At the risk of making him sound more interesting than he is, emeritus professor Robert Manne reminds me of one of Dostoyevsky’s liberals. 
In the distant past, he wrote something (who can remember what) which won him a literary reputation. Then, in the 1980s, Manne found it necessary to demonstrate that this reputation was deserved. He displayed the fearless independence of his thought by defecting from the left to the anti-communist right. With just as much fanfare, he defected back in the 1990s.
He has shown a willingness to slaughter every sacred cow. And the years have not diminished his eagerness. Manne has a comment in the Guardian titled “This pains me, but it’s time to compromise on Australia’s cruel asylum seeker policy”.
Bravery such as this – which always finds its way back to the status quo – impresses neither authority nor opposition. But this isn’t its aim. Such courage has itself as its only object. As much is indicated by the self-indulgent reference to the anguish Manne feels in making his argument. As Hegel wrote: 
“The individual who pretends to act for such noble ends and who masters such admirable oratory counts in his own eyes as an excellent creature – he gives himself and others a swelled head, although the swelling is only due to self-important puffery.”
This was how the Manne’s argument struck me in the 2000s when, as an undergraduate, I saw him make it at La Trobe University. He urged then, as he does now, that the left end its opposition to turning back boats for fear of provoking a backlash and worsening the situation for refugees. Dostoyevsky aptly describes liberals like Manne as running with the hares and hunting with the hounds.
Today the good emeritus professor, in keeping with form, makes his argument by way of biographical anecdote. Manne explains that he bears two souls in his conflicted breast. (His choice of such a self-infatuated rhetorical strategy within a month of the publication of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains should not escape comment.)
The first soul – that of the “social scientist” – draws on an appropriate albeit predictable intellectual tradition, including Vaclav Havel and Hannah Arendt, to diagnose the cruelty and evil in Australia’s immigration detention regime. This soul (the beautiful one) pays its rent in kind, by guaranteeing Manne’s line of moral credit. We aren’t dealing with Peter Dutton here, but a human who feels.
The second soul – that of the “public intellectual” – is the landlord of the first. This much more pragmatic soul differentiates between “Canberra” and “the opposition”. Canberra is caught in the grips of a groupthink that will admit no humane solution to the problem of asylum boat arrivals, and which has evolved to such a point that the most cursory and minimal human kindness is something to be outlawed. 
Given this, you would think “the opposition” preferable. However, Manne’s considerable life experience has taught him well: “Having written regularly on refugee matters since the 1970s and on the particular question of the boat arrivals from Central Asia and the Middle East since 1999, I was once a member of ‘the opposition’. I broke ranks, however, for two reasons”. 
The first reason he gives for his defection is that “the opposition” never acknowledged the success of former prime minister John Howard’s policies in stopping the boats. Implicitly, Manne endorses a utilitarianism that reduces ethics to a calculation. This is the moral logic of a businessman who believes that he has struck a great bargain when the torture and murder of a few is traded against the drowning of more. Utilitarianism is the ethical logic that defends bombing Hiroshima to save lives.
I have matched Manne’s Havel and Arendt with Hegel and Dostoyevsky. Now, I raise him Simone Weil. In place of utilitarianism, better that we say: “No reason whatever which anyone could produce to compensate for a child’s tear would make me consent to that tear”.
Explaining the second reason for his defection, Manne writes: “By ignoring the political dimension, the stale truism that politics is the art of the possible, ‘the opposition’ has failed even to search for a politically feasible solution to the tragedy of the people who have been marooned on Nauru and Manus Island for the past five years or more”.
Canberra is not to blame, but defenders of refugees because we have failed to speak to Canberra in a language it can understand. In fleeing from the moral consequences of the position he endorses, Manne puts the sin on the left. Behind these contrivances, one senses resentment.
So speaks a man who runs with the hares and hunts with the hounds. If only the hares would speak to the hounds in their own language, and master the art of the possible, they might shorten their suffering. It is not hard to come up with historical parallels for this kind of thing.
What, then, is the alternative? As Simone Weil argues, one must endure the void to grasp the true and the good. This holds on both a subjective and objective level. 
Subjectively, it is more laudable to keep one’s mind in the hell of overseas detention than it is to delight in a worldly sophistication that justifies sin while assuaging guilt with unconvincing rear-guard manoeuvres of conscience.
Or, let me put it this way: it is a painful realisation that we inhabit a country that allows a man to die from an infected cut and pushes a child to catatonic despair. Better to fully encounter the emptiness of spirit that this knowledge produces than to flee from the void under the cover of realism, foisting blame on the only group that has demonstrated any decency, no matter how ineffectual. Such a hardening of the heart makes redemption impossible. 
Instead, as Weil writes: “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void”. Such a grace, in this context, is the knowledge that we live in a state whose essence is a denial of the personhood of the other. This – and not the genealogy of contemporary policy – is the correct conceptual link between the current border protection regime, White Australia and the Aboriginal genocide. In knowing this, we may overcome it.
This understanding is the key to overcoming the antinomy between the beautiful soul, whose moral excellence conceals powerless egotism, and the morally compromised actor, willing to dirty his hands, but unwilling to face his crime. Manne’s life has been a series of flips from one to the other. Instead of this, the left must learn to preserve its abhorrence for Australia’s mandatory detention regime while also thinking strategically. 
Such a project has no home in Canberra and will tolerate no vain advice from Robert Manne.

