Time for a little philosophical story.
Once upon time, way back in the 1980s the once proud social democratic Australian Labor Party ( ALP) embraced and fostered the deregulation of the market so as to modernize Australia.Tthe symblic act was to float the Australia country. It was to save the country it was said. It saved the country, it is said today. As the 1980's rolled on, many of the ALP's lefty members fought rear guard actions against their Party's policies of on-privatisation, free trade, competition policy and deregulation of the financial sector.
Many in the ALP accepted that retrenchments and unemployment from "structural adjustment" was an inevitable consequence of economic growth and a changing product cycle. You can hear the 'econ' speak in the voices of these modernizing social democrats when they say this.
They justify it by saying that these experiences of retrenched workers are nothing new. They have been going on since the 1930s, retrenched workers have always found difficulty finding alternative employment, and those who secure new employment experience earnings loss and occupational downgrading.
Moreover, obtaining casual jobs----which is what many retrenched workers have been able to do---is a step up the rung of the ladder to full employment. And there may be an increase in job satisfaction, such as swapping the full time dirty job in the old factory for the casual job of lawn mowing. And many women are happy to work 20 hours a week. They do not want to work 40-50 hours.
Hmm.
Can this process---the Third Way--- be seen as a capitulation to the market? Many have thought so. Betrayal of the old social democratic values they cried.
The spin doctors of the modernizers, who marketed the political product offered to sceptical citizens at elections, tried to convince us otherwise. The modernizing social democrats still stood for social democracy, not just economic growth and markets of their Liberal opponents. They said they wanted to revive political engagement by creating a new vision for a better future with a new welfare strategy that would provide protection and security from social and economic risk and to promote citizenship.
A new welfare stategy? What was that? It was difficult to make out with all the noise being made by politics as marketing, media strategy and image management not substantive policy and public debate. The lack of policy was callled 'presenting a small target' by the spin-doctors.
There was lots of noise.
The conservatives in the liberal university stood for defence of tradition in the face of this onslaught of economic reform that made universities commercial institutions. They favoured the grand imagery. They depicted the economic rationalist reformers as the barbarians entering the gates of the citadels of civilization. Faced with being crushed by the onward march of a modernist economic reason they called for shutting the doors of the citadels (the universities) and hiding behind an Aristotlean ethics until economic rationalism consumed itself in a fury of self-destruction.
Meanwhile, the postmodern left in the academy were loudly calling for difference, diversity and pluralism, whilst pretending that they were way beyond social liberalism. Value pluralism was seen as a trump card as the unified nation state brokedown in the conditions of global capitalism. Foucault was deployed to say that the secular state no longer exercised sovereign power. Power was everywhere; it enmeshed in the micro networks of civil society.
Meanwhile, what was going on, as seen from the perspective of the unemployed in the Job Network was that the redistributive measures were connected to the ethic of paid work and individual responsibility. What was lacking in the economic talk was an ethic of care. That could be seen in the demonisation of the asylum seekers; the negative representation of people on benefits; the indifference to people with mental health problems or to the plight of street kids; the harshness shown toward disable people on benefits; miserable increases for pensioners benefits in the face of the GST, withdrawal of public health services and the increases in the price of energy due to privatisation.
Could there not be a political ethics of care in the face of this lack of mutual respect and equal worth? That was the question citizens were asking themselves. Could not this ethics of care underpin the new welfare state? Why cannot 'care' be a central political category? Could not social care be a part of the normative framework of obligation and responsibilities, instead of the conservative's mutual obligation and charity?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 9, 2003 04:12 PM | TrackBack