Rundle: on Minchin, the green movement and Marxism
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Five, six weeks ago Nick Minchin used Four Corners to start a war in the Liberal Party that ultimately elevated Tony Abbott to the leadership — which may not have been Minchin’s intention, at least at this stage of the game. Retrospectively, his intervention has become famous — “Oh you know green politics is like communism was, it’s just another move by the anti-industrial Left”. And Minchin doesn’t do anything accidentally — save, of course, for getting Tony Abbott up one election too early — and the remark was a magnet dropped into a pile of iron filings, bending the party into tight circles at each end. Now, the strategy was not without risk — chief among them that it will be quoted back at the coalition in a full election, to portray them as a bunch of conspiratorialists. Kazart! Ever since Bob Hawke destroyed Malcolm Fraser’s claim if Labor gets elected, your money will be safer under the bed with the remark “oh you can’t put it there, that’s where all the reds are”, the tinfoil hat stuff has been a non-starter — save for a few rural areas, where RM Williams sells hats ready-lined with Alcan. Consequently it was intriguing to see at least one commentator taking it seriously — our old mucker Christian Kerr, in the Oz Spectator (not online, or well-hidden if it is: I read it in the newsagents). Argues Kerr, there’s no doubt that the radical left moved holus-bolus into the environmentalist movement in the late ’80s and ’90s, Kerr argues, noting the entrist push into the 1984 Nuclear Disarmament Party by the then Socialist Workers Party (later DSP) among others. More acutely, Kerr sounds a note of caution: though environmental issues are a real problem, they’re ultimately a business problem, a question of cost — and people really believe that climate change is happening. Pari passu, the upshot of this is, let’s create a conspiracy about the conspiracy — regard the whole green movement as communism by other means, but let the lumpensuburbatariat think that you really care about the issue. By now, the whole issue has become so live, that it’s worth disentangling it a little — if only because it throws light on the Liberal Party’s separation from the mainstream. Everyone knows, or should, that the Communist movement — the Old Left — wasn’t anti-industrial in the slightest. It’s about as wrong a definition as you can get. The whole aim of Communist movements within capitalist countries was to build a movement within the industrial working class — and thus the growth and expansion of that class was vital to its task. In Communist countries, industrial development was vital to standing against the capitalist world. Left, Old Left, New Left … by the 1960s Communist Party dominance of the left was starting to slide, as a more civilisational critique of industrial and organisational humanity came to a head — including our impact on nature. Silent Spring, One Dimensional Man, DeSchooling Society, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Steal This Book, Growing Up Absurd, The Dialectic of Sex, and a hundred others suggested implicitly and otherwise that the Old Left was part of a monolithic system of growth and alienation, whose victory would do nothing to solve humanity’s deepest problems. Lord, by the time that official Communist parties had taken onboard this wider critique, they were irrelevant — and they often remained highly critical of much of its efflorescences. David “Burnout” Burchell fits well into The Oz’s op-ed page because as a CPA intellectual and editor in the ’70s and ’80s, a lot of his role was to hold back much of the “New Left” tide, both its macro-civilisational critique and its micropolitics of non-hierachical participatory organisation and frikkin face painting. He’s a grumpy sod, because those people were most of the readers of ALR, which he edited. In Michin and Kerr’s account, the accurate part is that a section of the Marxist left — the Trotskyist “far left” groups — began to see the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, as places for entry, activity and recruitment. Within the far-left there was keen debate about the dangers of “movementism” — of getting sucked into the actual cause, rather than building the party. “Far left” groups remained scrupulously agnostic about what form a socialist society would take — but their insistent motif was that environmental destruction was caused by the profit motive (often rendered rather unmarxistally as “greed”), and lack of social control of the economy. Seen thus, a section of the Green movement was Marxism by other means. But it’s more complicated than that. Because Minchin, Kerr and others can give no credence to the Marxist argument about capitalism — that it must expand endlessly, and at ever greater velocity just to keep going, that the idea of a stabilised capitalism is an illusion of the pre-Marxist classical economists who thought of it as an