Once the Australian working class was oppressed by big business. Today it suffers under the yoke of actors and actresses.

Is it just me, or have others noticed that the Liberal Party under Tony Abbott has become the party of class war, class envy and class hate?

In an astounding rhetorical trick Cate Blanchett is attacked as a symbol of wealth and power for speaking out on climate change. Yet dollar for dollar, she barely rates against genuinely wealthy Australians such as mining heiress Gina Rinehart who is a generous supporter of the climate denial movement.

Yet this is not new. Conservatives first discovered the working class in about January or February 1980 when Ronald Reagan's campaign for the US presidency began in earnest. Reagan's strategists found they could harvest the votes of ordinary Americans by attacking 'the elites' and appealing to 'traditional values'. Low paid and unemployed Republican voters became known as 'Reagan Democrats'.

The US neo-conservatives developed a whole theory which blamed everything wrong in the US on 'the new class', a vague, contemptuous description of rival intellectuals who supported the welfare state and civil rights. In Britain, the Thatcher's Tories attacked 'the chattering classes'.

When John Howard was Opposition leader (as Tony Abbott is now) he attacked 'powerful vested interests' which crushed the battlers in Australia. 'The families battling to give their children a break, hardworking employees battling to get ahead, small business battling to survive, older Australians battling to preserve their dignity,' he said.

Who were the vested interests who oppressed Howard's battlers'? It was not greedy banks or ruthless employers. It was 'chardonnay sipping, inner-city elites', shadowy, all-purpose targets of hate.

The anti-elitist rhetoric which has swamped political discourse in Australia has been studied by a number of scholars. Two academics, Sean Scalmer and Murray Goot of Macquarie University examined several Australian newspapers, focussing especially on columnists such as the Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman and the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt.

Anti-elite culture warriors, they found, resorted to Australians' well-known sympathy for the underdog. This was the basis for a rhetorical trick which portrayed a distorted image of the liberal-Left as an extraordinarily powerful and all conquering force. Its critics, often rich and rightwing, were embattled and intimidated.

Apart from allowing powerful voices to play the victim, this populist discourse has a sinister side, they said. It debated issues with extreme and violent language. Those with different opinions were enemies, not adversaries in debate. Scalmer and Goot argued that 'The differences between adversaries are tactical; those that separate enemies are moral. Enemies ... are evil. Unlike adversaries, they cannot be tolerated, only destroyed.'

Today this political rhetoric is fostered by the US Tea Party and climate deniers world wide.

To those with a long memory the seizure of anti-elite rhetoric by the Right has a funny, familiar ring. Simply put, it is a distorted echo of old-style Labor rhetoric which strongly identified with the underdog and challenged big business. The Right's rhetoric is the result of a clever ideological smash and grab raid on the rhetoric of the Left.

In her book , Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, political analyst Judith Brett from La Trobe University argued that the genius of conservatives like John Howard was that they simultaneously advanced their policies in a way that challenged Labor's core historic identity.

This identity historically grew from the poor and the working class which railed against the power of money and privilege. The antidote was the collective power of ordinary Australians, expressed in trade unions or in progressive governments.

In recent years Labor took this support for granted and desperately sought respectability. The price of respectability was that it dropped its so-called class war rhetoric. Tony Abbott was happy to scoop up the bullets and fire them back at their original owner, now disarmed.

Today the fire-power of money and privilege still exists. It was exercised brutally by mining industry's campaign against the mining tax. Yet Labor was paralysed rhetorically. It dared not use 'class war' rhetoric, even against an industry that employs very few people and whose profits largely disappear overseas.

If Labor wants to stop being used as a punching bag it could do worse than take off the gloves and start talking about the real consequences for ordinary people when climate change begins to hit. The rich will protect themselves against its effects and Labor's battlers will suffer the most.

Ordinary Australians oppressed by actors? That's Theatre of the Absurd.

___________________________

His book, produced by a major British publisher, appears at an auspicious time. The free market and the dogma of deregulation have been discredited, and in the mass media there has been talk of 'the crisis of capitalism' and references to Marx. As a consequence of the global financial crisis many hope that the radical decline of the left will now go into reverse. Eric Aarons doesn't comment on such hopes but it is clear that he thinks that a profound theoretical re-thinking is necessary rather than any movement 'back to Marx'.

In some ways the book's title is misleading. The framework of 'Hayek versus Marx' suggests that the author (and readers) will fall on one side or the other. In Eric Aarons' view, both thinkers have deep flaws in their theories as well as valuable insights. The great strength of Hayek was to explain why market mechanisms have virtues which are indispensable in a complex economy and society. He saw markets as a device for the rapid sending of information via prices through a network. On this level, compared to alternatives such as a central planning, they are useful and flexible devices for signaling to producers what their buyers wanted and in what quantity. On this insight Hayek erected a vast intellectual system in which all other social, moral and cultural values had to be subordinated or discarded in favour the market and its central value: freedom.

Marx's great strength was something about which Marx himself said little but which imbued all his writing. Marx's ethical values lead him to see the extraordinary injustices that flowed from inequalities of wealth and the 19th century system of industry. Yet these values are buried within his work and instead Marx tried to erect a scientific theory of social development and to discover the laws of history.

The flaws in Marx's world view were not simply wrong predictions but go deeply to his methodology. Marx argued in Capital that history changed according to 'natural laws' and tendencies which worked 'with iron necessity towards inevitable results'. On this basis he predicted the immiserisation of the working class. The labour theory of value and his concept of the falling rate of profit have also been shown to simply be wrong, according to Eric Aarons.

Hayek's methodology is also flawed. Hayek posited the existence of sets of rules which, if followed by societies, enabled them to flourish. As Eric Aarons points out Hayek never simply and clearly identified these rules but they tend to be those commercially based rules which allow markets to function with little restraint. Interference to shape the spontaneous evolution of markets thus becomes the philosophical equivalent of sacrilegious acts 'against nature'.

Hayek's proof of this idea was to assert that it was analogous to Darwinian evolution through natural selection. One of the consequences of this approach is that if society has 'evolved' then it becomes meaningless to talk about whether that social order is just or unjust; it simply is. Hence one of Hayek's pet hates -- the notion of 'social justice'. But as Aarons says this is pure assertion and not backed by any factual evidence.

As his introduction suggests, this book represents the latest stage of a personal quest that began in the early 1970s when Eric Aarons realized that the theoretical apparatus inherited from Marx and Lenin was inadequate and flawed. His conclusions about these flaws are remarkable considering that he was a leading figure for decades in the Communist Party of Australia. Today his commitment is to rethinking a social philosophy in which traditional Left concerns find a place within a framework dominated by the political need to forestall an impending ecological crisis.

Like a number of other contemporary thinkers Eric Aarons also sees the need to discuss questions such as: what does it mean to be human, and is there a human nature. These take us back to the long time span before capitalism, indeed back to the evolution of humans from more ape-like creatures. And then to varieties of human society from the hunter gatherer society to agricultural and to modern industrial society. Like the philosopher Peter Singer, Eric Aarons rejects the widespread Marxist view that no human nature exists and that humans behavior, needs and outlook are entirely formed by their social and cultural circumstances. Such assumptions, apart from being factually wrong, he argues, fed the mistaken belief that a perfect economic system could lead to a perfect society.

The central assumption of the book is that relevant and useful theories arise from the problems posed by the objective circumstances. That expresses it rather formally. But what it means is that just as Marx responded to the objective circumstances of cataclysmic changes wrought by industrial capitalism, so we must now develop new theories in the face of the slow but relentless crisis developing around climate and sustainability. This is not to ignore the enormous concentration of wealth and the social power it brings but to acknowledge that the struggle for social equality will take place within a framework dictated by the ecological crisis.

The scope of the book is sometimes frustratingly limited. As Eric Aarons says, neither Marx nor Hayek had a developed notion of politics and both minimised its importance. Democracy was barely mentioned by either of them. This is something which will strike even adherents as surprising even staggering. Yet to understand the implications of this absence in their theories requires deeper discussion of what occurred when Marxists and neo-liberals actually gained government. Also useful would have been references to the debate on the strengths and flaws of Marx's ideas that emerged when the Left revived in the 1970s and 80s. A whole generation of Left intellectuals revived Marxism but then abandoned it in favour of other radical analyses of oppression, racism and sexism. Addressing this experience may have gained significant readers for the book.

The book takes up a number of themes which Eric Aarons has explored in recent years. One of the centrality of values and morality as the foundation of a progressive world view. The significance of this is that it implies that a comprehensive 'theory of everything' is not the foundation. Trying to ground a radical analysis in yet another creative revision of Marxism is a road to nowhere. That may sound obvious but all over the world such attempts are being made and most are not even creative re-thinkings of Marxism but rather the re-affirmation of eternal truths said to be found in orthodox Marxism.

Eric Aaron's own view that so far, no 'internally coherent and viable alterative to capitalist society' has yet been found. He believes that the single most important step 'is for every society to reverse the priority capitalism gives to individual material betterment and gain and give that priority instead to social needs'.

--------------------
David McKnight works at the Arts Faculty at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War. He can be reached on d.mcknight@unsw.edu.au

Hayek vs. Marx and today's challenges
Routledge, London and New York, 2009.

Julia Gillard's refusal to consider regulating the banks highlights the reason for Labor's malaise

THE fate of the Rudd government and Labor's dismal election results have reignited a long-running debate about the beliefs and principles that underlie Labor's policy and public statements.

The Prime Minister was joined by ANZ chief Michael Smith, who wailed about bank bashing and compared Hockey with the president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez. Along the way, Smith's bank announced a profit of $4.5 billion.

No doubt Gillard's comments were prompted partly by a belief that Hockey was an opportunist posing as the people's friend. But essentially she damned Hockey for supporting the regulation of banks. Two weeks after Hockey's call and Gillard's riposte, the debate swung in favour of Hockey. This holds a lesson for Labor.

You do not have to be a radical socialist (or even a Hansonist) to realise that banks, like many institutions in corporate Australia, wield enormous power. Australia's banking oligopoly can jack up interest rates for home owners and small businesses and the government has little recourse. Once it would have been elementary that Labor would try to formulate a policy to rein in the banks.

Rather than this, voters see Labor accusing the Coalition of the political equivalent of blasphemy for suggesting the government intervene to regulate banks. Astoundingly, this accusation comes after the lightly regulated global banks nearly dragged the world into a second Depression.

The other barb in Gillard's speech was an expression of horror at the return of populism. Both sides of politics now use this as a swear word to describe the opportunistic seizure of shallow but popular fads. But populism actually describes a political philosophy that takes the side of the little people against the powerful. It's a force that propelled Labor for many decades. And it was a resurgence of community-based populism in 2006-07 that defeated laws that favoured employers and helped elect Labor.

Rather than abhorring populism, Labor needs to revive populism, especially among blue-collar workers, based on Labor values. The absence of such a populist element meant Labor was unable lead a community campaign to defend its mining tax. The usual strategic play of seizing the middle ground and acting responsibly meant Labor was incapable of badly needed tax reform. When the obscenely wealthy launch a campaign of lies, there is no option but to fight back in populist terms.

But it is Labor's infatuation with the market that is the central problem. Twenty-five years after the arrival of the privatisation and free-market agenda a significant part of the community remains sceptical. And for good reason. Common sense and life experience have made most people suspicious of elevating self-interest to a supreme governing principle. On the other hand, appeals to the common good can strike a resonance, if carefully packaged. This sentiment is a basis for reviving Labor's popular support and giving it renewed purpose.

Yet the Labor leadership embraces a philosophy that idealises market mechanism. Some verge on free-market zealotry.

The evidence for this can be seen by its first-term plans to deliver vital public services by setting up what are called quasi-markets. These government-sponsored markets for services (education, health, aged care) will replace or modify services that put the emphasis on the common good. It's a policy revolution that is barely remarked on because the opposition agrees with its direction.

Labor's schools policy is an example of this. The MySchool website makes each school's achievements public for the purpose of creating a competitive mechanism whereby parents choose schools as part of the laws of supply and demand. Its critics argue this will produce league tables of best and worst schools and will be a form of public shaming that will undermine attempts at improvement in many public schools.

Labor's schools policy reveals a naive faith in the superiority of markets to deal not just with economics transactions but all kinds of human relationships. The great fantasy is that parents' competitive choice of itself will somehow drive quality upwards and all schools will benefit. I expand on all of this in my chapter in the recent book co-edited with Robert Manne, Goodbye to All That?.

The government is determined to apply such market-based policies much further, in health insurance, education, aged care, child care and beyond.
For example, the government's inquiry last year into health services recommends a new health insurance termed Medicare Select. Medicare Select, it says, will involve greater consumer choice of doctors and of health insurance plans, and greater competition between them. The report claims the threat of consumers switching plans would place pressure on health and hospital plans to perform. But like switching banks, it is a clumsy and impractical mechanism. It also would place enormous responsibility on ordinary people to choose the right health insurance plan as well as opening the road for a future government to abandon genuinely universal health insurance.

In the universities, Labor has endorsed a demand-driven model so universities can enrol any number of students they like. Such a voucher system will drive institutional diversity, it claims. But diversity is code for inequality. Such a marketised system will strengthen the bigger players and threaten the viability of outer-suburban and regional universities. The only thing missing to make this a full voucher system is that universities cannot set their fees, but this will inevitably come.

Vocational training is another area where a voucher and privatisation model is being implemented.

Labor's backroom policy wonks show little awareness that real-world market models have unintended consequences. One is market failure.

This was the case with ABC Learning, which became the biggest publicly listed childcare corporation in the world. In 2008 ABC Learning collapsed, causing chaos for the parents of 120,000 children enrolled in their centres and the 16,000 staff who cared for them. Its meteoric rise and fall holds many lessons for Labor's plans to extend the market.

For a start, its expansion did not necessarily mean more choice. Childcare expert Deborah Brennan points out ABC became so big that sometimes it was the only centre in a particular region. Sometimes, ABC Learning deliberately operated childcare centres unprofitably to drive non-profit centres out of business. Nor did parental choice drive higher quality or diversity; rather the opposite. ABC Learning standardised its curriculum and met only the minimal requirements for staffing. Naturally, it lobbied government to lower these standards.

Labor's answer to this criticism is that better regulation will fix things. But better regulation may not be enough. Models that rely on user choice to improve standards have a crucial flaw. They assume users can recognise quality.
Researchers have found, for example, that a large number of parents cannot distinguish higher quality services from those of lower quality. Early childhood academics Jennifer Sumsion and Joy Goodfellow say parents have difficulties in discerning quality for many reasons. They may not have purchased long-day care before and may not know what constitutes high quality. By the time they become experienced their children are likely to have grown up, they say. Even parents who are knowledgeable actually spend little time in centres and struggle to monitor quality.

There are also emotional complications: research has found that in convincing themselves that they have acted in the child's best interests, parents may overestimate the quality of the long-day care they have purchased.
Supporters of marketised public services often paint a picture of old-style public services that are bureaucratic and inflexible, in which one size fits all.
But for decades Australia had a significant private sector in child care largely composed of community non-profit groups along with mum and dad private enterprises. Market models foster large corporations that seek to eliminate competitors.

All this has ominous lessons for the aged-care sector, which is still dominated by not-for-profit and religious providers. It's next in line to be taken over by giant care corporations with their inherent conflict between the goals of profit and care. In their recent book Paid Care, Debra King and Gabrielle Meagher reviewed the research on the quality of for-profit and not-for-profit services in Canada, the US, Britain and Australia. Their conclusions are disturbing.
In aged care, the research shows that, with few exceptions, the for-profit sector delivers inferior care. Studies of nursing homes in the US and Canada show, respectively, less staff and less contact between staff and clients. In Australia the for-profit sector has fewer aged-care workers per bed than non-profits. Similar studies of the childcare sector in Canada and the US (where for-profit care is most extensive) show a considerable body of evidence to support the argument that for-profit organisations are likelier to provide services of inferior quality, they say.

All this suggests Labor's rethinking on health, education and government services is not only wrong in principle but will degrade services and probably end up damaging it politically. Labor's reputation relies on delivering reliable government services.

At issue is not the use of economic markets in themselves, since no one, not even Marxists today, believe they can or should be banished or abolished.
The bigger issue that emerges is whether Labor has the capacity to think outside the knee-jerk paradigm of privatisation and the free market. Labor needs to identify the common interests that all Australians share and on this basis develop an overarching narrative and set of policies. This inevitably will require pitting ordinary people's interests against the priorities and interests of big corporate players, such as the banks and global mining companies.
Improving bank regulation and taxing mining profits each deserve a more serious strategy than quick quips about economic Hansonism.

David McKnight is the co-editor of Goodbye To All That?, a book on the failure of neo-liberalism, and works as a senior research fellow at the University of NSW.

The Australian is undoubtedly the most serious newspaper in Australia and its record on climate change matters because of this. More importantly, its stance matters because of the civilisational challenge which climate change presents to Australia and the world.
This was recognized by the CEO of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch who warned in 2007 that climate change posed 'clear catastrophic threats'. Mr Murdoch also pledged that News Corporation would 'weave this issue into our content' and 'tell the story in a new way'.

I happen to agree with Mr Murdoch description of the seriousness of the threat. But there is a puzzle. In recent years The Australian campaigned in favour of objective facts in the teaching of Australian history against 'political' interpretations. By contrast, its attitude to the science of climate change has zig zagged from a grudging acceptance of the facts to simple denial and back again. In all modes, its stance is invariably dominated by old ideological obsessions that are tangential to this profound issue.

Graham Lloyd argues that there has been a 'longstanding misrepresentation of this newspaper's editorial position on climate science and its longstanding support for a global response to limit greenhouse gas emissions'.

Really? How longstanding? Editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell told Crikey last week that 'for several years the paper has accepted man-made climate change as fact'. 'Several years' is hardly longstanding. But Chris Mitchell's statement is also disingenuous because it omits vital facts.

As Graham Lloyd showed, it is possible to find editorials in 1997 in The Australian under then editor-in-chief David Armstrong which accept the science on climate change. But after that period, The Australian took a different direction. This is paradoxical. As the scientific evidence for climate change strengthened, the newspaper's attitude went in the opposite direction.

At the beginning of 2006 an editorial agreed that the world was warming but claimed 'no-one knows ... why it is happening' (14 January 2006). At the same time the newspaper described itself as 'healthily sceptical about the possible causes of and solutions to global warming' (4-5 Nov 2006). No wonder Mitchell confined himself to the phrase 'several years'.

A couple of months after this, an editorial made the extraordinary suggestion that 'the real debate on climate change is only now getting started'. The editorial's contribution to this debate was to disparage the latest IPCC report and proffer the long discarded sceptical claim that there was 'a link between cyclical sunspot activity and the climate here on earth'.

Shortly after its 'sunspot' editorial, The Australian splashed a major feature article ('Rebels of the Sun', 17-18 March 2007) recycling this discredited theory and lamenting that the debate 'has become increasingly stifling and intolerant to dissenting voices', and citing fossil industry-funded sceptics and attacking Al Gore.

For many years The Australian has been unable to see climate issues except through a distorted ideological lens. For example, an editorial on 14 January 2006 argued that the environment movement was about 'more theology than meteorology' and '[S]upport for Kyoto cloaks the green movement's real desire - to see capitalism stop succeeding'.
Later, an editorial accused 'deep green Luddites' of believing that 'the only way to avert the coming apocalypse is to close down all the power plants, take all cars off the road and return to a pre-industrial Arcadia' (8 June 2007). Graham Lloyd's article ignores these embarrassing editorials.

He also fails to mention that just before the 2007 election an editorial characterized an environmental approach as wanting to 'transform the nation into a wind-powered, mung bean-eating Arcadia' (27 Oct 2007). This kind of unrestrained invective suggested that the newspaper itself could be accused of hysteria and alarmism, a charge it regularly threw at those who disagreed with it.

