According to a NASA-sponsored study released last year, the collapse of the global economy is likely within the next decade or two. The reasons for this are manifold, include everything from the tendency for the rate of profit within the global economy to fall as the natural environment degenerates and capitalism loses the ability to exploit natural resources ‘on the cheap,’ to the decline of the petrodollar system which since the early 1970s has made the continued vitality of the US economy contingent on the continuing flow of oil — and the oil, as we all know, is running out.
Despite its apocalyptic overtones, and the inevitable instability to which it must inevitably give rise (hopefully for no longer than the short to medium term), the collapse of the global capitalist economy also has the potential to create opportunities for democratization in the aftermath of neoliberalism and corporatism — nowhere more so than in the workplace.
As documentaries such as The Take and Zanon: The Heart of the Factory demonstrate, enterprises left idle as a result of economic distress can be collectivized in a post-capitalist environment and reorganized to be run on a cooperative, economically democratic basis, such egalitarian initiatives being established on a piecemeal basis amidst adverse circumstances rather than as the result of mass movements based on prescriptive ideology as per traditional party-based conceptions.
As it stands today however, such potentially empowering responses tend to escape our awareness, as do the issues with which they are associated, as some of our prior assumptions about the world that feed into them go unquestioned. We remain unprepared for what look increasingly to be certainties. We need then to go back a few steps.
Sustainability and survival requires justice
Addressing the problem of the relationship between fairness and survival in Australian society today is no simple task; as the gap between rich and poor widens, the general thrust of Australian society is towards inequality and injustice. Considering how closely social justice and democracy are aligned, the parallel decline of both comes as little surprise. During the French Revolution the champions of revolutionary democracy were also champions of equality, because they knew the two were and are inextricably linked. Monopolies of wealth presented a threat to democracy because they created imbalances of power between haves and have-nots; with deeper pockets, the haves could more easily dominate the political process. The deeper their pockets became, the more completely could they effect that domination.
With the advent of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood towards the end of the nineteenth century, the worst fears of the French revolutionaries began to be realized, as legal entities with the same rights as flesh and blood people established competition for protection under democratic law — already compromised by its class foundation, though discussion of such facts in a political mainstream increasingly subject to corporate power generally remains verboten.
In United States, representative democracy has always been and remains the ideal of slaveowners and landholders like James Madison, the ‘father of the Constitution,’ who described the proper function of democratic governments as being to protect ‘the minority of the opulent form the majority.’ And so it remains. Major historical events like the abolition of chattel slavery in the mid-nineteenth century only outsourced responsibility for upkeep of slaves to the slaves themselves, introducing a method of slave leasing we know today as the wage system. So completely did democracy normalize this mode of slavery that any expression of criticism or dissent directed towards it sounds sinister and alien, the stuff of fringe radicalism.
Asserting that God doesn’t exist inspires less defensive emotional reactions. Intuitively understanding that the interests of those who labour and those who lease it aren’t the same despite the much-vaunted equality before the law, workers have taken to organizing unions acting collectively in solidarity to defend our rights and advance our interests as a class; on that basis we have won major victories. Today the pendulum of class war has swung back the other way, bringing us the age of neoliberalism and all its unjust, oppressive and corrupt features, and begging the question as to where to now.
Rising above the thinking that created the problem to begin with
Albert Einstein had a good perspective on the issue. ‘We cannot solve our problems,’ he pointed out, ‘with the same thinking we used to create them.’ Einstein’s truism applies as much to the problem of neoliberalism and its social, economic and environmental consequences as to any — the challenge then being to unravel the thinking behind it. One clue in this respect appears in the form of Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life, which argues that binary thinking in the form of a Society vs. Nature dualism constitutes the basis for an objectifying mentality that values people and things only for their exploitability for profit, of a sociopathic worldview that only understands the world in terms of its serviceability to the needs of a subjectivity unrestrained by the understanding that freedom is not an absolute, but rather relative to, if not dependent on, the equal freedom of everyone else.
If the manner in which workers, women, the flora and fauna and the Earth itself are objectified and given a price tag or thrown on the scrapheap all derive from the same pathological mentality of unrestrained greed, then — that is to say, if they intersect — then the thinking behind each form of inequality and injustice is of necessity systemic one, manifesting in the present as neoliberal ideology. As the root cause of the endemic injustice and increasingly disordered nature of the world as we find it today, neoliberalism by definition revolves around the thinking that market liberalization is a moral good as a matter of definition because it promotes economic growth.
