It's the left Jim,but not as we know it.

[Matthew X]

It's the Left, Jim, But Not as We Know It
Produced by Tom Morton
Sunday 13 August 2000

Or download the transcript as a document file:

RTF format
Word 6.0 for Windows format

Books and websites relevant to this feature

MUSIC

Gunter Minnerup: Social movements, I believe, exist very much in the long term fashion. You could see the history of the Left as the history of one long wave of the rebellion of the industrial proletariat against capitalism which started in the late 19th century, fizzles out this century as far as its revolutionary radicalism was concerned with the 1930s and certainly in the aftermath of the Second World War, and persists today in a sort of rather skeletal form in the shape of traditional Social Democratic and Communist Parties, but with very little radical verve in it.

That wave of the rebellion against capitalism could be considered in one form or another as exhausted. Nonetheless, the problems that this movement initially responded to, persist, and as evidence that these problems are entering into a phase where they take on a more acute form even, than they did in the period say before the First World War, or in the inter-war years. Now for a new response to these problems to take shape, it is not simply a question of just simply reviving a movement which is exhausted.

Tom Morton: Gunter Minnerup, historian of the European Left. Hello, I'm Tom Morton and welcome to Background Briefing. And today, the future of the Left. If you're a regular listener, you might recall that about a year ago we brought you the Right stuff, a show about the state of contemporary conservatism. Well today, it's the Left's turn.

Like the Right, the Left is going through an identity crisis, a period of deep confusion and conflict over how to respond to globalisation. A decade ago, conservative intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama were confidently predicting the end of history, the death of ideology and the final victory of liberal capitalism.

Ten years on, if history with a capital H could speak, it might well say, like Mark Twain, that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. The Asian economic crisis, sharply increasing inequality in much of the developed capitalist world, and the breakdown of free trade agreements, suggest that capitalism isn't quite enjoying the dream run which Fukuyama predicted.

But the Left isn't sure how to respond. On the one hand, leaders such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton speak about occupying the radical centre of a politics beyond Left and Right.

Meanwhile a new coalition of protest movements is launching a frontal assault on the pillars of global capitalism, on the IMF and World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the World Economic Forum.

SFX: PROTEST

Tom Morton: Many on the established Left believe these protest movements are swimming against the tide of history. Here's Peter Lewis, Editor of Workers Online, an Internet newsletter published by the New South Wales Labor Council.

MUSIC

Peter Lewis: My concern is just that the Left has allowed itself to be manoeuvred into this position where it's almost a conservative agenda they're seen to be pushing, that there's this change going on and yes, it's been driven by capital but the nature of capital I think is changing. Capital is becoming much more fluid.

You see I actually have the view that the new economy in the long term, is not necessarily in the long term interest of your big corporations and your traditional capital. The conceptual nature of a network society is that the centres of information are no longer as powerful. I don't know if the Left really realised that this technology could actually help them win the old-style revolution which was never going to be won on the ground in a country like Australia, and I just think there is so many really interesting, exciting things going on and it seems to me that the Left is fighting battles that may have been relevant 20 years ago, but I don't know if they're relevant now.

STAR TREK MUSIC

Woman: Exactly what are we looking for, Mr Spock?
Mr Spock: I would assume that what is that?
Man: It's the Left, Jim, but not as we know it.
Mr Spock: Hold present course.

Naomi Klein: I believe that we are at the very early stages as a new international political movement.

SFX: PROTEST CHANTING
Person: Well really the only thing that we need is a vision of a better world in a pie.

SFX: HELICOPTER

Naomi Klein: The real perception in Seattle is that the Left have been written off as dead. Literally it has been buried.

MUSIC

Man: A financial revolution has begun.
Man: Our resistance needs to be as transnational as capital where it will be ineffective.
Man: Revolution doesn't wait.
Man: Resistance needs to be as transnational as capital.
Man: Revolution doesn't wait.

RAP/MUSIC

Man: It's the Left Jim, but not as we know it.

Tom Morton: It's the Left, Jim, but not as we know it. From London to Seattle, from Washington to Davos and coming soon to Melbourne's Crown Casino for the World Economic Forum, a new global protest movement is on the march.

