualitative change to money that has not been recognised in mainstream economics. If money no longer reflects a reserve of precious metals, where does it come from? Mainstream economics argues that in order for banks to loan out deposits, they first must have excess reserves. This is the monetarist theory of money. However, Mitchell and Fazi note that “the causality actually works in reverse: when a bank makes a new loan, it simply makes an entry into a ledger – Keynes called this fountain pen money… and creates brand new money out of thin air, which it then deposits into the borrower’s account.” As global financial analyst Ann Pettifor argues in her work The Production of Money, money is both debt and credit simultaneously. Money therefore reflects not a medium through which to calculate and carry out exchange, but rather a communication system that facilitates reciprocal trust and communication. As Canadian Economist Jim Stanford notes, “money is created out of thin air everyday (by commercial banks and central banks alike); the big issue is who controls that process, and what is the money used for?”[3] Given that the potential of the economy has developed from exchange and self-interest and towards trust and cooperation, we must pose the question; how did economics come to determine politics? Why have academics, economists, politicians and business people kept preaching that high GDP is the greatest good, and democratic control of the economy should be traded away for GDP growth? The economy should not grow for its own sake, as a tumour does. The economy can and should be put towards achieving goals that we as a society collectively define as worthy.
There are other factors to consider. The bleak Hobbesian vision of humans as complex, self-interested machines who are only capable of cooperation in terms of self-interest has thoroughly percolated through our culture. Work in a highly automated, energy intensive, and environmentally destructive economy is incredibly alienating. These and other factors are obstacles to consider. A comprehensive reconceptualization of money, that sees it as a means for reciprocal cooperation, paves the way towards autonomous national communities which can exercise democratic control over themselves and their economies.
By putting politics before economics, the political quagmire of the EU can be overcome. All the current options are unacceptable. The mainstream political parties have largely lost credibility and mostly don’t promise anything new. The left is either still tied down by neoliberal theory which sees the state as almost captive to the global economy, or rejects the national community completely, and thus denies any centre of strength and community before the power of global markets. This leaves the far right as the only ‘defenders’ of a national community; yet this community is not built on trust but on fear; fear of the outsider. By breaking out of the prism of neoliberal ideology, we can forge a new way forward for national communities built on trust and cooperation, both of which will be embodied in the functioning of the economy. This is the way out of the polarisation of politics in Europe and the rise of the far right.
This is relevant for Australia too. Free markets have led to a growing squeeze on everyday Australians. Mining companies make a fortune digging up our resources and the recent average of taxes and royalties paid by coal companies is almost half that of federal revenue from tobacco excise taxes.[4] House prices are exorbitantly high, and our largest cities like Melbourne keep growing in size whilst our already strained infrastructure will soon be at maximum capacity. But if you ask politicians, commentators, or mainstream economists in Australia, they say that we cannot afford to say no to overseas money, that we cannot create ‘investment uncertainty.’ The government is behaving like a captive of the global market, and that’s because to an extent it is a captive of the global market. The public debt-phobia in Australia is so strong that the government, having already privatised most anything that makes money, and refusing to strongly exercise fiscal policy (because of the ‘governments must live within their mean’ ideology) is dependent on overseas money and investment. It depends on the scraps it can get from overseas investment through tax, so that it can ‘afford’ to spend, to enact policies that will hopefully get the government re-elected. So long as this neoliberal economic ideology reigns, successive government will find themselves giving into foreign interest and the global market. What is briefly outlined here is a way out of this trap, a way to put politics before economics, the national community over the interests of profit.
The polarisation of politics in Europe is something that everyone should be seriously concerned about. The pathetic state of politics in Australia should cause outrage, not apathy. The two above represent quagmires where every option is unacceptable. This is the need for new ideas. Only by going beyond the assumption that we have held onto for so long, that we have failed to question for so long, can we forge a new way forward, and meet the challenges of our time. Trying to change the course of history is tremendously complex, and change comes from many directions. One of the directions it must come from is by creating and employing new ideas.
[1] Hourly inflation-adjusted wages have risen by only 0.2% per year, on average, since 1973; Current Employment Statistics, Bureau of Labour Statistics, (BLS 1973-2017), cited in ‘Here’s why millions of Americans feel left behind by the economic recovery’, Business Insider, Sep 2017
[2] W. Mitchell, T. Fazi, Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World, 2017
[3] Jim Stanford, ‘The Laws of Free Trade Are Not Immutable After All’. Real World Economics Review Blog, 9 January 2017
[4] Taxes and royalties on coal average to $5.4 bil over 2007-08 to 2013-14, (‘Taxes and Royalties’, from ‘Little Black Rock’, Minerals Council of Australia, http://littleblackrock.com.au/benefits-of-coal/#ref-11) whilst federal government revenue from tobacco was $9.8 bil in 2016 (Table 13.6.5, Annual Revenue from Tobacco Products, http://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-13-taxation/13-6-revenue-from-tobacco-taxes-in-australia)
The Uluru Statement from the Heart: Realising the Future through Recognition
by Lloyd Hebert
Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations was an incredibly important part in Australia’s history. It is only in recognising the wrongs that were committed in the past that a road to a joint future becomes visible. But to follow this road more is required. Apologies can soothe and console the wounds of the past, but only recognition, cooperation and solidarity can heal these wounds. We have to honestly face up to the cruel and brutal parts of our nation’s history; the violence visited upon First Nations’ peoples and their communities, the systematic discrimination against them, and a continued denial of recognition. The Apology was a significant step, yet now we must move forward, to make good on our words with deeds. Indigenous Australia must be accorded with its own voice, with self-determination, and its own say in the determinations of our country. Land rights, and the Uluru Statement from the Heart are crucial for this next step of recognition.
All Australians should read and become familiar with the Uluru Statement from the Heart. We acknowledge that the sovereignty of the First Nations was never ceded nor extinguished. We support the call for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.” And this recognition must be accorded with power, or teeth. Thus we support “the establishment of a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.”
To live in respect and harmony in Australia, we call for a change of the date of Australia Day. We should have a day where we consider our national Identity, so that we can examine our identity and goals as a community, and set ideals for the future. But a celebration of a national day must include all aspects of what Noel Pearson called our ‘triune nation’; the indigenous peoples as the first inhabitants of the land, the European settlers, and the more recent joining into our nation of people from diverse and disparate cultures. Celebrating the 26th of January—the arrival of the first fleet, and the beginning of violence and displacement towards indigenous Australians—locates the most central part of our history as the arrival of Europeans, and thus excludes Indigenous Australians. To sideline part of our triune community in this way is unacceptable. Any celebration of our national community must include all aspects of the triune. We would thus suggest that we pick a point in the future, a goal which we strive to achieve, rather than a point in the past, as a focal point for our community. As long as the injustice committed towards the First Nations is not reconciled, as long as the wounds of the past are not healed, but covered over, any Australian identity will be built on weak ground. We thus support the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a way forward for all Australians.
Link to the Uluru Statement from the Heart: https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/event/uluru-statement-from-the-heart
Federalism in Australia: Forming a New Collective Identity in Response to a New World
by Ryan Carolan
What is going on in Australia? We have moved into our 26th year of economic growth, yet in every single social category, Australia faces a crisis. From drug and mental health issues, a housing crisis, a debt crisis (with Australian households the second most indebted in the world), a political system in which the political ‘centre’ is flanked by worst and worse, a green party which is completely impotent and an environmental movement which has all but accepted the language and the lifestyle of neo-liberalism, while neoliberal policy continues the politics of growth, the precise politics destroying the environment. On top of this there has been the expansion of economic centres, which have impoverished their peripheries (where the centres get their energy from), causing extreme economic insecurity. That is, the huge centralisation of wealth and (often parasitic) economic activity in cities has eroded the culture of country towns and led to a loss of productive jobs. The political discourse around job creation emerges from this parasitic background, and the jobs that are created serve only to further entrench this situation: economically insecure people are forced to compete for limited resources and they are therefore forced to impoverish their environment in order to survive. These are the current ‘rules of the game’, as many economists say, which emphasise efficiency. It appears that the social and environmental price paid to enforce these economic laws has been enormous. Consequently, what we are facing is a major crisis, not just in the economy but in our national culture, which is being completely ignored by economists (and others in power), as well as economic logic, which claims that growth can resolve all social problems. However, ask any ‘expert’, and they will, referring to the data, argue that, while not perfect, with smart technocratic ‘choices’, major issues can be avoided. It appears that the blind spot of the entire nation is of the nation itself. That is, they appear completely blind to the enormity, and interconnectedness, of the crisis, revealing the inept forms of thinking which have co-evolved with the success of neo-liberalism.