Such rhetoric meant that genuine debate on climate in the pages of The Australian was simply not possible. The newspaper continually framed the debate as one between, on the one hand, sensible sceptics and, on the other, 'deep green Luddites'. By implication, the political and business leaders of Europe, plus Al Gore and Tony Blair, were in the latter category.

A newspapers' columnists have access to valuable journalistic real estate under the sponsorship of the editor. The lack of a single regular columnist who warned about climate change in the last ten years is remarkable. Instead, The Australian's columnists have repeated the dominant editorial line of the newspaper.

The economics editor, Alan Wood, over many years, characterized concern about climate change as 'green hysteria'. Another columnist, Alan Oxley chaired the APEC Study Centre which sponsored a conference of fossil fuel companies and climate deniers in Canberra in 2005 (5 April 2005). At the conference, he said, 'Leading scientists also explained how the science on which Kyoto is based was unraveling and argued that the cataclysmic threat of global warming is oversold.'

Shortly afterward Oxley argued, 'There is no reasonable certainty that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide from human activity cause significant global warming.' (2 August 2005).
When the Howard government began to acknowledge that carbon emissions were linked to dangerous climate change, another columnist, Christopher Pearson, said he felt 'bitter disappointment' about curbs on 'what will turnout to be, in all probability, a perfectly harmless gas' (18 November 2006). Unsurprisingly, this column, as with many others from The Australian, was recycled on denialist websites around the world.

Graham Lloyd reports that The Australian has defended the right of climate sceptics 'to have a voice'. This is curious. Does it defend the right of tobacco sceptics 'to have a voice'? Of course not, for the simple reason that all intelligent people recognised long ago that such 'sceptics' were fronts for the tobacco industry and that the medical science of smoking was settled.

On climate issues The Australian still gives voice to a global PR campaign largely originated by the oil and coal companies of the United States. On this score genuinely sceptical journalism is missing in action. Instead, an ideological sympathy with climate sceptics has been concealed behind a fig leaf of 'balance'.

But what shines through in the attitude of The Australian is its lack of intellectual and moral seriousness in dealing with the consequences of climate change. Climate issues are always taken as an opportunity for cheap shots about what The Australian calls 'the Left' or 'deep greens'. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the deep seriousness of the newspaper's endlessly re-affirmed belief in free markets, competition and privatisation.
The Australian's editorials and columns on climate change raise questions about its own standards of evidence. For example, the newspaper never questioned the 'evidence' cobbled together to confirm Iraq's possession of weapons mass destruction. This was deemed adequate enough to support an invasion at a terrible cost in lives.

But the overwhelming evidence on climate change accumulated over more than 25 years by the best minds in the field, was dismissed for many years by The Australian and is now only grudgingly accepted. This is what alarms many of Australia's leading climate scientists.
The challenge posed by climate change to our economy and society is profound. Most Australian political leaders who are locked into the 24 hour news cycle see it as merely 'another issue'. For a long time The Australian has characterized climate change as an issue with a political, not scientific basis. It bears some responsibility for the impasse we have reached as a nation.

The role of a serious national newspaper is to give leadership on such issues. It could do this by asking hard questions on the future of the coal industry and on Mr Abbott's comment that the science is 'absolute crap'. This is especially so given that climate change poses 'clear catastrophic threats'. On that score, I'm with Rupert.

Chapter Four

Underground in Asia

On May 1, 1929 an unusual meeting of trade unionists took place in Shanghai. The communists who organised the meeting later regarded it as 'perhaps the biggest single feat of illegal organisation' at the time.

It was a copybook version of the kind of illegal activity under conditions of savage repression which was described by the Comintern Commission on Illegal Work:
A guildhall on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the Settlement was booked. Factory workers went to the hall in groups of three or four. Their times of arrival were carefully staggered. They were still arriving when a policeman walked into the hall to ask what was going on. He was politely disarmed and locked in a small room. The meeting was held, 400 people heard a 45 minute May Day address and dispersed into the night. Then the policeman was released.
The description is by a British communist, George Hardy, who worked underground in Shanghai for Profintern, Comintern's trade union wing. Hardy's task was to stimulate the left wing trade union movement in China and in South East Asia and he worked closely with historic leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) such as Chou En-lai, Deng Hsiao-ping and Liu Shao-chi who were all active in the underground trade union movement, particularly that part centred in Shanghai.

* * *
China had been at the centre of hopes and fears of a second communist revolution for most of the 1920s, especially after the defeat of the German uprising in 1923. Although the Communist Party of China (CPC) ultimately carried through a revolution based on its strength among peasants, in the period between 1920 and 1933 its strategy included a primary role for the urban working class.
The period between the defeat of the CPC in 1927 and the departure of most CPC leaders from Shanghai to the soviet areas in 1932-33 has been somewhat neglected by historians, partly because of a certain orthodoxy in scholarship which saw urban events largely in terms of their relationship to rural revolution.
This chapter will study the Comintern's apparatus for underground trade union work in Shanghai in the period 1928-32. This period was one of savage repression directed against the Communist Party of China and the trade union movement which it heavily influenced, the All-China Labour Federation (ACLF). The focus of Comintern trade union activity was the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat (PPTUS) which, under its Russian name TOS [Tikho Okeanskii Sekretariat] was the far eastern wing of Profintern. The PPTUS in Shanghai was responsible for both support for the ACLF and for developing 'red trade unionism', as it was called, in South East Asia, Korea, Japan and India. The PPTUS apparatus was in turn, part of a larger network of clandestine organisations in Shanghai, notably the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence.
The underground work of the PPTUS can be schematically divided in the following way. In the initial period between 1927-1929 the American communist Earl Browder was the leading PPTUS figure; between 1929-1930 the British communist George Hardy was in charge of the work; between 1930-1931 when the trade union work was controlled by 'Leon' and 'Kennedy', the code names for two American communists who appear to be James Dolson and Charles Krumbein. In June 1931 the underground apparatus in Shanghai was severely disrupted, though not destroyed, by the arrest of two Russians who were officers of the Comintern's International Liaison Department (OMS). The two OMS officers administered the apparatus which supported the PPTUS and the Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern and worked as a language teacher and his wife under the pseudonyms of M. and Mme Hilaire Noulens. Their arrest meant the capture by the Shanghai Municipal Police of a vast quantity of administrative records which are now held in Washington, USA. Together with newly opened Comintern archives, in Moscow, they allow a valuable insight into the functioning of the Comintern and Profintern underground apparatuses in urban China.
The Communist International through Grigory Voitinsky first made contact with Chinese radicals in 1920. The following year Voitinsky helped found the Communist Party of China (CPC) which remained very small until 1925. In this year a national trade union conference formed the All-China Labor Federation (ACLF) whose leaders included many prominent communists and which immediately affiliated to trade union wing of the Communist International, Profintern or the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU).
The period 1925-27 saw the Chinese labor movement reach its zenith, only to crash to defeat. In large part, the growth of the labor movement depended on the political alliance formed between the Communist Party of China (CPC) (with the full support of the Soviet government) with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). In May 1925, shortly after the formation of the ACLF, a strike at a Japanese textile mill in Shanghai was brutally suppressed leading to nationwide boycotts and strikes against foreign companies and institutions. In June British troops shot Canton students and workers sparking a 16 month strike against the British in Canton-Hong Kong. In Shanghai workers twice rose up against warlord control in late 1926 and early 1927. Finally, in March 1927 an armed workers revolt took over Shanghai shortly before KMT troops entered and took control. But in April, alarmed by the unrest, Chiang Kai-shek turned on the CPC and its union supporters, bloodily breaking the alliance between them. From that point onwards the KMT government used systematic police and military terror against real and alleged communists and all CPC political and trade union work in cities was conducted in secret.
These epic events in China in 1927 coincided with an idea originated in Australia and taken up vigorously by the Communist International. In 1921, amid rumours of a new war, the Australian trade union movement proposed that a regional organisation of Pacific trade unions be formed. Though raised by Australian delegates at the 1922 Profintern congress the idea languished until 1925 when the general secretary of Profintern, Alexander Lozovsky informed his executive bureau of the Australian plan to convene a conference of Pacific trade unions in Sydney in 1926. While supporting the initiative, one of the Comintern's Far East specialists argued that Sydney was too far from the 'main lines of communication' and that Australia's racist immigration policy made difficult the entry of delegates from Asia. 'It might therefore be proposed , that although the initial step is being taken by the Australian comrades, the congress should be convened not in Australia but in a real Pacific country in Shanghai or Canton', he said. This is what occurred. Organised at too short notice, the conference attracted few Pacific unions, however a Profintern delegate, 'Comrade Rubanoff', (Rubinstein) ensured that groundwork was laid for a further conference in China in 1927.
The 1927 conference of Pacific unions, planned for Canton, was suddenly moved after a counter-revolutionary coup which destroyed the ACLF and its local leaders. The venue then moved to Hankow which was controlled by a local government of Left KMT and communists.
The Pan Pacific Trade Union Conference opened on May 20 at the People's Club in Hankow after a welcome parade of tens of thousands of workers organised by the local trade unions. In the course of a week the conference heard reports on political and labour movement conditions in Indonesia, Japan, the United States and China. Among the speakers from the All-China Labor Federation was Lui Shao-chi. Fourteen of the 22 Japanese delegates were arrested on their way to China and the Australian government refused to grant passports to its trade union delegates.
The importance of the gathering and the relatively legal conditions in which it was held was indicated by the presence of the secretary general of Profintern, Alexander Lozovsky. But even while the conference was sitting, the Soviet mission in Peking was sacked. The American communist Earl Browder emerged as a key leader from the conference which also elected him editor of the Pan Pacific Worker which was initially published openly in Hankow. Browder forecast a triumphal future for the PPTUS which would 'help tear down the numerous barriers of language and race prejudice which have kept the mighty armies of workers in the Pacific apart for so many years.' But the CPC-KMT split of 1927, ending with the defeat of the ill-judged Canton uprising in December 1927 forced Browder and the PPTUS to operate in a period of savage repression and deep clandestinity.
Browder had led an American trade union delegation to the founding congress of Profintern in 1921 and in the 1920s, when he spent most of his time in Moscow or China, he was a leading member of the American communist party. From 1930 to 1945 he was secretary of the CPUSA. Working with Browder for the PPTUS was the less well known figure, Charles Johnson (whose code names were 'Stein', 'Steinberg' or occasionally 'Charlie'), a 46 year old Latvian who was born Karl Ernestovich Yanson. Already a Bolshevik, in 1908 he migrated to the United States where he later headed the left wing of the American Socialist Party which split in 1919 and helped form what became the Communist Party of the USA. From 1920-22 he represented the American party in Moscow at the Communist International and from 1923 was a member of the Profintern Executive Committee where he became known to the head of Profintern, Lozovsky and Pavel Mif (Mikhail Firman) a specialist on China.
From its formation in 1927 the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat was responsible for a number of functions. First, it wrote and printed various publications initially, the Pan Pacific Worker then, after this was moved to the United States, the Far Eastern Bulletin which appeared in both English and Chinese. Second, it provided both advice and money to ACLF. At this time, before the real beginning of guerrilla war, this was the strategic core of the Chinese communists and the PPTUS officials met weekly with the All-China Federation of Labor leaders. Third, it supported and promoted red trade union work in the Philippines, Japan, Malaya, India, Indonesia and other South East Asian countries.
The PPTUS was quite open about its own existence within Shanghai. Publications, such as the Far Eastern Bulletin, defiantly proclaimed on their masthead that they were published in Shanghai. The Statutes of the PPTUS stated that the 'seat' of the Secretariat 'is to be situated in the city of Shanghai, China. The Shanghai police and the Kuomintang authorities thus knew that the PPTUS operated under their noses and were constantly alert. And although no Comintern officials were arrested until June 1931 a number of officials and militants of the All-China Labor Federation who worked with Comintern were arrested, jailed or executed.
To conduct such work a variety of conspiratorial techniques were used to send and receive mail, to hold meetings, to print and distribute documents, to hold larger conferences and to distribute money. For uncoded letters, a system of couriers operated irregularly between Shanghai and the Soviet Union via Harbin, with the dangerous border crossing often assisted by Soviet diplomatic staff and the Soviet security police, OGPU. However most mail was sent using the normal postal system (with people such as Browder signing himself 'Russell' or 'Morris') with a variety of cover addresses. A great deal of mail to and from Moscow was addressed initially to cover addresses in Berlin where Comintern had an elaborate 'post office' for re-routing mail to its true destination. In case of casual postal inspection, the letters were sometimes couched in a personal tone. For example, those to Profintern's chief, Lozovsky, from the Comintern representative in Australia, Sydor Stoler, usually began 'Cher Papa!' and were signed 'Votre fils qui vous respecte et aime.' . Left wing newspapers and magazines intended for the Far Eastern Bureau of ECCI could be sent openly by addressing them to the 'Universal Clipping Service, GPO Box 1565, Shanghai'.
Yet carelessness and misunderstandings by Moscow and its Berlin 'post office' dogged the communications of the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) and PPTUS. Bulky envelopes aroused the suspicion of customs authorities who opened mail and questioned the box holder. An exasperated letter from Shanghai reported that 'owing to all these acts of carelessness on the part of our comrades, we have now lost three safe addresses within the last six weeks, and they are now keeping a very close watch on all post boxes.' The commercial cable system was used for urgent messages but 'business' language was employed. When Johnson ('Stein') left Shanghai he cabled Alexander: 'leaving Shanghai turned over business new manager i gave also complete outline immediate business transactions joint meeting chinese shareholders - steinert.' [sic] (An attempt was made in 1930 to send information from Moscow via radio but this appears to have been an experiment. )
The PPTUS illegal apparatus in Shanghai was funded from Profintern headquarters in Moscow. The budget of the PPTUS is unclear but at one point in October 1929, the PPTUS representative, George Hardy reported that he had been without funds for two months and asked Moscow to 'cable $10,000 (Gold) and despatch messenger immediately with balance'. The PPTUS, in turn, regularly gave money to the All-China Labor Federation, to the Philippines Congress of Labor and to other Red unions in South East Asia. Profintern paid for the Australian edition of the Pan Pacific Worker, for instance, cabling £200 from Germany to the Australian union leader, Jock Garden, in June 1929. Much of the Russian funding for Profintern's activities worldwide was remitted in complex transactions through Swiss and German banks to businesses established by the OMS, typically import-export companies which habitually use cables and exchange money.

The Browder-Johnson period
The first major task which faced Browder and Johnson in this period was the holding of a full meeting of the Secretariat in February 1928 under conditions of complete illegality. Chaired by the Australian delegate Jack Ryan, who represented the ACTU in Shanghai, the meeting was attended by representatives from the Philippine Workers Congress, the Trade Union Education League (USA), the National Minority Movement (UK), the Japanese red trade union federation, the Hiogikai, the Far Eastern section of the Russian unions, an Indonesian union group and the All-China Labour Federation. The meeting discussed the difficult new conditions in China and the collapse of the ACLF. A report noted that in the recent revolutionary upheaval 'the red unions never had any well planned and detailed organisational system. So at the blow of the political reaction and in the process of transformation (from legal to underground) the organisation has been disintegrated [sic].' Another resolution, drafted by Johnson (Stein) urged the ACLF to fight for legalisation and to use 'all existing legal possibilities'. The February meeting decided to hold its next conference in Australia, prior to the 1929 congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
Apart from organising this meeting and arranging delegates for the Fourth Profintern Congress in Moscow in March, the work of the PPTUS had been confined to the production of the Pan Pacific Worker which was done under conditions of savage repression. 'Our printing arrangements have broken down entirely,' reported Browder in May.
The trouble came from the Chinese workers in the shop, who resigned in a body rather than continue to print what they thought endangered their necks. The crisis came after another print shop, suspected of having printed a "red" leaflet had its whole staff of 17 workers taken out and shot. It seems impossible to resume printing at this time, although we may be able to soon, having some encouragement from the proprietor who "wants the money".'
Although banned, occasional statements by the PPTUS were published in China Outlook, an American missionary publication. Largely because of these difficulties an Australian edition of Pan Pacific Worker began to appear in April.
While the Pan Pacific Worker hailed the red labour movement of China, the actual position was very different. In early 1928 Browder reported to Lozovsky that in Hankow the labour movement had been 'completely wiped out. Of the large cities, only Shanghai and Canton have any open labour movement and in both places it is under the control of the Kuomintang. The illegal trade unions are largely destroyed'. The 'yellow' unions of the Kuomintang, were 'gaining in power and influence'.
But the problem was even worse. When 35,000 silk filature workers went on strike the red union, the ACLF, was taken by surprise. Browder complained that the Chinese Communist Party had effectively fused the ACLF with the party. By allocating the leading ACLF cadres to other political work, it had 'practically abolished' the ACLF. Generally, Browder argued, the Communist Party displayed 'inexcusable confusion about and underestimation of TU work'.
The equivocal position of the Chinese Communist Party on political work in trade unions was a problem which for years dogged the successive Comintern cadres who staffed the PPTUS in Shanghai. Ultimately, the success of the CPC would lie in its work among peasants but in this period its outlook strongly influenced by the Russian revolution decreed that the working class would transform China. Even so, a resolution from the central committee of the CPC in April 1928 noted that practice did not necessarily fit theory:
In regard to the situation in all of China, it seems in general the peasants are radical and the workers are backward. The workers are now engaged in no active struggles, and show no development of the illegal trade union organisations. Although the Party organs have committed many military opportunist mistakes in the peasant uprising yet they still lead such actions continuously ..... Even where formally a trade union is maintained in fact it is only another name for the Party nucleus, and there are no non-Party members in it (as in Shanghai).
The resolution went on dutifully to urge a 'fight against the tendency of neglecting the labor movement' and urged that the party should 'make the labour movement [the] most important and fundamental work of our Party' so that the workers become the 'advance guard of the peasants and toiling masses.'
In spite of police terror, radical working class action was not entirely absent. When Japan staged a military incident in Manchuria in 1928 spontaneous anti-Japanese feeling erupted in Shanghai which the yellow (KMT) unions tried to channel. A trade union committee against imperialism was established on which the Communists had 7 out of 21 positions but after the local garrison commander took charge of one meeting the seven communists 'were so terrorised that they did not dare to say a word.' On May 30, National Humiliation Day, six factories in East Shanghai went on strike and an anti-KMT demonstration which Browder estimated at 1,500 took place in the international sector of Shanghai. In the Chinese sector of Shanghai, slogans were milder but industrial action more widespread. The Times correspondent reported that 'Communist agitation around Shanghai, though underground, is very active. Elsewhere on the street walls appear mysteriously defaced slogans such as 'Down with Chiang Kai-shek', 'Down with the Kuomintang'....The strike in the French concession holding up the tram and electricity and water services obstinately continues and is a purely political affair, the men having no real complaint.'
In the last half of 1928 relations between Browder and Johnson deteriorated, with Browder making official complaints to Lozovsky and during his absence even refusing to leave the key to the PPTUS post office box with Johnson. In December, Browder returned to the United States and from there began to edit an American edition of Pan Pacific Worker.