eternal structure (hidden beneath centuries of bondage) — they can’t credit the possibility that left wing people would work in either a Marxist organisation or a Green one, because they believe the criticism to be correct. Now, you would have to say that not only is there a strong case for this, but also that many people believe it — that our way of life, especially if it were generalised to all six billion people — would simply choke the planet dead. Many people aren’t prepared to actually change their life at this stage — which is why useless activities such as personal recycling are devised, to give the illusion of action — but hypocrisy is not the worst of vices. Understand this clearly — more people now believe the Red-Green hypothesis, that capitalism is a system testing us to destruction in its current form, than go with the idea that it is some empty charade of communism by other means. The idea that it’s merely a “business problem” is one they’re increasingly rejecting, at least in thought. To put it plainly, that group includes a lot of Liberal voters, and a high majority of Labor voters. None of them want to live in grass huts, but the idea that factors other than business will have to be brought into global economic calculus is one that appeals to them — including fairly radical schemes to make the electricity grid two-way with clean domestic power generation, relocalisation of parts of the economy, and drawing areas of life out of the commodity cycle. Ideas that are Green and, in a way, vaguely communistic. Seriously, it’s early days for all that. But it will grow and grow — and voters will assess parties on their seriousness about addressing the deep problems of global growth, not in advancing cheap kludges that give the sense of appeasing a fringe. The trouble for Minchin, Kerr and co is that they won the battle at one level — the privatisation of the economy — while culturally the new left prevailed in terms of a sense of what life is about. Now that the right’s victory delivered us a global financial crisis, the new left’s critique of its illusions is still there, and growing stronger by the day. |
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Crikey's Guide to Julia Gillard
30 Comments
Beautifully written, Rundle - thank you. It’s a complicated argument to make, and not easy to sound-bite, but some day it will permeate.
Yes, thanks Guy. We do need as a starter a lot better system of education than we currently have, including an understanding of the ways in which private corporations dominate world politics. Perhaps the free market apologists would be prepared to accept the contradiction of an upper limit on the size of individual corporations in order to reduce their power and influence. Only then can any debate be meaningful.
Obsessive compare and competitive contrast seems to be one of the issues of the human condition. When is enough … enough? I keep thinking of Kings of the middle ages. So rich they could bathe every day. Drink milk. Have fresh vegetables - from the other side of the country even. Enjoy slave helpers.
Substitute machines for slaves and even the humblest blogger lives better than a king of the empire today. So how much is enough? Really?
Good analysis Guy. I’ve worked for both the trade union movement (BLF and the NSW Timber Workers Union) and the green movement (Greenpeace and [god help me] the Wilderness Society) and have to say that far from the greenies being the inheritors of the old marxist-leninist mantle, they are, to generalise, rabidly anti-working class and bereft of any politics other than that of environmentalism. Class analysis? Forget it. A gender or race analysis? Forget it again.
My sense of the broader green movement is that they are increasingly avoiding any pretensions of mass involvement or support and happy to engage in shady preference deals with mainstream political parties. See the recent Wild Rivers debacle in Cape York in which Premier Bligh announced the further economic disempowering of Aboriginal people by “protecting” Cape York’s river systems at the same time as actively pushing to dam another river in SE Qld. This in return for Wilderness Society support at the last state election.
It seems to me that sections of the “green movement” could just as well fit the definition of a quasi corporate fascist movement as much as they could be described as communist.
I’m stunned at the silence on the pathetic product, and service, that is TiVO in this country. I haven’t gone home yet, but as of yesterday evening the TiVo EPG still had ABC3 as “To Be Announced”! Even my paper-based Newspaper TV guides had ABC3 programme details!
Try to tape a show that’s not in the EPG — as best as I can tell, it can’t be done. Try and tape a programme that starts before the TiVo’s EPG time — as long as it’s not more than 5 mins early, it can be done if you’re prepared to go through a ludicrous amount of steps — but it’s a pain. My TiVo is my first and last, and I wouldn’t commend it to anybody.