It appears that, along with perhaps Canada, Australia represents the greatest success of the neo-liberal regime, the big buck upon the wall of fame. The transformation of the state has been astounding, precisely because it has been so fast. Beginning under the Hawke/Keating government, a new age was ushered in and no one appeared to notice. Now, once democratic institutions have been transformed into measures of economic growth, which simultaneously pollutes the lungs of the poor and enriches the one percent, and, in the name of economic law (which has come to replace social justice), they are both subject to the forces of the market: one is the cause, the other the effect. If the issue is growth, the cause is the rich; if it is crime, they are the effected. The central logic underpinning modern democracy is thus: you can have it, so long as you can pay.
Incorporated into this logic, the logic which deems it ‘natural’ to allow a corner-shop to compete with a transnational corporation, is the view that land, labour and money are commodities. House prices go through the roof because Australians must compete with billionaires for the right to their own space. Wages go down as workers compete not only with each other, but also with overseas competition, and while they struggle for scarce money, they work to produce what will inevitably supersede them – machines – for the very rich. Thirdly, we have money, which, according to neo-liberal economists, is subject to the laws of the market. What this fails to recognise is that 95 percent of the money inside an economy is created in the form of credit, which is simultaneously debt, out of nothing which is backed up by nothing more than trust. As Pettifor argues, economists have it round the wrong way when they say that economic activity creates money. Rather, it is money that creates economic activity because it channels social energy towards certain ends which that society values. As she argues ‘this means a society based on a sound monetary system could ‘afford’ a free education and health system; could fund support for the arts as well as defence; could tackle diseases or bail out the banks in a financial crisis… However, if a monetary system is not managed and operates instead in the interests of just a few, it can have a catastrophic economic, political and environmental impact.’[1] Thus, money creation is based on and represents the dialectic of trust. It represents trust; or, today, paranoia, control and distrust. This reality has been ignored because economists have no concern with how money is created, nor what it represents. They consider it, merely a convenient form of measurement. Yet it is this blind spot which has fundamentally transformed the patterns reproduced by civilization, severely limited our ability to think outside these patterns and thus threaten the very core of civilization.
The event that we lived through in 2008 is now referred to by economists as the Great Financial Crisis, an event which few predicted. Australia narrowly escaped this mess by pursuing what we could refer to as pseudo-Keynesian policy, which we might remember as the ‘stimulus package.’ Although it was not given straight to the banks, as was the case in Europe and America, it appears that this represented avoiding a bad present for worse future. It represented a short-term ‘kick’, a nudge, which allowed the economy to chug along. It was an attempt to get consumers to spend by giving taxpayers their own money to spend in the same market, with the same set of relations, which caused the crisis in the first place. This money could have been used to redirect the economy towards more sustainable, long-term investments. Instead, Australia continued to ride two petering out waves, the mining boom and the pathological desire to de-regulate, in order to attract overseas investment. The stimulus acted as a blood transfusion, but the doctor did not concern themselves with real causes. If money represents the blood of the body politic, then its accumulation represents a blood clot, and failure to unclog this clot leads to a stroke. Untreated, this will cause death. A true Keynesian insight would not be just technical, but moral. He characterised the love of money as ‘a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a kind of shudder to the specialists in mental diseases’[2] and would have argued on this basis to fundamentally reorganise the economy and rethink its regulations so to maintain this form of order, designed to prevent, not limit, crisis.
This unwillingness to regulate the market, to regulate the flow of money, has become the guiding principle of political discourse, precisely because progressive regulation would challenge those in power to justify their power, which ultimately means the power to define reality.[3] Avoiding this, orthodox economists claim that an unregulated market tends towards equilibrium and, if this does not occur, blames everything but their assumptions. Yet, theoretical biologist Mae Wan Ho and theoretical ecologist Robert Ulanowicz classify equilibrium as ‘death by another name’[4]. Further, the orthodox claim that a free-market exists is complete fallacy anyway. In 19th century England, legislation – that is, a form of regulation – was created to constrain powerful social actors from employing children under ten in factories, and well-to-do people believed this regulation unjust.[5] Why? Because they thought it was against nature to regulate the market. Human civilization, they thought, evolved through eradicating the weak. We now think it is abhorrent to enslave a ten-year-old. Yet, the dominant logic is moving towards ‘rationalising’ activity like this again. This form of thinking, which developed in England in this period, considered it immoral to help the poor, the unfortunate etc., because it would slow the progress of humanity. One might still ask: progress to where and to what? This is a political philosophy know as social Darwinism: the reduction of all the complexity in the universe, history, humans and culture down to the struggle for survival, which justifies an ‘unregulated’ market whose goal is to weed out those unproductive individuals who refuse to compete in this way. In fact, it is a set of imagined laws that serve to justify the entrenched power, whatever it may be, and make it appear as if their power was simply objective. As economist Ha-Joon Chang points out, the market is always regulated in some way, and these regulations are based fundamentally on moral arguments, even if this is not recognised. There is nothing timeless about them.
Instead of economists and politicians recognising the positive social and economic role regulations have played in the past by an active government, however, the environmental crisis is rather understood deterministically through the lens of market competition, making the environmental crisis appears as an insurmountable crisis. This view excludes a place for learning and clearly contradicts experience. Yet, instead of thinking ‘what could be?’ and ‘how do we achieve this?’ economists merely say ‘what is there?’ and ‘how do we achieve it more efficiently?’ So, ‘in 2015 and 2016, the world’s major banks lent an estimated $198 billion to fossil fuel projects (mainly oil, coal mining and generation, and gas exports).’ Of course, these ‘activities benefit the financiers, producers, and consumers involved in the economic transactions whilst the environmental costs of burning these fossil fuels are indirectly imposed on the rest of society.’[6] This is considered the norm, but the question remains: is this normal?
If not, we have to think again what we think is normal. Should we all have a right to a home? Should democratic institutions have control over the flow of their own national currency? Should money be recognised as a public good? Should education be a public good? Should people have a right to reach their full creative potential? These things could be achieved, but it requires market regulation, backed up by coherent ideas, and a committed people with a clear vision of the future, something the environmental movement has yet been unable to achieve. That is, the environmental movement is not yet mature enough to mount a legitimate resistance to the politics of climate change.
The environment crisis not only poses an existential threat, it represents an epistemological crisis. It cannot be resolved through technological fixes. Indeed, from farming to education, technological fixes have created ‘wicked problems’, ‘solutions’ cooked by technocratic specialists that generate worse problems in the future. The environmental crisis and the continued economic crises, which have become more and more common and destabilising in the globalised world, represent a crisis at the very heart of the culture of modernity. This is associated with how we understand the world around us, and what we collectively value based on this understanding, a product of the privileging of economic laws over eco-logical realities; of laws over logic, conceived here as not contradicting experience. Indeed, the environmental crisis could destroy all life on Earth, and politicians are more concerned with the health of the economy. That is like saving the apple instead of the tree that provided it or the soil over the tree. If we want to save all three, it is necessary to recognise the importance and the dynamic evolution of the whole system. What came first our environment, that is, nature, or our cultural conception of nature (including our obsession with individualism), which we cannot help but see through the lens of our culturally constructed institutions, accepted values, norms and ways of being, which are reproduced through market laws, that themselves were adduced within a past culture, which produced us and this crisis. So, we must not only recognise the co-evolution of the external system, but also how our interpretation is a product of the co-evolution of nature and culture. There is no way ‘outside’ culture, but can it be critiqued, developed and transformed? This is precisely what this project hopes to bring about, with special emphasis on Australia. Thus, it is necessary to consider what is stopping this critique from taking place.
