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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

do you sense the totalitarianism? « Previous | |Next »
August 20, 2005

A couple of events. First a Geoff Pryor cartoon published in the Canberra Times:

Pryor VH.jpg

The other event is the Australian Financial Review's response to the negotiations over the sale of Telstra by Barnaby Joyce and his Nationals. The Review talks in terms of reforms passed by the Howard Government's control of the Senate being marred by pork barrelling:

Now control of the Senate has opened up a whole new vista, where pork is measured in billions of dollars.There may well be a need to bring rural communications up to scratch, but the $3.1 billion ransom for Telstra's sale reflects the National's price, rather than any rigorous assessment of need.

What is underling this is a concern about the faction versus the national or public interest with the public interest associated with the sovereign will. Pork is associated with faction and national interest is associated with the neo-liberal's economic plan of privatisation.

My interpretation? The privatisation of Telstra is part of the grand plan of economic reform and faction and debate represents a form of corruption of the sovereign will.

You could say that the Review's position is that reform represents the general will of the nation--the general interest that expresses a single indivisible sovereign power--as opposed to the will of all. Consequently, the Nationals, who represent the particular interests, are the enemy within the body politic.

Do you not sense totalitarianism with the AFR position, with its desire for order? The interests of the whole must automatically and permanently be hostile to the particular regional interests of the Queensland Nationals. Don't you sense the absolutism?

I'm not sure how the AFR gets a Hobbesian conception of a single indivisible sovereign power from its economic uititaritarianism--that puzzles me. But I understand that the AFR radically devalues pluralism, political action and the public sphere.

It is not liberalism that the AFR is expressing---since liberalism affirms pluralism.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:16 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

My girlfriend and I noted the same idea of totalitarianism.

I have to admit that I'm finding it all, and all that is happening in America very scary.

Are there alternatives? How can I help resist this rise of what I think is appalling?

Pax,
It is a difficult one. one suggestion--laughter and deflation.

I'm doing it in the weblog by talking about political life, democracy, citizenship and political philosophy to counter the economic reductionism of the econocrats.

Historical memory is another key. Have a look at description of the new conservatism's rewriitng of Australia's historical memory. Marilyn Lake suggests that we contest this by reaffiming Australia's

... proud traditions of political and social innovation that captured the attention of reformers around the world, traditions that include the democratic innovation of the secret ballot, free, secular and compulsory education, women's suffrage, the principle of a living wage, old age and invalid pensions, the maternity allowance and unemployment benefits. These achievements were won by Australians inspired by a vision of a new world that repudiated the status distinctions and religious and military hierarchies of the old world they or their parents had left behind.

We remember how important social liberalism was for us citizens and talk about this with out friends. We have our own historical memory.