Lumpensuburbatariat: I love it!
But do we mean it as pejoratively as Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) -the ‘refuse of all classes … including swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggars, and other flotsam of society’ like modern bogans?
I for one am glad that’s all been sorted. Now we can get on with the serious business of aggravating the far right until its ears bleed.
Abbott and his band of dinosaurs would have been comfortable in the DLP, which explains the paranoia of anything to the Left of Bob Menzies. The irony is that their extreme Right wing policies will push the Greens and the ALP closer together. Both want to act on Climate Change, and disagree only on how much and how fast. If the election will be based on Climate Change, as Abbott claims, the Greens and Labor will have to exchange preferences in order to maximise the chance of getting the numbers in both houses.
An excellent position, well argued Guy; but one note on style?
I think it’s the engineering background, but I baulk at long sentences and get lost easily. Also, I want to know exactly what your point is so I can argue against it.
Took quite a few goes for me to fully grasp this:
“Because Minchin, Kerr and others can give no credence to the Marxist argument about capitalism — that it must expand endlessly, and at ever greater velocity just to keep going, that the idea of a stabilised capitalism is an illusion of the pre-Marxist classical economists who thought of it as an eternal structure (hidden beneath centuries of bondage) — they can’t credit the possibility that left wing people would work in either a Marxist organisation or a Green one, because they believe the criticism to be correct.”
Otherwise, I totally agree with the finer details of the actual desires of a large swathe of the left. I don’t want to turn off the power all together; I just think it would be a good idea to stop fucking up the planet so quickly while we’re making it.
I have a thought the Greens would rather
hug Labor than Abbotts mish mash of religious right, right for the sake of it, centre leaning right, hate left and probably she’ll be right.
EvanB - possibly one the problems with Guy’s prose (apart from logorrhoea) is the dodgy punctuation, probably a result of his tendency to cut’n’paste - his numerous dependent, subjunctive clause clearly confuse himself.
In the one sentence clause that you copied, the comma between “Green one” and “because” is a mistake and ruins a cogent, if complex, point.
AlastairH - unfortunately I think you are correct, urbanoid archchair greenies are the worm in the bud of an essential mindchange. Old hippies used to call them “breadheads” and they destroyed that social awakening, giving us punk, ThatcheRaygunomics, G Geko and the GFC.
fantastic article, one thing you mentioned , but not with enough emphasis, there are already to many people on the planet, the most important issue even ahead of climate change , is world population growth
@cairns50 - I’d not only agree, but go further - without [runaway] population growth (and I stress ‘runaway’ because we’re not talking about a few more people here and there, but a doubling or tripling of the population IN MY LIFETIME and a seemlessly endlessly increasing increase beyond that … until it crashes) we would not have a fraction of the pollution and climate change problems we have today.
One village shitting in a river (together with the animals along the riverbanks) equals a natural cycle, a city of billions shitting in a river plus excreting hormones and antibiotics etc in their excreta (not no mention the wastes from industrial agricultural and livestock production, and taking water *out* of the river in large quantities to satisfy these enterprises) stuffs up the entire ecological system. As I understand it.
I don’t know how to solve the problem without condemning the world’s inhabitants to even more deprivation and starvation than most already endure today … but more than likely the disasters forced on us by climate change will solve it for us. (Gaia’s revenge?) Not a pretty picture. Even China with its ‘one child’ policy is increasing in population. And by all accounts the Chinese Govt seems to be taking the country’s problems seriously. Unfortunately the methods they’re using seem harsh - what IS the answer? Freedom/opportunity versus sustainability? How? Any suggestions?
Meanwhile the spoilers seem to be doing their best to undermine the Copenhagen meet … leaked emails, leaked leaks … small stuff so far, can’t they find anything better? Or is the ‘best’ yet to come?