The economic crisis which occurred in Australia in 1989 was due to the changing role played by banks in the economy, which occurred a few years prior. The transformation was premised on the view that a globally interconnected economy would create the conditions for universal prosperity under the mediation of a global market. In Australia the prelude to deregulation was due to three factors: the growth of non-bank financial institutions, fluctuating exchange rates and cost inflation.[7] Here, I will focus on the first point, but it is important to keep in mind that all three are interrelated to the growth of free-markets. Before deregulation, ‘banks gathered savings from savers and on-lent these savings to borrowers’, ‘maximised their profits by careful attention to bad debt’ and specialised in loans to small businesses, lent profits to home buyers and ‘charged interest to their mortgagees at low, regulated rates.’ This is the logic which ‘building societies ran on.’ However, despite their privilege playing a productive role which cultivated social trust, they argued that regulation ‘disadvantaged them in competition with other financial institutions.’ The proliferation of non-bank financial institutions in the 1970s created a problem for the government: regulate the whole system or dismantle the whole system of regulation.[8] Although, there was a third option: leave it as it is. In the event of crisis, non-regulated financial institutions would have most likely collapsed, and those working with real things would have survived and society as a whole would have learnt as a result.
After deregulation, banks ‘maximised their profits by maximising lending, by widening the gap between loan interest rates and the cost of funds, and by imposing service fees and charges… Incentive structures within the banks were overhauled to reward staff who sold bank products; in other words, those who successfully sold debt.’[9] In short, this was part of the transition from banks playing a productive to a parasitic role in society. This represents an aspect of the changing role of the economy, not only in Australia, but also around the world. This shift went from concerns with production to concerns with profit, a shift in focus from qualitative to quantitate concerns and transformed the whole organisation of society.[10]
This fundamental transition of Australia’s economy has been associated with an effort to integrate into the world market. The process of economic globalisation has been focused on ‘comparative advantage’, another word for specialisation, but on the national, rather than individual, level. So, when Scott Morrison said that it is coal, and coal alone, which ‘was dug up by men and women… that has ensured for over one hundred years that Australia has enjoyed an energy competitive advantage… and has ensured that Australian industry has been able to remain competitive on a global market’, he is arguing that Australia specialises in coal and that absolutely everything that has been achieved in 100 years can be traced back to coal and coal alone. The only thing that drove those ‘men and women’ was their own self-interest for profit. This allows him to argue that those standing in the way of this system, who have an ‘ideological and pathological opposition to coal’ are the real problem within this nation because ‘it is that malady… that is afflicting the jobs in the towns and the industries and indeed in this country because of the pathological, ideological opposition to coal being an important part of our sustainable and more certain energy future.’[11] Everything that we have, we can thank coal for. So, again, I ask: is this normal?
Despite his cries, and the humour he brings into parliament, what he is actually advocating is quite the opposite of the Egyptians and probably any sensible person. He wants to invert the pyramid, and build the economy on its head. He assumes that coal will be responsible for our institutions, people and allow us to achieve our nation’s goals, and our self-interest to profit will compel us to dig. It is this logic which has transformed Australia from a productive to an extractive economy, guided by the argument of economists such as Nobel Laureate Milton Freedman. When asked about the illusion of unlimited resources, he responded: ‘Excuse me, it’s not limited from an economic point of view. You have to separate the economic from the physical point of view. Many of the mistakes people make come from this. Like the stupid projections of the Club of Rome: they used a purely physical approach without taking prices into account.’[12] This confusion about reality has orientated the rationale driving economic organisation. To give just one example, the Melbourne cityscape has been completely transformed by market signals rewarding property developers. The number of cranes in Australia’s major cities is mind-boggling.[13] This is the outcome when man is mindlessly shaped by external signs.
Inherent social institutions, such as education, language, and consumption patterns, have been transformed in Australia under the metamorphosis of the economic system in the same manner, and man has obligingly adapted. Every social institution has become an instrument for economic growth; everything has become subservient to the rules of the financial system, squeezing broader questions, such as what future we kind of future we are co-creating, not calculable through economic logic, out of the public sphere, transforming the norms and habits of the entire culture in the process. The parasitic culture of the global elite has been filtered down to become embodied in everyday life. The economic realm and the social realm have effectively been divided, but the sociocultural realm (now measured solely through consumption) presupposes the continual functioning of the economy, organised by the extraction of coal. People’s identity, stories about themselves and ideas about the future are all based on the myth of infinite economic growth. Technological developments have allowed people to assume that specialisation is the key to happiness, but it is quite clear that the opposite is true. If everyone becomes a mechanic for a specific part of the economy, then the machine will run fine. But perhaps this metaphor is wrong, perhaps humans were never meant to specialise. And while those in positions of power, such as Rupert Murdoch, have accepted the logic that the state should be organised as a business to facilitate this specialisation, the state is not a business, for it is not constrained by the amount of money in its piggy bank. And if there are no constraints placed on the economy by institutions designed to uphold the common good, channelling this social energy towards productive ends, crises will continue to reoccur. Path dependency insures. And yet the final crisis will be global, not local: continued damage to the periphery will finally damage the whole system. Can we break out of these sets of habits?
I will end by identifying six distinct, but interrelated, problems facing Australia today that need to be resolved. One is associated with the economic insecurity which neoliberalism has caused for the average person. It is generally accepted by economists concerned with reality that if you have an economy in which growth is essentially based on consumption, and your citizens are in so much debt that they do not feel safe enough to consume, the economy will probably collapse, especially if money is not cheap. Record low interest rates have resolved this issue in the short-term, but it is money coming into the country from overseas that the government has little control over. It is this reality which is stopping middle Australia from reproducing itself. Accordingly, there has been a reduction in birth rates, limiting the labour pool, which is being filled by migrants, contributing to the ‘brain drain’.[14] Can we simply accept this reality through the logic of neo-Darwinian social theory or is it necessary to reject that framework and offer something new?
The second is associated with the explosion of distractive technology disembodying people from their environment. Technology has come to dominate the world and, with regards to politics, it has been associated with removing decision-making power from communities and rewarding those who accept this anti-democratic mode of decision-making. It is viewed as necessary for increasing productivity. Yet, for the most part, modern technology has not been anywhere near as productive as people assume. For example, economist Ha-Joon Chang points out that ‘studies have struggled to find the positive impact of the internet on overall productivity – as Robert Solow, the Nobel laureate economist, put it, ‘the evidence is everywhere but the numbers.’’[15] Further, technological production is extremely energy intensive in the extraction, transportation, manufacturing, organising and ‘productive’ process. The way in which this process evolves must continue to accelerate, which means continued technological progress accelerates the depletion of energy in the hope of creating a more efficient economic system. This represents the logic of addiction.
