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January 3, 2010
Alison Caddick in her Democracy evacuated editorial in Arena (Magazine or Journal?) addresses our relation as citizens to the democratic political process, to the market's reduction of development to economic growth and to a neo-liberal mode of governance. She makes an obvious point:
While we voted Labor because Mr Rudd promised real action on the looming emergency of climate change, we are locked into a crippled political process. Rather than a policy that makes a real contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions, we have the cruel joke of the ETS, which promises to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, while providing discounts and loopholes to industries of the worst carbon-emitting kind. We want action, but in some way unbeknown to us as ordinary voters, government is radically beholden to interests beyond our democratic control.
That is very true. Caddick adds that whilst we inhabit a (liberal) democracy and that part of our (historical) pre-consciousness still takes democracy for granted, we also know that neo-liberalism (as a mode of governance?) has changed things. It has dispensed with the venerable ethic of public service as such; the executive has become highly ‘politicised’; lobby groups now wield tremendous power; governments act to produce ‘results’; leadership is dead; and that management is the name of the game.
Neo-liberalism, she argues, is the Right's response to the ossification of the social democratic model, which had come to depend on a soulless machinery for carving up the ‘social product’; a political system dedicated merely to ‘redistribution’, the sine qua non of politics and government. It produces democratic ‘leadership’ is reduced to muscular action on the one hand and the tightest technocratic management on the other.
Arena Journal concerns itself with the possibilities for a renewed critical practice in an era of rapid transformation, and Caddick argues that issues such as global warming disclose a politics as politics should be — about the ‘good life’: about how we wanted to live; an ethic of the common good. Caddick's assumption is that we cannot tackle climate change within the parameters of neo-liberal globalisation--that neo-liberal globalisation is not capable of sufficient adjustment to turn climate change around. Questions can be asked.
Is climate change the tipping point around which to question the new-liberal recommitment to ‘let the market rule’ and to economic growth (measured as GDP) as the sole end of pubic policy. Is it the point to begin to question and rethink our deep-rooted assumptions about our mode of life and relations to the natural world? Or is climate change only the first among a series of crises likely to emerge if we cannot bring ourselves to change our present way of taking hold? Does it stir recognition of the way the uninhibited growth of the market can reach a point where it ceases to contribute to public well-being?
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Caddick's piece is singularly lacking in evidence and reasoning. She simply asserts that all kinds of unfortunate consequences have been caused by 'neo-liberalism', without attempting to develop a coherent causal argument. This seems just as woolly and misguided as wingnuts blaming all the evils of the world on socialists.