As the trade bureaucrats and corporate chiefs jet into yet another love-in for the global ruling elite, what the French call the 'cosmocracy', the protesters are waiting for them.

They're leaderless, decentralised, and as anarchic as the Internet they use to co-ordinate their demonstrations. They're a constantly shifting coalition of culture jammers, Greens, guerilla gardeners, unionists, church groups, grey activists, and they follow the trade bureaucrats around as though they were the Grateful Dead.

Those anyway, are the words of Naomi Klein. She was born into a Left-wing family and describes herself now, in her 20s, as a professional troublemaker. She's speaking to us from her home in Toronto.

Naomi Klein: Well I believe that we are at the very early stages of a new international political movement, and Seattle was the sort of 'coming out' party for Americans.

I think we saw glimpses of it around the world beforehand, we saw glimpses of it in London the year before on June 18th, we've seen sort of massive citizen uprisings in India, in South Korea, and I don't want to do a laundry list of protests here, but the common ground is that more and more all around the world, there's a feeling that political change is no longer achieved through traditional political means. That it doesn't really matter which political party you elect, because electoral politics has been taken over by corporations.

So basically what I see happening, and what I think Seattle was about was naming corporate power. And the truth is that when it comes to globalisation we're really talking about developing new structures that are as agile and international as capital itself.

Tom Morton: Naomi Klein.

VOICED SLOGANS: Creative Resistance/Globalisation from Below/Shut down the World/Guerilla Gardening/International Lobster Party/People Unite to Overturn Cars/Supply of Capitalism: Reclaim the Streets/Resistance is Fertile
Tom Morton: The new protest movements have been attacked and ridiculed by both the Right and the established Left.

After the May Day riots in London earlier this year, the editor of The Guardian, Hugo Young, referred to the protestors as 'herbivores' who he says, 'make a virtue out of being disorganised.'

Well herbivores it seems can have remarkably sharp teeth. Two years ago, together with a loose alliance of groups in many countries, they pulled off a spectacular political victory: stopping the MAI, or Multilateral Agreement on Investment, dead in its tracks.

The MAI was a wide-ranging agreement covering everything from financial services to films. It had the support of the OECD, the World Trade Organisation, and a range of international business organisations.
The MAI would have strapped national governments into a straightjacket, preventing them from regulating foreign investment, and it would have given transnational corporations legal rights to sue governments if they proved recalcitrant.

The MAI was defeated by a concerted international lobbying campaign by NGOs, citizens groups across the political spectrum, and herds of herbivores.
Jane Kelsey was closely involved in the campaign in New Zealand.

Jane Kelsey: Well I think the first thing is that people have an instinctive resistance to being told that globalisation is in some way inevitable and irreversible and irresistible, and when people feel both disempowered and disenfranchised by globalisation, but also when they suffer the negative impacts on their lives, they're not prepared to tolerate that sort of claim.
And so I think one of the interesting points for us in looking at the MAI and APEC and WTO campaigns all together here, are the diverse group of people who came together to say, 'No, that's not acceptable'.

We had an amazing combination of people who were not only expressing outrage, but who were actively lobbying government, talking to media and so on, ranging through from local government to Maori to Grey Power and the elderly lobby, to talkback corners, and it built up a huge momentum here, to the extent that the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said, 'Oh! The MAI, it's become like East Timor and Save the Whales!'

So it really did put a lot of pressure on them, in a way that they have never experienced before, and that's where the international part of the campaign became important as well, became the same issues were being raised in many different countries, and some governments in those countries were in fact conceding that there were problems here, and we were able to say 'But if the Canadians see a problem, then why don't you?'.

And I think in that sense, it was really empowering for people, that 'Yes, in fact you can not only say No, but in the case of the MAI, you can affect what happens in the outcome of negotiations that are in theory beyond your reach'.

Tom Morton: Jane Kelsey, author of 'Reclaiming the Future - New Zealand and the Global Economy.'

Reader: To those who wish to dominate the world, the world replies: 'Let them eat humble pie.'

Tom Morton: The words of the Biotic Baking Brigade, who landed a cream pie on Renato Ruggiero, head of the World Trade Organisation.

Ruggiero had just been attacking the anti-MAI campaign. 'When the fringe elements run out of arguments', he said, 'let them eat cake.' Perhaps not realising that Marie Antoinette said something very similar just before her appointment with the guillotine.