This brings me to my third point. It appears that the government believes it can continue without changing its path by simply proposing huge infrastructure projects. This includes road projects, which are likely to cause more, rather than less, congestion, especially as Melbourne is in a growth spurt. It is likely that these projects will be underfunded, rushed and unplanned, causing major headaches in the future. But there are two, more immediate, issues at hand. The first is associated with diminishing returns: the state government is not making productive investments, and tax-payers money is being handed to private contractors in the hope of generating some jobs and therefore more tax-payers, but the government is always left with less (effectively the same problem described in the above paragraph); secondly, these huge infrastructure projects, fuel the ‘logic of growth’ – a concept which people still imagine to be abstract rather than real. These projects take up energy, time and space and, of course, devised to cater to the ten million people in Melbourne by 2050, which will expanding the sprawl even further. Beautiful places like the Dandenong’s will be destroyed piece by piece to realise this vision, and it will be the collective efforts of all those worker ants in the economic centres, blind to the impact of their actions. This is the extreme cost of social fragmentation. On top of this, there will be more cars on the roads and more rubbish to be collected on the streets. This is a self-feeding process. And even if we exclude aesthetic arguments and we pretend the energy crisis is a fallacy, we still have problems. Perhaps the Age (3/8) is doing its most subtle work, in an age when subtlety is no longer valued. To remain what we could still call a newspaper, it placed the headline State’s slow growth buoyed by government build on the same page as an image of the rubbish piling up out in Kyneton under the title No pickups as recycling crisis worsens. Never mind that what they call recycling is actually rubbish, but what is clear is that the logic of growth is coming up against the reality of space. Effectively, we are reaching the very limits of space on the planet. We cannot continue to produce waste and dispose of it unthinkingly on some other country. These limits force us to recognise the limits of our natural resource stock. When someone suggests shooting the rubbish into space, we can disregard this fallacy straight away.
This brings me to the forth problem. Globally, there is huge tension between China and America which no one appears capable, or willing, to appreciate. China’s expansive mentality and America’s new found interest in trade-tariffs (actually, despite what all the politicians are saying it is not new at all) leaves Australia, and indeed the world, in a precarious position. And need I say it, despite the fact that the environmental crisis is not being discussed, it does not mean it is not happening. Indeed, the local rubbish crisis in Kyneton is a manifestation of the global political and ecological crisis. We are not just facing a crisis of time and space, but also a power battle. So while this clash unfolds before our eyes, we can take sides, or we can recognise that they represent two sides of the same worthless coin and think of something new. But how?
Where are the people who are responsible for informing the public of these realities? This perhaps brings me to the most devastating problem: the complete transformation of universities and the role of the intellectual. Indeed, being at Swinburne University, I am unsure if I could even call that vile mix of steel and hot air a place of learning, and yet it gives me a living. Nonetheless, they have simultaneously sought to shake every last penny from students, especially overseas students who have proved great business, while scaling back the education to such an extent that we can now safely say that neo-liberals, and their corporate managers, consider education nothing more than a commodity, like land, labour and money, to be bought and sold in the market, available to the highest bidder. All the government can supposedly do is free the market to provide this service. This has generated its own crisis. Australia, and especially Melbourne, is a place where students want to study, it is ‘the most liveable city in the world’. Thus, student’s swarm in and everybody celebrate as business is booming. Never mind about the education, there is money to be made by managers in Uni residence, at the Uni bar, from printing, from online studies, from restructuring departments and putting academics in precarious positions and plundering the subsequent freed assets. The education of an individual is considered nothing more than a metaphorical branch produced by Morrison’s magical world of coal, itself driven by the desire to specialise in a niche within the market, which it can then defend with its life from competition. Alternatively, students must have what is now referred to as ‘human capital.’ The market chops and changes so much that students have to be adaptable to service its requirements. The most important thing learned in a university today is the ability of students (future decision-makers) to sell themselves (like prostitutes) to the highest bidder. This is the meaning and purpose of life.
A country that was once referred to as ‘the lucky country’, and rightly so, has become completely overtaken by corporatists, which have reorganised the country through their eyes, causing it to loss its identity in the process. How did the country become so fragmented? How did a country once so concerned with values of mate-ship become so superfluous to notions of community? How did a country of lowbrow hard workers become a pack a self-indulgent control freaks? How did Australia become so hollowed out and corrupted? Was it always divided? Is what we have now simply the best that we can hope for? Or is it possible to break out of this trap and imagine something new and better?
This brings me to the final problem, mentioned earlier: the crisis of identity. Many will claim that our history is based upon the theft of land, the destruction of aboriginal culture and, therefore, that we should be impervious to our history. I reject what comes after the ‘therefore’. I believe that in the same way we should examine our own mistakes in order to ensure we do not make them again, we should do the same collectively as citizens of a nation, which includes questioning what Australia means in order to improve it. Australia is only a word; we fill it with meaning, and we can change that meaning. And if we do this, we ought to do it as a whole. I believe that this can only happen if Australians transcend this world-view and unite with a common vision of a future worth creating. Designing an economic system capable of providing for our grandchildren could be precisely the common struggle necessary to provide the justification for reopening the closed book that is our collective past. Ultimately, I believe that this is a philosophical problem and it is a problem of values. It means questioning the reality and the rationale of the individualistic rhetoric, which is propagated in every corner of the market, and take our social nature as absolutely fundamental. Perhaps this can lead us to realise how our impoverishment of aboriginal culture has simultaneously lead to an impoverishment of our own culture, opening up the potential to repair both. A book which could begin this conversation is a book called The Ethical State? by Marian Sawyer, but there are many more, including writers such as Bruce Pascoe and Henry Lawson, who could begin this.
It is my view that all the crises described above are intimately linked. This project aims to reveal the connections. But it represents not only that. It represents the effort to remedy the culture in which we live. It represents an attack on the view of what a human is. Propagated by neo-liberal economics, economic departments, psychology departments, sociology departments, and biology departments at universities across Australia who subscribes to the view that man is merely a calculating machine. It is aimed at those humanists at universities who subscribed to the narrative of post-modernism, effectively accepting the neoliberal transformation of the country by rejecting the possibility of a grand narrative while living under one. It also represents the beginning of an effort to break the power of the Murdoch press, which has dominated this country for too long. Generally, it is a wake up call to Australian culture. We have lost our status as citizens and have been reduced to consumers competing in the market. If these habits of representation are not changed, the consequences will be devastating. Lastly, and fundamentally, it is aimed at environmentalists and the environmental movement who, as mentioned earlier, have accepted the enframing of the world through the lens of neoliberalism and have failed to inspire hope in people who desperately needed it. To have any power or credibility, the environmental movement must find a way to transcend the destructive culture of modernity. The philosophy of Arran Gare can provide this alternative.
Australia is facing immanent economic collapse. When that happens, it appears that only one narrative can follow. If nothing changes, Australia’s hugely indebted populace will bail out the banks, further entrenching the realities of neoliberalism, and further accelerating the country, and the globe, towards ecological collapse. This will cause Australia’s inflated sense of self to contract and reality to set in, leading to either a forceful brand of austerity or, depending on what happens on the global scale, something much worse. If we are to face up to the dark realities of the present, because they are dark, we need a vision of hope to orientate collectively organised action. Can Australia offer a beacon of hope to the rest of the world by rejecting this narrative and create something new? What I have tried to show in this article is the deeply interconnected nature of the crisis facing human civilization, in which there appears no way out. However, I have tried to show how these visions stem from defective forms of thinking which serve to close off horizons which could offer radically new potentials. However, solutions exist and we seek to make them accessible to those concerned with the state of civilization. This is what this project seeks to generate: ideas, orientation and hope. It is an integrative project, focusing on rejecting the narrative of technological progress, market logic and nihilism, and ushering in a new age of cultural transformation driven by humanistic ideals. This should be understood as the struggle to revive the quest for economic autonomy and self-governance. This small piece should be seen as a contribution towards the revival of a Republican movement in Australia, reviving the quest to create a democratic federation in Australia, with the vision towards creating a globally sustainable Ecological Civilization.
[1] Pettifor, The Production of Money, Verso , 2017 p. 13 – 14.
[2] Pettifor, The Production of Money: How to break the Power of the Banks, Preface, Verso, 2017.
[3] This forms a dialectic between organisation and energy in which each reinforces the other.
[4] Ho and Ulanowicz, Sustainable System as Organism? Biosystem, 2005, p. 39-51.
[5] Chang, 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism, Ch 2, Peguin, 2005.