Daniel Lopez

Robert Manne’s self-important puffery

In The History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky suggests that peasants for the first time won a sense of the importance of their individuality during the February 1917 revolution. At first glance, this seems strange: isn’t individuality natural? Trotsky did not think so. Rather, individuality is a historic product.
Trotsky was special among Russian Marxists. His grasp of psychology shines through in his historical writing, due in part to his appreciation for the best of European intellectual life. Post-revolution, this was reflected in his sympathy for Freud. Earlier, during his exile in Vienna, he attended lectures by Georg Simmel, one of the most important and critical sociologists of the early 20th century.
Simmel’s 1903 essay “Metropolis and Mental Life” should be compulsory reading for socialists. In it, Simmel observes that modernity, based on a monetary economy and the city, produces a new type of subject who is urbane and blasé. The blasé subject is desensitised to qualitative differences by the levelling effect of the market and by the way that the city compresses many diverse products and people into such a small space. This subject strives to distinguish itself, for fear of being subsumed. Idiosyncrasy and individuation become defence mechanisms against uniformity and meaninglessness.
It’s a remarkably prescient essay. If you are picturing a denizen of Brunswick, Newtown or Brisbane’s West End, you aren’t alone. Prior to the Russian Revolution, cultural and psychological analyses like this were uncommon among Marxists, owing to widespread economic reductionism. This changed post-1917, largely due to efforts by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács. Also a student of Simmel and deeply influenced by Hegel, Lukács returned attention to ideology, culture and the subject.
Lukács’ efforts created a space for what came to be known as the Frankfurt School. Theodore Adorno, its most famous representative, has something of a bad rap among revolutionaries, perhaps because he called the police on student radicals in 1968. Nevertheless, his highly influential 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality provides some useful insights.
Drawing on Freud, Adorno explains why the typical middle class German formed the mass basis for fascism. Highly disciplinarian parenting created a unique combination of repression, powerlessness and identification with authority. Fear of the father meant that resentment was instead directed outwards, against those weaker or below. This type of subject fitted well with a centralised and hierarchical economy and military that demanded obedience and cruelty.
Pushed to crisis by decades of economic turmoil and class struggle, the authoritarian personality came to worship Hitler, seeing a little of himself in this Führer-father. At the same time, resentment was channelled into hatred for Jews, gays, Communists. This personality type was most extreme in but not limited to Germany. 
By the late 1950s, it began to unravel. As the Fordist command economy gave way to neoliberalism, internalised repression, the subsumption of the individual under the nation and the cult of authority gave way to a different, more self-centred cult. The new ideal individual sought self-actualisation, pleasure, lack of inhibition and – as in Simmel’s day – individuation. 
There was plenty that was progressive about this. A preoccupation with personal fulfilment frequently drove rebellion against traditional expectations and repressive social and sexual norms. 
Yet these traits also fit well with a consumer-driven, deregulated and precarious capitalism. Without a repressive and authoritarian command economy guaranteeing a job for life, the individual is encouraged to become an entrepreneur. This can co-exist with cynicism. Slavoj Žižek is uncharacteristically astute when he notes that postmodern ideology doesn’t demand loyalty to the nation or party. Rather, its strength lies in its ironic or cynical lack of belief.
Capitalism today is at home with symbolic diversity: instead of requiring that we hate difference in order to externalise resentment, we are encouraged to love diversity and value most what is diverse about ourselves. Indeed, this partly explains modern racism: Muslims, we are told, are less tolerant. Hence, we should not tolerate them. A recent academic paper praising military drones as gender-queer has taken this logic to a ridiculous extreme.
There are many permutations on the ideal neoliberal individual. Archetypes include American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, the embodiment of the nihilism, schizophrenia and violence of the finance industry. Or there is Elon Musk, a cartoonish combination of anti-human technological utopianism, hysterical anti-union libertarianism and self-aggrandising idiocy. Alternately, there is the more urbane, Burning Man-attending, Hillary Clinton-supporting, edgy white liberal who is starting a start-up which helps other start-ups start up.
All these archetypes are united by narcissism. In their caricatured form, most people find them repellent. Yet, they reflect a material reality and ideology that we are all subject to. We are encouraged to engage in lifelong learning, because long term jobs don’t exist. We are encouraged to be as agile and flexible as the modern economy and to forgo penalty rates. We are encouraged to constantly consider how marketable our interests are. We are told to passionately pursue our dreams, to work for them without pay. 
Yet neoliberalism is in crisis. Every social crisis also manifests as a crisis of the individual. This is plainly visible in the growth of mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. For those who fall behind, poverty, loneliness and disconnectedness lie in wait.
This now has a political dimension. Take your average member of the alt-right: a young white man who is debarred, economically, from leaving his mother’s basement, and who is incapable of attaining the gratification he regards as both his right and due. 
It is easy to see how this narcissist avoids blaming himself by externalising his frustration into a resentment of women and a belief in conspiracy theories that blame the queer non-white Marxist Jewish left for his problems. His sadistic enjoyment of 4Chan and Trump is the stuff of classical Freudian projection. He knows that the Nazis he worships (or even Trump) would regard him as degenerate: yet he loves them all the more, taking perverse pleasure in their cruelty. This explains the connection between neoliberalism and some of the most horrific crimes of recent times against women and minorities.
As should be apparent, this is where narcissistic individualism can flip into authoritarianism. What these sad figures dearly want is a father figure (say, Jordan Peterson) to tell them to stand straight and clean their rooms and to reassure them that, as guardians of order, they are right to hate women and the left as sources of chaos. Permissiveness has failed, so they now desire discipline. Where cynicism and incredulity towards meta-narratives once prevailed, there is a new desire for regressive and irrationalist grand narratives. 
Just as the once blasé subject of Simmel’s day became, during the war, either a fascist or a communist, the neoliberal subject of today faces a dilemma.
So, “progressive” neoliberal individualism is also in crisis. This is visible in the increasing ineptitude of mainstream liberalism and the decline of self-absorbed identity politics. For the right, there is no way out of this crisis. For the left, there is. Socialism is a third way that neither valorises liberal individualism nor becomes authoritarian. It is a movement which resolves the contradiction between the individual and the mass with solidarity.
Aside from its political virtues, this makes socialism a psychologically healthier option. Rather than answering individual frustration with resentment, projection and repression, socialism is born of the conviction that the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
After all, hating Elon Musk is both quite correct and entails a love of humanity.