The Hardy period

In February 1929 Charles Johnson (Stein) handed over the Profintern work in Shanghai to a new cadre allocated by Comintern, the British communist, George Hardy. Hardy, whose code name in his reports was 'Mason', had been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World in Canada, the USA and Australia before becoming a member of the Political Bureau of the British Communist Party in 1925-26. In 1923 he participated in the German revolution and in 1928 he became a member of the Profintern Executive Bureau. Before travelling to China posing as a well-to-do businessman, Hardy had experienced underground work in several countries. In Shanghai he became a key figure in Comintern liaison with the Chinese Communist Party. When Profintern tried to withdraw him from Shanghai in late 1929 the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party protested, arguing that he understood conditions in China better than other functionaries with whom they dealt.
One of Hardy's tasks in the first half of 1929 was to organise the attendance of union delegates at the second Pan Pacific Trade Union conference to be held in August. After the 1927 Hankow conference, Australia had been proposed as the venue of the next conference with the support of the new national trade union federation, the ACTU. But in June 1928 the conservative Bruce government, fearful of the threat to the British Empire and White Australia, announced that it would ban the entry of delegates. The PPTUS therefore decided that the second conference would be held on Soviet territory in Vladivostock. The conference was dominated by the recent Soviet-China border clash and the need to 'defend the Soviet Union' and by the prevailing leftist approach which saw reformism as the main danger to the workers' movement. To this extent the conference marked the Soviet domination of a body which originally had a more genuinely internationalist appeal. Alert to the gathering, Japanese, Chinese and British police prevented many delegates from attending Vladivostock and a second, secret conference was held in Shanghai, attended by delegates from Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaya.
Hardy's approach to trade union work in China was, like Browder's, critical of the CPC's labour movement strategy. At one point he reported to Moscow that 'in China the Party as a whole has not even fully grasped the full significance of trade union work' and 'even the PB [Political Bureau of the CPC] is not clear on all [trade union] questions.' Nevertheless, during 1929 there was mild resurgence of the labor movement. 'Terrorist tactics' were less readily applied by the KMT, reported Hardy. 'This does not mean that there is any evidence that white terror is being discarded as a weapon against the workers for hundreds are still being executed and tortured and it only means more are receiving long prison sentences for such offensices [sic] as distributing literature ... instead of being sent indiscriminately for execution.' In June 1929, according to The Times, the Nanking Government issued 'drastic regulations' for a weekly search for communist literature in all bookshops. The KMT-influenced Printers Union warned its members that printing such literature 'will be punished mercilessly'.
During this period the ACLF organised its May Day meeting at a guild hall in the centre of Shanghai referred to above. Such tactics were discussed later at a special conference in Moscow of trade unionists who worked illegally or semi-legally where a Chinese union organiser, 'Liu Tsien', described conditions in Shanghai. Meetings were organised within factories in such a way that they could disperse in a few minutes. For example, sometimes two communists would start a fist fight and workers would gather. The 'fight' would then stop and the fighters would then deliver a short speech to the crowd. At other places, workers' meetings were organised under the cover of a small company shareholders' meeting. 'Liu Tsien' reported that meetings in theatres were held where police were captured to prevent them raising the alarm. But he warned that poorly organised attempts at such meetings had resulted in the loss of many comrades. His report also confirmed Hardy's view that the role of factory nuclei was practically nil and that party committees substituted themselves for workers' nuclei.
While underground techniques had to be rapidly adapted and applied, another key problem which confronted Hardy was to convince the Chinese communists to take advantage of the extremely small 'legal' possibilities in the situation. After the defeats of 1927 the ACLF had strength only in the seamens' union and the railways union. A number of red unions had been taken over by KMT forces while the union of postal workers and the Mechanics Union had never been under the ACLF umbrella. The postal workers, for example, were run by 'disciples' of a Shanghai underworld figure who played a considerable role in the 'yellow unions'. Yet the only 'legal' opportunities for trade union work were those created by the existence of 'yellow unions', a designation which covered a range of non-communist unions under the control of the KMT or of employers.
Such legal work was difficult for at least two reasons quite apart from the obvious problems of illegality and terror. First, at the level of the Chinese Communist Party, a 'putschist' approach was strong. This tended to downplay demands based on the basic needs of workers and to emphasise revolutionary calls for uprisings and armed struggle. Second, the Communist International itself, from the Sixth World Congress in 1928, followed a strategy which was similar to the local 'putschism', emphasising the imminence of revolution and damning any co-operation with 'reformist' forces.
In spite of these evident similarities between the CPC and the ECCI, the question of legal work in yellow unions crystalised differences between the two. The CPC leadership tended to dismiss the minority within its ranks who favoured legal work as Rightists. The memory of the bloody defeat of 1927 after a period of open, legal co-operation with Kuomintang forces was still very fresh. As well, a number of communists who had recently worked in 'yellow unions' had gone over to the KMT. Yet legal work in reactionary organisations was an established principle of conspiracy. Hardy had the difficult task of resolving this contradiction. At a plenum of the ACLF in February 1929 Hardy criticised the minority within the ACLF which wanted to concentrate on forming red unions within all yellow unions. This amounted to accepting a minority status and relinquishing the possibility of independent red unions. In place of this Hardy urged a flexible strategy. In areas of traditional ACLF strength, red unions would be maintained; but in yellow unions, red fractions would be built to take advantage of legal opportunities, as the minority suggested. Elsewhere, in what he called the 'fascist unions', the ACLF would keep trying to build a small cautious base.
The weakness of the ACLF was due to a number of factors, according to Hardy. Apart from the effects of terror, the CPC often failed to distinguish between itself and the union federation. Thus instead of the unions calling for struggle for better wages and shorter hours, it issued calls for armed revolt. Such calls when expressed by the CPC leader Li Li-san were later to lead to a major split between the CPC and Comintern. Thus within the party opposite tendencies existed, one wanting to do mainly legal work in yellow unions to avoid repression, the other ignoring any legal possibilities.
At the Tenth Plenum of the ECCI in July 1929, the Comintern's key expert on organisation, Piatnitsky turned to this question and asked: 'But why do the Chinese comrades still waver on the question as to whether to work or not to work in the Kuomintang unions? What is the result? The Red unions are small outfits and the Kuomintang unions are mass organisations.' In response a representative of the Chinese party, 'Tsui Wito' [Chu Chiu-pai] asserted that some work was being done in yellow unions but also linked the desire to conduct legal work with the bogey of 'Right opportunism.'
In September 1929 the ECCI officially endorsed the direction of Hardy and Piatnitsky, criticising the 'remnants of sectarianism which still prevail' in the party. At the same time it argued that the Communist Party of China 'must raise the question of resumption of a legal existence by the Red trade unions, even if it were under another name and without official sanction, in connection with the revival of the labour movement. The actual leadership of these unions however, must continue to work on a conspirative basis'.
In November 1929 the Fifth Congress of the once mighty ACLF was held under illegal conditions in Shanghai. Hardy gave a report, which concluded with the silent 'shouting' of slogans in illegal fashion: 'by one comrade announcing the slogan and each forcibly raising their right hand with a clenched fist'. Although he estimated that 'we can reasonably expect some improvement in the proletarian base of the party', this was to be the last national ACLF conference until 1948.
Underground struggle in South East Asia
While direct contact with the Chinese labor movement was possible in Shanghai, elsewhere in South East Asia the cultivation of left wing trade unions by Comintern took place at several removes.
The most successful activity occurred in the Philippines where an organised trade union movement, the Congresso Obrero de Filipinas (COF) was well established and operated with a degree of legality. While the COF was prevented from attending the 1927 PPTU conference, it later affiliated and sent a delegate to the February 1928 Secretariat meeting in Shanghai. The PPTUS maintained close contact with both COF leader, Crisanto Evangelista, and the leader of the peasants' federation, Jacinto Manahan, who were undoubtedly among those Browder earlier referred to as 'as nucleus of devoted and energetic comrades' in the Philippines.
Both men visited Moscow to attend the Fourth Profintern congress in early 1928 and in early 1929 there was an upswing in class struggle which George Hardy attributed to 'close contact the PPTUS maintains with our Filipino comrades'. At the same time Hardy had to deal with a personal clash between Manahan and Evangelista after the former withdrew from the COF because Evangelista criticised him for allowing prayers at a peasants conference. But in May 1929 the COF split, with Evangelista leading a breakaway group. The Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern accepted the split and Hardy reported that the new COF (Proletariat) soon greatly increased its membership. Hardy issued instructions that the COF (Proletariat) hold a workers conference to decide on a 'national programme of action and demands' and to discuss Soviet-China tensions and other international trade union questions. McLane's linking of this split to the formation of the Communist Party of the Philippines in August 1930 is borne out by Hardy who argued that '[o]ur position will always be weak in the Islands until we can form a party group. Evangelista is hesitant ... [and] has given press interviews of a very social democratic character'. To remedy this Hardy urged the dispatch of an American comrade who could work there illegally.
A letter from Hardy to Australian communist Jack Ryan telling him that 'the Philippine comrades are doing extremely well' gives the flavour of the PPTUS work:
We are contemplating organising a united front conference in the Philippines in order to make a final effort to destroy all the reactionary elements and their organisation. Already their membership has fallen to 8,000 and their main strength is in the tobacco industry..... we are now engaged in a strike which involves unions affiliated to the reactionary organisation as well as our own. If we can win this strike it will give a great impetus to our position in this industry.
Overall, the Comintern archives tend to confirm McLane's analysis which emphasised the significance of the PPTUS and of American communists in shaping the Philippines political and union situation.
In Singapore and Malaya there was less success. The roots of the communist movement in Malaya lay in the contact between communists such as Sneevliet, Tan Malaka, Alimin and local leftists and trade unionists in the 1920s. By mid-1928 Browder could report that in 'Singapore and the Straits Settlements, an underground trade union movement is very active, which is led principally by Chinese workers who have been trained in the Canton trade union movement'. But the following year, George Hardy reported more coolly that there was 'some evidence of activity in Singapore'. In Malaya, he said, 'most of the members of the Committee of the Chinese Communist Party' had been arrested and some were executed including 'our representative'. But he added that Shanghai was 'completely isolated from Indochina, Indonesia, Siam and Korea'.
Overseas Chinese workers were organised in the Nanyang Federation of Labour, which attended the 1929 conference in Shanghai for delegates barred from the Vladivostock conference. Hardy established that the federation was based in Singapore, had 5,000 members including a small number in Thailand and Indonesia and used seamen as couriers to communicate with its members.
In February 1930 Hardy sent his 'best confidential translator and a very good comrade' to Singapore to urge local red trade unionists to become delegates for the Fifth Profintern Congress but this plan collapsed in a wave of arrests in Malaya in April. The arrests occurred immediately after the founding of the Malayan Communist Party at a conference attended by Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh). Some of those arrested were later executed after deportation to China. Yong, following earlier scholars, interprets the founding of the MCP as a 'brilliant tactical move' by the Russian-based Comintern to weaken CPC influence in Southeast Asia but while there was tension between the Comintern representatives such as Hardy and the CPC, there is no evidence in Comintern archives of a rivalry taken to such extreme lengths.
Contact with India was a problem for the PPTUS which was never solved. In 1927 the Indian Trade Union Congress tried to send delegates to the Hankow conference but they were not permitted to leave India. At the beginning of 1928 a PPTUS representative, probably the British communist T. R. Strudwick, went to India but he was not allowed to land. The Australian communist, Jack Ryan, attended the Ninth All-India Trade Union Congress in December 1928 having departed secretly from Australia aiming to secure TUC affiliation to the PPTUS. He reported that 'CID men followed me night and day ever since I reached Bombay' and that an American union delegate was arrested and deported. But a vote by the AITUC to affiliate to the PPTUS was narrowly lost. Hardy also tried to make contact with radical forces in British colonies such as India and Malaya through the British Communist Party but complained: 'They look upon the PPTUS as they look on all colonial work -- it is of third rate importance to them.
Communists and left trade unionists in Indonesia had early contact with those in Malaya but the situation in the Dutch colony was, if anything, more repressive than in Malaya. At the 1927 Hankow conference the delegate from Indonesia, Musso, reported that trade unions could not function legally and that simple conspiratorial techniques were used: 'Javanese workers find other means of coming together and preparing actions against their oppressors. Numerous auxiliary organisations in the form of social and sports clubs have sprung up in spite of the vigilance of the police and the spies.' Browder reported 'no direct connections' with Indonesia while in early 1929 Musso wrote that attempts to reorganise the party 'have been crushed' and the unions dissolved. Sugono, the chairman of the Central Committee was tortured by the Dutch. In February 1929 Hardy sent a Chinese courier to arrange for delegates to the Vladivostock conference but this had proved fruitless.
Delegates from Japan's left wing union federation, Hyogikai, attended the Hankow conference and meetings of the PPTUS in Shanghai in 1928 as well as the 1929 Vladivostock conference. Repression of red trade unions and of the Japanese Communist Party was savage from the late 1920s onwards and this made regular contact with Shanghai very difficult. The necessity to operate illegally made even simple communication very complex. Hardy complained that he was forced to write totally coded letters to safe addresses which changed four times in the space of 12 months. At the June 1929 conference the Japanese delegate did not appear because Hardy received the details of the rendezvous from Japan only half an hour before the appointed time and the delegate left Shanghai without making contact. The methods of maintaining contact included the discreet publishing of certain numbers in the left wing Japanese press denoting the current codes, a method used by the Bolshevik press. While in 1928 the PPTUS hailed the left Hyogikai, Hardy privately acknowledged that it had lost much of its strength.
The PPTUS under 'Leon' and 'Edward': 1930-1931
Hardy left Shanghai in mid-1930 and went on to lead the Profintern's maritime work through which it operated an international courier service. His replacement by 'Leon' was accompanied by a sharp deterioration in the security of Comintern activities and a break in contact between Moscow and Shanghai which lasted from June until late 1930. The security of the conspiratorial work in Shanghai also changed. In September 1930 Leon reported to the Profintern in Moscow that the bureau had issued its first bulletin but this was 'technically almost unthinkable and extremely risky'. However the Bureau continued to work closely with the ACLF and maintained good contacts with the left wing Filipino trade unions. An organiser was based in Hong Kong with a brief to work with trade unions in Indo-China and Malaya.
In January 1931 after this period of disruption a new plan for work was decided and the leadership of the PPTUS was reconstituted on instructions from Profintern. New leaders of the PPTUS, 'Leon' and 'Edward', were appointed and their activities can be followed using both the new Soviet archives and the long standing records of the Shanghai Municipal Police. 'Edward' (or 'Kennedy') was an American, Charles Krumbein, who arrived in Shanghai in early 1931. The previous year he had been jailed in Britain where police believed he was a Comintern representative. While in jail his partner, Margaret Undjus, visited him. In Shanghai, the two lived together under the names Mr and Mrs Albert E. Stewart with Undjus using the name 'Alice'. The identity of 'Leon' is less certain but a British intelligence analysis suggested that he was probably James Dolson, an American journalist and communist who had been associated with Comintern activities in China from 1927-28. Dolson's presence in Shanghai in 1931 is confirmed by other Russian material.
The major preoccupation of the PPTUS was assistance to the ACLF, including the re-commencement of the journal Pacific Worker. But the ACLF was badly damaged by a major split in the CPC (see below) and much of the first half of 1931 was spent re-building small trade union groups within the tram, rail, textile and seamen's unions. A wave of spontaneous strikes in the cotton and silk industries where the workers were mainly women lifted hopes that the tide was turning and 'Alice' made systematic contact with women workers.
Beyond Shanghai, the work of the PPTUS continued. In April-May 1931, 'Leon' visited the Philippines where he found 'the same handful of 4-5 comrades' were trying to manage the new Communist Party, the trade union federation and the peasants' federation. The arrests of the Filipino trade union and peasant leaders Manahan and Evangelista for sedition following the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines in November 1930 led to a PPTUS campaign of solidarity. In early 1931 the PPTUS began to have regular contact with Japanese communists and the trade unions which they led. Around May the Indonesian communist, Tan Malaka, was found living in Shanghai in a debilitated state. After medical treatment and rest, he was due to go south to establish contacts in Indonesia and India. Their continual frustration with colonies like Indonesia, Malaya and India led the PPTUS to write an 'open letter' criticising American, Dutch and French CPs for neglecting colonial work and demanding that the Executive Bureau of Profintern discuss this.
This frustration also resulted in determination to develop work based in Singapore and Malaya, evidently because it offered access to India and Indonesia, as well as having a growing left wing movement. This decision to work in the British colony was later to become crucial to the fate of the PPTUS. In early 1931 the PPTUS decided to send two cadres on visits of 6-8 weeks 'during which time they are to find out and establish permanent connections with Indonesian and Hindoo comrades in Singapore and through them with these respective countries.'
At the beginning of 1931 the underground trade union movement in China received a serious blow. This came not from the KMT government but from within the Chinese Communist Party. Over the previous two years criticism by the ECCI had been growing of the adventurist political strategy proposed by a key member of the CPC Politbureau, Li Li-san. This had culminated in a letter from Comintern in November 1930 and the arrival at this time of a Comintern representative, Pavel Mif, who helped unseat Li Li-san at the fourth plenum of the CPC in January 1931. The plenum also isolated the 'Right' faction (creating a three-way split) one of whose key leaders was a leading trade unionist, Lo Chang-lung.
The ACLF, perhaps closer to the day to day concerns of workers, was a base of opposition to Li Li-san's strategy which called for immediate armed uprisings and political strikes. In February 1931 'Leon' reported disturbing information among the state of underground communist work among trade unions in Shanghai. At a fraction meeting of ACLF cadres, 18 out of 19 had voted against the line of the fourth plenum, that is, against the clear wishes of the Comintern and the CPC majority. This split in the party resulted in most of the union activists in the ACLF breaking away and this left the CPC and the PPTUS with very few forces, reported 'Leon'. He railed against the treachery of the 'Right' faction. 'This faction used our people, our apparatus, our printing press, our money -- for their own fractional purposes. The Treasurer of the ACLF (Ou-Yu-Min) absconded with over 3,000 Mex, probably under Lochanlun's orders.'
Worse than this, all earlier assumptions about the strength of the underground union movement were discovered to be false. Before the split, he explained, he had believed that the membership of the red trade unions in Shanghai was between 700-800. 'It is now clear that what really existed was -- an apparatus, self-contained and almost completely isolated from the mass and their daily struggles (with but very few exceptions).' When he asked about previous claims, the Chinese comrades 'smile and shrug their shoulders and say they were never true!' To help retrieve this drastic situation, 'Leon' also passed on to Moscow the request of Chinese party that Lui Shao Chi be sent back to help lead the trade union work.
The situation worsened in April and June 1931 when two events badly damaged the Comintern apparatus in Shanghai and severely tested the effectiveness of its conspiratorial practices.
The first occurred in April 1931, when a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC, Ku Shun-chang, was arrested by the KMT in Hankow and revealed details of CPC organisation leading to the arrest of a large number of communist cadre in Shanghai. Key CPC leaders who escaped arrest disappeared but in spite of such precautions the general secretary of the CPC, Hsiang Chung-fa, was arrested and executed in June 1931 .
The arrest of Ku Shun-chang and his co-operation with the KMT meant that the Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern and PPTUS apparatuses also had to take rapid precautions and a 'wild state of disorganisation' followed as they struggled to preserve their lives and their organisation. Just before his arrest, Ku had organised an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle two Soviet military advisers to the Red Army and so they had to leave immediately.
The PPTUS leader, 'Leon', was on the point of returning from the Philippines, to rejoin his colleagues Krumbein ('Kennedy') and Margaret Undjus ('Alice'). On June 9 Krumbein reported to Moscow that most of the members of the Far Eastern Bureau had left and that the arrests since April had 'to a very large degree shattered our apparatus'. He closed his letter with the following: 'we feel certain that if we once can get our comrades on the correct track that things will take a rapid turn.'
A rapid turn began on June 1, when a courier for Comintern's OMS, Joseph Ducroux, was arrested in Singapore. Ducroux had travelled from Shanghai to Hong Kong where he had met the Vietnamese communist, Ho Chi Minh. Shortly afterwards, British police intercepted an 'invisible ink' letter from Ho Chi Minh to a leading Malayan communist which set up a meeting with Ducroux. This plus some unusual behaviour by Ducroux led to the his arrest along with several members of the Malayan Communist Party immediately after the meeting.
Ducroux had been on a mission for OMS to India and when passing through Shanghai had been given a Shanghai postal address used by OMS. When arrested, police found both the Shanghai address as well as some reference to Ho Chi Minh. This breach of conspiratorial practice which broke down the compartmentalised structure of two other fields of work led to the arrest of Ho Chi Minh and to the arrest in Shanghai of two key Comintern cadres, Jakov Rudnik and Tatiana Moiseenko. The latter, working under the pseudonyms of M. Hilaire Noulens and Mme Noulens, posed as a language teacher and his wife.
In fact, Rudnik and Moiseenko stood at the conspiratorial heart of the Comintern's Shanghai apparatus. Both had worked for Soviet intelligence in the 1920s and then for Comintern's OMS. As OMS officers, they were responsible for the entire technical and administrative support for the Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern and for the PPTUS. On top of this, following the crisis engendered by the April arrest of Ku, a large number of the PPTUS and FEB documents were given to Rudnik and Moiseenko for safekeeping since it was accurately assumed that Ku was unaware of the identities of the OMS officers.
Shortly after the British police arrested M. Noulens (of whose activities they had no inkling at first) they began to discover a treasure trove of letters, cables, finance records, addresses, ciphers and bank books, all related to the Comintern. These is turn allowed them to establish the movements of Comintern officials as well as their code names. In an analysis of the 'Noulens case' one year later, British intelligence declared that it 'afforded a unique opportunity of seeing from the inside, and on unimpeachable documentary evidence, the working of a highly developed Communist organisation of the 'illegal' order ... one moreover which ... is still in operation in spite of the set-back'. Of particular interest was a large number of letters from 'the notorious Annamite communist, Nguyen Ai Quac' (Ho Chi Minh). The 'most outstanding document' was a report from the CPC on the revenge killings of members of the family of Ku, carried out under the direction of Chou En-lai.
With their identities still unknown, the two OMS officers were tried, sentenced to death, then jailed instead and survived to return to Russia in 1939, a date which, ironically, ensured that they survived the worst Stalinist repression. On their return, they wrote a detailed report which is now available. Combined with other Soviet archives and the British analysis, we can now grasp the underground structure in Shanghai and get a picture of its operation. The Far Eastern Bureau, staffed by eight or nine Europeans, was oriented to China and was the source of an annual subsidy to the CPC of £95,000. It was also responsible for the selection of students to attend the Communist University of the Peoples of the Far East. The PPTUS had a staff of three Europeans and directed a subsidy of about $25,000 per year to the ACLF, as well as liaising with red unions in South East Asia, Japan.
The conditions in Shanghai required a high degree of skill in conspiratorial work. The OMS judged that meetings between Comintern officers and the CPC in public places such as cinemas, cafes and parks were far too dangerous and so private apartments had to be used. Rudnik ('Marin') noted that before he began work in Shanghai, he was told that a number of professional people would be able to make their apartments and offices available for conspiratorial purposes. But nothing like this occurred. Renting multiple apartments, he discovered, was complicated because most of them were leased by four large companies. This meant that a large number of passports and pseudonyms had to be used by Rudnik and Moiseenko to avoid obvious questions regarding one man's apparent need for so many apartments and offices. To add to this, the two most senior figures in the FEB, Pavel Mif and Ry'llski ('Austen') spoke only Russian, making translation and interpreting a major task. Mif could not walk around Shanghai in daylight hours because it was judged that, as the former director of the Communist University for the Peoples of the Far East, he might meet former students who had betrayed and now supported the KMT.
Both the FEB and PPTUS used the normal postal service but all letters between Shanghai and Russia were sent to Berlin to the address of 'some petty communist' who transmitted them to an intermediary from whom they were sent to Moscow. Long cables were broken into coded portions, 'each portion being sent to a different address and out of its proper sequence in the composite message'. Similarly, a system of couriers operated between Russia and most of the major centres in East and Southeast Asia.
Rudnik was meticulous in his conspiratorial technique, but not perfect. An American report into the 'Noulens Affair', prompted by the discovery that Richard Sorge had spent 1930-32 in Shanghai, noted that while under arrest, Rudnik asked to change into a grey suit. Examination of the suit by the Shanghai Municipal Police revealed that 'the three tabs bearing the tailor's name had either been deliberately cut out or frayed, so that they were illegible. Most of the buttons had been changed too. The trouser buttons, however, were untouched.' Tailor's marks on the buttons led to the identification of Rudnik with another person, 'Mr Alison', adding another small piece to the jigsaw puzzle of Comintern in Shanghai.
How effective was the system of conspiracy which was used by the Far Eastern Bureau, the PPTUS and the two OMS officials?
On first glance it would seem to have failed dramatically. The arrests of Rudnik, Moiseenko, Ducroux, the Malayan communists and Ho Chi Minh were severe blows; the apparatus and connections from Shanghai to Singapore were unusable; the mass of documents offered British and American intelligence an insight into Comintern which was unparalleled since the Arcos raid in Britain in 1926.

