Open Australia
By Lindsay Tanner
Pluto Press, 1999
248 pp., $24.95
Review by Allen Myers
Since its crushing electoral defeat in 1996, the Labor Party has been seeking to revive its image with the voters. Part of this involves projecting the idea that it is dealing seriously and thoughtfully with the issues of the day. Hence there has been a flurry of literary activity by the more intellectually inclined ALP MPs.
Last year we had Mark Latham's thoroughly wretched Civilising Global Capital. After Latham's turgid jargon, which served to obscure the poverty of the thought involved, Lindsay Tanner's Open Australia is almost refreshing.
There is none of Latham's effort to awe and bamboozle the reader with convoluted sentences and sheer wordiness in Tanner. For that mercy, I am grateful.
In content, however, Tanner's book really has no more to recommend it. It presents no systematic analysis of the state and direction of motion of Australian society. In place of a coherent program for solving social problems, it projects a tub-thumping nationalism that at best evades real issues.
Globalisation
"Globalisation", as in Latham's book, is the underlying theme and justification for policy prescriptions. Also as with Latham, precisely <197 or even approximately <197> what is meant by it is never explained. Instead, Tanner tries to suggest what is happening with lists of changes that at times seem interminable. Here is a typical excerpt:
"The nature and structure of work is [sic] changing. Within three decades the proportion of jobs which are full-time has fallen from 90 per cent to just over 75 per cent. This change has been driven by companies' need for more flexible work forces, the rapid influx of women into paid employment and the massive increase in participation in higher education, which has generated much greater demand for part-time and temporary employment."
It is impossible here even to be sure what is asserted as cause and effect — let alone discovering any evidence or reasoned argument for the assertion. There are pages and pages of such breathless gee-whizzery which explain nothing but are offered as the motivation for policies.
Capitalism has always revolutionised productive relations, and therefore also the social relations based upon them. So pointing to the fact of change doesn't tell anyone very much. We need to look at the specific causes of particular changes, at forces which might counteract those causes in the future and at the effects those changes are having and will have. Tossing around buzz words like "globalisation" only conceals the need to deal with specifics.
According to Tanner, we are experiencing "a complete transformation of human economic activity engendered largely by sweeping technological advancement". Therefore, he concludes, we shouldn't be too concerned about economic rationalist policies, which are "essentially a response to these changes, not their cause" and "in part are unavoidable".
But technological change by itself explains nothing. What matters is who controls change, how it is used and who benefits. Economic rationalism is a political project of the ruling class to put the burden of change on the working class and secure the benefits of change for itself. It is therefore of prime political importance for workers to oppose economic rationalism, and not to regard it as an unavoidable consequence of "change".
Tanner's talk about "a complete transformation of human economic activity" taking place at present is grotesque exaggeration. Technological change, on its own, never has and never will bring about such a transformation, which would necessarily involve a change in social relations. Information technology, for example, is not changing the relationship between bosses and workers into one between equals; rather the existence of the boss-worker relationship shapes the way in which technological change occurs.
Technological change is creating or strengthening the potential for the kind of transformation that Tanner pretends is happening now, but capitalist relations are an obstacle to that transformation. This is why it is absurd to talk about "technology" pure and simple changing society. But his absurdity is deliberate: it is a way of concealing the reality of class struggle.
'Individualism' and alienation
Tanner's treatment of history is no better than his handling of the present. There is a distinct current in the book of attempting to undermine the legacy of the 1960s social radicalisation; it suggests a "leftist" preparing to move openly to the right under the excuse of "older but wiser now".
What Tanner attempts to do here is to blame the social movements of the '60s for many of the problems created by capitalism in the '90s. Thus, after listing various forms of alienation and social exclusion, he claims:
"At the core of these problems lie extraordinarily powerful forces of individualism generated by technological and economic change and magnified by the social revolution of the sixties. Society has gradually reorganised itself along far more individualistic lines, with widespread negative social consequences."
Elsewhere he argues with a logic that Fred Nile could be proud of: "Family breakdown, crime, drug abuse, suicide, gambling and juvenile misbehaviour have all increased considerably since the late sixties".
The immediate manifestations of social breakdown are greed and other forms of selfish, antisocial behaviour — not "individualism", which can just as well include "non-conformist" rebellion against aspects of such behaviour. Alienation and social exclusion long preceded the '60s radicalisation, which was in many respects a revolt against such antisocial phenomena as war and rampant racism and sexism.
We can reproach the rebels of the '60s for not having succeeded in abolishing the source of alienation — capitalism — but it's a bit rich for a defender of capitalism to blame the '60s for antisocial phenomena which capitalism has been causing for as long as it's been in existence.
Nationalism
One antisocial phenomenon that has increased since the late 1960s is a malignant nationalism. It has increased because the ruling class consciously uses it to undermine some of the gains in political and social consciousness of the '60s radicalisation.
Open Australia is unabashedly nationalist: the first chapter is titled "The Battle For National Identity". "A vibrant national identity is an elusive but important part of achieving genuine social and economic progress", Tanner declares in one of those sentences that make you wonder if he could say it without blushing if he had to say it in public instead of typing it on his computer.
The same chapter declares that the "struggle for Australia's soul is being played out largely" around three issues: Aboriginal reconciliation, multiculturalism and the republic. This is in fact a good indication of what the Labor Party — "left" and right — stands for: a feel-good nationalism that ministers to our Australian "soul" while the Australian ruling class picks our Australian pockets.
"Unfortunately for Australia, no government headed by John Howard is ever likely to convey a national image that is cool, sexy and exciting", Tanner declares. Under a government that includes Kim Beazley and Lindsay Tanner, the unemployed can eat our sexy national image.
The other side of this nationalism is making "Australia" more competitive — a theme throughout the book. The problem is that it's very hard for the ALP even to sound different from the Coalition when it comes to beating the drums of international competition.
Tanner does his best to insist that "more competitive" doesn't mean just lower wages and more down-sizing by writing profusely about the importance of education, but it's not very convincing — he is constrained, after all, by what the last ALP government did to make tertiary education less accessible.
Policies
Space does not permit detailed discussion of specific policies advocated by Tanner. There would be not much point in such discussion even if space were not a consideration.
The policies themselves are a fairly predictable mix of the good, the bad and the indifferent. But even the best of them are largely meaningless because they are presented on their own, with no mention of the economic and political forces that would have to be overcome in order to implement them.
For example, a long section on water problems in the Murray-Darling basin is written as though the major cause of the problems has been ignorance, and proposals for improvements are advanced without mentioning possible resistance from agribusiness and the cotton industry.
However, it is perhaps worthwhile mentioning Tanner's remarks on the need to democratise the ALP. While it's indisputable that a bit of democracy in the Labor Party would be an improvement, a little recollection of history is useful here.
The stamping out of every even insignificant aspect of membership control of the ALP occurred in the late '70s and early '80s — the last time Labor felt the need to reinvent itself, after the election defeats of 1975 and 1977. Removing any prospect of democratic control was intended to assure Australian capitalists that Labor could serve capital's needs without being hampered by resistance in its ranks. If the ranks had to go — and many of them did — Labor's leaders considered that a small price to pay.
It's a memory worth keeping in mind as the latest reinvention of Labor proceeds.