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Book Review
| Nathan Hollier (ed.), Ruling Australia: the Power, Privilege and Politics of the New Ruling Class, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2004. pp. xli + 206. $29.95 paper.
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| In the aftermath of the 2004 federal election these essays are a useful reminder of what Bob Connell refers to as 'the great secret' about neo-liberalism: that it is not popular. These essays were written to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of Connell's book Ruling Class, Ruling Culture, and were initially presented at a conference at the Melbourne Trades Hall organised by Overland magazine. They engage with the theme of neo-liberalism as the way in which the ruling class now rules. They ask why, if there is no alternative to the reign of market forces, are so many foot-soldiers required to impose this view of the world. |
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The more optimistic of the contributors, like Verity Burgmann, see evidence of community resistance to the hegemony of neo-liberalism, despite the takeover of the Labor Party by 'Moloch's Little Mates', the decline of working-class organisations and the pervasive nature of spin and surveillance. Mark Davis, on the other hand, feels there has been a failure of sustaining narratives on the Left, together with a failure of organisation, to counter 'the armies of compliant journalists; the proselytising politicians; the legions of think-tanks'. |
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Bob Connell contributes a characteristically elegant account of the last 25 years of Australian political history in 'Moloch Mutates'. He sketches the decline of an ethically driven capitalist politics after Malcolm Fraser and the weakening of an ethos of public service. He describes how public sector management was absorbed into the corporate elite by a 'combination of intimidation and bribery', known as performance incentives. The public service was thus neutralised as an alternative to market rule. While elegiac about the huge expansion of the logic of greed sold as a moral triumph, Connell is also looking for sources of resistance and finds them in places as diverse as the Sea of Hands, Mardi Gras, ethical investment and the Ernies, He calls for resistance not just in terms of critique, but in terms of utopian thinking about alternatives, about ethics in fact, which was very unfashionable on the Left 25 years ago. Connell tells us that both neo-liberals and third-wayers have been at pains to discredit utopian thinking, forgetting that this was also the case for both classical and Althusserian Marxists — one reason why the Left did not have a compelling narrative to offer as an alternative to the market. |
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A splendid essay about the ethnography of ruling-class men is contributed by Mike Donaldson and Scott Poynting. 'Time of their Lives' is about clubs and restaurants and golf; about giving orders for 'drowning the kittens' (laying off employees); about the lack of distinction between work and leisure; about work as a multi-level game or gamble; and about retirement as an unreal concept when it means giving up ruling. |
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Damien Cahill also has a fine chapter about the 'reorganising of common sense' and the nuts and bolts of the drive to create neo-liberal hegemony. This covers the creation of new organisations, including the free-market think-tanks, their sources of funding and their access to the mass media, where their political identity is rarely revealed, preserving the illusion of neutral comment. Cahill explores how the lack of popularity of the neo-liberal project required the grafting onto it of neo-conservative discourses of threat, fear and 'family values'. He ends with the insights he explores more fully in Us and Them: Anti-Elitism in Australia concerning the way in which the Right has adopted the language of class to demonise the Left. Any advocacy of restraints upon market forces has been delegitimised as the self-seeking of a new class with a vested interest in the expansion of the public sector and the spending of other people's taxes. |
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While there is much of interest in this collection, it could also have done with more editing. It is unfortunate that Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire is misquoted in the Introduction to give it an opposite meaning from the original and that Bob Connell's name is misspelled three times and Phil Raskall's once in Chapter 7. Aberrations such as 'creditability' and 'en toto' make an appearance in Chapter 5. Later Rupert Murdoch is credited with buying the Sunday Times in 1956, which would have made him very precocious (in fact it was 1981). Mark Davis' splendid peroration at the end of the book is marred by the misspelling of 'proselytising'. Still, the message gets through that politics is not over, as shown by the amount of political organisation required for neo-liberal rule, and that the Left in turn must reinvent political agency. |
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| Australian National University |
MARIAN SAWER | |
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