Here's one of those fringe elements now: Agent Pecan, speaking to 2-SER's Kyla Slaven.

Agent Pecan: Well really the only thing that you need to be a member of the Biotic Baking Brigade is a vision of a better world than a pie, and we recommend that people do not use fruit pies, because somebody could choke on the fruit or they could injure their eyes, and we particularly recommend against cherry pie or something that's red like that because people who witness the pie oftentimes mistake it for blood and tend freak out a little bit.
So, we would definitely recommend against that.

As far as whether it is actually injurious to somebody or not, you have to ask the larger question. Usually the people who are getting pied are people who have committed great crimes against society, against cultures, or making decisions for us in the shadows without public participation or public knowledge. And that's a far greater crime than a little bit of a food fight.

SFX: PIE THROWING

Tom Morton: Agent Pecan, who was fined $70,000 and spent two months in jail after pieing the Mayor of San Francisco.

Representatives of the chemical giant, Monsanto, were laughing on the other sides of their faces recently after a demonstration in the Indian state of Karnatak.

They'd gone there to try and persuade farmers to plant genetically modified seed, but when they got there, the joke was on them. Here's academic and activist, Devlina Ghosh.

Devlina Ghosh: There was a very big demonstration of farmers and when the State politicians and these executives came out to talk to this huge delegation of farmers outside the State Parliament, these farmers just sat there and laughed at them, and that was their form of protest, they just literally had groups of laughers. So when one group would stop laughing, the next group would start, and so they had a relay of laughers.

But it was an incredibly effective form of protest, because it was completely non-violent but it was also a sign of how totally ridiculous I suppose, they found these arguments that were being advanced to them. It was saying, 'It's OK to have sterile seed because it can just buy more.' It was in the days of Terminator sort of like seeds and so on, and it's OK to have these seeds which need this incredibly expensive fertilisers and pesticides.

And I think that's what remains very positive, going back to India where there's so many other sorts of problems, but there are all of these various local and community sort of protests and resistances, and very creative ones.

MUSIC

Agent Pecan: We inject a lot of humour into a fairly dry movement. I mean these are very, very serious issues that we're dealing with, issues that involve genocide on a mass scale of not only indigenous cultures but of our plant and animal relations as well being wiped out wholesale through the impacts of international capital and the globalisation of capital.

And our resistance needs to be as transnational as capital where it will be ineffective, and again our pie in the face is an international visual Esperanto, everybody understands what it means. So it's a way for us to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

Tom Morton: Custard pies, laugh-ins, bicycle brigades and guerilla gardening, are all part of an emerging international theatre of protest. But while the visual Esperanto of this movement is simple and direct, its political aims are extraordinarily diverse. Protesters against genetically modified foods join animal rights activists, unionists march side by side with environmentalists, gay activists join hands with church groups.

So how much does this alliance of single-issue campaigns have in common with the more traditional concerns of the Left, things like equality, social justice and redistribution.

James Goodman says that those concerns haven't gone away, but the form in which they're being expressed is changing.

James Goodman: Well for me it's a signal that in a way the north has woken up.
I feel in many ways that what we've seen over the last four or five years is a process of mobilization against sources of corporate power at the global level transnational corporations, and against interstate organisations like the World Trade Organisation and others. I think this opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of linking up with people's organisations and governments in the global south, which of course been working on these issues for many, many decades.

If you look at the example of what happened in Seattle, what we saw there was the millennium round, the proposed new round of so-called liberalisation, the removal of government from the economy, globally, defeated by the alliance between so-called Third World, the governments of the south, 70 governments of the south, and northern NGOs, on the streets in Seattle. And that was planned, it was worked through the proposals, with the specific proposals that would be opposed at Seattle, and the specific government alternatives that would be put up, were all worked out through NGO activity north and south and governments in the south.

Tom Morton: James Goodman, co-editor of Stopping the Juggernaut - Public Interest vs the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

MUSIC

Tom Morton: That's Asian Dub Foundation getting into the collective mode. ADF, one of the hottest young bands in Britain today; they grew out of community music workshops for young Asians in East London. And the music, as you can hear, is a blend of Indian pop music, reggae, hip-hop and surf guitars. ADV are also heavily involved in political activism.