In this sense it might be said to reflect a tendency to answer questions no one is asking, or to claim possession of all the answers without a clue as to the question. If democracy is all it is made out to be, when was the meeting where we decided to treat the Earth as an infinite resource and infinite garbage can? Few besides those who benefit from it materially are asking for this, but neoliberalism operates on the basis of the pretense to the contrary.
The kind of reductionistic thinking implicit in the substitution of economic growth for progress reflects other associated myths — not least of which being the idea that society can legitimately conflated with corporate oligarchy, nothing of value being able to exist outside of it. The myth that the interests of the propertied few and those of society as a whole are identical leads inevitably to rich people tears whenever anyone tries to hold them to account for their contempt for the rights of others. Willfully confusing being criticized and being attacked, they accuse dissenters of aiding the enemies of society (‘if you think for yourself the communists win’). This kind of blame-shifting are characteristic traits arguably of an ideology designed to enable the pathological objectification of the world and everything in it for profit, constricted atop the Society vs. Nature binary.
At this juncture we might pause to consider the relationship between the issues surrounding the effect of neoliberal ideology on societies like ours here in Australia, and other, apparently unrelated phenomena such as the global moral panic over terrorism with related themes of anti-immigration and Islamophobic xenophobia that seems to provide what Stuart Hall has described as a ‘therapeutic psychodrama’ — in essence, a nice protracted distraction from other issues they do not find it convenient to address. In Melbourne, anti-globalisation protests took place a year to the day before the 9/11 attacks; there has not been once since.
This is hardly a coincidence. The political classes within the neoliberal corporatist state are hardly unaware of the problems the world is facing; on the contrary, we know for a fact that they are in the process of militarising themselves in preparation for long, permanent waves of urban disorder for which they are both the cause, given the inevitable reaction to neoliberal transfer of wealth from poor to rich within and between nations, and cure, on the basis of the terror panic and national security panic narratives that have been the stock in trade of mainstream politics for the last decade and a half.
Such developments are not unprecedented. History teaches us that, for as long as it suits the ruling classes to play at being democratic for the sake of appearances, when their class privileges are sufficiently threatened, they have a conspicuous tendency to dispense with democracy in favor of fascism. History also teaches us that when crises occur, the political class acting in the name of the privileged interests they represent always manage to find a scapegoat in whatever group they perceive as a threat. The criminialisation of eco-activism under laws introduced in the midst of the Terror Scare portends very darkly in this respect.
Given that future crises fuelled by climate change and climate change-induced economic stress, particularly in areas such as food, water and housing security, are inevitable, and given that the spiraling income inequality is all the while putting our purported representatives at the behest of the privileged moneyed interests that dominate the political process, the question is thus begged as the effectiveness of liberal climate change movements operating within the bounds of the system produced by the thinking that created the problem and continues to reproduce the conditions under which it escalates.
This appears particularly true when we consider the fact that, if neoliberal capitalism is the problem a la the Capitalocene, so is its political superstructure. In this respect, the Anthropocene concept is arguably its last gasp, proposing to understand climate change as the product of an era of human activity per se, as if all human activity should of necessity lead to climate change. A conspicuously ahistorical concept as such, the Anthropocene concept commits the greatest fallacy of environmental politics by laying blame for climate change at the feet of human nature.
This (1) sweeps under the rug the decisive role of capitalist relations of production in socializing climate change as a cost of enriching and maintaining a neo-feudal global corporate aristocracy in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed, and (2) lets both neoliberal capitalism, as well as the pathologically absolutist and binary thinking that produces it, off the hook, while (3) enabling the reproduction of the thinking and conditions that produce the problem it purports to solve, providing for it a scapegoat in the form of human nature.
To seek compromise as the liberal green movement seems to do with a neoliberal ruling political class far too enslaved or addicted to its economic and social privilege to overcome its sectional, vested interests to effectively address the question of global warming constitutes, to all intents and purposes, appeasement. When we should be distancing ourselves as much as possible from a sinking ship, such approaches promise to pull us under along with it.
Challenging vicious cycles with cycles of virtue
At this point then the crucial importance of Einstein’s observation becomes impossible to miss. The problem of injustice and inequality in Australia, as we have seen, is systemic, and global to the extent that we are part of a globalized world. Similarly, the system of neoliberal capitalism is built around a grandiose mentality rooted in a priori binary thinking and based in the pretense of having all the answers without understanding what the question is. Since we can’t effectively respond to the problem, which is systemic using the thinking that created it, lest we reproduce parts of the economic and political system that produce injustice, inequality and disorder in the name of effecting solutions to them, then as a matter of necessity we must, as noted, think outside the system, and look to virtuous cycles to combat the vicious cycles that perpetuate the thinking behind inequality and social injustice.
