Labor must take the reins of progressivism — otherwise the times will suit no one

Well, Labor really took the fight to the Coalition on the gas issue, didn’t it? I do not mean that sarcastically. But nor do I mean it literally.

It certainly didn’t do the Obama/Rudd thing of simply ignoring the political attacks from the opposition on the grounds that they were ludicrous — which they were. But nor did it lead with a politics-first attack. Chris Bowen, in his donnish manner, expressed exasperation at the opposition’s cynicism and wilful stupidity around the “gas trigger” mechanism: “But … it wouldn’t kick in until January!” Yes, Labor knows that, Chris. That’s why it said it. 

Bowen should have led with the slap-down he proceeded to give after we’d all had a quick tutorial in gas management. Keep it simple, make it the lead: “This opposition gave us a decade of waste and failure; it has nothing to offer at this point. Now let me tell you about pipeline maximisation pricing yields, you may want to take a wee break first…”

There’s still a dose of the old asymmetry that will bedevil Labor. People on the centre-left believe in objective truth, and solving problems in ways that minimise inequality and maximise universal possibility. The right has no regard for truth whatsoever, and would quite like to gouge out the eyes of the weak with boat hooks. Whatever values of collective life the right had, arising from traditional values, have been worn away by 40 years of neoliberalism — and here, especially by the past decade. 

The right has nothing left. The nihilism of market-led politics has eroded the ground beneath its feet that was essential to its politics. To compensate, it has tried to inject ever more explicit “rich content” — Anzac, Gallipoli, Western civilisation, etc — like a political botox job. 

Last year that stopped working in Australia. As your correspondent noted, the culture wars, in their existing iteration at least, were coming to a close. The right is now in the position that the radical left was in throughout the late 1970s. Western industrial capitalism was being dismantled, and class politics with it. 

The right was bold and assertive, and had a complete program. The left was in denial and wasted a decade believing the coming of neoliberalism to be nothing more than a historical moment that would soon have its dialectical reversal. 

But there the symmetry ends and the risks begin.

The right that took over at the beginning of the 1980s was bold and ideology-driven; the left it was carving up — the Carter administration and Callaghan government — was barely left at all, drained of command by compromise and centrism. The right triumphed not because it offered technical fixes to economic problems, but because of its new value system replacing a failed postwar social-democratic liberalism. 

The right has been living off that Thatcher-Reagan big bang ever since. Alan Tudge’s ridiculous fingering of the national curriculum was a distant echo of that, the surviving background radiation. As it persisted in that program, society changed underneath it. The moment for the right to pivot and shift its politics should have been at the same-sex marriage plebiscite, when only two otherwise utterly different areas — Western Sydney and Central Queensland — voted no, and everyone else said either “Hell yes!” or (mostly) “Sure. Whatever. Who cares who you do?”

That would have been the moment for adopting a sensible, progressive conservatism as the right’s house ideology. Instead, in installing a compromise candidate for leader, it got itself a Christian warrior who took the opportunity for one last rally. Labor’s victory has been narrow, but the Coalition’s defeat has been broad. 

That tells you the true nature of what happened. What won was progressivism, which is the politics of a knowledge/information society. Industrial society relies on the steering of capital and labour via money and bureaucratic command. A knowledge/information economy relies on dialogic discourse, oriented to truth-finding. Your developing software to run machines? It has to be true, i.e. it has to work (unless you’re RMIT University, which will buy any old gobbledygook code, decade after decade). A lump of coal, a car, a widget isn’t “true” in the same way.

Capital may now be carried by knowledge economy processes, but only by respecting its truth-finding, evidentiary processes. So, gradually, what’s emerged is a politics based on those processes, that simply assumes them to be a world process. That’s the Greens and teals, and it’s Labor’s progressive dimension. One can see it sort of “clicking” into place. The failure of the hard right to self-organise may be a mark of the degree to which a progressive approach — in its deep structure at least — has achieved dominance of the political culture. It would explain why there was mass indifference to Katherine Deves’ version of the trans issue, and the particularly handcrafted, heritage moral panic made of trans persons in sports. 