Their hybrid sound, which defies all the stereotypes of 'ethnic music' reflects the hybrid, eclectic nature of the new protest movements. But it's this very eclecticism which has attracted criticism from other sections of the Left.

'We know what they're against', say the critics, 'but what are they for?'

Paul Hirst is a prominent member of the British Left who describes himself as a Labour moderniser. Paul Hirst.

Paul Hirst: The real problem with the coalition in Seattle is that it's a completely, how shall I say, incoherent constellation of opposed interests. You have American labour unions with an essentially protectionist agenda, environmentalists with many cases of protectionist agendas, sometimes justified, sometimes not; and then a real rag-tag and bobtail of anti-capitalist groups.

Now the real problem with the phrase 'anti-capitalism' is that in the old days anti-capitalism meant socialism, you thought you had something to put in its place. But most of the anti-capitalist rhetoric is grounded on nothing, it doesn't have any alternatives.

Now at the IMF and the World Bank, they certainly need a makeover. And certainly the neo-liberal agenda needs to be reined in. I mean the damage it did in the Asian crisis ought to have stopped it in its tracks, it just shows that these guys never learn and don't listen. The neo-liberal agenda ought to have run into the sand; the reason it hasn't is that the alternative arguments have not been coherently put.

Tom Morton: Marxism itself, of course, began life as one anti-capitalist movement among many. And the movers and shakers in the new protest movements argue that the Left's former obsessions with manifesto politics, grand visions and master discourses have blighted its history.

Not long ago, the demonstrators in Seattle got public support from an unexpected source: Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist and Vice President of the World Bank. In an article for the American magazine New Republic, Stiglitz launched a stinging attack on the IMF and its performance during the Asian crisis.

By imposing a one-size-fits-all austerity program on governments in East Asia, says Stiglitz, the IMF made the crisis much worse than it would have been had they not intervened at all.

He's particularly scathing about the IMF's prescriptions for Indonesia, and the terrible human cost which followed them.

Stiglitz himself has spent many years inside the corridors of the international institutions which are being targeted by the protesters. But he says they're performing a public service, by drawing attention to the deeply undemocratic nature of the IMF.

Reader: Bad economics was only a symptom of the real problem, secrecy. Smart people are more likely to do stupid things when they close themselves off from outside criticism and advice. If there's one thing I've learned in government, it's that openness is most essential in those realms where expertise seems to matter most. If the IMF and Treasury had invited greater scrutiny, their folly might have become much clearer, much earlier.

Tom Morton: Stiglitz himself believes that the IMF and other international institutions ought to be retained and reformed from within. Many people in the new protest movements on the other hand, think that these institutions are beyond saving, and should be replaced with new and more representative organisations.

Either way, Stiglitz's criticisms of the IMF underline an embarrassing problem for many of the more ardent advocates of globalisation, including those on the mainstream Left, such as former Prime Minister, Paul Keating.
It's known in the trade as a crisis of legitimisation. In other words, people just won't support a process in which they feel they have no stake, and the less likely they are then to go on believing that those who are running the show really know what's best.

Reader: Since the end of the Cold War, tremendous power has flowed to the people entrusted to bring the gospel of the market to the far corners of the globe. Economic policy is today perhaps the most important part of America's interaction with the rest of the world, and yet the culture of international economic policy in the world's most powerful democracy is not democratic.

This is what the demonstrators, shouting outside the IMF next week will try to say. Of course the streets are not the best place to discuss these highly complex issues, and not everything the protesters say will be right. But if the people we entrust to manage the global economy in the IMF and in the Treasury Department don't begin a dialogue and take their criticisms to heart, things will continue to go very, very wrong. I've seen it happen.

SFX: PROTEST

Andrew Gamble: I think what's most interesting about these protests is the way that they can be seen as the stirrings of a transnational civil society. What is desperately needed, given the pace of globalisation and the dominance of neo-liberalism, are new public forums where transnational and global issues like the environment and poverty and security can be debated.

Tom Morton: Andrew Gamble, Professor of Politics at Sheffield University.