Neoliberalism and the individual

The New South Wales state government recently passed laws imposing bans on protests outside abortion clinics. 
If you live in Victoria or one of the four other states with such bans, then you won’t have seen one of these protests for a few years. This is because, in 2016, the state government imposed a similar ban. 
Still, I remember what the “protests” looked like. They were misogynistic and repellent. Theirs was a special hatred that can come only from a lifetime of internalised repression, dashed hopes and barren spiritual resources. It takes a special drive to so determinedly attempt to drag others into the pit of shame and self-loathing you’ve dug for yourself.
These tactics mostly didn’t work. Most women ignored them. But why should women be forced to stifle their disgust while exercising their right to control their own bodies? And what about the few who were bullied into continuing with an unwanted pregnancy? 
There is a simple solution to this problem, and for all its faults, the Victorian government implemented it two years ago. This did not lead to the destruction of the right to protest.
As with all legislative solutions, there are better or worse options. That the NSW Liberal government has imposed a maximum one-year jail term on violators of this ban is stupid and unnecessary. Steep and escalating fines are more than sufficient.
However, in principle, there is nothing wrong with laws like this. This is why I disagree with <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6374">Emma Norton’s recent comment piece</a>. 
Yet there is a much we agree on. We agree that there are far greater barriers to accessing abortion. We also agree that the right to protest has been eroded.
I also agree that the left ought to be wary of any moves that further restrict this right. After all, the Liberals and Labor are capable of staggering cynicism. It is entirely within their playbook to use progressive sentiment against progress. Tony Abbott marched at White Ribbon Day. Julia Gillard heroically stood up to misogyny and then cut payments to single mothers.
However, I disagree with Norton because her view rests on a basically libertarian attitude. Socialists are not libertarians. Our politics demand no pure-hearted opposition to everything smelling of state authority.
Yes, enforcing a no-protest zone contains an authoritarian element. But then so do Medicare and Centrelink. So do laws targeting drunk drivers. So do laws prohibiting assault, damage of property, stalking, arson, theft, extortion and so on. 
Clearly socialists do not believe that crime is the main problem facing society. Nor are we fans of the police force. But we do not oppose state authority on principle. 
The very principle of law (which, as Marx reminds us, is founded on an antagonistic and oppressive class structure) contains authority. And yet, we propose laws. Sometimes, we call for greater authoritarianism: we would like to see far more ruthless investigation into and prosecution of bosses whose negligence causes workplace injury or death.
Norton makes more concrete arguments than these. Her key argument is that the ban constitutes the thin end of an anti-free speech wedge. She writes: 
“It is easy to imagine the laws being applied to pro-choice demonstrators or striking health workers setting up a picket line. All a judge need believe is that such actions could cause stress or anxiety to any woman attempting to access an abortion.”
There are many problems with this. The first is that the laws stipulate abortion clinics. Judges are creative, but not that creative. The second is that Labor and Liberal state governments don’t need new cover to introduce laws against pickets or protests: they generally have done so with minimal fanfare or justification. They also need little pretext to strengthen police powers. 
The right to protest has been curtailed across Australia, and in no example has this been linked to laws restricting anti-abortionists. Why would they invent a conspiracy when they don’t need one?
My main objection, however, is that freedom to protest is not the main freedom in question. The freedom to access abortion is just as much a right – and one that anti-abortionists violate. To paraphrase Robespierre, liberty cannot exist without tyranny. If we aren’t willing to defend a right, it is not worth the paper it’s written on. 
The most salient case in point is the desegregation of the Jim Crow South.
A few years ago, I visited the University of Mississippi. Until the 1960s, the university was a segregated bastion of “the south will rise again!” Confederate fuckwittery. 
Then, under desegregation laws, James Meredith, an African-American and veteran, was admitted. He wrote personally to JFK to ask him to support his right to enrol. This was a tactic to pressure the federal government into backing up anti-segregation laws. JFK eventually assented.
On the evening of 30 September, 1962, US federal marshals, backed up by the 70th Army Engineer Combat Battalion, assembled on campus. They did so to secure Meredith’s right to enrol. 
White supremacists and KKK members, led by a retired army major, also assembled – in far greater numbers. As the crowd of racists grew into the thousands, they became violent. Snipers fired shots at the federal forces. More than 300 people were injured, the vast majority federal marshals.
The following day, the marshals suppressed the riot and enforced Meredith’s right to enrol. He completed his degree in political science in 1963, at which point he was still protected daily by hundreds of troops.
This event was a turning point in the civil rights movement. Segregationists argued that their freedom to protest had been violated. In reality, this was a rare instance of the US federal government fighting for freedom by refusing to allow racists to obstruct it. If anything, the federal forces were far too delicate with the white supremacists.
The context surrounding the free access zone laws is different, as is the scale of the issue. But the principle is the same. While it is logically possible to discover unlimited tyranny in every exercise of authority, this is not how the world works. 
To treat every instance of state power as an attack on freedom is to slip into schematism and ultimately, libertarianism. This is no way to determine which policies socialists support.