[6] New Economic Foundation, Central Banks, Climate Change, and the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy, p. 7, http://neweconomics.org/about-us/
[7] Peter Brain and Ian Manning, Credit Code Red: How Financial Deregulation and World Instability are exposing Australia to Economic Catastrophe, Scribe, p. 45. For a word on the irrational fear of inflation see Chang, 23 Things they Don’t tell you about Capitalism, Ch 6.
[8] Ibid, p. 46—47.
[9] Ibid, p. 46 & 56 – 57.
[10] Michael Hudson, Financial Capitalism Vs Industrial Capitalism, 1998, http://www.othercanon.org/papers/index.html
[11] See Scott Morrison this is Coal at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UByLTMHUszo
[12] Clara Ravaioli, Economists and the Environment, Zed, 1995, P. 33.
[13] See Steven Letts, Apartment glut warning: More cranes on Australian east coast than in North America, 21/10/16, access 3/4/18 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-21/real-estate-warning-more-cranes-in-australia-than-us/7954108
[14] Matt Wade, New migrants drive NSW Population Growth as Birth Rate Slumps, 22/3/18, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/new-migrants-drive-nsw-population-growth-as-birth-rate-slumps-20180322-p4z5rm.html
[15] Chang, 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism, Penguin, 2010, Ch. 3
The Decision to Write the Newspaper: Rejecting the Subversion of Mind to Market
by Ryan Carolan
In deciding to create and propagate a physical sign representing a community of knowledge which we believe requires interpretation and recognition, it could be well argued that we are going against the logic of the market and, upon that basis, we will no doubt fail. We should be giving you what you want, not challenging what you think. However, we believe that it is this logic that is flawed, and that it is the unexamined truisms embodied in the concept of the market, regarding what we are and what we want. This logic assumes that we must tell ‘the people’ want they want to hear in a manner that is convenient to them. It thus rewards those efficient disseminators of information who can calculate what people want based on current social trends, assuming that these calculative obsessions do not influence social norms, such as Cambridge Analytica. Lastly, the assumption that we are individual, rational choosers, completely detached from a web of relations, who knows exactly what we want and what is good for us is absolutely central to market theory. This is another way of saying that we are not influenced by the world around us, and that our calculations, or choices, are neutral and influence neither up nor the world around us in any way other than making it more efficient. Lacking any relational form of thinking, these assumptions are groundless abstractions.
So, in the vein of the Wizard of Oz, those who have market domination support a ‘straw’ or ‘mechanical’ conception of man to fit into the mechanical and abstract universal world of market laws of supply and demand, which are thought to exist prior to any human depiction of them. In doing this, they have excluded from their theory the fact that man is not made of straw (or metal), but that she is a product of irreducibly complex relational processes which she must make sense of through a brain which is sometimes fearful, uncertain, lost and always influenced by its social and natural environment. For the sake of meaningless convenience and abstract certainty, economists exclude this from their thinking and then impose their own brain and their own assumptions onto everything, including man, nature and the cosmos. That is to say, economic theory simply assumes that everyone is a calculating socio-path like those economists obsessed with money. It was this, 90 years ago, that inspired John Keynes’ quest to subordinate the ‘financial sector to the interests of wider society’ through ‘actively campaign for the ‘euthanasia of the rentier.’’[1] However, the market conception of man has, 90 years after Keynes, created a tautology in which the conclusion continuously justifies the assumption, making it appear as though the assumption is not an assumption but a fact, or another groundless assumption. It is this rentier archetype, this imaginary man, which dominates in the market today, and indeed the world, driven by the view of man as an accumulating beast, creating a society which justifies this activity. Korean institutional economist Ha-Joon Chang writes in the chapter entitled ‘Assume the worst about people and you get the worst’ that ‘if the world were full of self-seeking individuals found in economic text-books, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of out time cheating, trying to catch cheats, and punishing the caught.’[2] The only thing that keeps the economy from collapsing is people not acting in this way. It appears that man has become deceived by a false representation of himself, and this representation is continuously reproduced in a culture which glorifies accumulation. Our social ideal of man is a man that will necessarily destroy the conditions of society. Thus, the environmental crisis.
How did this vision of a brainless, and yet rationally calculating and consuming individual, completely isolated and disconnected from the environment which he inhabits, become the accepted, or rather assumed, paradigm in which to talk about man being in the state of freedom and rationality? This can only be understood by broadening the scope beyond economics and examining the realm of natural law and logic. Only then can we understand this problem, which is associated with removing the creative subject from the laws of logic for the sake of logical consistency because creativity cannot be accurately quantified and therefore explained rationally. This problem paved the way for a conception of man completely disembodied from the world. And the failure to take this crisis seriously is causing creativity and creation, and the spaces required for the deep thinking necessary to generate these, to be destroyed. Consequently, this is destroying the ability for humanity to creatively respond to the forces which are destroying the conditions required for civilisation; that is, to not just exist but to flourish – to actualise his or her potential. Our goal is to express the fundamental problems of this characterisation of man (of course, being used in the widest sense) and to reassert the power of that brain which we all have, something that the institutions, leaders and citizens of society appear to have forgotten.
The presumptions and logic underpinning social institutions by economists are extremely anti-democratic largely because they assume that market logic guides institutional creation, reducing all down to the world-view described above. It should come as no surprise, then, that the expansion of the market since the 1990s, despite being celebrated by the children of the enlightenment, has left in its trail crisis after crisis and a suspicion of the very ideals of democracy. French social theorist Lucien Goldmann argues that the Enlightenment thinkers upheld a view of God in order to overcome the paradoxes generated by assuming everyone is a rational individual: ‘the philosophes often admitted the need for a double standard of truth, depending on whether they were addressing the cultivated classes or the uneducated masses.’[3] Despite being universally opposed to the Church and religion, their enlightened conception of God gave them this right. The two direct heirs to this tradition are those who promote enlightened consumption, and enlightened economists for whom the market takes the place of God, which provides the conditions for consumption in general and enlightened consumption in particular as the necessary ethic of any society. All can be reduced down to market concepts and nothing significant would be lost. The free-market simply organises, in a neutral an efficient manner, the path towards democratic freedom based on the rational choices of the cultivated class. So what went wrong?
While the tendency in modernity has been to equate free-markets with democracy, this has been on the presumption that human communities and human culture consists, deep down, of nothing more than a collection of rationally choosing individuals whose wants are essentially the same as the ‘cultivated class’ who ‘know’ what freedom is; that is, modernity has always been based on highly undemocratic assumptions. Ecological economist Richard Norgaard argues that there are three ways to organise a complex society: democratic institutions, markets or bureaucracies. Democracy requires the self-construction of laws and the education necessary to understand these, as well as boundaries to maintain the integrity of these institutions and a relatively equal society economically. Markets can exist, but they must be constrained by democratic institutions and channelled towards some conception of the common good so as to maintain social unity. Free-markets undermine these institutions and ideals, they fragment society and cause one group to grow at the expense of the many, who then make their own laws, and construct bureaucracies that serve to lock their views in place. This creates an extremely hierarchical society not organised productively but rather to justify the power of those who find themselves there. Emphasising the freedom to choose in the market as a political right, and then framing those choices within the market, has really been associated with the government siding with corporations against their citizens, and has shifted the stage from which to achieve change from the social to the market sphere, ushering in a new era in the politics of control.