Andrew Gamble: I think what has to be done is to use the opportunity to co-ordinate much broader movements of protest and collective action across national frontiers and regional frontiers, and up to now one of the big problems, it seems to me, is that a large part of the globalisation agenda has been pushed forward without any real input or participation by the publics of the countries and regions involved.

Tom Morton: Recently, a number of prominent European intellectuals have thrown their weight behind the protest movements. The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu has launched an appeal on the Internet, and in other public forums, for a European charter of social movements to oppose neo-liberalism.

Bourdieu wants to build a bridge between the new anti-capitalist movements and more traditional forces on the Left, such as the trade unions.
He acknowledges that this new alliance will have many differences and disagreements, but he thinks it can find common ground in fighting for the defence of those who have been 'left aside by neo-liberal policies', as he puts it, and agitating for the reconstruction of a strong welfare state.

Bourdieu, now in his 70s, says that he's excited by the support and enthusiasm of the many young people he's met as he travels around Europe busking for the new charter, and he believes that the Seattle demonstrators are showing the rest of the world the way.

Pierre Bourdieu: Yes, I think so. Everywhere people say, the young people are depoliticised. In fact it's not true.

I think the main depoliticisers are the political men, you know, they speak in such a manner they think that young people don't pay attention, but as soon as you speak in terms such that people understand, they are interested, mainly when you speak of education, when you speak about the future of work, when you speak in terms of the future of gender relationships, they are very interested and they want a new form of politics, they don't want these old-fashioned politics with leaders, with huge apparatus and so they quake when they see the old unions, they don't like that.

They are much more educated, much more open to international themes and they want new forms of leadership, new forms of messages, they want messages more close to their programs and so I think there is something new which is happening.

Tom Morton: Pierre Bourdieu.

MUSIC

Johnny Rotten: The Labour Party that promised so much after the war, they've done so little for the working class, that the working class were confused about even themselves, and didn't even understand what working class meant any more.

Man: Well it's cold and miserable, no-one had any jobs, you couldn't get a job, everyone was on the dole. If you weren't born into money, then you might as well kiss your fucking life goodbye, you weren't going to amount to anything.
John Rotten: The germ, the seed, the Sex Pistols generated from that.

MUSIC - SEX PISTOLS "Pretty Vacant"

Tom Morton: The Sex Pistols, experimenting with new forms of politics and protest back in 1977.

As John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten was saying, the Pistols burst onto the scene at a time of growing disillusionment and anger at the Labour Party. Like the Seattle demonstrators, the Pistols were brilliant manipulators of the media, scandalising and terrorising the British public. A cover story on the band in The Daily Mirror sold more papers in a single day than ever before or after in Britain.

Like the Seattle demonstrators, the Sex Pistols were also giving the fingers to the political establishment on both Left and Right.

John Rotten: People were fed up with the old way, the old way was clearly not working.

Tom Morton: From The Filth and the Fury, a new film about the Sex Pistols. Like the Pistols, the young people who Pierre Bourdieu was talking about are fed up with the blandness of conventional politics.

Now of course, anti-hierarchical, anarchistic movements which try to change the ground on which political struggles are fought out aren't anything new. But it's arguably the first time that they've gone global.

Meanwhile, as the established political parties jostle to occupy the radical centre, the teams are getting harder and harder to tell apart.

As Labor was preparing for its national conference in Hobart recently, that well-known left-winger, Tony Abbott, the Minister for Employment Services, was singing the praises of the Third Way on Radio National's Breakfast, arguing that the Government's Job Network was a shining example of the Third Way in action.

Tony Abbott: With reforms such as the Job Network, we are trying to empower local communities. We've been putting the Third Way into practice with these sorts of programs.

What we're doing with them, for argument's sake, Job Network Enterprises, we're creating a social market in the sense that it's been created by government, and it's going to build social capital in the sense that at the end of this, we're going to have more connected individuals and stronger communities.

Tom Morton: Now of course the Third Way happens to be a favourite phrase of Tony Blair's New Labour. And many of the ideas Tony Abbott was expounding there, building social capital, strengthening communities, and so on, can be found in spades in Lindsay Tanner's book 'Open Australia'. Lindsay Tanner is Shadow Finance Minister, and one of the intellectual heavyweights of the Labor Left.

