[csaa-forum] Cultural studies and left politics: the state of play

[Terry Flew]

Jasons, and other CSAA Summer program participants

Returning to Australian politics, there has been a recurring problem of 
conflating a dislike of aspects of the Howard government with the 
assumption that people would vote for the ALP as an alternative government 
(or at least preference them if they voted for the Greens), pretty much 
regardless of its policies. This was one of the problems with the "Not 
Happy, John" movement, along with its Radio National tendencies. It assumed 
that people were sufficiently angry with Howard on things like the 
"Scrafton memo" to vote against them, and that confidence in an alternative 
government was irrelevant. A change of government in Australia would 
require the Radio National listeners and the Australian Idol viewers to 
find common sources of discontent and common yearnings for an alternative, 
and it is unlikely that inter-governmental memos will do it.

More generally, the Federal ALP went to the 2004 election with some real 
rubbish policies, which all now seem to be eminently ditchable now they are 
in opposition. While 100% of the blame for this has been sheeted home to 
Mark Latham by his enemies within the ALP, you just have to note the gap 
between the policies Latham has advocated in his own books and the 2004 ALP 
Platform to get a sense of the problem.

And this is not just a problem with the 'bum-crack vote' (also known as the 
aspirational self-employed). The policy for Higher Education that Labor 
went to the election with was rubbish, and everyone who has responsibility 
for a budget of any sort within a university knew it. The idea that you 
could simultaneously reverse the 25% HECS increase, reimburse the 
universities that introduced it, abolish up-front fees, increase choice and 
diversity in the sector, and increase public funding to some pre-1996 
level, was impossible, and a lot of people knew it. Such a platform doesn't 
matter if you are the Australian Greens, and no-one expects you to form a 
government, but for Labor it: (1) indicated how far they had drifted from 
the fiscal policy rigours of the Hawke-Keating years while in opposition; 
and (2) gave fuel to the fire that Latham may embark on some kind of 
Whitlam-era sending spree that would definitely be bad for interest rates 
for a mortgage/credit card charged-up electorate.

Can cultural studies academics come up with some better answers? Who knows?

Would they be asked? Probably not. And this is not only due to the Andrew 
Bolt factor, but also to the retreat of the ALP federally to its trade 
union/party apparatchik heartland, at precisely the time when more and more 
people are talking about the value of networks in the knowledge economy.

Best
terry


At 05:14 PM 7/01/2005 +1100, you wrote:
>Padding up late on a friday afternoon, an expendable nightwatchman strides 
>purposefully and optimistically onto the wicket...
>
>Interesting that Jason's account of the UK Labour party in the 1990s 
>sounds eerily familiar
>
>"Thatcher won three terms because the opposition was so weak and clearly 
>the mass of people would have been worse off under its policies. Voters 
>realised this and voted for the lesser of two evils. The Labour party in 
>the 80s refused to swallow this and blamed everyone else, especially the 
>media, for their own failures."
>
>Remove the 'u' from the party's name, move the action to the antipodes and 
>fast forward a couple of decades and hey presto, a diagnosis of the 
>problem that the list spent so long discussing in November emerges.
>
>Clearly the electorate here in Oz didn't buy an injunction to read to 
>their children as "new ideas for a better society".
>
>
>
>Jason Jacobs <j.jacobs at griffith.edu.au> wrote:
>Dear Terry et al,
>
>Just to correct - or really nuance one point in Terry's last post. While 
>the cultural studies crew in the UK certainly did take Thatcherism 
>seriously they actually mystified rather than clarified its popular 
>appeal. First was Stuart Hall's nonsensical idea that Thatcher and her 
>crowd appealed to a sensibility of popular authoritarianism, that somehow 
>- using some strange mystical power - the masses were basically hypnotised 
>by a market-driven law n' order agenda. (Note that Thatcher and her 
>cronies never dared go as far as the current New Labour in its 
>authoritarianism.) This was simply wrong - Thatcher won three terms 
>because the opposition was so weak and clearly the mass of people would 
>have been worse off under its policies. Voters realised this and voted for 
>the lesser of two ev ils. The Labour party in the 80s refused to swallow 
>this and blamed everyone else, especially the media, for their own failures.
>Secondly, Marxism Today launched its equally nonsensical 'post-Fordist' 
>ideology (Jacques, Hall, Hebdige et al) which was really an apologetic 
>acceptance of the market and Thatcher's 'there is no alternative.' Forget 
>the fact that only a minority of Western manufacturing was ever 'Fordist' 
>or that the emerging Asian economies - funded by Western investment - were 
>using precisely the manufacturing techniques that the MT crew were saying 
>were obsolete - what was revealed was the isolation of the left, 
>projecting their own small worlds onto the real one. The success of New 
>Labour depended on its major players having successfully internalised the 
>failure of the left over the past 30 years and turning to so-called 
>'managerial' small-scale (read politically empty) approaches to society 
>and its problems. Even so the Blair 'landslide' of 1997 disguised the fact 
>that Blair did not win as many votes as the grey John Major in 1992. With 
>no vision for the future its leaders increasingly turned to the 
>international stage in order to project their moral authority. Note that 
>yesterday both Blair and chancellor Brown talked about Africa and solving 
>its problems. Well the West has been meddling in Africa for 200 years and 
>I think it's time the African nations did without the moral wand of Europe 
>or America.
>
>I guess my point is that the post-war left - in its many national and 
>international inflections - has been characterised by a marked inability 
>to see its own shortcomings. Inspiring the electorate with new ideas for a 
>better society (hang on, I'm just fetching my kum-by-ah guitar) would be a 
>start. But that seems to have been left in the too hard basket for now.
>
>Jason
>
>(who's getting lunch for  three kids and not in his office at all)
>
>Dr Jason Jacobs
>Senior Lecturer
>School of Arts, Media and Culture
>Griffith University
>Nathan Campus
>Queensland 4111
>Australia
>Phone: (07) 3875 5164
>Fax: (07) 3875 7730
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Dr. Terry Flew
Senior Lecturer and Discipline Head, Media and Communication
Acting Head of Communication Design
Course Co-ordinator, Creative Industries postgraduate coursework degree program
Reviews Editor, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies

Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology

GPO Box 2434
Brisbane Queensland 4001

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Phone: 61-07-3864 8188
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Email: t.flew at qut.edu.au
Research profile: 
http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/people/staff/next.jsp?userid=flew&secid=Introduction

CRICOS No: 00213J

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