Safe zones outside abortion clinics are welcome

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, who had for years passed as Black, was exposed as having Caucasian parents. She was accused of blackface and epitomising white privilege. Unsurprisingly, she was ruined.
In a recent autobiography, she defined herself as “transracial”. The feminist journal Hypatia then ran an article by Rebecca Tuvel, which defended her. Also unsurprisingly, Tuvel was attacked viciously. More than 500 signatories demanded that her article be rescinded and condemned. Yet, something different happened. As a New York Times op-ed by Roger Brubaker noted, many voices spoke out in defence of Tuvel’s article; it was not retracted after all.
The point isn’t to defend Dolezal or the idea of transracialism. Rather, this debate is a sign of changing times. While the millennial left’s preoccupation with identity has not disappeared, the moralistic fire has grown dimmer.
This moralising culture was built on what Brubaker called “epistemological insiderism”. That is the view that only the bearer of an identity is entitled to speak about that identity. To question this was considered tantamount to silencing oppressed voices and erasing history. So, too, micro-aggressions and misuse of language were identified with actual violence.
In a self-righteous race to the bottom, transgressions were called out in the increasingly toxic echo chambers of social media. We were told to check our privilege. Then, it was argued that checking privilege was privileged; so-called allies were indulging themselves with “performative wokeness”. Thus, moral worth was determined not by one’s actions, but by one’s nature: privilege became an inescapable original sin.
This reification of identity led to infinite particularism: after all, there are as many combinations of identity as there are individuals who bear them. It became de rigueur also to check the privilege of one’s age, level of ability, mental health and even one’s knowledge, appearance or cultural background. Intersectionality tried and failed to provide a universal framework within which to explain oppression. Rather, it became a catalogue.
At the same time, trigger warnings and cultural appropriation became a battleground. Hurt feelings or distress were taken as unassailable arguments. To disagree was to “gaslight” the victim. Activists suggested white people refrain from eating tacos, practising yoga or wearing flashy gold jewellery. No-one really considered the upshot: were Anglo-Saxons really supposed to restrict their cultural intake to Morris dancing, Jane Austen and porridge? Upshots are rarely considered in an atmosphere of moralistic browbeating.
As has been widely noted, this culture had a censorious edge. Last year, Yale students forced two faculty members to resign. Their crime? One of them wrote an open letter criticising campus restrictions on Halloween costumes, suggesting instead that students openly debate any costumes they found offensive. The other defended the letter. This dark side was not confined to the student world. It has become commonplace in Australia, for example, for politicians to justify law and order politics in feminist terms.
Of course, it might be argued that the left has always had a moralistic streak. After all, was it not Chairman Mao who popularised checking one’s privilege? On the other hand, when the radicals of the Italian Red Brigades marched, pistol in hand, one assumes that they didn’t issue trigger warnings.
However, modern identity politics was different. It was a product of neoliberalism. Everydayfeminism.com, which usually specialises in patronising cartoons and “radical self love”, is a magnificent case in point. Last year, it ran an article (now removed) entitled “20 ways to help your employees struggling with food insecurity and hunger”.
To be fair, not all identity politicians are business owners. But many demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit that would make the puritans of Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic blush. At the website safetypinbox.com, for the low monthly price of US$100, you can subscribe and receive a box containing tasks guaranteed to make you a better ally. Why just check your privilege when you can pay it off in endless instalments?
These ridiculous extremes aren’t aberrations – they are the logical conclusion of identity politics. This is at least part of the reason that identity politics is in decline. Articles documenting the latest inanities are first rate click-bait these days. Critiques of identity politics are almost as cliché as the politics themselves.
However, there are other signs of the demise of these moralistic times. Recently, Jacobin magazine ran an excellent long-form article on the issue by Shuja Haider. Among other things, Haider quotes Richard Spencer, a white supremacist leader of the alt-right, celebrating the closure of a yoga class for students with disabilities. While the program was closed due to concerns about cultural appropriation, Spencer praised this as an example of “racial consciousness formation” and applauded student activists for “engaging in the kind of ideological project that traditionalists should be hard at work on”. He and other alt-right thinkers have started branding their own politics as white identity politics.
When the far right starts adopting some of the left’s goals, it is perhaps a sign that something is wrong. On the other hand, the popularity of critiques like the one published in Jacobin shows that identity politics no longer enjoys the easy moral authority it once did. Even a few years ago, the article would have invited scandal and opprobrium.
Perhaps the most important reason for this shift is the return of class politics, in the form of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other newly popular social democrats. To identity politics, class is just another privilege to be checked. But to socialists, class is the basis for a universal politics that transcends identity and moral individualism. So, in place of sanctimony and fragmentation, a space is opening up for debate and solidarity. This is happening not a moment too soon.

The beginning of the end for identity politics?

Trump’s victory marks the defeat of “progressive” neoliberalism. The astonishment and dismay at his victory show that the basis for this defeat was laid a long time ago. It wasn’t Trump who was disconnected from reality, but the political establishment, the A-list, the media and inner city liberals – in other words, people to whom the last few decades have been kind.
But if you venture out of the gentrified suburbs of US cities, it is glaringly visible. I have driven through the Deep South twice in the last two years. Rural Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee are grindingly poor. In downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi, at a conservative estimate, 50 percent of shop fronts are shuttered or abandoned. Other towns are even worse. As you drive into an urban area, huge signs advertise payday loans and pawn shops – markers of extreme hardship.
Commentators should (dare I say it) check their privilege before reacting with incredulity, disgust or elitism. Despair is also a selfish response. Real despair has existed for a long time: Trump is its result.
To understand Trump (and the rise of populism around the world), we have to understand what neoliberalism did to politics. It ate it out from within.
Going into the neoliberal age, the Democrats took the working class vote for granted. But almost four decades of austerity have taken their toll. While Silicon Valley and Airbnb-style entrepreneurs have done well, the flexible economy left millions behind. A deep bitterness at the economic system and the privilege of elites has emerged.
How could Clinton offer hope when she helped create this situation in the first place? In fact, she systematically destroyed the candidacy of Bernie Sanders – the only politician in the US who really spoke to this class-based anger.
This is why her Wall Street connections and her former position as a Walmart board member were so deeply resented. Trump may be an egotistical billionaire, but politically and economically, he is less criminal than Clinton. When he said, “Make America great again”, it resonated. When Clinton replied, “America is already great”, it seemed like a sick joke.
I don’t want to imply that the vote for Trump was a working class vote. Sarah Smarsh wrote one of the best pre-election analyses, destroying the myth of the racist white worker, pointing out that many of Trump’s supporters are solidly middle class.
In truth, neoliberalism atomises people, destroying class solidarities. So the Trump vote was a cross-class populist vote. When class and political loyalties disintegrate, personality rises to the surface. To the incredulity of the establishment, Trump supporters – including 42 percent of female voters – were attracted to Trump as a person.
Trump’s appeal was not in spite of, but because of, his crudeness. The man is openly and admittedly a liar, but he was their liar. Hence also his honesty – he isn’t intimidated by political correctness and isn’t beholden to the political machine. He is an open bully, and like all bullies, he exercises an attraction over those less powerful who both crave power and despise those below them.
This was always the attraction of The Apprentice. These qualities meant that a repulsive billionaire could pose as an outsider, capturing the disaffected, anti-establishment vote.
In addition to personality politics, neoliberalism gave rise to identity politics. Often assumed to be the domain of the left, identity is just as important for the right.
Trump mobilised injured identities: people who identify their own decline with that of their nation. Patriots who avoid facing the bleakness of US freedom by hating its supposed enemies. Whites who blame their own marginalisation on the empowerment of non-whites. People proud to be called “deplorables” by the people responsible for driving their lives into the ground.
What does this say about Clinton? Another common misconception about neoliberalism is that it was simply a conservative or right wing project. In fact, neoliberalism has a “left” wing: the Democratic Party. Obama led the golden age of “progressive” neoliberalism. Even his signature reform – Obamacare – was neoliberal through and through: rather than providing free, state-funded health care, it forces people to choose between $700 tax penalties and dramatically rising insurance premiums.
Perhaps Obama’s greatest asset was his charisma. In lieu of this, all Clinton really offered was neoliberal identity politics. She appealed to women, Blacks and Hispanics. And she did this on a negative basis: Trump is a sexist and a racist. Sadly, however, fine sentiments cannot beat intolerance unless they are backed up with real change.
So what reforms did Clinton offer? More women in corporate boardrooms, paying their employees the minimum wage? LGBTI drone pilots to bomb the Middle East? More Black police?
African-American and Hispanic voters did largely vote Democrat, but this wasn’t enough. Clinton’s technocratic and soulless personality inspired distrust and even hatred. This wasn’t primarily a result of misogyny, but a result of her deep and thoroughgoing ties to the status quo.
“She is the most qualified candidate”, her supporters said. This is precisely what Trump voters most distrusted about her! This is why the email scandal mattered; it was a cipher for her general dishonesty.
Trump’s victory is a turning point. But we should remember that other countries (Poland, Italy, Hungary, Russia, the Philippines, India and more) have blazed this path. An era is ending and a new one is taking form. Despair, anguish, incredulity are expressions of grief for the lost era. But why should we mourn the loss of the neoliberal period, whose promises were frantic, individualistic self-improvement and austerity?
The new era of politics, with Trump at its head, is ugly. But on the bright side, clearing out the neoliberal left might afford the real left – the class struggle and solidarity left – a chance to rebuild. Sanders’ immense popularity shows that this is possible. Meanwhile, if you want to blame anyone for Trump, blame Clinton. Progressive neoliberalism has reaped what it has sown.