Lindsay Tanner: Politicians will always try and steal each others' clothes. The real question is, is the person who's sprouting those objectives fair dinkum, and I'd suggest to you that all Tony Abbott's doing is being a bit naughty and trying to close initiatives that in some case really don't stand up to any serious scrutiny in convenient language, just to steal his opponent's clothes.

Tom Morton: You're not suggesting here Lindsay are you, that it was another politician who stole Malcolm Fraser's trousers?
Lindsay Tanner: (Laughs) Well that is a crime that I understand has yet to be solved, so I suppose that the Memphis Police have still got it there, an open file with a list of suspects, and who knows, there may be one or two politicians on the list!

Tom Morton: I mean there is a more serious point here, because you for example, in your book, you're a bit less polite in a way; you talk about the Third Way as an example of cocktail politics: you take two nips of market forces, a dash of socialism, stir vigorously and you've got the Third Way.

Lindsay Tanner: That was essentially a complaint about sloganising.
I don't like the term, it's a hackneyed term, it was first used back in the 1920s by Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Fascists.
People don't want to be confronted with somebody who's talking about the Third Way or the This Way or This-ism or That-ism, what they want to hear is from somebody who says 'Here's how we are going to improve your lives. Here's how we are going to change the education system so that you've got greater opportunity, your kids will have a better chance, their reading and writing opportunities are going to be better, and they will have jobs in the future.'

And I think that's part of the problem that Tony Blair now has in Britain, where his polling numbers have fallen considerably because people are starting to brush these labels aside and say, 'We want to know what's happening with the National Health Service'.

Tom Morton: In his book, 'Open Australia', Lindsay Tanner says that redefining the role of government is the most urgent task facing progressive forces throughout the industrialised world. Unusually for a politician, Tanner is candid enough to admit that he doesn't have all the answers about how to do this.

But if you'd been looking for a robust debate about this urgent task at the ALP Conference in Hobart recently, you would have been looking hard and long.
You might, however, have found something much more like ideological ferment a few days beforehand at 'Unchain your Mind', which was A Forum on New Social-Democratic Ideas for Labor in Government, put on by the Pluto Press and the Fabian Society in Melbourne.

Now we can reveal to you that Joe Cocker did not make an appearance at 'Unchain Your Mind'. But Lindsay Tanner, Mark Latham, and a number of other luminaries of the Australian Left, did.

Also participating and observing, were the writers and all-round people's intellectuals Guy Rundle and Kevin Murray. Kevin Murray.

Kevin Murray: Aspiration was the great word yesterday. The aspirational voters. A point raised by McKenzie Wark really, and echoed in some other speakers that Labor has problems with the aspirational voters in the sense that it's seen to be arguing for equity, whereas the majority of the Australian population are looking to improve themselves, not necessarily to be equal, but to be able to gain some of the things that might be abhorrent to a lot of Leftists, like the four-wheel drives, and Pay-TV and kind of consumerist treasures like that.

And in terms of being able to win government anyway, I think a lot of people are arguing that the Labor Party should provide something, a message that would appeal to this kind of aspiration.

Tom Morton: That magic word, 'aspiration', marks one of the fault lines running through the Labor Party at the moment.

There's a strong view in some sections of the Party that it should look to those groups of voters who are benefiting from globalisation for its future support base, workers who are taking jobs in the new, flexible service-based economy, and aspiring to the middle class.

Others, both inside and outside the Party, think that this upbeat optimistic assessment of globalisation is smoothing over the painful social and psychological costs, ignoring those who are stuck outside the citadels of the cosmocracy.

Guy Rundle.

Guy Rundle: As you increase the levels of globalisation, whether you do it in a fair trade way or a free trade way, as you promote economic growth and the further spread of what's known as prosperity, then another sort of social cost starts to emerge which is the psychological cost, the cost of people feeling that communities are being pulled apart by market forces, and what then happens is, that those social costs which come out as rises in stress, depression, other sorts of social maladies, are rapidly becoming social forces in their own right.

In other words, they're becoming such a major cost in terms of medical costs, in terms of lost work days, in all those sorts of things, that they're becoming a very material part of politics.

