Mythbusting Labor’s woes and the decline of social capital
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The travails of the New South Wales Labor Party following Saturday’s catastrophic election defeat have revived talk of the urgent need for party reform. Insofar as this discussion hones in on reviving party membership, the barriers to participation said to be inherent in general trends discussed by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone are cited again and again. Declining social capital, driven by individualisation, passive consumerism, changed and more fluid lifestyles and work habits, is the culprit: most recently invoked by Dr Andrew Leigh, MP, in the Financial Review, but increasingly an all-purpose explanation in Labor circles. There are two problems with this proposition. The first is that it’s not true, at least not in the form stated. The second is, like most conventional wisdom, it avoids rather than engages with the problem. Hence its attractiveness, but also its danger, for Labor figures. Putnam’s thesis has come under a lot of attack. A bit like Richard Florida’s Creative Class, it has been accused of being entrepreneurial pop sociology — something seemingly common sense in search of a statistical grounding. There’s an element of romanticism in the idealisation of strong ties (as anyone who’s left a sea-change town for a big city can attest), and good evidence that weak ties can be more instrumentally effective in many contexts of collective endeavour. And there might be a lot more people playing multi-user games than at the bowling alley. But, leaving the academic debate aside, there are wide variations in the rate of voluntarism and political participation even among nations shaped by an English language culture, and American imports don’t always hit the mark. More importantly, though, the concept is too diffuse to be politically meaningful. As Dietlind Stolle and Thomas Rochon have observed, forming a bowling league is not the same sort of thing as taking collective political action. The concept of “voice” is useful here. It’s not the same thing as a motivation for wanting to serve a community, or seeking status, or friendship. Unions are another social institution often said to be declining because of a lack of social capital. But this is to ignore the difficulty unions have with transient and casualised workers lacking a primary identity tied to their job, and with legislative and management barriers. Consistently, polls have found that more workers would like to be in unions than join — and that inclination is strongly correlated with a desire to have their voice heard at work. As I argued in 2006, and as Sydney University political scientist Ariadne Vromen’s research confirms, there’s no lack of interest in political issues among many Australians, particularly among young Australians. It’s just that the existing political institutions — which include political parties — find it difficult to harness or channel that interest. The UK Labour Party has just gone through a period of soul searching after its election defeat, and a somewhat more profound one than the federal ALP’s recent exercise. A research report by the Fabian Society, Facing Out Online: How Party Politics Must Change To Build A Progressive Society, very usefully cites much of the research on the disjunction between frozen institutional structures and activist impulses. It would repay a much broader reception in this country. But the key point here is that tinkering at the edges is not enough — the decline of political party membership is not just about a lack of willingness to review the minutes of the last meeting in a cold school classroom on a week night. It’s the way that political parties give their membership no effective voice. There is, in other words, no lack of potential social capital around. But it’s not just a matter of finding tech savvy ways to harness it. Internal party democracy, a word that strangely seemed much more at home in debates about parties 20 years ago than now, is one ingredient in the mix. There would never be a better time to try an electoral college system or a Canadian style “closed primary” for the election of a new party leader in New South Wales. But it’s the disconnect between party membership and voice in public policy, and therefore input into real bottom up social change that is the missing link. There are all sorts of ideas that could be tried — Climate Change Citizens’ Assemblies aside, deliberative democracy has great promise, as do a range of ideas so far oriented to government about crowd-sourcing public policy. There’s no good reason why political parties couldn’t take some of the excellent ideas generated in the Gov 2.0 exercise, and use them in their policy formulation processes. But what the Labor Party doesn’t need, and what we as citizens don’t need if we wish to live in a rich democracy, is a set of clichés about “Bowling Alone” becoming an excuse for cosmetic change, or worse, business as usual. Dr Mark Bahnisch is a sociologist and a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He founded leading group public affairs blog Larvatus Prodeo. |
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8 Comments
The ALP need to reform the party to recruit quality candidates. Unfortunately, most sons/daughter/spouse of party fraction power brokers tends to be corrupt and incompetent. What ALP have currently is a fiefdom structure.