Trump’s victory and the ignoble death of ‘progressive’ neoliberalism

In 2010, the Sydney-based firm BBY was ranked fourth largest stockbroker in Australia. On average, it traded $150 million per day. Five years later, the company went into voluntary liquidation, owing clients about $61 million. An investigation into BBY has discovered that its insolvency went back years.
The investigation also discovered that Glenn Rosewall, the company’s executive chairman and majority owner, had been relying on the advice of professional psychic, astrologist and feng shui consultant Nevine Rottinger.
Rottinger describes herself as “a professional intuitive and an energy healer”. She made predictions about stock prices “purely intuitively”. Sometimes she also looked out a window. “I just get an image in my mind that tells me what a price may be”, she said.
Capitalism – the most rationalistic system in human history – harbours deep irrationality.
Rottinger met Rosewall on 9 June 2009, at about 9am, later noting, “There’s a lot of nines in that”. In an email to Rosewall, she told him, “When I met you, [the] spirit asked me to hold you in the light”.
According to court testimony, Rottinger also assisted Rosewall with his chakras, giving him incantations to recite. Rosewall, for his part, hoped that Rottinger would practise “mind over matter” in order to help the firm escape insolvency.
We might well ask how a character from Game of Thrones came to influence such large sums of money. But this question misses the point.
In his 1923 masterpiece, History and Class Consciousness, Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács explained that capitalism is a rationalistic and calculable economic system produced by humans, but which is divorced from our control and understanding. He called this reification.
If you think about it, the market is really a series of (exploitative) human relationships. Yet, because it is out of our control, it dominates us. Lukács argued that economists try to comprehend rationally the laws of these institutions in the same way that scientists try to comprehend the laws of nature. However, because no individual capitalist, group of capitalists, or even nation can control the market, ultimately these attempts are doomed to failure.
This is why economists are powerless to prevent (or even predict) economic crisis. Capitalism – the most rationalistic system in human history – harbours deep irrationality. Wherever reason breaks down, irrational, mystical and magical world views can get a hearing.
This isn’t uncommon in history. As revolution approached and as he ran out of options, Tsar Nicholas II famously turned to the advice of Rasputin – an alcoholic, womanising monk. Irrationalism can also coexist comfortably with cold rationalism. In addition to presidents Nixon and Reagan (who weren’t famed for their solid grasp on reality – Reagan believed in astrology), Henry Kissinger is one of the highest profile members of the “Bohemian Club”, a secretive and highly selective club that organises regular country escapes that are reported to include bacchanals and bizarre rituals.
Today, the Burning Man festival has become a Mecca for ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to discover the joys of “radical self-expression” (read: get off their tits and dress like extras from Mad Max III).
A little while ago, a visiting academic at La Trobe University gave a lecture describing a system of supercomputers owned by the biggest financial firms in the US. These computers make millions of automated trades per day, transacting hundreds of billions of dollars in tiny spaces of time. The algorithms that govern these computers are so complex and performed so rapidly that each company employs someone to keep an eye on things. This person’s job isn’t to guide the computers, but to pull the plug whenever they spiral out of control.
This is probably the purest embodiment of reification I have ever heard of. Explaining why her psychic approach works, Nevine Rottinger said: “We’re made up of electromagnetic energy. We can manipulate that field … to create better outcomes”.
She wasn’t too far off the truth. She just wasn’t as good at manipulating electromagnetic fields as a supercomputer. So, the fact that BBY traded stocks based on psychic advice isn’t an anomaly. Rather, it demonstrates that irrationalism is the truth of capitalist rationality.