Yet the damage was limited. In spite of being able to identify a number of Comintern officials by code name, residence, dates of arrival and travel and personal habits, the British were unable to arrest any of these individuals. Except in the case of 'Edward' and 'Alice' (Krumbein and Undjus) no independent identification was established, meaning that figures such as Pavel Mif and Gerhart Eisler (later a top official in East Germany) slipped through the net. As well, there is no evidence of damage to the officials and apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. We can conclude therefore first, that the system of establishing false identities and the use of pseudonyms largely worked well. Second, in spite of the collapse of compartmentalisation between the FEB and the PPTUS (Rudnik held the records of both), the more significant 'compartment', between the CPC and the Comintern, remained solid. Third, the raid did not affect Soviet military intelligence based in the city and one of its principal officers, Richard Sorge, followed the progress of the trial and did not leave Shanghai until late 1932.
This was also the conclusion of the British police and intelligence who thought it 'unwise to take too optimistic a view' of the raid and arrests. It was 'to be regretted that Austin, Schneider, Stewart (Kennedy) and Margaret Undjus (Alice) should have been able to cover their tracks and slip away unscathed. And it is a tribute to the efficacy of the system of concealment employed by these people that, except in the case of Stewart and Margaret Undjus, so few of their personal details have been betrayed by the papers as to render their reappearance in the same area, or elsewhere, free of any grave risk to themselves.'
Moreover, the British discovered that the Rudnik-Moiseenko arrests did not stop the continued functioning of the Comintern apparatus. While the trial of those two OMS officers was proceeding during the latter half of 1931, they had reason to believe that the remnants of Comintern were reporting it to Moscow:

[E]ven when the confusion resulting from the Noulens' raid was at its worst, the conspirative system previously estasblished was still effective enough to afford freedom of manoeuvre to the remains of the organisation for the purpose of remodelling its lines and withdrawing its threatened personnel, that the organising centres at Moscow and Berlin never really lost their grip on the situation and that gradually and furtively the Comintern's Far Eastern staff are re-establishing themselves.
We can be less certain about the consequences for the Chinese Communist Party's underground trade union work but it is clear that the practice of the CPC underground was much less successful. This was not only because of severe repression but also because of major strategic mistake. The fundamental problem lay in the CPC's unwillingness or inability to work in a 'mass' way in the manner prescribed by Lenin's re-invention of the Russian conspiratorial tradition. The only way to break out of conspiratorial isolation was to look to the 'yellow' trade unions and to conduct 'legal work' within them. This was made impossible by a combination of the ECCI's Third Period policies which discouraged this and by the CPC's own putschist orientation and its memory of the 1927 disaster which was preceded by co-operation with KMT forces. The consequence was that, as more recent Chinese scholarship points out, 'the [CPC] underground had no strategy to join hands with the neutral elements in the labor movement ... and attacked all organisations other than the red unions.'

Around the world the financial crisis and climate change have focused many minds on a revival of the Left. Some people point to the success of socialists in South America or the election of Barack of Obama, other point to the rise of a Left Party in Germany. Even Michael Moore's latest film, Capitalism, A Love Story, seems to be a straw in the wind. The fate of the Left was one of the topics at a conference of activists and thinkers at Deakin University recently and was discussed in an editorial of Arena (No. 102). The purpose of the conference was to rethink ideas from that broad political force known loosely as 'the Left'.

Putting it simply, the Left lacks such a framework. Instead of a framework, we have only issues and campaigns. Instead of projecting a vision, we are merely oppositionists and hyper-critics. All kinds of people are grouped under the rubric of the Left. Both militant coal miners from the CFMEU and coal critics from Greenpeace. There is an old Left, whose critique is based around the material deprivation and the need for redistribution; and a new Left -- if that's the right word -- whose critique is based around the unsustainability of the economy and the empty affluence it creates. Neither has the answer and the danger is that this division will become an even deeper fault line than it already is.

Is a perfect agreement between the various sectors of the Left waiting to be discovered? I don't think such a new unifying ideology is possible, or even desirable. (In Beyond Right and Left I argued that agreement will be found in a set of values, rather than a new ideology or all-explanatory world view.) But the diverse sectors of the Left can do better in co-ordinating a wider agreement than they have now.

The process of finding what these values might be and then building a political strategy on top of them is a difficult one partly because there isn't a recognition that there is indeed a problem in the first place.

For one part of the left a simplified Marxist-influenced theory of society and politics still forms a default position. It's also a sentimental option because there is a long and proud heritage of working class struggle. Such a theory assumes that all social evils arise from the economy and from economic deprivation. If capitalism is the cause of all injustices then clearly you need to stick to a theory which aims to abolish capitalism in its entirety.

But it is obvious that considerable oppression and injustice are not caused by capitalism. Patriarchy and women's oppression pre-date capitalism. As do racism and ethno-centrism. Unsustainability is aggravated by ruthless corporate power but if we have to abolish capitalism in order to achieve sustainability then we may be waiting a long while. Anti-capitalism is also flawed because 'non-capitalism' has proved such a disaster. The actual consequences of anti-capitalism has been a string of grotesque societies which are a travesty of any democratic or socialist values. This has been recognised for decades, but some on the left still haven't faced the fact that aspects of Marxist theory contributed to the disaster.

The problem which the Left exists to solve has also changed. Marx and Engels saw poverty as the main problem and assumed that capitalism could not harness the forces of production to satisfy human needs. Today the forces of production are in overdrive, generating an output threatens to drown humanity in a climate disaster.

Some parts of the Left realized these fatal weakness of Marxism many years ago. This cultural left, based largely among intellectuals, developed a more sophisticated analysis of power and culture. Basing themselves on the social movements of women, youth, gays and ethnic groups, they challenged the values and beliefs of dominant culture and ideology. This successful challenge made for a freer, more diverse society. But the trajectory of the cultural left has run into sand. Its central of ideas of freedom and diversity fitted the emerging consumer capitalism which dissolved much of its cutting edge for social change in a sea of affluence. As well, the cultural left has never developed a political strategy or identified a base for social change. Moreover, significant anti-scientific strains within its world view make it hard to identify with the other radical movement based around the environment.

What to do? In past articles in Arena I have argued that the main circumstances which requires attention from the Left is the dramatic and accelerating threat of global warming. This threat is moving to be the fulcrum of our political situation for decades. Here we find a further complication for any revival of progressive ideas. So much of politics today has been professionalized. The largest environment groups are elite organizations which conduct their politics through symbolic actions designed for media attention. Mass action is seen as an adjunct to a strategy based on media and on lobbying governments. No perspective exists to make mass participation a central feature of action for change. Yet historically we know that societies only change when large numbers of people take extended, demonstrative action.

The most pressing issue is the need to reinvent an inspiring, new kind of mass politics to struggle for sustainability and against the powerful coal, energy and electricity corporations. Perhaps with this urgent need in mind the fragments of the Left can begin to engage in a collective effort to provide a synthesis of ideas, values and theory. Then, maybe, we will see 'a new left forming' as Arena's editorial (No 102) suggested.

d.mcknight@unsw.edu.au

The following six months resembled a kind of normalcy for me. I left each morning to work on a small left wing weekly newspaper. Our small collective wrote, sub-edited, laid out and printed the paper - as well as cleaned and swept the offices. I'd come home fairly tired and at the door Ilse's mother would greet me and then immediately put Ilse into my arms. She too was tired. How come? She had been at home all day, while I had been at work. I didn't fully understand until months later when I became a house father.

When Ilse was six months old, her mother returned to work and I took over at home for the next six months. Nothing prepared me for the surprise that parenting could be so demanding, both physically and psychologically. Nappies demanded constant washing and drying on the line. Bottle feeding was an elaborate ritual which began with a search of inner-city health shops every few days for goat's milk. This simple trip involved taking Ilse in a carry-basket along with a spare nappy, bottle and spare clothes. Then boiling the milk (but not too long) bottling it, checking its warmth (not too warm) and feeding Ilse. At all times, I had to be constantly aware - to develop a sixth sense - about where she was, what she was doing. How did mothers cope with two, let alone three or four children, I wondered? At the back of my mind during all this time was my nightmare fantasy was that she would one day pull a saucepan of hot water down over herself or eat something toxic as she crawled quickly around the house.

During that time and later, I became aware of unexpected emotional and psychological changes in myself. I had become more vulnerable. My sense of well being was profoundly attached to that of another, utterly dependent, small human being. She was, after, all the most stunning and precious thing that had ever come into my life. This vulnerability and sense of caring extended to unrelated parts of my life. A year or so later I realized that I was no longer taking pleasure in risky stunts while bushwalking or in eating lunch with my legs dangling over the edge of 40 metre cliff face. My walking mates thought I had become a little neurotic.

My 'world view' changed too. Most mornings by 9am, the people from our terrace share-house and those from our street had all left for work in offices and factories. Left behind was another workforce which I had unwittingly joined. After 9am I'd push the stroller with Ilse up to the shops. I noticed other people pushing strollers with small children -- my fellow workers, all women. As the first weeks ticked by it gradually dawned on me that I was observing, and had entered, a parallel world that had been hidden in plain view all the time that I was self-importantly writing articles, discussing politics and working on our little newspaper. It was the parallel world of mothers and very young children, the world of home-work, the world of social reproduction which parallels the public world of production and paid work.

In this chapter I want to examine the pressures of work and family, what we mean by equality between women and men and by the culture war over 'family values'
The flowering of feminism

History is littered with the sudden emergence of movements for social change which begin with a very small but radical core of people committed a vision which strikes a profound chord among a broader number of people and then spreads rapidly throughout the society.

The sweeping revolution initiated by what was once called the women's liberation movement has not only affected the texture of our everyday lives, it is reflected in changes in the positions of authority once occupied almost entirely by men. In 1970, when feminism emerged from the universities and from left wing circles, there were three women in the Australian parliament; at the time of writing (2004) there are 56. The first presenter on a significant Australian television program, Caroline Jones on Four Corners, was appointed in 1972. Today there are many women presenters, including those in 'voice of authority' news broadcasting. The first woman to pilot a passenger aircraft, Christine Davy, did so in 1974 while Deborah Wardley became the first pilot for a major commercial airline in 1980, after a battle at the Equal Opportunities Commission. The first female judge in the High Court, Mary Gaudron, was appointed in 1987. The first female state premier, Carmen Lawrence, was elected in 1990. In 2001 Christine Nixon was appointed first Police Commissioner in Australia. The revolution in the education of women is striking. Women students at universities now make up 56 per cent of the total and are roughly half in many medical and law faculties, once largely the preserve of male students.

In the mid 1960s, women who married had to resign their permanent positions in the Commonwealth Public Service, a practice known as the 'marriage bar' which passed into history in 1966. In 1969 and 1972, forms of equal pay decisions lead to increases in the earnings of some women workers. In 1977 the first state Sex Discrimination Act was passed and in 1984 its federal counterpart came into operation. Shortly afterwards the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission began its work. By the late 1980s equal opportunity programs, aimed at tackling deeper structural issues of discrimination in jobs were widespread in major institutions. Beneath these headline events, deep cultural changes affected ordinary people no less profoundly. Established ideas and prejudices about women's 'proper role' were criticised, cast aside or radically reformed on the basis of insights of a reinvigorated feminism.

The women's movement also detonated a revolution in intellectual frameworks, challenging the ways we saw the world. Until the late 1960s feminism was seen as an interesting but old fashioned movement largely concerned with female voting rights. After the 1960s, feminism revived notions of equality and individual rights in the most dramatic way possible,. These were central ideas of the 300 year old doctrine of liberalism. Many other intellectual frameworks flourished in the early days of the women's movement, including socialism which linked social class to women's oppression and feminist separatism which argued for all-female institutions and practices based on the celebration of women-centred values. But the main way in which the goals of feminism were socially validated and translated into public policy was through an argument about equal rights which was based ultimately on liberalism. The appeal of liberalism was wide and thus the ideals which began on the streets with a radical women's liberation movement were soon taken up by broader layers of women in established political parties, in trade unions, in business and in the professions.

So completely have feminism's aims diffused into broader society that there is today no longer a definable 'women's movement' with a single view on what constitutes feminism. Elements of feminism have been absorbed into the legal framework, into social policy, into everyday conversation, into TV sitcoms --- into the whole culture. Everyday life has been transformed, overwhelmingly for the better.

But 35 years after the first whispers of what became a roar of social change, the movement for women's equality and women's rights has run into a road block. Feminist academic, Professor Belinda Probert notes 'progress towards gender equity appears to have stalled'. Writer Anne Summers in her book, The End of Equality, argues: '[A]lthough the language of equality is still used, and despite the successes of so many individual women, the actual experience of far too many women in Australia suggests that the promise of equality has to been met. Sadly, we are actually going in the opposite direction.' The steady drift toward social conservatism has been going on for some time, summed up in the phrase 'family values'.

Some of the awkward facts which constitute the roadblock include:

• Women have not flooded into full time employment. In spite of growing levels of tertiary education, higher pay, an end to social disapproval (and legal barriers) of married women working, 'the proportion of women 15 to 59 years employed full time is much the same today as it was 35 years ago', notes economist Bob Gregory with puzzlement. Also surprising, full time employment has increased among married women and fallen among single women.

• Women have, however, moved into part time work in large numbers. Forty four percent of women in paid jobs work part time. While paid work offers a degree of financial independence it is often not the first step towards a full time job, in part because many women appear to seek work that allows them to continue to do housework and raise children.

• Child raising was one of those things that the New Age Man would share with the New Liberated Woman. But it has not happened. The gender of primary care givers for children has not changed much at all. And when paid leave is available to fathers, it is not always taken up.

• Housework is still overwhelmingly done by women. The apparent small increase in men's share of housework is largely because the number of hours done by women has decreased.

• Families with two wage earning parents find it increasingly hard to find adequate and unpressured time to spend with their children, let alone with each other. In the last three years both major parties acknowledged this largely hidden family crisis as a national problem and promised to do something about it.

• A substantial number of married women with children continue not to work outside the home. Even when the youngest child is teenaged one in four mothers are not in paid work; when the youngest is 4-5 years, it's 41 per cent. If the road to women's emancipation lies through work outside the home, then a substantial number of mothers are a stubborn part of the roadblock.

The family crisis around work and care and the fertility crisis are both somehow linked to the rise of second wave feminism, the most important and valuable social change we have seen in recent times. If we take the long view, this impasse at the beginning of the 21st century should not surprise us. History has a lesson and it concerns how social reformers over the last few hundred years have vainly tried to envisage the role of mothers and children in an imagined, future society. These utopian writings often prefigured a more equal society and a more materially rich life for ordinary people - much of which has come to pass in the wealthy West. But when it came to child birth and rearing children, social reformers have imagined the most fantastic solutions, often involving the magic of spontaneous conception in Herland (a visionary work in 1915 by American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman) or through laboratory fixes as in Marg Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and in Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. Socialist writers also envisaged less fantastic but quite unreal schemes for the complete communal (or government) rearing of children, virtually breaking of the bond between parent and child. Needless to say such schemes have come to nought.