There they go again - non sequiturs in e.g. 6th para from the end. Such that I’m moved to declare the Rundle Periphrastic Constant: Non-seqs vary in direct proportion to the degree of Hegelian complexity in the Rundle thesis.
This is stating the obvious. Yeah, the Right tries to smear greens with red paint. No one’s really believed this for decades, except perhaps pop-eyed nocturnal prowlers like Lord Monckton. Minchin is far too smart to believe it. Minch must be a teensy-bit opportunistic here, dog-whistling to 60 votes last seen west of Longreach.
And yes, we know that Trots in the 80s, having Entered and Deep Entered every organisation they could find, fetched up in the Green movement where they vanished up their own contradictions before turning into organic broccoli.
Stating the obvious is fine, but why is this a Crikey “Top Story”? Didactic, tangled verbosity masquerading as political analysis.
N.B. Evan Beaver, there’s no need for sycophantic apologies for your ignorance. It’s not you, it’s Rundle.
I think Christian Kerr is correct, there has been a wholesale movement of people who are part of the left to environmental causes. That is not a conspiracy, it just reflects the nature of people who see problems in the world and try and become part of the solution. It is the defining difference between conservatives and liberals.
The environmental candle was kept alight by academics in related disciplines and people of alternative persuasion more or less since the publication of Silent Spring in the 1960s until the late 1980s so it is not as if there was a sudden move to this cause. As evidence of environmental problems became more obvious, the attachment of people to this cause, people who care and think became more widespread.
I dispute the claim that the right have somehow won the debate because of the privatisation of industry. Private industry now operates within a set of regulations designed to ensure that virtually every item on the wish list of those on the left has been won. I don’t think there is any dispute that at least in this country, workers in any workplace have more rights than were ever envisaged in the socialist or government-owned enterprises here or abroad in the 1950s. Through superannuation and widespread investment the ownership of the means of production is now so diffuse that the Marxist agenda is now meaningless.
As for economic growth, consider the Iphone. This has for most young people who own one, replaced the gramophone, the radio, the telephone and a host of other devices in a gadget which weighs less than 100gms and whose value is embedded in its intellectual property. It is vastly kinder the to environment than the myriad devices it has replaced. There are many such examples of economic growth that have happened and will continue to happen in the future that can and will reduce the impact on world resources while adding to the quality of life. Consider just the quality of food we now eat and the better farming practices used to produce it, and the electric car industry that will take the world by storm over the next 10 years.
Lastly, in the long run conservatives are always wrong. We are not a conservative species. Consider the social changes since the Wilberforce campaign against slavery.
DavED - your Iphone point is highly relevant to the Future, if any - pity about the essential rare mineral that is the new ‘blood diamond’ in the Congo, as once plantinum for amerikan catalytic converters propped up ZuidAfrika’s apartheid.
The way india went from wildly expensive, stunningly inefficient copywire landlines straight to moibles in villages that didn’t even have el;ectricity is a lesson. Rickshaw wallahs wouldn’t be able to function without them now.
Similarly chips did away with valves andf who knows what the next breakthrough will be?
Congratulations Guy Rundle. A well written article that makes sense and clears up a lot of ideas for me.
“Everyone knows, or should, that the Communist movement — the Old Left — wasn’t anti-industrial in the slightest. It’s about as wrong a definition as you can get.”
Rundle, if you can struggle your way through de Maistre then you can grab yourself a copy of The New Left: the anti-industrial revolution by Ayn Rand. As soon as Minchin talked about the Greens and de-industrialisation it was clear what his sources were.
In the ’60s Rand predicted the hippies would form the basis of an environmental movement that would seek to set up an economic system that did not feature surplus value - to each according to his/her needs, &c. Yes, the debate has moved on since then - but like the idea that Indonesia poses a real and immediate invasion threat to Australia, or that Australian republicanism is Fenianism rebranded, Rand’s New Left contains a whole bunch of Ideas That Will Not Die for the right.