These must of necessity prioritise the task at hand ahead of our subjective emotional attachment to prior assumptions that, while convenient in the present to the extent that they demand nothing from us in terms of reflection, contribute nothing constructive and perpetuate the conditions that make injustice possible. Prescriptive strategies are bound to fail insofar as they would rely on traditional forms of implementing policy, and thus fail to address the problem at its source in failing to acknowledge the intersection of the dynamics behind social injustice and inequality in the system itself.
Such virtuous cycles must studiously avoid reproduce the thinking we’re trying to overcome by establishing and maintaining, insofar as possible, a basic harmony between means and outcomes — in the first place by acknowledging that the latter are determined by the former. A great lesson from past failures is to be a found in using authoritarian means in the name of libertarian ends and achieving authoritarian outcomes; in this respect we have a clear choice to learn from the past, or continue repeating it. To take but a few of the most obvious examples, traditional small-l liberals and laborites trying to have their cake and eat it too have been flanked, encircled and routed by right wing taking advantage of the more conspicuous shortcomings of representative democracy via moral panicking over immigration and terrorism. Having sold its soul to neoliberalism, federal Labor is now in terminal decline. History will repeat itself when the Greens manage the same, as it has in Germany where they are now regarded as ‘neoliberals on bikes.’
For its part, the far left often leave the impression that its stock in trade are alienated roles of permanent protest at the fringes of the electoral cycle, and that they are terrified of working class autonomy, hung up on their legacy of reproducing the autocracy they sought to overcome in Russian Tsarism. Where they manage to avoid this pitfall, they often close off into ideologically pure ghettos that perpetually degenerate into internal spats over identity politics. The points at which organized groups get over their attachment to the line laid down by the party or informal clique and start focusing on what they have in common are all too few.
Thus where party politics and anti-politics ghettoes are concerned, we should neither put all our eggs in one basket or hedge our bets on mainstream politics being able to deal decisively with the root causes of social injustice or effect social, economic or climate justice over the longer term. In the end there is no justice, just us.
Consistency between means and ends
Basic consistency then between means and outcomes is the practical basis for the freedom to articulate our own independent thinking and action, to assert for ourselves our own individual needs as social and economic actors, while defending our right and accepting our responsibility to exercise control over the conditions of our work and lives (as opposed to giving ourselves over to authoritarianism for the sake of trying to dodge responsibility for the consequences of our actions).
The point merits laboring for the sake of thoroughness: either the strategies we employ retain adaptability as a key facet, or they services prior assumptions and reproduce the thinking that creates the problem to begin with. While we can hardly ignore mainstream politics, we must keep things in perspective by remembering that if we do face concerted class warfare from the global corporate oligarchy, maybe fact the left hasn’t figured out that it needs to stop reproducing the thinking it’s trying to overcome goes some way towards accounting for how far the situation has gotten away from us.
On that note, and given everything we have already looked at so far, what has worked the best to improve the lives of average Australians? Surely it has been unions. With neoliberalism ascendant, and the global corporate oligarchy using democratic language to associate traditional democratic norms with neoliberal economic fundamentalism and smear dissidents as democracy haters while perpetrating concerted class warfare, it is unions and not the political parties beholden to it that have provided us with our greatest protections.
We spend so much time thinking about and trying to reform and rebuild politics; why so little time thinking about and trying to reform and rebuild unions? The time and energy invested would last well beyond the end of the next election campaign, much less to say beyond the end of the global economy. As the documentaries referred to above indicate, they may well be one of the few civil structures able to reorganize and continue production once no longer a viable source of profit.
Becoming the facts of a cooperative post-capitalism
Paul Mason, writing on post-capitalist tendencies evident in the present such as collaborative production and the shared economy, points to some of the directions where opportunities for developing cooperative and collectivist elements of a post-capitalist social and economic order might follow. Such might include Parecon, libertarian municipalism, urban permaculture, self-management strategies drawn from syndicalism and council communism, and internet-based direct democracy — some elements of which can be developed in the present at a grassroots level in and around the union movement, here in Australia and internationally.
This we can do without the dubious benefits of traditional political approaches, whose attempts to reform the problem using the thinking that created it has left those embracing them powerless to deal with the point at which the crises they beget intersect as a totality. This tendency constitutes the appropriate focus for those of us concerned with fairness in Australia; in the day and age of climate change, neoliberalism and increasing social instability and volatility, the question of fairness in Australia is a question of fairness globally and intersectionally. Responses that fail to take that fact into account, while possibly easier to grapple with in the immediate term, will ultimately only perpetuate the thinking that created the problems to begin with.