Tom Morton: Guy Rundle says there's a good analogy for Labor here with the environmental movement. If you'd told the Party conference back in 1965 that the damming of a river in Tasmania would become one of the most explosive political issues of the '80s, they would have said you were mad. If you'd told them that by the late '80s Labor would be desperately courting the Green vote, they would have had you committed.

In the same way, says Rundle, what now seem to be the fringe issues, the province of ratbags and heretics, herbivores even, may well become the ground on which elections are lost and won in the future.

MUSIC

Guy Rundle: My suggestion is that in the next 10 to 20 years, the social issues, the issues of inner nature and inner psychology, will become political forces in their own right, they won't be marginal stuff about self help books or therapy or stress reduction management, or anything like that.

The question of how you can live a meaningful life and the pressures of contemporary life and how that prevents you from living life to its fullest, will become part of the central political discourse. And so there's a strategy there for the ALP as much as anything, to once more talk to people about their real social needs.

Kevin Murray: I guess the additional problem is that most of the public are quite sceptical of moralising of voices that attempt to try and explain the fact that most of them are going down a path of alienation or disenfranchisement or whatever, partly because of the hyper nature of consumerism and the increasing scepticism towards all kinds of political voices. And I think one of the challenges that faces anyone who's trying to produce an ethical argument is to find a language that isn't hectoring.

MUSIC - MIGHTY WAH "Story of the Blues"

ARCHIVE RECORDING: BRITISH MINERS' STRIKE SPEECH

Tom Morton: Agit-prop doesn't get more soulful than that; it's the Mighty Wah with the Story of the Blues, written during the Miners' Strike in Britain.

Pierre Bourdieu, who you heard earlier in today's program, said recently that we are living through a conservative revolution. And it's the special talent of conservative revolutions, he says, to turn politics on its head.
What was previously progressive becomes reactionary; and what was reactionary becomes progressive.

The Left has always tried to portray itself as in the vanguard of progress and liberation, as having history on its side.

Bourdieu says that beginning with Margaret Thatcher, the neo-liberal revolution has turned all of this upside down. Anyone who questions the benefits of globalisation now, or laments the destruction of the old industrial economy is a dinosaur, a conservative, an enemy of progress.

There are many on the Left who share that latter view, and that unrepentant neo-liberal, Paul Keating, said recently in an interview with 'Workers Online' that the workforce of the future will be more fluid and mobile and more highly paid. And that, he says, has to be some kind of triumph for Labor. It's actually better for Australians, according to Keating, to have their shirts and underwear made somewhere else, perhaps in Rome or Milan, in the former PM's case.

Many within the Labor Party still speak as though there's a simple, unavoidable choice between the old and the new, between the industrial economy and the new information economy. And there's even a name for this view: TINA, short for 'There Is No Alternative.'

But according to Paul Hirst, this is a false choice. We don't have to choose between TINA and the nanny State, he says; we can have both an open economy and a strong welfare State. But only if governments of the Left are prepared to utter an obscene, unmentionable truth.

Paul Hirst: The first thing to do really is to start off trying to explain some simple facts of economic life to people, like for example, you cannot simultaneously have low taxes and good public services. Certainly in Britain, I think that fact is beginning to break through into public consciousness, because two decades of trying to pretend that we could have low taxes and good public services have led to a situation where the education, health infrastructure are all so poor by international standards that there isn't really any argument that they're bad.

In that sense, the Social Democratic battle has to be fought on the field of tax, we have to win that battle with the public. But a crucial part of winning that battle is to provide services that people want, that they think are value for money, and that they have control over. I mean imagine you have two airlines; one is a kind of Soviets-time Aeroflot, and the other is Lufthansa, which will you fly with? I mean there's no point in creating a welfare State that looks like an Aeroflot.

Tom Morton: For much of the last two decades, neo-liberals have argued that all we can really afford is an Aeroflot, that the disciplines of global markets put governments into a fiscal straitjacket.

If we want to be part of the global economy they say, we have to accept that there are strict limits on the taxes which governments can collect, and the amount that they can spend on things like health, education and welfare.
But Paul Hirst, and a number of prominent economists, have produced a range of meticulous research which blows that argument out of the water.

Some of the most open economies in the world, countries such as Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands, which are truly and deeply plugged in to global markets, these countries also have some of the highest levels of taxation and of welfare spending.