All the parties (not just the ALP) need to listen to the people that are electing them, and by listen I don’t mean “policy by polls” (which are fair to easy to manipulate), but actually engaging with them. They also need to stop doing what the lobby groups tell them to, especially when it is against what voters actually want. Corporations/”industry groups” are not supposed to have a vote, but they certainly seem to have more power with government than they should have and what the average voter has.
The power privatisation in NSW is (IMHO) a great example. As far as I can tell, no one that actually elected the government wanted it (from some of the articles I’ve read on Crikey, even the party voted against it), but they sold it anyway. The ousted members of the Labor party shouldn’t try to blame anything else, this is where the down hill slide started, they turned their backs on their electorate, stopped listening, and now they’ve paid the price…
Dr Mark Bahnisch, I could kiss you on the mouth. I doubt there is a rival for a crap hypothesis (capitalism aside) that is so badly understood, so often misused and has held so much sway over public policy in the post war world.
Maybe they should have told the public that they sold it because they couldn’t afford to keep it.
As a True Believer who left the Labor Party last year, I can’t find anything left to believe in.
I appreciate this article. It summarizes the top-down approach used by powerbrokers, while they ignore the bottom-up approach needed for real communication and growth.
I have no political ambitions myself, other than the actual achievement of the rights listed in the UDHR. These are rights our two “opposing” political parties increasingly ignore.
Thanx very much for this piece. I, too, have been annoyed by Florida and Putman’s pop sociology that selectively quotes statistics and overlooks contrary information.
I am a member of a public sector union, on a huge salary with conditions to die for (over 12 months sick leave accrued and a 35 hour week with 5 hours allowed to be worked off site and no accountability requirements for this ‘off site’ work thanks to union intervention). I am a line manager who is unable to direct those who work with me; I can negotiate only This union I belong to is not fighting for fair conditions for ‘workers’; they are fighting for conditions that are simply unsustainable and increasingly unfair.
I grew up in a Labor household with a father who worked in heavy industry. Once a once staunch supporter of the Labor Party, I no longer am. I am simply not convinced by the statement that many would join unions if it was easier for them to do so and I am constantly distressed by the huge voting block given to the union movement at Party Conferences, given that they now represent a distinct minority of those who work in areas outside of mining and education (where a claim of having won ‘fair’ wages sometimes seems laughable). I am married to a manual worker, who works ‘on the tools’ in his own business alongside his 2 full time employees (and 1 to 2 casuals) on civil construction sites. This is a man who earns considerably less than many other workers, who risks daily our assets, who ensures that his workforce is paid all entitlements and above award rates, and who is denigrated by the Labor movement as a ‘company owner’ trying to rip off his workforce. Why he would want to rip off the men he relies upon, and beside whom he works every day, is unclear to me and never adequately explained by Labor.
The Labor movement I knew as a young child and adult represented workers like my husband. These people did belong to a union back then. The Labor movement I know now no longer represents those workers who have become small business owners like my husband. Lumping these workers in with ‘big business’ is insulting and one of the many reasons workers like my husband have abandoned the movement.
It is an interesting question whether a sub contractor or small business owner who employs 4 workers is a member of the proletariat who should be represented by Labor or a member of the petite bourgeoisie who share interests with the bourgeoisie who are represented by the Tories. Marxists recognise this fuzzy border and say that in the end it turns on industrial action: when the workers go on strike does the sub contractor or small business owner join the workers on strike or keep working in the interests of the bourgeoisie? This varies for different sub contractors, probably over different issues.
As for Labor not representing the interests of the proletariat, that was Marx’s original criticism of 19th century trade unions (there being no labour parties then), and has been Marxists’ and socialists’ sustained criticism of labour parties ever since. It is for this reason that many on the Australian left support the Greens before Labor. However, I don’t know how long the Greens will be able to maintain their mildly left wing policies in the face of the attacks from almost everyone else including Labor for ‘extremism’.