Modern day Rasputins

The suburb where I grew up, North Watsonia, wasn’t much of a cultural hub. Aside from the milk bar and local park, about the only place to go was Greensborough Plaza. If you’ve never been, you aren’t missing out. It’s the same as every other shopping mall in the country.
But Saturday mornings were an exception. We’d get in the car and drive in to Preston Market to do the week’s shopping. I’d enjoy a slice of pizza the size of my head while my parents would buy groceries, occasionally including live crabs that would become significantly less tranquil in the warm car boot on the trip home.
Now I live in Preston and the market is a short walk down the road. It’s still a wonderful place. With Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino, Middle Eastern, Italian, Greek (and many more) stalls and restaurants, it’s a living example of the unforced multiculturalism of Melbourne at its best. You can still stretch a $20 note to cover a bowl of pho, coffee and cannolis and a half kilo of fresh sardines.
For years, however, rumours have circulated about a proposed redevelopment of the market. Reports now suggest that the first phase of this redevelopment will begin in October. On paper, it sounds innocuous enough. It includes some long-overdue refurbishment, a raft of sustainability measures, something called “smart building technology” and an extension of the “Preston Artists’ Market”.
But alarm bells are ringing, and not just because Preston Market is chasing the hipster dollar. Firstly, traders were not consulted about the plans until after they were announced. The Leader, the local newspaper covering the north, has reported that at least three traders have been given marching orders, while many more are operating on a month-to-month basis.
And this is just the beginning. Since they acquired the market and surrounding properties in 2004, the Medich and Salta development corporations have planned to redevelop the area radically. Stages two and three of their proposal include multiple high rise apartment buildings (including one of 28 storeys) as well as multi-level car parks.
This has the potential to utterly destroy what is so special about the Preston Market. Salta has form on this, with a number of generic suburban shopping malls, apartment and office buildings to its name.
The first change it made to the Preston Market area was to build the Centrelink office on Murray Road, opposite the supermarket. Featuring tinted glass and angular off-white and grey panelling that contemporary architects seem to love so dearly, it is yet another monument to postmodern soullessness.
For years, developers have turned everything they touch to shit. The Queen Victoria Markets face similar threats. How many beautiful shop fronts or mid-century homes have been torn down in favour of ugly, cheaply built yet overpriced townhouses? Let’s not forget the windswept wasteland that is the Docklands or the slow motion train wreck that is Fisherman’s Bend. Why do they do this? Because developers are money-hungry vultures and because state governments have been gutless at best or bought off at worst.
The future of Preston Market is up in the air. Given the half-billion dollar price tag associated with the redevelopment, it’s safe to assume the developers won’t give up. The Darebin Council has been something of a barrier, albeit not as steadfast as we might like.
Activist groups have begun to form, including People for Preston Market and others. Fights like these will define the culture and quality of our suburbs in the years to come.

Vultures circling over multicultural Melbourne market

Events in the UK over the last week have made me realise that politicians are just not good people.
Take the debate in the British parliament over the future of the UK’s nuclear weapons program, “Trident”. 
The British parliament is hardly a bastion of upstanding moral forthrightness. Who could forget the expenses scandal in which MPs were found to have claimed public compensation for things like duck houses and moat cleaning? There was the charming footage of baron John Sewel (of the House of Lords) enjoying large quantities of cocaine in the company of many prostitutes. Finally, there was the gift that kept on giving: David Cameron and his special porcine friend, or “Pig gate”, as the scandal has been cheerfully named.
The debate over Trident makes these – shall we say, indiscretions – look innocent. The most important honourable exception has been Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party. He clarified: “I make it clear … that I would not take a decision that kills millions of innocent people. I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations”.
Good to hear. It’s gone a long way to alleviating the doubts about Corbyn’s character raised by the unruly and frankly desultory state of his rose bushes. Despite his strong stand, around 140 of Corbyn’s (hopefully soon-to-be-deselected) MPs have defied their leader and voted with the Tories to renew Britain’s nuclear submarine program.
Even though we all know what nuclear weapons are, it’s easy to avoid thinking about what they do. While the British Navy doesn’t reveal the power of its warheads, 100 kilotons each is a generally agreed upon estimate. It is depressingly easy to calculate what effects they could have on a city like Melbourne, using the website nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap.
Detonated midair, a 100kt warhead would produce a fireball as wide as the CBD, north to south. The radiation would extend to the inner suburbs. Within this radius, mortality from radiation alone would be between 50 and 90 percent. This says nothing about the blast radius, which would cover all of Collingwood, Richmond, Southbank and North Melbourne. 
The thermal radiation would extend as far north as Brunswick and as far south as South Yarra. Within this radius, anyone not shielded can expect third degree burns, which are, horrifyingly, painless at first. The casualties from such a blast would be in the hundreds of thousands. This figure could be much higher in a more densely populated city (let’s say, for no reason at all, Tehran or Pyongyang). Why would Labour MPs vote for the possibility of inflicting this on anyone? Here’s what Toby Perkins, former shadow defence minister, said: 
“Labour members should know that they are voting in accordance with the policy they were elected on and in support of working trade union members and our heroic armed forces personnel, that they are contributing towards global security, that backing Vanguard is in keeping with our internationalist principles, and that it is the right thing to do.” 
John Woodcock, Labour MP for Barrow and Furness, lamented that the party’s failure to vote unanimously in favour of nuclear weapons was a “terrible indictment of how far this once great party has fallen”.
One of the most chilling phenomena associated with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the thermal radiation imprinted the shadows of people who had been incinerated on the surfaces behind them. This is the price Toby Perkins believes in paying in order to stick to party policy, guarantee jobs and uphold internationalism. This is Woodcock’s gold standard of greatness.
Theresa May went a little further in her first prime ministerial speech. Asked if she was “personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children”, May replied: “Yes”. 
It is an interesting fact of modern politics that leaders are often judged in moral terms. Qualities such as personal integrity, warmth, kindness, strength, honesty and so on, are often seen as more important than the policies and social interests that politicians represent.
For example, John Howard and Tony Blair were regularly condemned for lying in the lead-up to the Iraq war. If only they had gone to war honestly. Or, when a politician’s sordid personal history is exposed, it is generally more scandalous than the grievous social consequences of the policies they have enacted.
Not that scandals are irrelevant. But next time a scandal unfolds or a politician expresses sincere sympathy for victims of some disaster or atrocity, remember this: in the right circumstances, most of these people would be willing to order the killing of millions in the most indiscriminate way imaginable.