Take the Danes, for example.

Paul Hirst: I mean it is very clear that the Danish economy is still based on lots of innovative small businesses; Denmark was based on small farms and workshops. Labour regulations always made it relatively easy to hire and fire. On the other hand, there was a fairly generous unemployment benefit, so both sides accepted this.

Employers had, small farmer has to be free to dismiss farm hands if something goes wrong. But those farm hands wouldn't be thrown into the street and starve. So that system built up, and it's mean that Denmark because it has a good education system, good public services and a relatively loose set of labour regulations, it's meant that the private sector has been able to function well. It gets good inputs from the State and it's relatively free.

Tom Morton: The secret of Danish success is a bargain, what used to be called a social contract. Danish workers have accepted high levels of job insecurity, or if you prefer, flexibility. But the tradeoff for this flexibility is generous welfare spending.

Dani Rodrik, who's John F. Kennedy Professor of Government at Harvard, has shown that the same bargain holds in other countries with very open economies, like Holland and Austria.

'Societies like these seem to demand an expanded government role as the price for accepting larger doses of external risk', says Rodrik.
In other words, people are more likely to accept the risks of globalisation if they know that there's a strong safety net to catch them if they fall. And Paul Hirst says this is why support for the welfare State in countries like Denmark is still so strong.

Paul Hirst: There's still a consensus in Denmark on maintaining the Danish welfare State, despite the very high levels of taxation there's a great deal of popular support for it. Because almost everybody benefits, either from day care for children, so you can go out to work, day care for the elderly and so on and so on. It's a classic system where you consume collectively, but you can see the benefits of it and so you're willing to pay.

Tom Morton: Neo-liberals who sing the praises of Anglo-American capitalism point to the success of Britain and America in creating jobs. Better a low-paid job, they say, than no job at all.

But unemployment in Denmark, currently at 4.7%, is lower than in Britain, where it's 5.8%, and not far above the United States, 4.1%.

In Holland, unemployment is less than 3%. So while Tony Blair talks about squaring the circle, the Dutch have actually done it: they've got low unemployment, stead growth and a sturdy welfare State.
Well you might ask, it's all very well for the Dutch, but could it work here? Could we transplant the Dutch model to Australia as easily as we could a tulip?

Paul Hirst: Well, if you look at the Dutch experience, Holland has not always been so successful. I mean for much of the '70s and '80s, people were writing Holland off as a basket case, and they very successfully reformed their economy and welfare State. So the idea as it were, that there were certain lucky countries, I mean you know the phrase, which just the sun shines on them, isn't true.

If the Dutch could turn themselves around from a situation of really very, very severe decline at the beginning of the '80s, then other countries can do so too, it isn't impossible.

Tom Morton: Paul Hirst, Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck College, London, and co-author of 'Globalisation in Question'.

SFX: CLANKING

Tom Morton: The sound of capitalism triumphant. Some entrepreneurial Berliners chipping off bits of the Berlin Wall to sell to tourists back in 1990.

After the collapse of Communism, many people said that the Left too would become little more than a memory, a quaint historical relic. Ten years on, Gunter Minnerup says that it's actually a time of renewal now for the Left.

Gunter Minnerup: I think it would be ludicrous to expect that adjustments to these changes and an intellectual, pragmatic, and political responses to this new climate of the 1990s would appear overnight; it is a question of almost rebirth, and this relaunch, or rebirth I think, is what is really the big issue as we enter the 21st century: how to revive a popular movement against capitalism, a radical movement, a radical anti-systematic anti-capitalist movement which while on one hand preserving what was best about the Social Democratic and Communist traditions of this first wave, also is capable of resuscitating the radicalism, the fundamentalism of the early phase of that movement in the new setting, the protests against the WTO in Seattle, then the World Bank in Washington, and who knows very soon in Australia, in Melbourne, are just the tip of the iceberg of this.

Tom Morton: You've been listening to Background Briefing. Our Co-ordinating producer is Linda Mcginnis; Technical Operation on today's program was by Mark Don; Research was by Paul Hughgenson and the readings were by Justin Monjo. Background Briefing's Executive Producer is Kirsten Garret. I'm Tom Morton.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s164552.htm