This evolution of the politics of control has fundamentally changed the way we experience reality. Individual choice has displaced community activity; people spend more time in front of screens, with headphones on, disembodying themselves from reality, and the signs (advertising) that fill our environment depict the logical connection between freedom and consumption. Underneath this surface is the collection of data in the effort to control and stabilise reality. The consequences of this have been destabilising. It has created a Kafkaesque reality of meaningless bureaucracies, it has generated the ‘loneliness epidemic’ faced not just in Australia, but by all Western countries, through the social isolation engendered by the ‘efficient’ organisation of the global economy. As political economist Ann Pettifor argues the financialisation of reality engendered by the freeing of markets has debased the very idea of citizenship. Combine that with the loss of economic productivity for the sake of unproductive speculative activity by a financial sector no longer constrained by regulation, and it makes sense that governments have become addicted to the influx of money generated by exorbitant bubbles, such as the housing market, prices of which are now beyond the reach of citizens.[4] Consequently, the housing market has become a bastion of financial speculation. And no rational argument can be made against this based on market logic except to build more houses, transforming the city scape for the very rich. As Pettifor argues: ‘the dramatic rise in the price of an asset that has no intrinsic value – Bitcoin – can easily be explained by delusions and the madness of crowds. Not so property market price rises. These, contrary to conventional wisdom, are best explained by the financialisation of markets, not by a shortage of supply.’[5] Projections based on current growth rates have Melbourne at a population of 10 million by 2050. Yet the government’s response has been totally negative: they have sought to invest in prisons and riot police as if to say ‘if you don’t like this, this is what you have to deal with.’[6] With creativity excluded from the picture, this is rational under market logic. The expansion of the suburbs has already been dramatic, and yet they still expand. Where will they end? Is it possible to make rational arguments against the logic of supply and demand, and the logic of a fully expanded, fully integrated, global economy organised by a characterization of man that makes financial capitalism the only way of doing business?
The concrete facts of our changing world rarely bring us to question the validity of efforts to control nature’s energy more efficiently through technological progress. We blame this or that figurehead if a crisis occurs, rather than the background through which it emerged, which makes this or that figurehead’s action appear logical, at least from their perspective. This background consciousness is informed by technological progress. Conscious or unconscious faith in technological progress is the essential product of a culture, and the people that reproduce this culture, which has constructed its identity and its story upon this notion of progress, which is inherited and passed on, often at a sub-verbal level. It appears as our only way out of our situation. It provides an implicit mapping through which we can make sense of individual actions. Yet, it also serves to constrain our ability to conceptualise our own complicity in the reproduction of cultural myths.
Indeed, the problem is not energy creation, but the institutions through which we distribution it. It is precisely this highly energy intensive organisation which is generating huge amounts of global disorder through the attempt to remove borders restricting capital movement and then reconstructing borders in a different form which are considered as natural, whether in the form of bureaucracies, private property, ‘pathways’, debt, or the financialisation of society. To maintain the integrity of a system, it is obvious that not everyone can participate. Speaking in much more generic terms, borders, or constraints, are an essential component to the integrity of life, and they can be either consciously or unconsciously constructed; that is, how we define these borders, and what we seek to limit, is another matter, and the type of constraints help to define the system, where an individual organism or an economic system. If I don’t think about what I eat, my physical borders are likely to expand, and I am constrained by the fact that I can no longer move swiftly. Guided by the global adoption of free-market ideology, which considers the market as the broadest set of constraint, its laws have emphasised the free movement of capital, which has generated emergent phenomenon (constraints) that serve to maintain the stability of the system as a whole. Even national governments cannot question these boarders. Energy is supplanted by external exchange relations, all of which is considered equal and good, with no ability to distinguish between the types of activity generated by the different forms of energy and no ability to conceptualise the good that could come from limiting energy input.
Thus, freedom, in this broader sense, is implicitly assumed as when a body has no awareness or control of what is entering into or coming out of its system. And lower level constraints have supported, rather than undermined, the logic of the free-market by making communication unidirectional. ‘You’re lonely, why don’t you use this dating app?’ ‘You feel depressed? Why not see a psychologist?’ Humans have become epistemologically closed systems in response to the opening of the market, preferring to base their identity solely on the flows of money in and out of their bank account, flows that are assumed to be permanent. Yet political turmoil, the ecological crisis and economic crises around the world are fracturing the legitimacy of this reality. This will necessitate a fundamental rethink of the nature of constraints in the global system, which America has already begun. In consciously revealing this, we argue that political change cannot be made by mindless choice, but rather by an active rejection of the categories of control embodied in the mechanical logic of economic theory and the globalised free-market which that logic rationalises. The view of the cosmos through this logic has completely mischaracterised life and yet conceptualised everything in its terms, severely constraining our ability to take seriously our free, creative capacities.
Why is the market still so dominant as a concept? This is where things get a little speculative. Is it that individuals follow the laws of the market because the market commands it, or is it that the market commands it because individuals follow it? This is an elaboration of the Socratic question: ‘Is conduct right because the Gods command it, or do the Gods command it because it is right?’ Or is it, as the Italian humanist Vico argued, that we create a God to explain nature, and then create monuments to celebrate His majesty, and then become fearful of Him and destroy nature in His name? The mechanistic view of man and nature promulgated since the scientific revolution – Newton’s laws of Nature – are the crowning jewel of Western culture now destroying its environment. It was this that created the conditions for the enlightenment, the influence of which is embedded in western institutions through the success of the scientific method. By emphasising analysis over dialectical thinking, this method separates knowledge from society. This constrains and organises our thought in such a way that we cannot conceptualise that the world around us is fundamentally creative and alive. Like those civilizations we have mocked before us, we have become enslaved to a set of laws which we have placed beyond the realm of rational discourse. In order to overcome this crisis which is enveloping all of civilization, it is necessary to reject the conception of man and nature as mere machines, the sum of his parts, produced by the banging together of atoms and ask: what is man?
The tendency to forget to ask this question is not new. Rather, it has been echoed through the annals of history to become a truism, as true as the Ten Commandments were when the Church dominated Europe. Rather than understanding history as the story of development, man has reinterpreted it in order to suit what he is currently doing, seeing all that came before him as culminating in himself. From this perspective, one might ask: why aren’t we simply born adults? In reality, this view of the past is associated with imperviousness towards philosophy. Philosophy is the natural product of curiosity and creativity, traits naturally occurring in children, but removed in adults through the realities of life and debt. When one takes this view, history appears as though formed by people asking questions, being killed (or silenced) and then being celebrated in the future as a pioneer. Yet, we silence children asking questions today as if to say, ‘be quiet until you are rational!’ The Enlightenment, as the child of the Scientific Revolution, necessarily separated thought from action in arguing that ‘the notion of the unhampered advance of knowledge and general education would suffice, without further action, to bring about the liberation of mankind and to end the great social evils of the day.’[7] Based on the faith and method of Newton’s laws, which reduced everything, including human consciousness, down to the physical laws he creatively devised, Enlightenment thinkers did not, and indeed could not, believe that knowledge could change history. Thus, while understanding how fields of knowledge were interrelated, it ‘did not strike them as so fundamental as to make an internally organised presentation indispensible or absolutely preferable to the dictionary style of arrangement of information in separate items.’ The storage of facts was key to the encyclopaedia movement of the enlightenment, the mode of retrieval was assumed to be universal based on the assumed universal categories of the rational individual. Fundamentally, this was based on Newton’s conception of order, bits of knowledge were analogous to atoms, and collecting more bits would provide more knowledge. Goldmann argues that ‘the thinkers of the Enlightenment in general lack all sense of the dialectical relation between knowledge and action, between self-awareness and practise.’[8] Thus, there is, in philosophy, a constant dialectic between theory and praxis.