Politicians are not good people

At least 80 people have been killed in an attack in Nice, France. As of Friday, it appears that a single attacker rammed a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day on Thursday night.
At the time of writing, world leaders have not pronounced at length and most opinion pieces have not been penned.
Yet, the script is already being acted out. The Greek chorus of social media is in the middle of the overture. Facebook has made its “safety check” feature available for people in Nice. #OpenDoorsNice has been trending on Twitter. Utility aside, these gestures are already ideological performances.
In the coming hours and days, the right will warn us of the danger of radical Islam and ISIS. The Donald Trumps of the world will fire off many a “told-you-so” into the vulnerable crowd of public opinion. Reports of ISIS-linked twitter accounts celebrating the attack have already <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/world/europe/nice-france-truck-bastille-day.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=span-ab-top-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news&amp;_r=0">circulated</a>. Most leaders will stake out a superficially moderate position. Christians, atheists and good Muslims will be called on to unify against bad Muslims. This unity will probably conceal attacks on civil liberties, as it did after the Paris attacks in November last year.
Think pieces will appear. They will tell us the beauty of Nice, now forever scarred, will nonetheless recover. We will not allow terror to impact our way of life. We will defy hatred (and help local business) by bravely going out for a drink. The significance of Bastille Day will be shallowly mulled over. Never mind that the burning of the Bastille (a hated royalist prison) was labelled terrorism at the time. The French Revolution liberated France’s colonies while the sans-culottes of Paris railed against racism, calling it the “aristocracy of skin”. This will be forgotten as Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité are invoked against contemporary victims of French racism and colonialism.
All the while, the social-media chorus will mirror the play. Articles and tributes will be shared and profile pictures will be filtered through the tricolour.
Some will ask why we didn’t change our profile pictures following other recent attacks. This is a good question.
This is the fourth major attack in two months. Before Nice came Dallas, Baghdad and Orlando. These attacks were all premeditated and carried out by individuals or very small groups. But the reactions have been starkly different. Baghdad was the deadliest: over 250 died. This bombing, also claimed by ISIS, largely passed without comment. Very few profile pictures were changed, no public vigils were held and no think pieces questioned how life would ever be the same.
There is an implicit racism here. Are the lives of Iraqi Shias worth less than lives of liberal Westerners? The more honest reply justifies the selectiveness. We have come to expect that type of thing from Iraq. Never mind that 2016 bombing was ultimately a consequence of the 2003 invasion. Franz Fanon noted that fascism is the implementation of colonial governance in the home country. Similarly, the Nice attack a small taste of what the West has made a norm in places like Iraq and Syria.
But these observations lead in difficult directions: on the one hand, it might be tempting to “democratise” our public mourning. Change your profile picture following every attack; grieve for every person killed unjustly. This would be to take arms against the proverbial sea of troubles. As Shakespeare warns, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”.
Reacting with horror to an indiscriminate killing is human. But what adds to the tragedy is that this human reaction will be manipulated to serve anti-human political ends. While Turnbull was pledging solidarity, <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/nice-attack-tony-abbott-warns-of-creative-terrorists-as-malcolm-turnbull-pledges-solidarity-20160715-gq6iim.html">Abbott was warning</a> us about the creativity of Islamic terrorism. He has denounced the ingratitude, “malice” and “prepared[ness] to kill and be killed” of migrants who have been “given succour” by our society.
At times like this, indifference is better than contrived grief. Emotional blackmail is the ally of racism. Genuine solidarity must stand apart from all of this.
This isn’t to say that emotion has no place in progressive politics. After all, the outpouring of sympathy for the 49 killed at Orlando was both real and progressive. Despite the Islamism of the killer, (whose mental state was clearly compromised) these deaths were not so easily co-opted by the right. This was largely because we recognize that our own society is shot through with homophobia. Even so, the more cloying sentimental responses to Orlando have been hard to stomach. Try sitting through Jennifer Lopez and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tribute song, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRRhSMCz7xg">Love Make the World Go Round</a>”.
This brings me to the Dallas shooting. The way that the Black Lives Matter movement reacted was perfect. Rather than being blackmailed into endless public denunciations of the shooting, they called more demonstrations. They pressed home the point that Blacks are killed and injured wantonly by police every day. They refused to allow the public discourse to be transformed into one of manufactured sympathy for police. Blue lives are taken infinitely more seriously than Black lives.
While this is a clear-headed political response, it is also well acquainted with grief and anger. It is impossible to watch one of the many videos of African-Americans being murdered by police without hatred welling up.
Herein lies an answer to the depressing script that will play out over the coming days and weeks. We have to refuse to be emotionally or politically manipulated by the powers that be and their hack writers. In place of the synthetic grief and denunciation to come we should not “democratise” our grief and denunciation, lamenting and condemning every inhumanity. Instead, we have to exercise our own political and emotional selectiveness. The path to a better world will not be illuminated by vigils, but by the fire of resistance.

