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December 2, 2006
In an article in the November issue of The Monthly Kevin Rudd says that Howard's political offensive against the Left known as the culture wars--one based on fear, anxiety and uncertainity---is a cover for the real battle of ideas in Australian politics. Rudd argues that the real battle of ideas in Australia is:
...the battle between free market fundamentalism and the social democratic belief that individual reward can be balanced with social responsibility...Howard's culture war, however, masks a deeper more unsettling reality: that socially conservative values at the core of Howard's cultural attack on the Left are in fact under seige from the forces of economic neo-liberalism that he himself has unreleashed from the Right. Whether it is "family values", the notion of "community service" or the emphasis on "tradition" in the history wars, "traditional conservative values" as being demolished by an unrestrained market capitalism that sweeps all before it.
Though I reject Rudd's dismissal of the culture wars as just a cover for the real battle of ideas, I do subscribe to Rudd's argument about the contradictions within the Right. He is right about this. The contradiction between conservatism and neo-liberalism is pretty obvious and it results in a movement away from liberalism. What's left is a market liberalism that celebrates a deregulated market. However, I do not accept that 'an unrestrained market capitalism that sweeps all before it' as Rudd claims. Another contradiction arises ---the Right's statist commitment to a big and centralized national security state. So what is on show is the movement away from classical liberalism.
Rudd acknowledges John Howard's account of these two strands but he says that Howard gives no analysis of how traditional social values of family, community and country are comptaible with the economic utlitarianism of the dereguated market whose ethos is one of unrestrained individualism. Consequently, Howard provides no philosophical framework for the Right's competing neo-liberal and conservative tendencies. Rudd then proceeds to explore such a framework. Responses by Andrew Norton here and here. As far as I know there have been few in the Australian bloggosphere who have engaged with Rudd's critique of neo-liberalism.
Rudd argues that Burkean (old style) conservatism, which sought to temper the excesses of market capitalism, capitulated to Hayek's critique of the 1950s (ie., Road to Serfdom) and the resurgence of neo-liberalism that was propounded by Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) as part of their critique of socialism and social democracy. Though these think tanks see themselves as working within the classic lliberal tradition---promoting values of free enterprise, minimal government and an open society of free individuals-- they have been deeply, both as a form of social insurance and an institutional corrective, against the inequalities caused by the free market.
As Rudd puts in his November lecture to the CIS Hayek's broader critique of socialism was directed at the idea of social justice, which he judged to be akin to:
the former "universal belief in witches or the philosopher's stone". Hayek's polemic against the left was an axiomatic component of his advocacy of a radical, neo-liberal alternative---one which argued the absolute centrality of the market; a role for the state as a protector of that market but little else besides; and apocalyptic warnings that any political interference with the integrity (even 'sanctity') of the market would place the entire national project on the "slippery slope" to totalitarianism.
Rudd relies on the work of David McKnight's Beyond Left and Right to argue that Hayek understands market morality in terms of evolutionary rules about private property, contract, exchange, comeptition etc; that we live in two the two moral spheres or orders of the market and the family and that the market order is based on self-interest whilst the obligations of the family order are based on love and altruism.
Rudd's critique is that 'the impact of neo-liberalism cannot be effectively quarantined from its effect on the family--and beyond the family to other sub-economic recipriocal relationships within communities and other social and spiritual organizations. ' Consequently, the bonds of respect, civility and trust between people are being weakened and relations based on competition self-interest and suspicion are growing. This is illustrated with the reforms to industrial relations in the form of the Workchoices legislation. Rudd says that as a result:
breadwinners are now at risk of working less predictible shifts, spread over a seven day week, not sensitive to weekends and possibly for take-home pay. The pressures on relationships, parenting and the cost and quality of childcare are without precedent.
This is how the market encroaches on the non-market life-world of families.
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