Both in history and in modern times, in spite of important advances the movement for gender equality has stalled and the roadblock has something to do with the complex connectedness of caring for children, gender roles and paid work. Moreover, in many major industrial countries the issues of care for children, care for the aged and declining fertility have shot to the top of the political agenda. It seems like the right time to intervene on family policy with progressive and feminist ideas, but that's the problem. What exactly constitutes a progressive and feminist response, given the experience of the last 35 years? That's what lies behind the 'mother wars' so bitterly fought out in newspaper columns in Australia and overseas. At its most positive (and this is rare) the 'mother wars' debate is about how to renew the feminist vision and in this chapter I'll try to describe the parameters of that debate and make some suggestions.
The price of motherhood

Ann Crittenden is an American feminist who could be the prototype for the generation of women fashioned by feminism. Until the early 1980s she was a reporter on the New York Times, living a lifestyle built around a deep and satisfying commitment to her job. Ready to travel at a moments notice, she and her husband often ate out and employed a cleaner. In 1982 Crittenden gave birth to a boy and the consequences for her life - and the wider consequences for modern motherhood, she recounts in the book The Price of Motherhood.

Before she gave birth, Crittenden admits to feeling 'superior' to housewives. She wondered: 'Why aren't they making something of themselves? What's wrong with them? They're letting our side down'. She went on:

I imagined that domestic drudgery was going to be swept into the dustbin of history as men and women linked arms and marched off to run the world on a new egalitarian alliance. It never occurred to me that women might be at home because there were children there; that housewives might become extinct, but mothers and fathers never would.

In her account of her experience, Crittenden concludes that in spite of the rhetoric of 'family values' the central work of most families, that of child rearing, is systematically devalued by society. Crittenden illustrates this by translating the cost of motherhood into dollars and cents. For herself, as a well paid journalist, she estimates the cost of her decision to have a child and forgo income and superannuation was between $600 and $700, 000, a cost she describes as 'the mommy tax'. For a woman on average wages, the price is smaller but relatively just as high. The point of this was not to suggest that the value and meaning of having a child can be equated with a monetary calculation but to highlight the unreasonable penalty which women bear when they have a child.

In spite of 30 years of struggle for equality it is still women who make adjustments for the sake of having children and, thinks Crittenden, it is likely to continue to be that way. Given this impasse for mothers, Crittenden concluded:

As the twenty first century begins, women may be approaching equality, but mothers are still far behind. Changing the status of mothers, by gaining real recognition of their work, is the great unfinished business of the women's movement...But revaluing motherhood will not be easy. Even feminists are often reluctant to admit that many women's lives revolve around their children... the standard feminist response to the fact that child-rearing marginalises women is not to raise its status but to urge men to do more of it. Though this has been the cry for thirty years, almost 100 per cent of the primary caregivers of young children are still women. This suggests feminism needs a fresh strategy. [emphasis added]
Questions of strategy

The women's liberation movement discussed strategy passionately when it first emerged -- in the US, UK and Australia - and one of the first and fundamental questions it faced was the 'wages for housework' or 'mothers' wage' debate. Should the new movement demand that full time housewives and mothers be paid a wage in recognition of the value of their work? In 1974, just a few years after the first meetings of the women's liberation movement, an article in the new journal Refractory Girl discussed this issue. Its author was one of the early activists of Australian feminism, Liz Windschuttle, who discussed a proposal for a 'mothers' allowance' floated by the Department of Social Security under its Labor Minister Bill Hayden. While rejecting the idea that 'all women's problems will be solved if they join the workforce', she concluded that 'the woman who stays at home, isolated from her sisters, financially dependent on a man, her ideas very largely determined by advertising agents and the other trivia merchants of the mass media, is least likely to be a force for any sort of social change.'

She posed the key question: will a mother's wage raise the consciousness of housewives 'by allowing them to see that their jobs are socially necessary and worthy of a wages' or will it enforce 'the idea that a woman's natural role is that of a housewife/mother?' She added : 'What should be the attitude of feminists to women remaining housewives/mothers? Are there any circumstances where this is desirable or should we encourage all women to work outside the home?' To the two questions in the last sentence Windschuttle answered, respectively, no and yes, and in this she spoke for nearly all of the women's movement. While isolated feminist groups took up the fight for 'wages for house work', the most convincing argument to the majority was that the road to equality lay through paid work for all. This would lead to a wider public world where women would take their place in politics, the professions, the church, corporations, trade unions - in every male-dominated institution. The article and the movement posed the choice as between paid work or housewife-mother, that is between women who stayed at home and those who worked. It seemed a simple choice.

Windschuttle's article was written in the middle of what was, on the face of it, a dramatic shift into the workforce away from the housewife-mother role. In 1966 36 percent of women were in the labour force and by 2002 this had risen to 55 percent. As a result the traditional male breadwinner family has been overtaken by the dual income family. But this is not a family of two identical income earners -- it is more complicated. Women flooded into part time jobs, three quarters of which are now held by women. Women working in these part time jobs constitute 44 per cent of working women. These changes have had a major impact on the working and family lives of Australians and are the subject of a study by someone who is supportive of feminism but prepared to ask some hard questions.
The work-life collision in Australia

Apart from producing one of the best studies of work-family issues, Barbara Pocock has the distinction of creating a new phrase in the language, 'the work-life collision'. It's the title of her book published in 2003. Using extensive social science data and nearly 200 interviews, Pocock investigates the transformation of work and care in Australia over the last 40 years. The transformation has not been easy, nor has it turned out the way it was expected.

Paid work, Pocock argues, was not the only goal of feminism but it was a key goal for women's entry into public life and much progress has been made toward it. But 'this goal has found its happy co-conspirator in a market greedy for women's labour, its 'flexibility' and enthusiastic for the spending power of women's earnings. Of all of feminism's goals, entry to paid work has been the most compatible with the globalising market.'

But at the time more women were entering paid work, the workforce was undergoing a transformation. Gains made in previous decades were being rolled back. The price of efficiency and competitiveness meant that Australians started to work longer and longer hours, often unpaid overtime, and significantly, women's share of these longer hours grew and is still growing. The proportion of workers spending more than 45 hours a week at work increased from 18 per cent in 1985 to 26 per cent in 2001. In many workplaces, work has intensified and working hours now often cover weekends and unsocial times of the day. Australians, says Pocock, have a 'long hours culture'.

All of this has consequences for the two million couple families with children and the over 750,000 single parent families, all juggling work and care responsibilities. As Pocock points out: 'Changes in workplaces have reduced the number of hours we have available to spend on our homes, communities and care. Activities that were once mostly the province of women at home -- cooking and care of small children for example - are increasingly provided by the market.' Spending on child care has increased four fold between 1984 and 1998-99 and between 1993 and 1996, the proportion of children under the age of three who were in formal child care rose by 27 per cent.

Within the home, women still do far more housework than their partners. Women on average do 33 hours a week of housework, child care and shopping compared to men's 17 hours a week. The surveys which suggest that the gender gap on housework is decreasing largely rely on the fact that women are now doing less housework, rather than men doing more. . While much has been written about the super-mum who can 'have it all', Pocock discovered this belies angst and unhappiness. Working mothers are often full of guilt at not being a 'proper mother'. There is enormous pressure to be a 'super mum' and to develop an intensive style of 'super mothering' alongside paid work. 'Most women spoke of the remorse they felt at not being able to do it all - be there for the kids and meeting the family's financial needs, the expectations of motherhood and their own ambitions or experience.'

Moreover, women are divided. 'Interestingly, women with jobs feel criticised for being working mothers (called selfish and 'money hungry') while on the other hand, women at home feel criticised for being lazy, incompetent or unable to "get a job"'. Despite the sentimental valorization of motherhood in society, the mother at home is often regarded as a 'non person'. Comments Pocock: 'Those who respect full time mothering and those who do it, work against the grain of society where so much of personal worth, value and self is shaped by a worker identity established through the market.'

This taps into a wider paradigm in which the family is functioning. One of the answers for many families is commodified, market-supplied care and some of us prefer this rather than engaging in the more complex emotional exchanges with grandparents or friends which non-market care involves. The market sets a clear rate for the job, free of this kind of reciprocity. But the long term problem is that non-market exchanges - -reciprocal favours, donations, help, care - are what builds personal and community relationships. 'Mutual non-monetary exchanges have embedded with in them - indeed create - personal and community relationships. These obligations are the stuff of community and generalized reciprocity. They create trust and long term witnesses to one's life.' One of the deeper processes occurring in the work-life collision is a competition between two kinds of life-world. 'While the market hungrily offers its commodified supports (food and all kinds of services delivered to the door) where the prospect of profit exists, the engine for non-monetary community creation ... is a weaker machine, one that is starved in the face of time pressures in streets where work sucks both time and place.'

This collision between the demands of work and home is quite historically unprecedented and the crisis created, which might have once been regarded as a private matter, has become a matter for national political debate. Prime Minister John Howard referred to the problem as the 'barbecue stopper' - the sensitive discussion which dramatically brings to halt the normal small talk of that most ordinary of social occasions. Women, it seems, can be anything: high flying lawyers, corporate chiefs, government ministers, but they are finding it much harder to be mothers these days.

What do women want?

One of the most influential figures in the debate is Canberra demographer Peter McDonald who characterizes this debate as dealing with the transition from the 'male breadwinner' model of the family to the 'gender equity' model. He defines 'gender equity' as a situation in which 'there is incoming earning work, household maintenance work, and caring and nurturing work, but gender has no specific relationship to who does which type of work.' (Like others in this debate, McDonald states that his definition of 'gender equity' does not 'imply exact equality' between the man and the woman' but then defines it in terms of 'equality of resources and capabilities' of men and women. Yet men and women are not equal in one vital capability - that of giving birth to children.) He believes we are on the road to a gender equity family, and that 'a large majority of Australians have adopted the gender equity model'.

His evidence for this is a survey which shows 95% of men and women agree that 'if both the husband and wife work, they should share equally in the housework and care of the children'. When asked about the statement 'It is better for the family if the husband in the principal breadwinner and the wife has primary responsibility for the home and the children' then 34% of men and 31 % of women agree. Around one third agreeing with a 'traditional' family is not inconsiderable but McDonald seems to believes this is a temporary situation and that the tide will continue to run the way of 'gender equity' as he defines it. He argues that the problem lies in the fact that social institutions have been subjected to the goals of feminism but the family is lagging behind. 'The core change required is the one which is the most difficult. Gender equity needs to be promoted within the family itself. Changes in cultural values are slow and idealized family morality is resistant to change.' McDonald suggests that 'a different socialization of children can lead to change in the next generation' perhaps with more gender equity content in school curricula. McDonald's statement should give us pause. He says the institutions have changed but the people are lagging behind. One could ask, on whose behalf and in whose interest, have the institutions changed? No wonder the ideologues of the Right talk about feminists and the Left as 'cultural elites' engaged in social engineering.

But McDonald's view that we are on the way to a family model in which work in done regardless of gender is contested by contrary results from other surveys. Two other researchers, Mariah Evans and Jonathan Kelley, have written a series of articles based on large scale surveys reporting that the overwhelming majority of mothers (71 per cent) think that mothers should not work when their children are of pre-school age. A substantial minority (27 per cent) think part time employment with young children is good, while a tiny two percent favor full time work.

Another critic is feminist writer Anne Manne who has often written about the dilemmas thrown up by employment-defined equality. She points to one of the most sensitive issues of all which is research which suggests that certain kinds of institutional child care may have detrimental effects on children, especially on the very young and on children who spend long hours in care. In particular that 'children in over 30 hours of care in all ranges of care and including father care, showed three times as many aggressive behavioural problems as children in care for less than ten hours'. The research, some of the most sophisticated and extensive ever carried out, usually brings the response from some feminist critics that the detriment is due to poor quality care but as Manne points out all variables such as 'quality of care, type of care, mother attributes and stability of care were carefully taken into account. Quantity not quality was the issue.' Perhaps reservations about child care explain women's preference for caring for their child themselves in its early years, she suggests. Manne may well be right but the problem for many people committed to extensive child care to underpin their work choices is that it is difficult to discuss such results in a detached and calm way. This research simply cannot be true.

Anne Manne also points to the work of British sociologist Catherine Hakim who has been demonised as if she is a rabid moral conservative. But this is misleading and simplistic. The basis for this attack began with her outspoken criticism of what she called 'feminist myths' in sociological research. Hakim criticised was the denial of certain facts because they were assumed to undermine employment-oriented feminism. Hakim is best known for what she calls 'preference theory'. She uses opinion surveys to ask men and women to express their personal preferences for one of three different family models. The first, the egalitarian, was a family where 'two partners have an equally demanding job and where housework and care of children are shared equally.' The second model, the 'compromise', was one where 'the wife has a less demanding job than the husband and where she does the larger share of the housework and caring for the children'. The third is the 'separate roles' family where 'only the husband has a job and the wife runs the home'. She argues that none of these options has overwhelming support although the traditional 'separate roles' model has clearly lost its dominance.

On the basis of her analysis of men and women's expressed preferences and other data , Hakim concludes that government policies should be neutral, supporting a diversity of preferences on how to arrange the work-life balance. Ultimately, she says, part of this diversity involves paying 'all full time mothers a wage for their time and efforts while their children are small.' Where such a policy has been tried the allowance could also be used to pay for childcare services but most mothers take the allowance for themselves. Apart from anything else, this is a good anti-poverty measure, as Manne argues.

By contrast analysts influenced by employment-oriented feminism look at the rise in the number of women working part time and see the positives - a chance to broaden their outlook, be financially independent, participate in the public world and essentially take steps towards equality. They conclude that more steps along the road to equality could be achieved if only more women could work full time and they conclude that this depends on government policies supporting child care, maternity leave and similar supports. But they rule out financial support for full time mothers.

Hakim can be criticised because her categories of preference are drawn too rigidly whereas the lived reality is blurred as many women make transitions in their life from full time work, to full time care then back to part time or full time work. What this means is that most women value the benefits of a paid job and also recognise the value of caring. Their preferences vary at different times. Barbara Pocock points to such a 'three-stage transition [which] is common for women' but warns that this is only an 'average pattern of the majority. There are many variations around the mean. Many women spend extended periods at home especially with multiple children. On the other hand, a third return to paid work relatively quickly after having their last baby'.

All commentators agree that the popularity of the traditional male breadwinner family with dependants has been overtaken by the dual income family. But this conceals as well as reveals. Today's traditional family is tomorrow's dual earner family and vice versa. As well, most dual income families are 'modified traditional households with one and a half workers in many cases.' And in any case about 30 percent of families with children still fit the traditional mould of working father and home-based mother.

Recognition and support for diversity should surely be the foundation of family support policies yet this conflicts with the definition of equality centred largely around fulltime paid work. One of the great acheivements of modern feminism was to struggle to broaden women's choice by breaking down legal and cultural barriers to wider fields of employment and to authoritative positions in society. But having achieved much of this and having expanded choice, somehow we are reluctant to accept that women who chose to stay at home for extended periods after the birth of their child are in fact freely choosing. We blame only ideological blinkers or structural impediments such as lack of child care. Lack of affordable childcare is indeed a problem preventing some women from working but it does not wholly explain the choice by many women to care for their child(ren) themselves. Some feminists may feel privately, as Ann Crittenden did, that such women were also 'letting the side down'. But perhaps we should look again at the meaning of equality and choice.
Separating motherhood from patriarchal values

The paradigm of feminism which assumes the equality (and liberation) of women mostly depending on long term, full time participation in the paid work force is not succeeding for two reasons. First, it cannot explain the actual behaviour and diverse choices made by many women who become mothers. Second, philosophically, it is an expression of a kind of liberalism which, while it has many virtues, imposes an inflexible model which fails to capture the major ethical and emotional dimensions of human lives. It also fails to cope with the felt needs of many women centred around the notion of love and caring. Prizing these qualities has been a submerged current of feminist thought which has recently re-emerged in the work of a number of feminist writers who cannot be dismissed as mere 'conservatives' or enemies of feminism.

One such is Germaine Greer who describes her 1999 book, The Whole Woman, as the sequel to feminist classic The Female Eunuch, first published in 1970. Greer says she was also driven to write The Whole Woman because of her alarm at the fate of feminism and her rejection of what was being claimed in the name of feminism. Women might well have broken barriers to join male institutions but rather than transforming them, they simply accepted their values and practices. The renaming of the women's movement from its original title, Women' Liberation to feminism masked a deeper change.

What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word. We were settling for equality. Liberation struggles are not about assimilation but asserting difference, endowing that difference with dignity and prestige and insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination.... Seekers after equality clamored to be admitted to smoke-filled male haunts. Liberationists sought the world over for clues to what women's lives could be like if they were free to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate.

Motherhood is a central concern for Greer. Where once the social ideal of motherhood acted as a straight jacket for women's potential and identity, today motherhood is scarcely understood and sometimes reviled. Breast feeding mothers cause a panic and children are regarded as a 'personal indulgence'. The ideal of feminine beauty has become 'boyishly slim and hipless, the broad hips and full bosom of maternity as monstrous as motherhood itself.' Mothers' experience of raising children is intense and unlike that of most fathers: 'The experience of falling desperately in love with one's baby is by no means universal but it is an occupational hazard for any women giving birth.'

Germaine Greer acknowledges that her views on motherhood have changed. She disentangled the experience of motherhood from the oppressive practices which devalued it and which forced women to limit their horizons to it. In The Female Eunuch she had argued that motherhood should not be treated as a 'substitute career'. She now believes that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career and as paid work. 'What this would mean is that every woman who decides to have a child would be paid enough money to raise that child in decent circumstances. The choice, whether to continue in her employment outside the home and use the money to pay for professional help in raising her child or stay at home and devote her time to doing it herself, should be hers.' In her conclusion she says, with characteristic over-statement: 'Women's liberation must be mothers' liberation or it is nothing.'

Greer does not have the last word on the meaning of feminism but she is an important participant in a growing debate which is re-discussing women, employment and the family. With a healthy contempt for politically correct restraints on debate she reminds us that an original component of feminism challenged not just the overwhelming institutional power of males but also the patriarchal values which pervaded the culture. Underlying much of The Whole Woman is a concern with how different women are to men, both physically, psychologically and in the values which women tend to express. She is aware that to many feminists (particularly in academia) this commits the crime of 'essentialism' i.e. believing that men and women are born with different psychological qualities as well as physical chacteristics. On the basis of essentialist ideas, it is said, women have been regarded as inferior. But to reach that conclusion you have to assume that the 'female' qualities are of less value.
The politics of care

Behind the 'work-life collision' and the fertility crisis are a series of knotty problems around motherhood, the family, equality for women and women's' values that have been debated within feminism for many years. Greer's recent work reminds us that in the mid-1970s a strong tendency existed within feminism which valued women's special attributes, including the ability to give birth and a nurturing temperament. This 'cultural feminism' prized traits that might be described as maternal, 'a certain consciousness of care for others, flexibility, non-competitiveness, cooperation ...' As a tendency within feminism, cultural feminism subsided partly because it became associated with an inward-turning separatism and partly because, whether this had occurred or not, it could not operationalise its aims into a practical political strategy around work and mothering. The latter required linking the abstract and ideal aims of the movement with the practical reality of many other women, through a series of campaigns to improve their lives. The only attempt at such a strategic demand was 'wages for housework' or 'a mothers wage', but at that time this demand struck a resonance with neither the young feminists nor with the mass of women and was largely rejected, as we saw earlier. By contrast, a different current within feminism which was based on equality within the framework of paid work, became very successful. It coincided with a pre-existing tendency of women to enter paid work, it appealed to the ideals of fairness and equality and it offered women the financial independence. Traditional 'women's work' such as child raising and housework, it was envisaged, would be shared equally between the two employed parents.