What is it that relates a body of knowledge? Presumably, a community of thought. What is it that unites a community? Presumably self-organisation. Thus, knowledge and order are closely related. The notion of individual rationality created by the enlightenment thinkers was supported by those within the community they formed. It was so obviously before their eyes that they failed to realise how the actions of others influenced and shaped their views of themselves, their activity and the commitment to their project and vision of the world. They were self-organised, but their logic could not describe that. This notion of logical order came to dominate the subsequent organisation of the world, and the institutions within it. Each individual’s work would be ‘atomized’ or specialised in their specific field, collecting knowledge which can be thrown into the buck of knowledge. From Fordist production to scientific managerialism, Newton is the grandfather. As, anthropologist Karl Polanyi, writing in the 1940s, points out ‘no less a thinker than Adam Smith suggested that the division of labour in society was dependent upon the existence of markets.’ People could not organise themselves, but rather required guidance by the ‘invisible hand’, which was analogous to Newton’s concept of force. Creativity was replaced because the mechanistic assumptions guiding thinking could not conceptualise anything but control. So, assumptions became truisms, and a new vision of man and man’s rational order was built out of these assumptions. Polanyi continues:
in spite of the chorus of academic incarnations so persistent in the nineteenth century, gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important role in human economy… (Nonetheless) Herbert Spencer, in the second half of the nineteenth century, could, without more than a cursory acquaintance with economics, equate the principles of the division of labour with economics, and another fifty years later, Ludwig Von Mises and Walter Lippmann could repeat the same fallacy. But that time there was no need for argument. A host of writers on political economy, social history, political philosophy and general sociology followed in Smith’s wake and established his paradigm of the bartering savage as an axiom for their respective sciences.[9]
This truism is no longer discussed, but has been incorporated into reality via ‘the perception industry.’ The internal relations of any social institution, no matter what they think of themselves, are expressed in their organisation. The inability to recognise this is associated with the pervasive disconnect between thought and action, a product of the Enlightenment. Environmental philosopher Arran Gare argues that this is associated with the tendency to presuppose human as Hobbesian caricatures driven by the mechanical desire to seek appetites and avoid aversions, which directly challenged the Aristotelian view of humans as ‘political animals.’ He writes: ‘Aristotle argued that humans have an element in common with plants and animals, that is, vegetative activity. This is the irrational element of humans… However, humans are also capable of a higher rationality of participating in the governance of their communities and of enquiry to comprehend the world and their place within it.’[10] The problem is that the economic activity generated in our own time turns man into either a machine or a monster. However, Aristotle did not consider this view of rationality as the ‘natural state of individuals’ but ‘something won and maintained’ through being ‘members of an autonomous or self-governing State or community.’[11] Upon this basis, Aristotle argued that humans cannot reach their full potential, and therefore cannot become fully human, if they did not live in autonomous communities. This was the conception of liberty devised by Aristotle and was central to his characterisation of ‘the good life’ which was assumed by ‘all subsequent Western philosophy of ethics and politics’ whether assumed ‘overtly or covertly.’ Hobbes understood this and set out to ‘destroy the philosophical foundations on the basis of which liberty had been defended and extolled’ by destroying ‘Aristotle’s conception of humans.’[12] He did this by extrapolating a mechanical view of humans, which has, like the myth of the bartering savage, become institutionalised at the sub-verbal level of Western institutions. This mindless and imaginary archetype is destroying the conditions for life on earth.
Goldmann argues society is as much a dynamic subject as it is an object, organised by semi-autonomous groups of activity, which coalesce under some vague form of representation, which provide sense and meaning to action. Yet ‘certain groups are particularly important because their actions and behaviours tend to structure society as a whole.’[13] It is these groups who tend to close this vague representation, and make it appear unchanging, paving the way for transformation or collapse. The globalisation of the economy has led to the situation where what appears to be semi-autonomous institutions are actually organised under the same rules, committing ourselves to one path and the actualisation of one potential among many.
Goldmann was writing in the 50s and 60s, well before the digital age and could not have envisioned that a social group could have such a pervasive influence through technology, although he no doubt understood the relationship between the globalising economy and technological development. He argues that ‘when the members of a group are all motivated by the same situation and have the same orientation, they elaborate functional mental structures for themselves as a group within their historical situation. One cannot have mental structures for each separate action. These mental structures… have an active role in history and are also expressed in major philosophical, artistic, and literary creations.’[14] English philosopher Robin Collingwood has argued that eras can be defined by the domination of certain metaphysical assumptions, such as every cause has an effect, which coheres with Goldmann’s views that the dialectic between order and knowledge produces history. Adam Smith’s (and Newton’s) imaginary world of markets (atoms) was an elaboration of the whole of history based on a mechanistic world-view of production and consumption (nature) that had replaced the Scholastic tradition of knowledge, which utilised a different brain structure. The transition was the transition of a functional brain structure, and Smith expressed it in the field of economics, Thomas Hobbes in political philosophy. However, Newton’s cause and effect view of nature represents the assumption that underpins their ability to form coherent brain structures. Yet, this cause and effect logic cannot explain how it came about. That is, it cannot describe creation, the fundamental problem of the scientific tradition. Despite this, the dialectic exists between society and the individual, who emerges from within a community itself within a society organised by the global economy, through harmonising the social order with the cognitive order. But if this order is defective, the power to change the social order requires imagining a new form of order, which can rationalise its own emergence.
This is why Polanyi argues that Smith’s views were much more prophetic of the future rather than the past. The mechanistic conception of market laws was extremely functional during the industrial revolution, for its method excludes what are now referred to as ‘externalities’. As Polanyi writes: ‘the trading classes has no organ to sense the danger involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighbourhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing and arts, as well as the innumerable forms of private and public life that do not affect profit.’[15] The dominant class had no mind grounded in reality. Thus, as Goldmann points out, ‘scientific sociology’ based on assuming that humans want more of the same misses the point when it concerns itself with what people are now thinking ‘even if this can yield very exact, photographic information’ because ‘it is men, groups and social classes that elaborate structures orientated toward providing them with equilibrium.’ When these structures are no longer functional ‘they elaborate new ones.’ ‘Positive sociology… dedicated many resources, investigations and monographs to the analysis of French society without, however, being able to foresee in April 1968 the possibility of the crisis (huge riots) that occurred in May.’[16] So too the crisis in 2008, Brexit, Trump, Corbyn and on and on. The materiality of empirical scientific sociology, implicitly assuming a form of rationality under this empiricism (Newtonian mechanics), cannot conceptualise the immaterial bonds, which unite individual activity together within our communities and the collective activity of these communities of knowledge which form a society all the way up to globally connected civilisation and add coherence and rationality to the whole system. The inability of those in power to think outside the organisation of the global economy is associated with their continual (and unconscious) elaboration of a functional cognitive structure that is necessary in a civilisation reproduced by such cancerous habits, Goldmann would argue. They are not able to conceptualise how their collective individual activity is constantly forming and reforming wholes. This it because these wholes are not meaningful but rather contracts, rights theory, utilitarianism and general disillusionment, guided by power politics far disconnected from concerns of the common good. It is these wholes which then act as constraints on the wholes that exist under them and act in relation to them, which structures the organisation of society. In today’s society, this group represents a community of knowledge completely divorced from the reality of things. Consequently, their actions are divorcing those communities whose activities they structures from engaging with reality. This dialectic of disembodiment and disconnection is causing humanity to lose the plot, misconceiving its relationship to its environment and, as a result, appears superfluous to its potential destruction. Is it possible to resolve this urgent crisis?