There is thus a hunger for a politics of practical and rational problem-solving, which Labor is leading with. But such a politics by its very nature does not establish simple dominance, because it is always oriented to the possibility that there are other arguments. Thatcher asserted a simple — and illusory — “truth” and acted from it. So did Lenin. The 20th century was Nietzsche’s century, the politics of will. Ours is one in which claims to real truth, and rights, are coming to the fore. 

So the upshot would be that if a progressive government having won power does not find the right mix of assertion and evidence, a wilful and irrationalist right would have “one more” victory in it — and that “one more” could then take command in the era.

Progressivism, evidence, and truth dominate social and economic processes now, but they are not the property of all social classes equally. The more knowledge practices expand into everyday life, the more a divide opens between the organisers and organised. In 1960, a factory owner and factory worker could have a roughly equal idea of how the factory worked — and the engineer knew how it really worked. Today the engineer is the owner, and workers are divided between those who have an idea of how it works, and those who have none at all, people for whom life is becoming a series of sealed black boxes. The class struggle becomes one over how that knowledge is shared, whom it empowers and benefits, and whose kids get to get raised to have expertise within it. 

Now in Australia I don’t think there’s a chance that a Liberal Party based around a Protestant ascendency of private school networks can make itself over as a populist representative of the knowledge-excluded, as the Republicans have done in the US. But it is not impossible that they could sneak a cheeky upset plurality victory in 2025 if Labor does not take command of the social knowledge/truth machine and make it work for the mass of people. 

Labor could get really confused about what progressivism and truth-orientation mean as a global crisis unfolds and begins to batter us. It is identifying its role as being the (very limited) truth-teller about just how awful everything is. It’s clear that Jim Chalmers really enjoys giving bad news. There’s almost a smile of relish as he does it. Not because he wants people to suffer, but the opposite: he wants to dispel illusion so we can get on with addressing the real issues, beyond the, as I may have mentioned, “decade of failure and waste”. It’s genuine, but he looks like the vet, syringe in hand, who’s about to kill your dog and then bill you $350 for doing it. 

Genuine, but that’s no free pass. Should Labor simply use its truth-oriented politics to enforce conformism of the population to the system, it will fail and deserve to. Right from the start, as these crises occur, it has to open the conversation about a wider reform of the system — a reform now simply structurally necessary, under any form of political philosophy, aside from headbanging blind libertarianism. 

Millions of Australians have barely had a recovery since 2008-10. Capital took most of it, through quantitative easing — financial bubble investment, immune to interest rates. Now workers are being asked to pay the bill for the inflation inevitably following. That will create a crunch that Labor — and especially Labor-right wonks, the PhDs that Professor Peter “I forgot to vote” van Onselen billed and cooed over — can really get on the wrong side of. What’s left of the Labor left — and what’s left of leftness in the hearts of the Labor left — will have to wage war against this deep desire of Chalmers, Andrew Leigh, Andrew Charlton et al. to play “system cop”.

That is not said with the aim of saving Labor’s skin at all costs. If it becomes system cop in what is to come, it won’t be worth saving. Whatever happens, “red” community independents are going to emerge as candidates in Labor seats, starting with the Victorian election in November. Their preferences will wander to the right if Labor does not in some way represent the people against the system, because populism is the zone where “left” and “right” distinctions start to disappear. The Libs medulla-brain, junkyard-dog political sense will kick in, and someone on the hard right will emerge who is not a delusional narcissistic moron, and they will reap the benefit.

So no nonsense about not going left, and purity in impotence and all that crap, blah blah blah. It’s not a simple oldskool left-right thing. No one is proposing nationalising the 100 largest companies. But Labor is going to have to open the question of how, within a global system, we can use our multiple forms of knowledge to begin to build in other ways to live, steer the economy, and resolve the problems of a capital-dominated system that clearly, obviously, barely works at all anymore, even on its own terms. 

Get that done, will ya? Your correspondent will be taking a week or so off, to lie very still for days on end. Have it on my desk when I get back. (I do not have a desk. See, that’s what I’m saying…)