Philosophically, this current of employment-focused feminism was a form of liberalism and was part of the re-energizing of liberalism that occurred from the late 1960s onwards. Like all liberalism, its great strength was a recognition of equality in the face of backward-looking, ancient prejudices. It asserts a common humanity between men and women which gives this current within feminism a continuing relevance. Its weakness was that it tended to go further than this and insisted on an identicality between men and women. Moreover its rise coincided with the rise of another kind of liberalism - neo-liberal economic thinking - which assumed the supremacy of the market and the public economy of production and which deepened the devaluation of the world of care and reproduction. This neo-liberal devaluation of care and the limitations of liberalism are among the reasons that this interpretation of feminism has reached the road block acknowledged earlier.

But cultural feminism which identified women's special attributes was not quite dead. For some time it has been enjoying a rebirth in the wake of research by feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan. In 1982 Gilligan wrote a book, In a Different Voice, based on research on people facing difficult moral conflicts or choices (one conflict concerned abortion). Gilligan argued that she had found a 'different moral voice', which she called an 'ethic of care' and which she contrasted to the traditional ethic of rights in political philosophy. The former was found largely among women and the latter among men. The naming of caring as a vital human activity based on attentiveness to needs and to sustaining relationships was an important conceptual advance which crystallised a widely recognised but 'invisible' social phenomenon.

Arising from Gilligan's original research has been an ongoing academic debate about the meaning of 'an ethic of care' largely applied to the fields of nursing, education and welfare. It has not yet been articulated in a political outlook in the wider society. Critics of the 'ethic of care' fear that it will undermine the advances by women by reinforcing the idea that women are naturally disposed to caring. This is seen to entail the risk that women will revert to denial of self, will lose financial independence and continue to over work. But what if women are biologically inclined to be empathetic and to value relationships more than men? This is, first of all, a question of fact, in the sense that either it is the case or it is not. Eventually knowledge of the make-up of humans will settle this question. If it proves to be the case then it needs to be faced and discussed. Second, the devaluation of caring and the assumption of male norms is surely a significant part of the cause of women's oppression and if this is so, then the struggle is to initiate major social and legal reforms which value caring and empathy.

Is it possible to use an 'ethic of care' as part of a political philosophy without risking all the gains for women and plunging them back into performing compulsory care? Is it possible to spread the values embodied in nurturing and caring to men, indeed further, so that they imbue social structures, politics and our culture? This is indeed possible (though it will not be easy) and, in my view, represents a vital element in fashioning new ideas beyond Right and Left. Many creative and valuable ideas in this direction are now emerging from feminists who have confronted the problem.

Part of the answer lies in tackling those awkward questions: in the wake of women's entry to paid work, why have men not stepped in to do their share of caring work? There are many possible answers to this question. Some are concern the structure of jobs and careers, others concern the values and privileges of men who refuse to do caring work.

One of the clues comes from what Ann Crittenden said earlier in this chapter. 'The standard feminist response to the fact that child-rearing marginalises women is not to raise its status but to urge men to do more of it.' Only a few men have responded and it is unlikely that the majority will do so unless changes are made to entrench the value of caring in out culture and laws. Like a growing number of people, Crittenden argues that child-rearing is an extremely valuable - but under valued - human activity. It is the foundation on which sits 'human capital'. But even economists who recognise that the skills and knowledge of a workforce have a major value, often do not recognise that the formation of this 'capital' begins in the first years of child's life and not simply through learning skills at school or in universities which is mostly what is meant by the term. Most countries do not collect statistics about the labour of women in the home and with children. Where they do, such as Australia, it is found to constitute roughly half of the Gross Domestic Product.

In spite of its actual value, the raising of children is largely unvalued by the New Capitalism and done at a cost to mothers. One of the major reasons why men still dominate the upper rungs of many institutions and organisations is not because they discriminate against women in some simple sense but because they these organisations assume their employees are care-less and because most men act as if they are care-free (even though many are fathers.) This prejudice against care means that those women and few men who give priority to care are penalized when they try to assume positions of institutional authority.

Nevertheless many mothers care for their children when young. In so doing they make a 'huge gift of unreimbursed time and labor', argues Crittenden and this is a major reason why adult women are so much poorer than men - even though they work longer hours than men in almost every country in the world. 'In economics, a "free rider" is someone who benefits from a good without contributing to its provision: in other words, someone who gets something for nothing. By that definition, both the family and the global economy are classic examples of free riding. Both are dependent on female caregivers who offer their labor in return for little or no compensation.' Barbara Pocock, who analyzed the work-life collision, agrees and points out that neo-liberal economists barely recognise this with their myopic focus on market relations. In fact, 'the paid workforce and its entire product actually swims unconsciously atop, and wholly dependent upon, an unrecognized world of the unpaid -- where workers, and their managers and employers are reproduced and sustained.'

Crittenden identifies this large sea of unvalued labour and points out that it also has another characteristic: it is largely selfless, and forms a reservoir of altruism in the world. This is not an economic fact but a social fact of the greatest importance. If we want to shift the unfair burden of care from being largely a female responsibility how can we do this without simply decreasing the overall amount of altruism in the world? More than that, how can we ensure that care for our children, our aged parents and our friends remains genuine loving care and is not wholly supplanted by marketised and commodified care?

One of the most exciting thinkers in the new politics of care is the feminist economist, Nancy Folbre, whom we met in Chapter Two. Like Crittenden she believes care is massively undervalued in contemporary society. And that goes not only for the devaluation of maternal care for young children but also for caring labour in the paid workforce. Child care workers, nurses in hospitals, in aged care and other personal service jobs often bring a dimension of genuine care to their job which is qualitatively different from the instrumental and rational functions which exist on the surface. In my own experience, I recall the last two years of my father's life in a nursing home were materially and emotionally improved by a dimension of warmth given freely by nurses and nursing aides. They could have adequately fulfilled their tasks without such involvement, but they did not. As Folbre says: 'Just because care is paid by a wage doesn't mean that it isn't motivated by love as well as money.' But caring jobs, of course, are poorly paid.

But this caring labour works against the grain of a market-oriented society in which all values are increasingly reduced to commercial values. This insight that an economy based on self interest tends to corrode the virtues of altruism is not a modern discovery. Conservatives have worried about it for the last 200 years and have romanticized mothers and their selfless labour. But as Folbre says the conservative argument which idealizes motherhood depends crucially on an argument about the 'separate spheres'. Men were fitted for the public world of production, and women for the private sphere of reproduction. But the separate spheres of home and work have radically changed forever.
New directions

The conservative desire to return to a past of happy families based on quite separate gender roles will be achieved. But neither has the vision of employment-focussed feminism because men have not stepped into caring work as women stepped into work and the public world. The consequence is the 'work-life collision', especially for women.

Trying to resolve this dilemma has lead me to two conclusions which I did not expect when I began researching feminism and the culture war. First, that caring must be now foregrounded as a vital quality in society but not in the way conservatives have usually seen it -- as largely the contribution of women. Rather, caring is a vital human activity in whcih men should engage far more deeply. But this will not occur until the value of care is radically raised in soceity generally. To achieve this a massive transformation of the structure of work is needed. Shorter working hours and parental leave are needed along with flexible working hours and financial support for carers at home. Underpinning this, a cultural revolution in values in needed to ensure that caring is genuinely held in much higher esteem by society.

This relates to the second conclusion which is that protecting the family from the inroads of the market should now be seen as a vital progressive cause. The family is part of a parallel world of social reproduction characterized by altruism, trust and non-rational (but not irrational) values which are vital to human well being. The family is now the focal point of social and cultural contradictions precipitated by the New Capitalism. It is becoming more apparent that 'family values' can be a rallying cry against the instrumental logic of an increasingly commercially-driven society. And this involves both protecting individual families but also ensuring that social supports are available.

Is a new strategy possible which asserts that women can do more than 'care' and which values care much more highly and spreads it to men? I believe this is possible. It will not be an easy struggle since powerful vested interests benefit from the current arrangement, not just many men but also all major private and public institutions. This involves waging a culture war to regain the initiative for the original ideals embedded in feminism. The foundation of such a culture war is the development of a new set of ideas and values which are grounded in the problems of the 'work-life collision', which are convincing to many people and which project social change for a better future. This involves reconstituting what is usually meant by 'family values'. It also involves reconfiguring what we mean by equality so that it is not largely defined by full time, long term paid employment. A crucial issue is collective financial support for full time parenting for the early years of childhood.

Almost forty years ago the British feminist, Juliet Mitchell, wrote a pioneering article entitled 'Women: The Longest Revolution' and so it has proved to be, in twists and turns and ways unseen even by many supporters of that revolution.

If we look back in a year's time to our meeting today, I suspect we will say that we were (or are) living in a kind of phoney war period, a lull before a storm. We are on the brink of a profound economic crisis which will be historic in its implications. A large degree of unemployment at best, or at worst, global tensions leading to local wars. But even more profound than this crisis is the growing climate emergency, with events moving far faster than expected while the leadership of advanced industrial countries continues to avoid decisive action.

So is this the death of neo-liberalism, the end of economic rationalism?

I don't think so.

Neo liberalism arose for reasons that still operate. First, it suits particular corporate interests and has delivered extraordinary growth in wealth to them. Second, it is deeply naturalised in Australian society. It is internalised, partly because ideas of freedom, competition, choice and self interest have an over-riding appeal to a significant number of people.

But another important reason is that there is no immediately apparent alternative philosophy. Without a robust alterative, we may be here is ten years railing against some future hybrid of neo liberalism which will have failed even more spectacularly.

Today I want to make some comments on what such an alternative might be and how we might strive for it. But before I do so I want to describe what a successful set of ideas is not. It is not is long shopping list of nice things you'd like to achieve. It is not the sum total of the various causes of progressive groups. In the real world there are conflicts and choices to be made. The most difficult centre around the contradiction between material delights of seemingly endless growth and the unsustainability of this. More tangibly, this means a genuine commitment to renewable energy will conflict with those who refuse to change in the coal mining and coal fired electricity generation industries.

But let's talk about possible alternative philosophies to neo-liberalism. In fact we can actually learn a lot from the rise of neo-liberalism. After all, it has been remarkably successful. From a set of idea which were universally regarded as absurd and marginal, they developed into a kind of new 'common sense'. I am not suggesting we need an ideological world view similar to neo-liberalism -- a Theory of Everything -- rather we need a set of values, a political outlook and a degree of coherence which the progressive movement so far lacks.

The most obvious thing is to learn from its success is the power of ideas, the ability of a set of ideas embedded in an intellectual framework, to inspire people and to change society. This has been the case with both neo-liberalism and with the earlier powerful paradigm of ideas grouped around socialism. Without inspiration and the strength that comes from a set of ideas, few will develop the determination which is necessary to actually change anything.

Such ideas operate on many levels. They have values by which to analyse society, they set longer term goals, they make assumptions about human nature, they contain moral principles, they suggest a range of political strategies for change, and ultimately they suggest practical principles to create policies.

In the case of neo liberalism, a key assumption about human nature is that narrowly defined self-interest is the key driving force of humans and that the main yard stick of value is the growing output of material goods. A related assumption is the claim that outcomes of free markets are somehow ethically 'good'. The latter is a principle about morality, in this case a deeply flawed morality.

These deeply embedded assumptions explain the hysterical attacks on those who argue that endlessly rising living standards are unsustainable and who disagree that human well being must be based on a growing supply of consumer goods.

Finally on neo-liberalism, we need note that the problem is not the use of markets per se, it is the fundamentalist and utopian philosophy that markets must be used wherever possible and that market outcomes can substitute for ethical decisions.

So what would a new philosophy look like?

In my book Beyond Right and Left I attempt to sketch this out. I argue that we need a synthesis of principles drawn from some of the world's major philosophies. I believe we can forge a new kind of common sense, a new hegemony on this basis.

At the heart of an alterative is the recognition of the inter-connectedness between what we used to call the economy and the environment. Sustainability is a fundamental concept and measure. This is a concept that breaks not only with neo liberalism but also with the economic assumptions of traditional socialist ideas. It involves rejecting assumptions of endless material progress. It involves supporting the concept of 'enough' and 'sufficient', not 'more and more'.

So my first point is about the deprivation model versus the sustainability model. Recently the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that, over a 12 month period, due to a money shortage, 13% of Australians said that they had gone without meals or had been unable to heat their home.

As against that, on a longer time frame, real incomes in Australia have trebled in the last 50 years. Many, many working Australians enjoy a lifestyle undreamt of by their parents. Four wheel drives, home entertainment systems, overseas holidays. My point is not to brush poverty under the carpet but to ask: if our vision assumes that deprivation is central, then problems arise. The first is that the emphasis seems to be misplaced and does not accord with central facts. Second, in political terms, by emphasizing material deprivation, we are addressing the needs of a minority and risk say little to a much bigger group whose support is vital for social change.

This relates to my second main point which is about the need to assert the common good. For too long progressives have had a love affair with diversity. We valued the differences between people. We formed movements based on particular constituencies. Diversity is not bad principle at all, but taken on its own its application in practice has been negative. It fed the celebration of individualism. It meant that we didn't search for the commonalities, the common interests. In many ways it meant that progressive were simply a patchwork of special interest groups each pushing their own barrow and saying little about common interests.

Both the economic collapse and the climate crisis emphasise our actual common interests. There is hardly an individual solution to either. Neo liberalism assumes that choices and competition can be constructed -- but in the case of the environmental crisis, we have only one planet, we cannot choose another. We have only one atmosphere in which to breathe and one climate to sustain us. Given that growth will be constrained by the planet's limits we should talk about a more equal sharing of limited wealth, not endless expansion. In practice, a more equal sharing of wealth means vast improvements to the shared infrastructure of society, its common assets such as a health care, system, transport, education, energy and so on.

This relates to my third point, that we need to assert the goals of social equality. The economic crisis has spotlighted the grotesque wealth inequalities which exist in this society. Whether corporate bonuses of tens of millions of dollars are paid to competent or incompetent managers, the sums are immoral. But this is not the central point. The real reason we must have equality at the centre of our vision is that business will try to impose its own solutions to the economic crisis. It obviously wants to get back on track and its solutions will take little heed of social inequalities. In fact they will be predicated on them., More than this, in the years to come, as the climate emergency grows, corporate Australia will begin to act aggressively to solve it, because ultimately it wants to survive too. The solutions which it will promote, as so often in the past, will entrench inequality. The key social consequence of the climate crisis is that energy will cost far, far more than it ever has in the past. This means the costs of all goods and services will rise, in some cases radically. Ordinary people will bear a disproportionate cost unless social equality is at the heart of a climate response.

Finally, we need a new kind of movement based on this set of progressive values.

In terms of a movement, we need more coherence and co-operation across NGOs, trade unions, environment, welfare and church groups. But we need more than simple organisational efficiency. We need to work towards the inspiration of a new grass roots movement of people that goes beyond these lobby groups and their interests. In my lifetime, many activist causes have been transformed into institutionalised groups whose faces are turned to the government, not to the public at large. This development was largely inevitable but now the circumstances and the possibilities are changing. Rather than seeing mass action and public pressure as a small part of a wider lobbying effort, the progressive movements need a new orientation which sees building a mass movement as a real priority. In recent times the closest we have come to this is Your Rights at Work campaign. Unions had no chance of winning through lobbying so they began to organise both in an old familiar way and in new ways. Among the climate groups, a similar thing will hopefully occur. I may be old fashioned but a key thing for any movement to make an impact is its ability to mobilise in the community, and come into the streets in large numbers.

The key to this movement is a new set of shared values which are already present in embryo, are based on:
-- sustainability and conservation
- social equality;
- a common good;

These values sound easy to adopt but in practice, differences and disagreements will surface within and between the progressive movements themselves. The phrase one hears more frequently these days is about the fault line between greens and browns. Developing a vision that can inspire both activists and a wider circle of supporters will not be easy but it will help to resolve the fault line issues. The sooner we begin this process the better.

There are have been many delicious moments in the last few months as the banks on Wall Street tumbled like an unstoppable sequence of falling dominos. Having the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan admit that he had misplaced his faith in deregulated free markets was one. Another was the sight of the British and American governments nationalizing banks as their losses forced them to the wall.

By contrast, the columnists and commentators of the free market Right continue to blame governments. They argue that the reason for the sub-prime crisis is that the Clinton administration forced banks to lend to poor people. The logic of this is, of course, that in this crisis we need freer markets and more deregulation, not less. Above all, say the Right, we must not draw moral lessons from the crash. Any talk about the grotesque bonuses to bankers and screen jockeys is far too crude. Mentioning greed as a factor causing the crisis is so simplistic.

This hasn't been the response of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who damned 'extreme capitalism' and a 'culture of greed' as the cause. Rudd is often accused of being an Antipodean Tony Blair, but the economic crisis is revealing that Rudd is quite different. Rudd's recent attack on 'free market ideologues' was a speech that neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown - or certainly not Paul Keating -- would have made.

After explaining Labor's response to the crisis to the Federal Labor Business Forum in Sydney in October, he characterized the crisis as a 'fundamental failure of values'. The fact is, he said, that much of the root cause of the sub prime crisis came down to our financial markets rewarding people for taking extravagant risks.

'Executives earned massive bonuses. Their rewards were skewed to short term “success” rather than long term creation of asset value. They literally laughed all the way to the bank … These were the most obvious manifestations of the culture of greed and short-termism which pervaded large parts of the American financial sector. This culture was never challenged by a political and economic ideology of extreme capitalism.'

His particular target was 'extreme free market ideologues' who, he said, 'have a naïve belief that unrestrained markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve optimum outcomes. Ideologues who believe that any regulation of private business is fundamentally wrong. Ideologues who have resisted the regulation of financial markets and the supervision of a wide range of financial institutions. Ideologues who lectured the developing countries caught up in the Asian Financial Crisis a decade ago about the need for transparency and disclosure, but did little to reform their own financial systems. Ideologues who believe that government is always the problem, never the solution.

'Except of course when there is a crash - then, the self-same ideologues argue, having privatised their profits, [say] we should socialize their losses. And by the way, having demanded lower and lower taxes all the way through.'

Rudd's attack drew a predictable reaction. The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman denounced him. Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian' said that the banks were not to blame at all. It was “do-gooders peddling universal home ownership”. The Melbourne Herald-Sun's Andrew Bolt chimed in on cue and said: 'The "greed" that started it was that of poor people in the US who wanted a house and took out home mortgages they had little hope of repaying.' A few weeks later Albrechtsen returned to the theme, arguing that Rudd's speeches were merely a 'dog whistle' to the Left. If that is all they were, you might wonder, why is she so upset?

But these justifications don't cut much ice. The reason is plain for all to see. Today, it is only government which can save society from the consequences of decisions made by the banking sector and its poor lending practices. It was always going to be that way - but this was an unfashionable thing to argue when the economy boomed and neo-liberalism held sway. This economic ideology of the free market has been most deeply applied in the banking and finance sector. And for quite a while, it seemed justified. In the old days, it is true, home loans were given only to the most cashed up borrowers. You had to go to the banks on bended knees to get a home loan. Deregulation seemed to make sense.

But the level of home ownership has not changed very much over the decades and deregulation meant high interest rates at times and a housing bubble. The availability of easy credit has meant the creation of a wider debt bubble. That is why the coming recession will hit many people very hard. Those who lose their jobs or businesses will have large personal debts still to pay off, and these debts will be larger than in previous recessions, because Australians have been encouraged to borrow freely for many years.

Whether the Rudd government will do anything to change this is a moot point. Its watchword so far has been excessive caution, disappointing many supporters. Rudd has decided that a key part of winning the next election is to fulfil the letter of election promises, neither more nor less. Hence his unwillingness to introduce reforms that genuinely roll back the workplace laws which Howard introduced. But a global economic crisis changes the terrain on which politics is played and some caution needs to be set aside. Already his government is using traditional spending measures to stimulate the economy and it has said that it will go into temporary deficit if necessary. Re-regulation and deficit spending mark small but important changes to the neo-liberal wisdom.

