There are times when living in Australia is a bit like
living in a bubble, sequestered from the massive economic and political
convulsions that have marked 2011. It is the kind of situation that allows
prominent progressive bloggers, like Greg Jericho (Grog’s Gamut) and Scott
Steel (Possum Comitatus), to spew venom and ridicule at the modest run of
#occupy protests that have hit capital cities in the last week. Sure, they
argue, things may be really bad in the United States where Occupy Wall Street
has become the epicentre of a rapidly growing and multifaceted social movement,
but there’s no excuse for the kind of nutty, far Left indulgence of the
Australian iteration.
Don’t these protesters realise how lucky we are, how good
economic management by the government and RBA (with help from sound financial
sector regulation), has prevented the kind of policy failures that have led to
economic catastrophe and a 1 percent — 99 percent scenario in the US? Jericho
has also made fun of
occupiers needing multiple working groups to organise themselves, and
compares them to Tea Party style “nutters”. Meanwhile, Possum (see his Twitter feed) has been livid that
the protesters haven’t come up with concrete policy demands or blueprints
—fulminating about their protest being “ideologically” (rather than
“empirically”) driven and detracting from the hard policy slog of reformist
politicians and bureaucrats. Their views are not so far removed from that of
the Wall Street elite, which
has privately rubbished the movement as “unsophisticated”.
That such vitriol is being delivered by ostensibly
progressive writers means the Right’s job is that much easier. Of course, it
hasn’t stopped The Australian taking
the argument to another level, not only reminding its readers how great
liberal capitalism is but seemingly taking inspiration from Bertolt Brecht’s
line, “Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and
elect another?” when writing off the protesters’ grievances:
When protesters suggest 1 per
cent of us run the other 99 per cent, demand “human need instead of corporate
greed” or claim we don't have a “real democracy”, we ought to listen. Not
because they are right but because we should be concerned that people feel so
disengaged from the systems that support them.
Quite what this disengagement represents remains
unexplained, and it is to this that I want to turn, because in their
reactionary way The Australian’s leader writer is closer to
the mark than some of #occupy’s left-leaning critics.
The problem with the Jericho-Possum type of analysis is that
it seeks to find the cause of the US protests pretty much solely in the level of hardship being visited on that
country’s population by the Great Recession. Therefore, while protests are
understandable (even if misguided) there, in Australia they are meaningless.
Yet while hardship has been a major factor driving the rapid growth and spread
of the American movement, drawing in large contingents of ordinary working
people of different ethnic backgrounds, it cannot be understood as simply or mainly
a response to some absolute level of immiseration. It is a movement that
specifically argues these problems are the result not of bad policy choices or
particular political parties; rather, the problem is a whole system of elite
rule, which has subordinated politics and government to a tiny minority’s
interests. The idea of the “1 percent” draws on specific statistics about
patterns of US wealth distribution over the past few decades, but it is also
clearly meant as a descriptor of what Marxists would call a “ruling class”.
Thus it is a non
sequitur to quote statistics showing how much better off Australians are
than Americans in terms of inequality or poverty — precisely because the
#occupy movement is opposed to a set of power relations that systematically create inequality and
poverty. Then again it is worrying that progressive critics are trying to make
such a positive case about inequality and poverty here while the
top 20 percent own 60 times the wealth of the bottom 20 percent, and when
there has been a
lot of worrying data released as part of Anti-Poverty Week. What exactly is
it they are defending?
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| Occupy Sydney general assembly |
Having participated in Occupy Sydney on four occasions for a
few hours at a time, I am yet to meet a single activist who thinks that
Australian conditions are identical to those in the US, but almost everyone
sees these as part of systemic global processes that are stacked against
ordinary people. Of course the depth of the crisis and its local consequences
have played a role in shaping the size, social breadth and politics of
different “take the square” movements internationally — for example, the high
rates of unemployment among tertiary graduates in the US and Spain, or the
militancy of the unions in Greece. But the logic is the same, a reaction to
globalised neoliberal capitalism in crisis.
The social basis of a
global movement
US foreign policy realist Stephen Walt, hardly a fringe
radical, describes
well the factors that have led to the rapid spread of occupations despite
the differing conditions in various countries. He lists: (1) Economic
globalisation causing growing inequality between and within countries, (2) new technologies
allowing much more rapid spread of information, and (3) the “incompetence
and/or corruption of governing elites … and the tendency of governments to do
too much to protect wealthy and powerful interests and not enough to help
ordinary people”. Paraphrasing a colleague, he adds that, “the present
combination of economic inequality and political gridlock is fatal to the
proper functioning of democratic orders”.
Similarly, the economist Nouriel Roubini has
reflected on the wave of revolt sweeping the globe in 2011 as resulting
from growing inequality:
Any economic model that does not
properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy. Unless
the relative economic roles of the market and the state are rebalanced, the
protests of 2011 will become more severe, with social and political instability
eventually harming long-term economic growth and welfare.
Such problems are clearly not amenable to steady-as-she-goes
policy wonkery, not even the well-meaning variety. The pattern among all
Western governments, Australia’s included, is not gradualist amelioration of
poverty and inequality, but its intensification. Sure we are not suffering a
program of attacks on ordinary people of the sort
being rammed through by the Greek government at the behest of Eurozone
bankers and financiers, but the
Gillard government’s agenda has been one of cuddling up to mining
billionaires, deferring to big polluters, and seeking to inflict punitive
measures on welfare recipients and Indigenous people. A funny kind of reformist
social democracy, this one.
To understand what is really happening it’s more apt to turn
to the words of Antonio Gramsci, which Left Flank has quoted before to describe
the current conjuncture:
In every country the process is
different, although the content is the same. And the content is the crisis of
the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has
failed in some major political undertaking, for which it has requested, or
forcibly extracted, the consent of broad masses … or because huge masses ...
have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity,
and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically
formulated, add up to a revolution. A “crisis of authority” is spoken of: this
is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the state. (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p.
210)
In such a crisis, the description of politics as “the art of
the possible” loses its meaning, precisely because the institutions limiting
the horizon of what is possible (parties, governments, bureaucracies) are
incapable of playing this role, incapable of channelling discontent into safe
and passive cul-de-sacs. Those who
seek the reasonable middle ground — who chastise radicals for being dangerous
dreamers instead of hard-headed pragmatists, who pine for a return to serious elite
policy-making, who shake their heads at governance by crisis and panic — are
victims of a situation where the
centre cannot hold.
The protesters occupying public space may still only have
the passive support of large sections of the Australian population, but they
have done something very important — given a voice and shape, however inchoate,
to a new culture of resistance and rebellion. By doing so they have also
exposed a crisis of authority from which our rulers are no longer immune. Today’s heavy-handed response by the police in Melbourne
should not be mistaken as a sign that the state is happily reasserting control. Similar
attacks on occupations in Madrid, Barcelona, Athens and New York have only
strengthened the resolve of protesters to build their movement, and broadened
their support. In each case sections of the commentariat opined that this was it for the movement, but in each case they were proven wrong because the social reasons for the protests ran deep.
Comparing
the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 with today, The Independent’s Andreas Whittam Smith argues: “There are two
characteristics of a pre-revolutionary situation — a valuable insight widely shared
[the intolerable gap that has developed between rich and poor] and the
endurance of those who hold it,” before adding, “We have the first, but it is
not yet clear whether we have the second.”
The coming days, weeks and months will answer that question, both overseas and in Australia.