Nice, Dallas, Baghdad and Orlando

If you walk towards the La Trobe library from carpark seven, you will be greeted by a bleak field bearing a lonely “No Ball Games” sign. Ahead looms the brown façade of the social sciences building. In recent months, the view has been adorned with a towering red banner bearing the message:
“We are a diverse community that believes we can be the difference. Together, we’re solving some of the most significant problems of our time.”
This is one of the quotations of vice-chancellor John Dewar. “Be the difference” is La Trobe’s main publicity slogan. You see it on trams, in broadsheets and at bus stops. The slogan is often accompanied by bright-eyed, bushy-tailed alumni who have miraculously and inoffensively combined social justice and capitalism (usually by adding the words “ethical” and “sustainable” to “business” and “entrepreneurship”).
La Trobe began urging us to “be the difference” at roughly the same time as they sacked 350 staff members in 2014. Therein lies a clue. This slogan and banners are part of a concerted ideological campaign. For example, courses must now conform to the <a href="http://www.latrobe.edu.au/essentials">Three Essentials</a>: “Global Citizenship”, “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, and “Sustainable Thinking”. These values will make La Trobe “Future Ready”.
The imposition of these painfully vapid liberal sentiments has largely been met with irritation and cynicism. Having to re-write a course guide for, say, philosophy or a language, in order to include bureaucratic buzz words is mildly intellectually offensive. All the more so when it is a criterion for funding.
But there is something else going on here. Just like the 2014 sackings, the suspension of Roz Ward, over a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/02/could-roz-ward-keep-her-job-if-she-liked-the-australian-flag-a-little">private Facebook post</a> which criticised the Australian flag as racist, reveals the coercive side of this neoliberal kitsch. After all, it could easily be said that Roz Ward, was “being the difference”. She is a founder of the Safe Schools program, and, as a socialist, has been a tireless activist for years. Her success in these fields is precisely why she was targeted.
La Trobe’s decision to suspend and investigate her came after former Liberal premier Jeff Kennett demanded <a href="https://newmatilda.com/2016/06/01/latrobe-suspends-safe-schools-co-founder-and-academic-roz-ward-for-criticising-racist-australian-flag/">that she be sacked</a>, or else the program might lose funding from beyondblue. HR’s letter to Ward <a href="https://newmatilda.com/2016/06/01/latrobe-suspends-safe-schools-co-founder-and-academic-roz-ward-for-criticising-racist-australian-flag/">accused her of</a> undermining Safe Schools, damaging the reputation of the university and wasting the Victorian government’s time as well as that of senior university staff. Finally, she was accused of having “drawn [colleagues] into the negative publicity around Safe Schools and this has impacted on their ability to continue with their research in a safe environment”.
These accusations patently blamed the victim of a witch hunt for said witch hunt. As many noted, including the <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/lawyers-academics-condemn-la-trobe-universitys-suspension-of-safe-schools-cofounder-roz-ward-20160602-gp9nmz.html">National Tertiary Education Union</a>, they were an attack of freedom of speech. But, on top of this, they reveal the hidden authoritarianism of La Trobe’s institutionalised liberalism. According to John Dewar, by standing up for the safety of LGBTI kids, Roz has allegedly compromised the safety of those kids and her colleagues.
The backlash against Ward’s suspension was swift and widespread. In the space of a day, the We Stand with Roz Ward Facebook page garnered 5,000 likes. An online petition accumulated more than 10,000 signatures. Condemnations of La Trobe’s decision flowed in from all corners. Opinion pieces defending Ward proliferated, first from the usual suspects such as Crikey and New Matilda. Then, the Guardian joined in, followed by the Age.
It was probably the NTEU’s threat of protracted legal action and an angry rally that made John Dewar think twice. But I like to imagine him opening up the Herald Sun and murmuring “et tu, Brute?”, upon seeing that even the Murdoch rag had run an <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/susie-obrien/outrageous-safe-schools-cofounder-roz-ward-sacked-for-saying-australian-flag-outdated-racist/news-story/b305cfc8dd99fb1b0484a3d305684c2a">opinion piece</a> defending Ward. So on Friday afternoon, Dewar emailed the university community notifying us of his backdown.
His email is worth reading closely. He admits no wrongdoing on the part of the university – neither legally nor ethically. He offers no apology. Rather, his backdown is expressly pragmatic, intended to save the university further bad publicity. Denying that Ward’s sacking was politically motivated, he writes:
“The reason the university took the action it did … [was] because [Ward’s comments] were made at a time, and in a context, when there is intense scrutiny of a program which is closely associated with La Trobe, and which she could have foreseen would further inflame opinion about the Safe Schools program and her involvement in it.”
By these standards, John Dewar should be subject to disciplinary proceedings. After all, his actions came at a time of “intense scrutiny” of La Trobe University, and it didn’t take a vice-chancellor to predict that they would bring La Trobe into disrepute.
More than this, his reasoning demonstrates a greater disregard for freedom of speech than most of his critics dared imagine. Not only can we be fired for our views, but for the time at which they are expressed. Good news for PR consultancies, but for the rest of us, troubling.
La Trobe also hosts the “Ideas and Society Program,” convened by Robert Manne. The program regularly runs talks on a range of issues – “Islam: what are we afraid of?” featuring Waleed Aly, or “Hope at last? Prospects for the planet after Paris”. I once endured one of these talks, in which Manne (in true John Dewar form) argued that the Labor Party should retain its support for mandatory detention because to do otherwise would produce a racist backlash. But aside from occasional painful intellectual acrobatics like this, the talks are neither here nor there. In fact, from time to time, <a href="http://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/ideas-and-society/beyond-extreme">they host serious radical intellectuals</a>, like Tariq Ali.
That’s the same Tariq Ali who inspired the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man”, and who ran in the 1974 British elections on an openly Marxist platform. The same Tariq Ali who, <a href="http://tariqali.org/archives/3072">in response to ISIS’s attack 2015 in Paris</a>, condemned Western violence in the Middle East as a greater evil (rightly so). His timing was impeccable.
And despite this, a sentiment at least as radical as Ward’s condemnation of the Australian flag, La Trobe was happy to invite him. Why? He is safe. This is the point: La Trobe is fine with free speech, provided it is marketable.
This is more than cowardice. This is what liberal censorship looks like, justified by self-evidently false concerns for “safety” and progress but motivated by political and financial concerns.
As you walk from La Trobe’s Agora towards the health sciences building, another vast red banner reads: “The true measure of a university’s greatness is the total effect it has on human welfare and progress”. This week has proven that the only people at La Trobe to whom this applies are the staff and students who stood with Roz Ward against the cynicism and hypocrisy of the administration.

Robert Manne’s self-important puffery

Neoliberalism and the individual

Safe zones outside abortion clinics are welcome

The beginning of the end for identity politics?

Trump’s victory and the ignoble death of ‘progressive’ neoliberalism

Modern day Rasputins

Vultures circling over multicultural Melbourne market

Politicians are not good people

Nice, Dallas, Baghdad and Orlando

La Trobe: be the difference (and be fired)

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us