But the erosion of neo-liberal dominance can and will open up real possibilities for change - if only progressives can grasp them. Free market ideology has been mortally wounded on its strongest point: that it is the only economically sustainable choice worth taking. Now it has been shown to be economically unsustainable and potentially the cause of a great deal of misery depending on how deep the recession dives.

There is a tendency already evident that for some people to see the economic crisis in very traditional terms. They point to all those articles suggesting that Karl Marx will rise from Highgate Cemetery and be vindicated at last. But neo-liberalism was much more complicated and far-reaching than an economic phenomena. And neo-liberalism's social and environmental effects are still with us. They have had a permanent impact on social institutions and have not been eliminated. The logic of neo-liberalism is still threatens the climate. That's why its fatal wounds still call for a new politics.

We have to deal with the fact that neo-liberalism has created social practices that are unsustainable. For example, it has eroded the social and cultural framework in which certain things were not done, no matter how profitable they might be and certain areas where no go areas . Neo-liberal policies have meant the massive spread of gambling. All over Australia gamblers and especially gambling addicts provide massive revenue for state treasuries. Similarly with the sale and consumption of alcohol. Free trade in gambling and alcohol sales is economically rational. So we now have a choice—that wonderfully deceptive word - about buying vodka at midnight and playing the pokies til 6am. We are therefore in a freer society.

But both gambling and alcohol consumption have downsides, in some cases terrible social effects. And the more they are liberalized, the worse the effects become. My point is that it was once only the religious right who opposed their spread. Today I think there is a good case for the left to combat these policies and to link up with anybody on the right who sincerely wants to roll back the libertarian policies. This doesn't entail closing all pubs and banning gambling - but significant changes less than that.

Neo liberalism also slowly and relentlessly creates a culture in which widely held social values are skewed towards individualism, self-interest, and competition. It creates a society in which we are obsessed with paid work and with the material goods which work brings. Without going into it more deeply, all this process of commodification is antithetical to the kind of personalities and instincts we have as creatures shapes by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. In human values lies part of the resistance to neo liberalism.

Another consequence of the encouragement of individualism, self interest is the loss of social cohesion. Often this is clothed in the language of diversity, choice and flexibility. The lack of social cohesion expresses itself in the increasing need for private provision for heath and education and the degrading of public provision. In a different kind of way, social cohesion is put under strain by the changes in the work forces such as outsourcing. We are now in the process of creating a layer of working poor in our society. When the unions and their supporters challenged Work Choices this was movement for greater regulation ad for greater social cohesion. Some saw it as a sign of revival of an old movement and I suppose it was that - but the resonance it struck in a wider society was about resistance to the disorder and decreasing social cohesion which neo-liberalism entails.

All of this is about what I've called a libertarian capitalism or what Anne Manne and others call the New Capitalism. It may seem quite natural and normal for people under 30, but it is something which is quite new, it is constructed, and it can change. Indeed it must change because a society of individuals pursuing self interest has a lot of trouble acting in collective ways. Yet the kinds of challenges which we will face in coming decades are ones which need a collective solution.

The most obvious instance of unsustainability is climate change, although it is not the only one. The British economist Nicholas Stern regards the climate crisis as an example of 'market failure'. He said:

'Markets do not automatically provide the right type and quantity of public goods, because in the absence of the right kind of public policy, there are limited or no returns to private investors for doing so…Thus climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods …. All in all it must be regarded as a market failure on the greatest scale the world has ever seen.'

The most recent research indicates that its effects are coming faster than anticipated. A report from Sweden I saw recently seems to indicate that parts of the permafrost in the northern hemisphere are warming, releasing methane gas. And thanks to David Spratt and Phillip Sutton's book Climate Code Red we know that the decay of the polar icecaps is proceeding far more quickly than scientists predicted.

That means that some of the problems that flow from this will arrive relatively soon. This means, for example, large scale refugee movements from flooded areas, such as Bangla Desh and from some Pacific Islands. Droughts may trigger wars and conflict over drinking water in south east Asia.

Within Australia we can predict an increase in social tension between the disadvantaged and the comfortable. To decrease fossil fuels use and change to renewables, the price of energy must rise radically and this will undermine some of the lifestyle we enjoy. The political problem is that no one wants to tell people this unpleasant truth. Certainly not a government or an opposition which wants to be elected.

On this basis, I believe that mitigating it and adapting to it will dominate politics for the foreseeable future. That is, it will be the pivot or the axis on which alternative and progressive politics will be built. A whole of lot of other concerns for progressives - racism and inequality for example - will find their sharpest expression in the response to climate change.

Theory and practice

I've spent some time sketching out these problems. I do this for a number of reasons - if you want a critique you must begin with problems, if you are interested social change must sketch those problems on large scale. If you want social change, you must be interested in connecting theory with practice - which means among other things, you must be able to make a connection between the problems which will affect ordinary people and the wider social vision you aim at.

Every successful movement for social change has invariably had one major advantage over bigger and more powerful forces. That advantage is the ability to see problems emerging from beyond the horizon and to prepare for them with a new social vision.

Why is that? Certain forces have a logic of their own. They impose themselves on events regardless. Things are forced to change - and if you are in tune with that change , if you understand something like climate change in all its shocking implications, then you can seize an opportunity when it arises. Because when things begin to change, those who have a vested interest in the present state of affairs don't want to recognise the new reality, they want to tinker with it, they hope for the best.

Those who do not have a stake in the present, but who have a vision of the future which is both principled and pragmatic can have an enormous influence.

Because you never know what is over the horizon. Let's say in the next year there was a return to a fierce drought. Let's say the water supply of Melbourne and Sydney dips below 30 %, down to 20% or less. This frightening example of climate change - would also be the kind of event which forces the whole society to consider new possibilities in public policy and politics. Being able to explain these events gives you have a tremendous advantage in being able to suggest a course of action.

The challenge

In his lucid study of the pioneers of neo-liberalism Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, Simon Marginson notes a crucial element of the challenge presented by these thinkers.

'What has been impressive about this group - it is a lesson its opponents would do well to learn - is the long term nature of their project. They realized that this meant a major change not only in government policies but in the economic and political culture in which those policies were implemented … [This was] decades in the making.'

That's what we must do - plan to set a new political agenda over the next decade of two . It is what I set out to do in my book Beyond Right and Left. What the book is actually about is the development of a new social critique, a new critical project, a new set of ideas and values on which a new political force could be built. This seems to me vital - if only for the reason that no other movement for social change has ever existed which did not have some sort of coherent social critique.

I say this while also saying you don't have to agree with me on details. I am not saying progressives need a coherent set of ideas and they have to be my ideas. But we do need to reshape and renew out vision - for many reasons, including the challenges thrown up by neo liberalism and climate change.

But a set of ideas is not enough. The other vital ingredients for really significant social change - is mass support. And the need for some sort of mass support affects how you develop and emphases the ideas. To win mass support such ideas must be relevant to the perceived problems of a large section of society - they have to have an immediate applicability as well as some longer term depth. They must touch people's hearts and heads.

No social change has ever happened without mass support - by which I mean not 50% support - that is impossible from a standing start -- but of a critical mass, a thoughtful, determined minority which aims to speak to a majority and whose ideas are projected as a long term vision affecting the whole society.

That's what occurred over the great 150 year struggle of the labour and trade union movement. There was rank and file support for the early socialist and anarchists because of the very obvious deprivation and injustice which workers faced every day,. But there was also a long term vision to remake society - and that actually occurred, though often in unforeseen ways.

Similarly, and in a much short time frame, the emergence of feminism and environmentalism developed a set of ideas which addressed both the immediate situation and projected a longer term vision.

But these is another element in all of this which we must address. All of these visions - labour movement, of women and of the environment - are partial visions. Part of what we need to strive for is a vision which connects and makes coherent certain elements which touch on all these areas. Not a totalising and all-explanatory theory but rather a set of values that informs a looser kind of social analysis.

To analyse the multi-sided nature of the emerging crisis in our society we need to build an intellectual movement that can begin to think through some of the dilemmas all this poses - and this is not a short term project, but in terms of ideas, it is the only thing worth concentrating on at the moment.

Murdoch obliquely referred to this in his first Boyer lecture as "the great transformation we've seen in the past few decades", but otherwise his praise for free-market thinking was muted, perhaps because people blame finance deregulation for the economic crisis. But last year, to support its bid for The Wall Street Journal, News Corporation began advertising itself on the theme "Free people. Free markets. Free thinking."

In support of such a position, Murdoch maintains loss-making newspapers such as the New York Post and the London Times. The Australian lost millions for 20 years until the mid-1980s. Murdoch's preparedness to take losses year after year testifies to the fact that he often puts ideas and influence before profit.

In a 1994 address to the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney free-market think tank, Murdoch argued ideas in society were more important than short-term profit. He quoted John Maynard Keynes's argument that political and philosophical ideas are often very significant to men who regard themselves as supremely practical. In the media business, "we are all ruled by ideas", Murdoch added.

An important example of this is his support for the Washington publication The Weekly Standard, an influential and elite magazine regarded as the journal of American neo-conservatives. Murdoch began it with $3 million in 1995 and, for a number of years, it was a determined opponent of the Clinton presidency. In 2003 The New York Times described it as the "prime voice" of Republican neo-conservatives and one of Washington's more influential publications.

Like Murdoch, the magazine strongly supported the invasion of Iraq and most Bush Administration positions. The annual subsidy to The Weekly Standard is thought to be at least $1 million, though this is small change amid corporation revenue of $US32 billion. Murdoch's speechwriter, Bill McGurn, was Bush's chief speechwriter.

That corporate culture at News is deeply political is evidenced by the regular global retreats of editors and other senior staff - not because corporate retreats are unusual (they are not) but because News's so closely identify with politics. The early retreats expressed a clear preference for the Republican Party and its neo-conservative wing.

The first of these was in 1988 at the ski resort of Aspen, Colorado. According to the the Murdoch biographer William Shawcross, the star attraction was Richard Nixon. The other speakers representing "different aspects of Murdoch's view of the world" included Norman Podhoretz, an early neo-con and father of a founding editor of The Weekly Standard.

In 1992, at the second of these powwows, one discussion panel included Stephen Chao, the president of Fox television; Lynne Cheney, the morals campaigner and wife of Dick; John O'Sullivan, the editor of a major conservative journal; and another neo-con intellectual, Irving Kristol, whose son, William, now edits The Weekly Standard.

A male stripper disrobed as Chao spoke and Chao, who was trying to make a point about sex in the media, was sacked by Murdoch. The seminar's title? "The Threat To Democratic Capitalism Posed By Modern Culture" - a regular theme of neo-cons, who argued profit imperative destroyed moral barriers. Another high-flown concept pioneered by News in Australian political life is that of "culture wars", a notion derived from American think tanks to describe the conflict over such things as the interpretation of history, values and skills in public education and the welfare state. Some of these themes will feature in the Boyer lectures and have been the subject of campaigns by The Australian for some years.

The Australian's existence is an example of Murdoch's commitment to quality journalism. But the newspaper's stance draws deeply from intellectuals in American think tanks and it finds itself at odds with many Australian thinkers unconvinced by neo-conservatism.

For example, just before the defeat of the Howard government, The Australian Literary Review ran a cover story on Australia's "second-rate" intellectuals who refused to recognise Australia's great political leadership. An editorial noted: "Australia continues to be a lucky country thanks to a generation of first-rate national leaders but has been let down by second-rate public intellectuals." It named several, and continued: "Their contempt for our political leadership is matched only by their disparagement of ordinary people." Accusing left-liberal opponents of being powerful elites who hold ordinary people in contempt, News replicates another tradition of American neo-conservatism.

One key target over the years has been La Trobe University's Robert Manne, who was attacked by The Australian in a 2001 article of an unprecedented 7000 words, mainly for Manne's defence of the Bringing Them Home report on the stolen generations of indigenous children. Manne had said there was an organised campaign of historical denial in which writers and columnists at News Corporation newspapers had taken a prominent part.

Rupert Murdoch's ideas are said to have mellowed.

In 2006 in California, he was persuaded by Tony Blair, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore to abandon climate scepticism and to accept the scientific evidence of climate change. Shortly afterwards Murdoch warned of climate change's "catastrophic" threat.

While a change of heart, the statement confirmed the Murdoch commitment to ideas was unchanged. It reaffirmed his media's unified corporate position on major political issues. Previously and predictably, his media promoted climate scepticism; now that the orthodoxy changed, they turned in a new direction, like an army on the march.

Profit remains important to Murdoch; of course it does. But it is also balanced, in part at least, by a commitment to ideas.

His unashamed attack on free market ideology came in a remarkable speech to the Federal Labor Business Forum in Sydney in October. After explaining Labor's response to the crisis, he then went on to discuss 'the fundamental failure of values' revealed by the crisis.

When the tobacco industry was feeling the heat from scientists who showed that smoking caused cancer, it took decisive action.

It engaged in a decades-long public relations campaign to undermine the medical research and discredit the scientists. The aim was not to prove tobacco harmless but to cast doubt on the science. In the space provided by doubt, billions of dollars in sales could continue. Delay and doubt were crucial products of its PR campaign.

Exxon's decision comes after a shareholder revolt by members of the Rockefeller family and big superannuation funds to get the oil giant to take climate change more seriously. Exxon (once Standard Oil) was founded by the legendary robber-baron, John D. Rockefeller.

In 2007 the chairman of the US House of Representatives oversight committee on science and technology, Brad Miller, said Exxon's support for skeptics 'appears to be an effort to distort public discussion'.

The funding of an array of think tanks and institutes which house climate sceptics and deniers also worried Britain's premier scientific body, the Royal Society. It found that in 2005 Exxon distributed nearly $3 million to 39 groups which 'misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change'. It asked Exxon to stop the funding and its protests helped force Exxon's recent retreat.

The chief scientist of New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research, Dr Jim Salinger, knows all about misrepresentation. Two months ago, he was named by an Exxon-funded group, the Heartland Institute, as a scientist whose work undermined the theory that burning carbon was a cause of global warming.

The Heartland Institute - essentially a free market lobby group - emphasises that 'the climate is always changing'. It is a common theme of many climate change deniers who talk about a so-called 'Little Ice Age' (1300-1900) and 'Medieval Warm period' (800-1200). Salinger's research studied variation in climate, so his research was enrolled in the denial campaign.

Variations in the climate are normal, Salinger said, but this did not in any way weaken conclusions about the dangers of burning oil and coal. 'Global warming is real,' he said, and demanded reference to his work be removed. The institute refused. The Heartland Institute received almost $800,000 from Exxon, according to Greenpeace's research based on Exxon's corporate giving disclosures.

Another regular piece of evidence in the denial lobby's PR campaign is the 'Oregon Petition'. This urges the US government to reject the Kyoto Protocol and claims there is 'no convincing scientific evidence' for global warming. It has been cited in by climate sceptics such as the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt among others. It is said to be signed by 31,000 graduates most of whom appear to have nothing to do with climate science.

The petition originated in 1998 with a scientist, Dr Frederick Seitz, who had been president of the US National Academy of Science in the 1960s (and a tobacco consultant in the 1970s). The petition was accompanied by a purported review of the science which was co-published by the George C. Marshall Institute. This Institute has received at least $715,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998. On its website, the Oregon Institute appears to be a large shed in a small town in Oregon. It also offers research on beating cancer with a diet and 'nuclear war survival skills'.

Claims about the world cooling, not warming, are common in the world of deniers. Cardinal George Pell referred to this possibility recently. In his recent book Heat, George Monbiot gives the example of the TV presenter and botanist, David Bellamy, who is also a climate skeptic. He told the New Scientist in 2005 that most glaciers in the world are growing, not shrinking. He said his evidence came from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland, a reputable body. When Monbiot checked the service they said that Bellamy claim was 'complete bullshit'. The world's glaciers are retreating.

When pressed, Bellamy pointed to a website iceagenow.com which claims we are heading for new ice age. Last week, this website published an article that stated that in July 2008 the American Physical Society had 'reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.' This is stunning. Global warming is all about physics and the APS was the premier body of US physicists. But a check with the APS website showed the opposite. Prominently displayed was a press release re-affirming that the evidence for global warming was 'incontrovertible'. Once again the skeptic website was simply lying.

In Australia, the main group which tries to undermine the science of global warming is the Lavoisier Group. It maintains a website with links to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (over $2 million from Exxon) Science and Environmental Policy Project ($20,000) and the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide (at least $100,000). The Competitive Enterprise Institute returns the compliment to Lavoisier in its publication Cooler Head Digest which praised the The Lavoisier Group for its work in defeating the Kyoto Protocol. The Group, it said 'provides the principal intellectual and organizational opposition in Australia to Kyoto.' Its sources of funding are not public.

The Lavoisier group is certainly influential in the federal opposition. A senior figure in the group told Guy Pearse, author of High and Dry, a study of climate policy in Australia, that there 'is an understanding in cabinet that all the science is crap'.

But perhaps the oil companies' PR campaign is not the main reason for the success of the climate change deniers. There are at least three others. First, the implications of the science are frightening. Shifting to renewable energy will be costly and disruptive. Second, doubt is an easy product to sell. Climate denial tells us what we all secretly want to hear. Third, science is portrayed by the free market right as a political 'orthodoxy' rather than objective knowledge, a curiously 'postmodern' argument.

The tide slowly turned on tobacco denial and the science was accepted in the end. Some people still choose to smoke and some pay a price for it.

But climate is different. There are no 'smoke free areas' on the planet. Climate denial may turn out to be the world's most deadly PR campaign.

May 1970 was the high point in protests against conscription and the Vietnam war. That month the Vietnam Moratorium drew 100,000 people onto the streets in Melbourne and 30,000 in Sydney. The Liberal-Country Party government, which had denounced the protests as communist-inspired, was alarmed at the strength of the demonstrations.

A month after the protests, the NSW secretary of the Liberal Party, John Carrick, approached the federal Attorney General Tom Hughes for help. He asked for ASIO briefing papers on the student protest movement which had done so much to turn the tide against the government.

The release of such information to a private individual was not unusual. Hughes was doing what many of his predecessors had done. Indeed ASIO research papers were regularly sent to rightwing journalists and to anti-Communist organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and to B.A. Santamaria's National Civic Council.

So when Justice Robert Hope began investigating the Australian Security Intelligence Organization in 1974, he found an organisation that was routinely used for party political purposes by the Liberal Party. But he decided that none of this dirty washing would be released in his official reports. His role, he said, was to 'make recommendations for the future rather than to seek to track down the truth or otherwise of past errors or alleged past errors.'

Nevertheless the details of ASIO's politicization scandalized him and his small staff who were the first independent investigators into the shadowy organization. Many of the details which Hope found but chose not reveal for strategic reasons emerged during my research over the last four years into ASIO's archives.

Perhaps the most bizarre instruction given to ASIO came from the Foreign Minister, Nigel Bowen in May 1972 who asked ASIO chief Peter Barbour to investigate the 'subversive affiliations' of the Australia Party. The Australia Party, a precursor to the Democrats, had been formed by dissident Liberals. ASIO reported that the party had links with the anti-Vietnam protests but was not strictly speaking 'subversive'.

More serious were ASIO reports that were used to damn the Opposition Labor Party and its MPs. One briefing paper in particular analysed the political motivations of Dr Jim Cairns, a senior Labor MP who was a leader of the Vietnam Moratorium movement. The paper argued that Cairns' activities could ultimately lead to the destruction of parliamentary democracy. The anti-Labor bias continued as the government prepared for the 1972 election. At one point, the Attorney General, Nigel Bowen, and Minister for Labour, Phillip Lynch, asked for ASIO's assessment of proposals put forward by Labor's shadow Minster for Labour, Clyde Cameron and ACTU president, Bob Hawke, on reforming the industrial arbitration system.

