The banking royal commission — and its tales of shonky loans, systemic selling of the customer to the product —  is Australia’s own contribution to the global revival of socialism as a proposition for government. Not mere social democracy, but actual socialism, in which key sectors of the economy — call them the commanding heights, or the underlying utilities, whichever direction you want to come from — are in social ownership and public control.

Elsewhere, the exposure of the real practices of other industries is having the “socialist effect”. Five years ago, the proposition that Facebook or Google should be socialised was a marginal idea. Now, with their power being exposed, people can see that they are not simply an innovative product like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, but general online connection and information, respectively.  

In all cases, what has made such a mass observation possible is not what is being revealed by various hearings themselves alone, but the fact that they are happening now. Had the banks and big data conceded to far-reaching inquiries five years ago, they could have got away with the notion that mere regulation and a bit of introspection was required.

Now, after Wikileaks and Snowden globally, and after exposure of one shonky industry after another here, that is far less possible. The conduct of capitalism has made the argument for socialism, not through an exposure of its pathologies, but by making visible its normalities. This really is a dialectical moment in world history, when things emerge from seeming nothingness, fully formed. What could not be thought by many even two years ago — what was not accessible to many as a thought — now seems obvious. Banking should be under public control. Energy and power should be under public control. And so on.

This could not be thought two years ago — but was thought thirty, forty, fifty years ago. From the end of WW2, to the 1970s, social democracy and socialism were the go, and the only question was one of system and settings. The combined catastrophe of the depression and the war, the lesson of planning during the war, and a democratic surge afterwards made social democracy/socialism the universal framework. By the mid-1970s, it was staggering, and the Reagan-Thatcher-Hawke/Keating victories killed it off in the anglosphere, though many on the left continued to see these victories as a brief aberration, for a full decade after they occurred, a pretty important lesson.

What killed it was the recession and stagflation of the 70s — a crisis of underlying capitalism, not of a still developing socialist framework — and the bureaucratic mode by which it was being conducted. But in an era of dial phones, telexes and mainframes, there wasn’t much alternative to fairly hierarchical and unidirectional modes of steering. Now there are alternatives, and it’s noticeable that the place where such old hierarchical modes survive are the places which offer us the new tools for new ways of co-ordinating complex life – Facebook, google etc.

Once you take the brand labels off — and name Facebook as “peer-to-peer multi-connection” and Google as “the searchable global archive” — then their utility nature becomes not merely one way of looking at them, but the only way of understanding them. Facebook shouldn’t be paying its users for use of their data; its users are Facebook, with a central hub that determines the manner in which they are connected. There’s no reason why those methods and processes could not be determined by a board elected by all Facebook users, and changed as the board’s composition, or wider voting processes, change. To undertake this, Facebook would of course use Facebook.

The banking royal commission is having an even deeper effect, because it is undoing the mystique of an earlier layer of capitalism, showing us that finance is a set of social relationships, that can be socially determined.

“What actually is capital?” the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson asked, to much derision, in the 1950s. But she was ahead of her time. Once capital began to leap from screen-to-screen in nanoseconds, to be capable of production through endless towers of abstraction, then the fact that its limits and actions are determined by a series of decision as to how it flows, make its utility status clear. What the banking royal commission makes clear is what the environmental crisis makes clear — we now have no choice but to impose a qualitative ends-based system on global production — with quantitative means — rather than one of quantitative means (i.e. unlimited capitalism, commodities and the market) to serve our species’ qualitative ends.

Last time round, it took a war of mass destruction, genocide and 50 million dead to teach us that lesson. It’s tempting to end by saying
“probably the same”, but that’s just for effect. It’s more than possible that a global realisation of the necessity of system change will be the historical event itself. And if you believe that, I’ve got some short term loans you might like to be sold to …