Arran Gare argues that the nation state and the Humboldtian model of the university are products of the radical enlightenment; a subverted historical tradition concerned with democracy as self-governance rather than merely exchange. These institutions are dialectically related and maintain their integrity through cultivating individuals into citizens able to participate in democratic institutions, reproducing democratic values and a democratic culture which equates freedom with responsibility through collective action. This is the dialectical conception of community and environment, from which a true individual emerges, who understands the conditions that gave rise to him and protects them accordingly. Within the university, this means privileging the humanities, which engage dialectically with the sciences, united through the cultivation and commitment to truth, situated within the border of a national economy, another product of the radical enlightenment. This is a consciously constructed and dialectically contingent truth, something incomprehensible through market logic, which constructs a view of man that could never become a citizen, and a view of truth that could never be questioned. From this perspective, the economy is the elaboration of a new dialectical metaphor first posed by Aristotle. The state, as a series of internally organised households, acts as a shield, in the vein of a turtle, to protect those within its borders from external forces and seeks to provide them with the conditions necessary to reach their full potential. This is the purpose of a national culture with democratic control over the national economy. Social and political theorist Sir Isaiah Berlin, paraphrasing German philosopher Johann Herder, one of the main proponents of the radical enlightenment, argued that ‘cultures could not be reconstructed fragment by fragment in accordance with mechanical rules supplied by a generalising science: their constituent elements could be grasped adequately only in relation to each other – this indeed was what was meant by speaking of a civilization, a way of living and an expression of a society characterised by an identifiable pattern, a central style which informed, if not all, yet a great many of its activities, and so revealed, even in its internal tensions, its differences and conflicts, a certain degree of unity, of feeling and purpose.’[17] A national economy is the only way to promote national autonomy, which means the cultivation of a national culture. There is no one way of developing a cultural style, but it should not be distinct for the economic organisation of a nation. Progressive action on climate change, therefore, should be geared towards the dismantling the economic system and giving nations the means to repair their own cultures and construct their own institutions, and their own economies. The expansion of the market and its logic represents a form of cultural and economic imperialism, and has empowered people whose brain structures support those seeking to unite the world under one market. That is, national leaders around the world share a common brain structure, and their activity is constraining the groups below them under the same logic, slowly generating a monocultural world, in which creativity, autonomy and purpose mean nothing. This is a child of Newtonian logic, which separates knowledge from action. Reacting against economic globalisation with a progressive view of constructing a national economy could then be the core driver channelling energy towards community building projects, such as ecological restoration, as Pettifor has argued. This requires a logic, which can explain its own emergence, purpose and creativity. This might be able to reformulate our story of ourselves upon a new basis, dismissing this conception of humans as uncreative, calculative machines in the process.
I have argued that the global crisis represents the positive dialectic between the imaginary mechanistic world-view and the symbols which it created – money, machines, markets, etc., and the identities formed as a result of this system – consumers, technocrats, producers, etc., which refer not to some spatio-temporal reality, but rather derive their primary purpose from the abstract symbolism of the market. That is to say, individuals are not primarily considered members of a particular spatially defined political community, but rather abstract universals in the imaginary world of market mechanisms. This is destroying the conditions for civilisation and has transformed the culture of nation states, privileging those who care not for community and creativity, but for profit and control.
So, the point of creating this newspaper is to revive the very idea of democracy, which has been almost completely discredited through the deeply held assumptions about the nature of reality based upon the metaphysical tradition of the modern enlightenment, which has been concerned with controlling nature through scientific rationalization, as the Frankfurt School have argued.[18] It is this tradition, guided by the Newtonian conception of nature, which is concluding in the irrational effort to control the world, destroying our environment and the conditions for life in the process. In order to come to terms with this reality, to overcome it and posit a new reality which can overcome these defective assumptions, it is necessary to build institutions which are capable of organising around a radically new conception of knowledge. This necessitates a radically new form of social organisation in which we can actively feel the union of purposes and actions, and to unify our inner world of feeling and our outer world of activity with our own co-constructed model of reality, based on a common project of autonomy, which can provide the conditions necessary for our grandchildren to flourish. This is the beginning.
[1] Pettifor, The Production of Money, Verso, 2017 p. 6
[2] Chang, 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism, Penguin, 2011, Ch5
[3] Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Routledge and Kegan Paul, trans. Henry Maas, 1973, p. 32
[4] See Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money, Verso, 2017.
[5] Ann Pettifor, The financialization of the housing market, Feb 7th, 2018 http://www.annpettifor.com/2018/02/the-financialisation-of-the-housing-market/
[6] See the Age 24th of March, 2018.
[7] Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 5
[8] Ibid, p.2
[9] Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, 1944, p. 43-44
[10] Arran Gare, Philosophical Anthropology, Ethics, and Political Philosophy in an Age of Impending Catastrophe, p. 265-266, Cosmos and History, http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal
[11] Gare, Democracy and Education: Defending the Humboldtian University and the Democratic Nation-State as Institutions of the Radical Enlightenment, p. 11
[12] Arran Gare, Philosophical Anthropology, Ethics, and Political Philosophy in an Age of Impending Catastrophe, p. 266-267.
[13] Goldmann, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 41
[14] Ibid, p. 42.
[15] Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 133
[16] Goldmann, Essay on Method in the Sociology of Literature, Trans. William Q. Boelhower, Telos Press, 1980, p.40.
[17] Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 23
[18] See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectics of the Enlightenment, and Marcuse, One Dimensional Man
Postmodernism and the Internet
by Darcy Forster
Technological inventions have been responsible for enormous social, cultural and political growth throughout history. The printing press saw the democratisation of knowledge, as information became much more easily accessible to a larger number of people. This collective awakening in education fuelled the fruitful exploration of old ideas during the Renaissance period and encouraged social and political progress as well as development in areas of art, literature and philosophy. Reminiscent of the invention of the printing press in the 20th century, is the Internet and the extent to which it has connected individuals to a plethora of information resources. The strange times we face in the 21st century is without question, related to the circumstantial shift and acceleration of ideas the internet has caused in modern culture. Given the complexity of the situation at hand, no two relatable phenomena can be seen to explain the modern condition in full, but what is a very interesting, and arguably ironic convergence, is the relationship between post modernism and the internet.
At its most rudimental functioning, the internet has impacted the rate at which we have been able to formulate and consider ideas. This is evident in the entrepreneurial world as well as the philosophical, but the level at which these ideas are being engaged with is debateable. Arguments can be made about the depth of engagement the internet really encourages between individual and concept, but nonetheless, the conclusion can be drawn that ideas are abundant. With this access to digital knowledge and the increased activity of idea formation, one might assume our culture would be in a more composed position about its future, yet disarray is as prominent as ever. Could it be that the inundation of information has stifled us rather than enlightened us? To understand in greater depth the issue at hand, one must qualitatively consider the ideas that are being adopted. Foreseen by no one, the recent reconsideration of the ‘Flat Earth’ conception is just one example of radically liberal idea adherence. This may seem obviously incoherent to the intellectual evolution of the human race, yet people have seemingly chosen to adopt this model of reality merely for the sake of it. One may argue that it is not the information nor the way it is being presented to us, but instead the ideological framework we are choosing to use that is result to our current state of affairs.
A Postmodern world has effectively undermined our ability to distinguish items of value from items of complete nonvalue. One of the underlying presuppositions of Postmodernism is that we are subjects in a world filled with infinite interpretation- this is an appealing statement when the world we inhabit has been explicitly injected with an even greater amount of interpretable information. There is nothing objectionable about this Postmodern claim, and in fact, seems to represent a truth about the human condition. However, in order to enact any agency in the world we need a means of ordering things in a value system. Traditionally, humankind has gone through its existence by creating cultures with imbedded value hierarchies that situate people in the world and provide meaning and suggested course of action for trying times. So, stifled by technology we seem to be, as issues of modernity pile up at our doorstep the trepidation of inaction is neither realised on the political nor the individual level. Consequently, one must only look at the means in which the environmental crisis we find ourselves in has been addressed. Either by ignorance on the political level, or misguidedness on the individual level, the extent to which we seem to seek solution appears to be fallacious.
Postmodernism and the internet are like a couple that never should have gotten together, and their mutual existence seems to only bring inaction in a world that demands wiser choices from us all. This is not to say that the Postmodern ideology has become entrenched within the West to a point of no return, or that cultural values have been abolished, but time is against us and signs of erosion are becoming visible. Therefore, any hope of navigating through the infinite sea of information we find ourselves sailing through will require, at the very least, some kind of map and compass that Postmodernism refuses to provide or even recognise the value of. And although solutions and smooth sailing are not guaranteed with map and compass in hand, at least they provide direction, purpose and meaning, with that of which we can begin to define the real problems that beckon us in the technological age.
A New Kind of Human 