While Ivor Greenwood was Attorney General (1971-72), frequently sought security information which he could use to attack the Labor Party. On one occasion ASIO informed him of behind the scenes moves to get a communist trade union leader John Halfpenny, to leave the CPA and join the Labor Party.

Greenwood also liked reading raw intelligence, unusual even for Liberal Attorneys General. In October 1971 he asked to read the transcript of a telephone intercept on Darce Cassidy, a leftwing employee of the ABC. He also asked for security details on a number of left-wing trade union officials, including George Crawford, a leading figure in the Victorian branch of the Labor Party. In the case of feminist and trade union activist in the Melbourne Mail Exchange, Zelda D'Aprano, he suggested to ASIO an unusual strategy. 'He thought she should be got rid of, even by promotion (!) [sic] to some minor Post Office,' reported an ASIO officer.

Just before Christmas 1971 two senior ASIO officers briefed Greenwood on the 'the Aboriginal problem', covering the influence of the Communist Party, marxist intellectuals, the US Black Power movement and the influence of the World Council of Churches. Greenwood saw threats where even ASIO did not. According to one ASIO officer, Greenwood 'was emphatic' that major violent incidents were likely to occur and that 'he was not satisfied with some [ASIO] assessments, [which argued] that no major acts of violence were likely to occur'. Greenwood suggested more telephone intercepts might be required and said he was happy to approve them.

Justice Hope was especially concerned with the practice of back bench MPs asking for information from ASIO for political purposes. One example occurred in 1967, during bitter political conflict in the NSW South Coast electorate of Liberal MP, Jeff Bate. Bate asked then Attorney General Nigel Bowen to inquire of ASIO whether local shire councillor, John Hatton, was a member of the Communist Party. ASIO said they had no information that Hatton was a Communist Party member. But it then gave helpful details about one of Hatton's associates who actually was a CPA member. Later an anonymous smear pamphlet which purported to describe the 'security record' of Hatton and his supporters was spread in the area. Years later Hatton later became a distinguished Independent MP in the NSW parliament.

Perhaps because of such blatant requests, the new ASIO chief after 1970, Peter Barbour, refused to grant some requests for political ammunition. In April 1970, just before the huge Vietnam protests erupted, Prime Minister John Gorton's secretary asked ASIO for published references to 'any brushes by Dr. J. F. Cairns with the law'. She said that the Prime Minister recalled that Cairns was involved in an incident in 1956. She also stipulated the Prime Minister wanted this information 'to be provided solely from within ASIO resources and no reference was to be made to the Victoria Police without the approval of the Prime Minister'. After some considerable delay Barbour responded that he 'regretted being unable to provide the information requested as it had not been considered of security interest'. The wording of this response, carefully recorded in a 'Note for File', is deceptive because ASIO did have the information. Barbour refused to hand it over. Shortly after his deputy, Jack Behm, suggested to the Attorney General 'that perhaps the Liberal Party research group could provide the service which members sought.'

But resistance to politicized requests was patchy. In April 1970 the South Australian Liberal MP, John McLeay, asked ASIO for information on the Rev Eric Nicholls who had taken part in anti-Vietnam groups in which communists had been active. Barbour reported that that he 'does not propose to accede to Mr McLeay's request' apparently because nothing adverse was recorded on Rev. Nicholls. But 12 months later ASIO assisted with corrections to the manuscript of an anti-Communist pamphlet written by McLeay. Needless to say such services were not offered to Labor members of parliament.

Shortly before the 1972 election, perhaps having in mind the possible change of government, Barbour told Greenwood, that he declined to provide information on communist trade unions to a backbencher. 'I explained that ASIO was not geared for researching newspapers and other public sources... I said we liked to think that Members of Parliament would turn to the Parliamentary Library or to their party secretariat for such material.' Barbour repeated his statement in writing to Greenwood the following day and pointedly noted that '[t]his sort of requirement seems to me to raise questions about the use of a security service'.

Many of these incidents were uncovered by Justice Hope's first Royal Commission. Hope chose not to dwell on them publicly but noted in an acid aside that it was 'improper for an MP to ask such questions for remission to ASIO, improper for a minister to transmit them to ASIO in the expectation of a reply and improper for the Director General to communicate information on persons by way of reply to the MP's inquiries'.

But ASIO's critics got things wrong. They imagined that ASIO was 'out of control' and running its own agenda. They thought it needed to be brought under democratic control and be accountable. But the problem was that ASIO was already under too much 'democratic control' and it was too 'accountable', at least to its minister. Hope realised that if Australia was to have a security agency it needed autonomy from direct government control. It needed to be accountable to the government but it also needed to have the legal framework to reject politicized requests.

Hope's findings are relevant to a post-911 world. In the cold war much righteous anger was directed at communists against whom any tactic was justified. In those days ASIO cast a wide net around anyone they regarded as sympathetic to communism. They believed they faced an infinitely evil and infinitely cunning enemy.

Today Islamic fundamentalists are the target of much righteous anger. They are seen as infinitely evil and cunning. Today exaggerated threats from terrorism can form a handy tool for governments to mobilize a frightened public. But thanks to Justice Hope today there is at least a better legal framework.

Today those subject to adverse security reports can lodge an appeal. Those who suspect ASIO is acting improperly can at least complain to the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security. None of this guarantees that abuses will not occur but it puts some balance into the relationship between citizens and 'the secret state.'

My starting point is the observation that the societies in which we live have been transformed by the political Right over the last 25 years. We live in what a number of people call libertarian capitalism.

This is a deregulated economy, where the ethic of competition is elevated above all else. It is a society defined by choice, self-interest and a narrowly conceived economic efficiency. Central to this is the belief that free operation of the market is the key to the good life which is largely defined in consumerist terms. It is a society in which all other values and needs are sacrificed to the needs of business to make profits. It is a society in which disproportionate power lies with a wealthy elite.

Allied with these facts is another. We live in a society which is the richest in human history. In part this is a long term development since world war two, and in part it arises from deregulation itself which has a dynamic and energizing effect on an economy. For our purposes today, a central point to grasp about this extraordinarily affluent society of libertarian capitalism is that, put simply, it is unsustainable.

First, it is socially unsustainable. Capitalism has always been encased or contained within a social and moral framework in which certain things were not done, no matter how profitable they might be and certain areas were no go areas. For a long time these limitations were largely based on religious beliefs. These have eroded for a long while and very little is now off limits.

That is why in my book 'Beyond Right and Left' I spend time looking at how the family is under assault from libertarian capitalism. A number of people have spoken against the commercialization of childhood and the massive drive to turn small children into consumers. And then there is the issue of working hours and family life. Libertarian capitalism pushes towards a 24/7 society in which commercial values take precedence over family values and over non-commercial values.
There is a relentless drive for the economy to commodify all human relations. Human relationships, with neighbors, with fellow students, with parents, with children, and on and on - all these are pushed increasingly towards market relationships. Historically, market relations began literally in market places with the buying and selling of food and salt - but these are now penetrating far beyond the economy. So students in universities become customers and clients, so sport becomes a billion dollar industry while physical unfitness soars, and so on. This in turn leads to the entrenchment in society of commercial values in place of any altruism, and caring.

Some have called this a 'risk society'. Where the individual must make a vast number of decisions for him or herself because the old certainties, the old institutions have weakened or disappeared. This risk society champions a certain kind of freedom but the flip side of freedom is insecurity. This gives rise to a strong popular desire for security, a desire for protection. And often this emerges in exaggerated and distorted forms - in fears of criminal behavior and of terrorism. In framing a response to libertarian capitalism we need to appeal to people's desire for protection and security - in this case against the unregulated market.
Libertarian capitalism devalues non material, non market relationships, relationships of social bonding, of caring and dare I say it, love of fellow man and woman. Some have described this overall result of libertarian capitalism as form of 'social recession'. [1] Others such as Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennis in their book Affluenza discuss the simple fact that affluence has not produced happiness. [2] In the book The Culture of the New Capitalism Richard Sennett has described how the modern economy shapes and rewards damaging behavior and empties work of meaning.[3] All these and many others are part of a search for what I would call a post-socialist critique of capitalism.

The second and more tangibly threatening aspect of libertarian capitalism is its environmental unsustainability, Libertarian capitalism is extraordinarily wasteful and unsustainable for reasons which we all know, to do with consequences of fossil fuel use. I don't know if you are aware of the latest results of climate change but it all seems to be going much faster than the cautious scientists of IPCC suggested. We seem to be sleepwalking to disaster.

Significantly, even within the Bush administration there is a slow shift to acknowledge the existence of climate change but to reassure everyone confidently that it can be solved by human ingenuity. In Britain there is a more realistic approach. The British economist Nicholas Stern regards the climate crisis as an example of 'market failure'. He said:
'Markets do not automatically provide the right type and quantity of public goods, because in the absence of the right kind of public policy, there are limited or no returns to private investors for doing so…Thus climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods …. All in all it must be regarded as a market failure on the greatest scale the world has ever seen.'
We will certainly need ingenuity but as Stern implies we need to restrain and tame the nature of libertarian capitalism.

Climate change poses problems of diabolical difficulty. The central one is that much of the good life which many ordinary people enjoy in industrial societies like ours is predicated on unsustainable grounds. To decrease fossil fuels use and change to renewables, the price of energy must rise radically and this will undermine much of the lifestyle we enjoy. The political problem is that no one wants to tell people this unpleasant truth - certainly not a government or an opposition which wants to be re-elected.

So what I am doing today by sketching out the consequences of libertarian capitalism is to outline the new nature of the struggle for a good society.
There are other big issues in society which I have not mentioned, but these two sets of objective circumstances - unsustainable social relationships and an unsustainable environment - seem to me to be the foundations on which to build a new kind of politics. That's the first thing I want to say today.

As an aside, I might just pause and say that, every successful movement for social change has invariably had one major advantage over bigger and more powerful forces. That advantage is the ability to see problems emerging from beyond the horizon and to prepare for them with a new social vision.

Why is that? Well, because certain forces have a logic of their own. They impose themselves on events regardless. Things are forced to change - and if you are in tune with that change, if you understand something like climate change in all its shocking implications, then you can do one very important thing. To put it bluntly you can seize an opportunity when it arises. Because when things begin to change, those who have a vested interest in the present state of affairs don't want to recognise the new reality, they want to tinker with it, they hope for the best. Those who do not have a stake in the present, but who have a vision of the future which is both principled and pragmatic can have an enormous influence.

Because you never know what is over the horizon. Let's say in the next 12 months an unprecedented expansion of the drought occurs, after several years already of drought. Let's say Sydney's water supply once again dips down below 30 %, down to 20% or less. This frightening example of climate change would also be the kind of event which forces the whole society to consider new possibilities in public policy and politics. Being able to explain these events gives you have a tremendous advantage in being able to suggest a course of action.
That's really a diversion into how a strategy of politics must be founded on a long term social and economic analysis. I now want to move back into the area of ideas.

The Left tradition

If I am correct, or mostly correct, about the social and environmental unsustainability, then this poses a kind of dilemma for a certain style of politics which many of us held to be self-evident.
Until now, most politics has been about a struggle over who gets what in a society of scarcity. The political leaderships of the rising working classes of the 19th and 20th centuries stood for many glorious things but above all, they stood for a better material standard of living. This simple human need, harnessed to a long term vision, drove the creation of powerful movements which transformed politics for more than century. Yet today, at least in societies like ours, it is an addiction to material abundance that may be the death of us.

In a very practical way this fact alone poses the need for a sharp rethinking of the goals of 'a good society' today. It poses a need for profound rethinking of the Marxist tradition, and the discarding of several key assumptions.

One of the many valuable things I learnt while in the Communist Party of Australia and while listening to people like Eric and Laurie Aarons was the great pitfall of radical groups - the occupational hazard if you like - is dogmatism. That is, a strong desire to hold on to a familiar set of beliefs rather than to recognize the painful reality that those beliefs have been undermined and how they need to change. And this is mixed up with sentimentality and nostalgia that is very human but which, in the end, does not help in grappling with new realities.

There are a number of reasons why traditional socialist theory is inadequate as a starting point - I set them out in Beyond Right and Left. They include the changing nature of class, the radically new nature of the global environment, the experience of dictatorships established in the name of these ideas. There are many others. I'll just add one issue, relevant to the topic for today of 'the good society'. I once believed that 'the good society' was a socialist society - a society with little or no private ownership of property, where social goods were distributed according to need and not according to the market. When you think of 'the good society' in such terms, its existence feeds back into your strategy and practice for today.

If capitalism is to be abolished in the future, then in today's political work there is no need to, as we would once say, 'reform capitalism'. If the market is the problem and will once day be cast side then there is no need to figure out ways it could be used to promote socially valuable goals. And so on.

But if we have learnt one thing coming from the socialist critique it is that capitalism is extraordinarily flexible. It can take an almost infinite variety of forms, depending on the social political and moral framework within which it operates. On the one hand there is 19th century style exploitation (which still exists in the 21st century) and there is fascism, and on the other, Swedish-style social democracy, and various other kinds of democratic and progressive society.

Today I think we won't abolish capitalism but we'll force another change to it, to create a kind of green capitalism, in which the full cost of natural resources, water, and energy are part of the calculation of what we today call the economy.
In this struggle the majority of the existing corporate world will be an opponent for a long while, because it has a material stake in the ways things are. A minority within business will be allies because they can see that it is unsustainable.

New goals, new ways of arguing

But I want to now turn to new possibilities which are opened up by the new situation in which we find ourselves. Let's look at what becomes of progressive politics in libertarian capitalism. Once again I emphasize that I am restricting myself to certain issues, largely confined to the economy and its moral and environmental frame work.
One of the key strategies therefore is to build a moral and environmental framework for this new kind of capitalism while not having the illusion that it can all be abolished. The key contradiction therefore is between deregulated capitalism and humanist values. This is the crucial weakness into which we have to drive a wedge.

I want to close with three brief examples.
The first puts the traditional left alongside strange bedfellows. One of the destructive aspects of libertarian capitalism is the profit drive towards unrestricted 24 hour liquor sales and unrestricted gambling. It's part of the same demand that we should all be available to work 24/7. If we move into this territory of values - and the struggle for a sustainable society, we find the ground has been colonised before. The language of values and the assertion of society against the economy has been the language of religion. We need to recognize and welcome this. In another area - the pressure on the family by libertarian capitalism - we need to value aspects of the family by asserting a new kind of family values.

The second example is more familiar and traditional. One of the most crucial struggles against libertarian capitalism is the union campaign to roll back the deregulation of labour laws represented by WorkChoices. This is a classic struggle for human values against instrumental and morally bankrupt neo-liberalism. But it has been fought in new ways, for instance by asserting the need to protect the family and working life, rather than using a more traditional language based on inequality and exploitation. Also significant, has been that the support that came from the churches.

The third example is not so well known, it touches on issues of multiculturalism. Deregulated capitalism has no problem with diversity because diversity means new, separate marketing niches. Diversity can be great - but too much can undermine shared values.
One powerful impulse towards diversity and division today is the movement away from public education and toward private provision of health care. One of the most powerful tools to argue against this is often not used. This is the argument that these institutions are institutions for social cohesion. Progressives tend not to use this language. We automatically talk in terms of equality and inequality but this cuts little ice today.
Protecting public education means recognizing how schools integrate the community and how they assert common values, especially in a society based on migrants. Using a language of protecting Australian values and calling for social cohesion is not familiar, but it picks up on peoples' desire for security and protection in a deregulated world and in a risk society. Defining Australian values in progressive terms - and not assuming it inevitably means narrow nationalism - is a positive ways to engage in the battle of ideas.

All of these campaigns involve a clash of values, a battle of ideas. These campaigns assert a humanist set of values to those of libertarian capitalism. Both assert sustainable social relations against the values of self-interest and commercial freedom.
So the struggle for a good society is different today. Unlike the previous era, it is not based centrally around work or the workplace, though the labour movement remains important. It is much more a social struggle and an environmental struggle than it ever has been. Finding common ground between these three sectors - social, environmental and work-based - is absolutely crucial.

We face a big challenge today, which is the challenge to re-define and rethink what progressive politics means in a post-socialist age. This means developing a new kind of politics which meets and asserts human values in the face of threats to them, but a kind of politics which can ultimately have a broad popular appeal.

Most important of all is a serious debate about these issues and I am glad that the SEARCH Foundation is starting to give more emphasis to this aspect of the challenge.

[1] See for example a pamphlet by a group of former members of the British Communist Party, 'Feel-bad Britain: a view from the democratic left' downloadable in PDF from hegemonics.co.uk.
[2] Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough, Allen & Unwin 2005. See also the 'Manifesto for Well Being' : http://www.wellbeingmanifesto.net/index.htm
[3] Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale Univerity, 2006

Whatever else it does, the 2020 summit may be remembered as sounding the death knell for the Australian Labor Party. Events around the NSW Labor's conference next weekend may bury the corpse.

There was a time once, not so long ago, that when a Labor government took office, its ideas and policies would come from the Labor Party. Based on its local branches and membership, the party would hold conferences and convened policy committees to prepare for office. Left and Right would fight to ensure that their preferred policy was adopted. The stakes in the party were high.

There was a time once when MPs, elected to parliament on the efforts of grassroots members, did not dare reverse explicit policies decided by conference. Not anymore. The NSW Premier and Treasurer have decided to privatise electricity and will, if necessary, defy the party's highest body.

There was a time when party members collected many small donations to swell the coffers to fight the election campaign. The era of the chook raffle actually existed. Not anymore. Today election expenses are funded by governments and big corporate and union donations.

In the internal life of the Labor Party, all that matters are factions and the small group of people who run them. Factions now act as 'executive placement agencies' for ministerial staffers and would-be MPs, in the words of former Labor MP Rodney Cavalier. Star parliamentary candidates are recruited outside the party from those with media profiles.

In elections, parties have become franchises and campaigns are about marketing a brand, not a social vision.

All major political parties are undergoing the same process of hollowing out but this process affects the Labor Party most of all, since it still has the skeleton of a mass membership and the remnants of a grand vision of betterment.

At the heart of the problem is a crisis of ideas and vision. To have a political party that means something, its members must care about a cause. They must feel a passion. Last week Kevin Rudd argued that politics has moved beyond Right and Left and spoke about a new reforming centre. But where are the new ideas that will actually mobilise and revive a political party?

Perhaps the answer lies in something else identified by Kevin Rudd as one of the primary challenges of the our century : climate change. Preventing climate change depends on stopping 'business as usual', according to Ross Garnaut and Nicholas Sterne. What they didn't mention was that this involves stopping 'politics as usual'.

Politics-as-usual decrees that the purpose of politics is to have more. Governments tax and spend to give the public more goods, more money, more consumption. 'Enough' is not a word in the lexicon of old politics. But dealing with climate change means people must make do with less. In simple terms, the price of energy must rise and along with this the price of almost everything.

This will be the greatest challenge to Kevin Rudd and any other political leader in Australia for the next few decades. To implement genuine reforms on climate will involve sacrifice of personal convenience. Political leaders have only ever achieved this (and stayed in office) during a national wartime emergency. Moreover, such changes cannot be imposed from above, if they are to be accepted. Instead a genuine groundswell of support is needed to make the sacrifices acceptable.

Herein lies the chance for the revival of political parties like the Labor Party. The old vision of the labour movement was based on the threat of material deprivation and the need for social equality. It asserted that survival lay in a collective approach not an individual one. It called on supporters to make great sacrifices to achieve a grand humanitarian ideal.

Today a new vision and values built on the threat of climate change offers a close parallel. Climate change is a real danger in the same way that unregulated industrialisation once was for ordinary workers. Equality and sacrifice are vital for acceptance of the policies that are needed. There is no individual solution to climate change, we all share the same atmosphere. Climate change is an issue which won't go away. It is no longer an 'environmental' cause but one that centrally involves the economy. It may become a central driver of all government decision-making.

Along the way, it may become the One Big Idea to revive political parties.