I’ve read that book, I’ll bet Christian Kerr has, and I’ll raise you that Minchin and Peter Coleman have too. If there was a Right Book Club, The New Left: the anti-industrial revolution would be in it. Unlike her novels, Rand’s New Left is a short read but far more instructive about one side of the current political debate than bloody de Maistre.
Jeez Elder, talk about living in the past…de Maistre, Ayn Rand Corp., Trots growing vegies…How could anyone NOT predict in the 60s that the vast algal bloom of hippies wouldn’t follow Carson, Erlich et al? True, most of them were hosed down by their mothers and welded into suits, but not all. The Otways, Nimbin etc still have colonies of original drop-outs. Aged and accidentally rich. They bought the dead dairy farms of the 60s….
Equally obvious since the 60s is that anti-industrial ideology had little effect on environmentalism. How could it be otherwise when 90% of greens are middle class suburbans? Avid consumers all. So what if they hate Gunns and Big Oil? All they’ve managed thus far is to curb some of the worst excesses of feral capitalism and vanquish certain species of light bulbs.
The number of bathrooms per house has climbed relentlessly, and most greens are en suite with that.
That’s the tragedy of the climate cult- the environment movt. finally grabs its chance to change the world. MRET and ETS. A farce we all have to pay for.
While the faithful gather in Popehagen, the pack-rape of the environment continues.
What was that about the permanent pack-rape of the environment? From today’s Age:
“Farmers loom as the winners from the strategy, with the state vowing to fight for existing water entitlements to be protected when the reduced extraction limit is imposed nationally on the Murray-Darling river system….
River flows will be ”Insufficient in the long term and would lead to a rapid and continued deterioration of river health and likely loss of many species.”
Fuck Dopenhagen
and all the ensuite Greens…
You certainly are the livid type, Frank C. How many bathrooms y’got. I’ll hose you down if you like.
Dicky Murphy: One. But we hose it out when Rundle visits.
Actually my main complaint about Crikey cult-suckers is the lame quality of the insults…try a Creative Rudeness course at East Bumcrack Uni…
Now then Frank, all that yowling at the moon will soften your brain
Baal- you’d better do the C.R. course…hurry though, places are scarce…
Frank - will they teach me to make my own jokes instead of recycling? (I hear the Institute for Desperate Attention Seekers has plenty of vacancies at every level)
Oh dear, Baal, yes you do need intensive humour therapy as well as CR… Avoid the intravenous option. Some impatient churls died laughing…
An extra on Medicare.
At least I invent me own jokes, culties…your humour is like your insults- Grade 5’s noisy recess…
Coincidentally, I posted the following reply on a Crikey “top story”- about the real environment- which appeared on 20th Nov. That story had just 4 comments on it until today. That shows where The Cult’s priorities really lie:
kulange
Posted Friday, 11 December
Frank, I agree with you. The world is heading towards disaster. I have done some work on this issue and have concluded some interesting results. It will be interesting to see the end result of the Kutubu drill fluid leakage and drilling within the boundaries of a gazetted RAMSAR area. Kulange, PNG.
Posted Friday, 11 December 2009
I’m glad someone does Kulange…I’ve spent the last month like a naked Spartan down to his last cod-piece fending off waves of AGW’s…how do I do it? Well luckily the AGWs are armed only with primitive insults…
I don’t see 100 plus Oz pollies and bureaucrats jetting off to Indonesia, PNG or anywhere else to discuss the end of the rainforests…Sumatra’s lost 85%. the last Orangutan in Borneo is renting a flat in Sandakan….photos of his murdered parents hang on the wall, where he hangs most of the time too…
Frank - re ‘at least I invent me own jokes’ - so you are claiming invention of East Bumcrack Uni. Well congratulations, you must be so proud.
As I’ve explained many times on Krikey Baal, East Bumcrack was Annabel Crabb’s attempt to piss on sceptic scientiists- i.e. they inhabit Bumcrack unis. Climate scientists, being low status, also inhabit Bumcracks. Get it? I’m gunna hammer Crabb’s ignorance until even you can see through it…