Conversations with your Drunk Uncle - The Meaning of Brexit for Australia

There's a large lot to swallow for political types in yesterday's Brexit vote. A lot more again for people of the left and people of Labo(u)r. But I worry we're going to wind up focussing on the wrong things again, and I worry more that we're not going to have many more chances to learn the lessons.

Because to me, the one, salutory lesson from yesterday's vote was clear: 

Had the Syrian refugee crisis not peaked when it did, Britain would not have voted to leave the EU.

This was, as much as many campaigners on either side attempted to make it not, a vote entirely about the issue of immigration. So Farage's "Rising Tide" poster was one of the key moments of the campaign. Because it was one of the few moments where one felt like the discussion was anywhere near the genuine locomotive issues for most people.

And the real message of that poster was "Turkish muslims are coming to swamp us when they too join the EU." It was perfect because it played into feelings of the EU as a kind of structure "out of control" and misaligned with traditional European national identities. But it also clearly posited "you wanna see another repeat of all these Syrians ..." dovetailing perfectly into anti-muslim sentiment, working class fears over job insecurity, and a sense that EU membership effectively means ceding control of one's national borders.

Europe is Burning, Australia Smoulders

Chatting online with European friends lately, one cannot emphasise how severely the totally unprecedented levels of Syrian refugees the continent has accomodated has led EVEN THE MOST ARDENT MUTICULTURALISTS amongst them to wonder aloud whether we've gone too far. The change has been too profound, the potential risks to our broader social fabric are seen as too great, and too real. In short, ALL the sorts of anxieties that we are all too prepared to call racism when workers exhibit them are now being voiced aloud by liberal left elites all across the continent.

And this resonates with us particularly here in Australia, where immigration and the broader multiculturalist project have become a zone from which politicans have sought to build personal agendas, where they have come to be seen as a kind of political "pet project" of the political elites that working people blame for the broader economic insecurities they are feeling.

"This was not a vote on the undeniable lack of accountability and transparency of the European Union. Above all else, it was about immigration, which has become the prism through which millions of people see everyday problems ... Young remainers living in major urban centres tend to feel limited hostility towards immigration; it could hardly be more different for older working-class leavers in many northern cities and smaller towns."
-Owen Jones, The Guardian 

Every inner city hippie type who opposes "stopping the boats" needs to heed this message, and stop listening with condescention to the people delivering it. Your outrage against "racist" immigration policies and "dog whistling" is only convenient to you because it turns your opponent's argument into a unidimensional charicature.

Because if you're fighting racists then you've already won the argument, right? Well that only works at Uni in debating club. Try retrofitting that into a world where you need to win over actual living, breathing, sentient beings before you can win ANYTHING and it's simply yourself and your own argument that wind up losing.

We're mapping a whole raft of different phenomena here, but one of the crucial ones for Labor people in Australia is that we URGENTLY need to start showing that we understand the economic frustrations, but more importantly we need to give people a much better sense that we have an actual plan capable of addressing them.

Who owns "globalisation"? The left turns up to protest it vehemently. The populist right pillory it as ceding control of nationhood and economic independence, and millions of people worldwide suspect it's a process that directly threatens their best interests. There was a time when Labor would have done anything to attach itself to a mast of that size, but that it would be reticent to do so today tells you how badly our political culture has declined. Any Keating-scale headline policy would be eschewed by modern federal Labor as too ambitious, and Keating's experience would be cited.

But did we ever bother going through what Keating actually got wrong in how he sold his agenda before we declared big agendas "too difficult". For this author, no, and not by a very long way.

Modern Australians - Keating's Illegitimate Offspring

Everyone remembers but nobody understands the meaning of Keating's "banana republic" speech. It was a specific call to "open the economy up, or become yesterday's backwater". And it was an absolutely essential prescription. If you don't remember growing up in Australia in the early 80s, you won't properly remember a time when "Australian" meant "like the rest of the world, but a bit shitter", when the "cultural cringe" was a real phenomenon induced in you every time "Australian-ness" was ever invoked on a global stage.

That backward, insular Australia died in public policy terms at the end of Keating's political vorpal sword, but he totally failed to bring the people most impacted by those policies to see and understand their benefits. By the time he'd gotten around to "the recession we had to have" - and that was really just another (worse) way of phrasing the banana republic speech - nobody was listening to the policy headlines because they were too busy bearing its negative impacts.

We need to spend some actual time talking to people about why an open, not a closed, economy is crucial for Australia to prosper - being a huge landmass with a tiny domestic economy in global terms, it's not a difficult argument to make. Your kids will have a better future in a more open Australia.

But we very urgently need to understand that for so long as workers feel that their current job insecurity is the coin used to purchase that future then they are not going to sign on to the vision. And they are going to take every opportunity to blacken the eyes of the "political classes" untill we show some sign that we appreciate this.

Calling people racists who are afraid that we've ceded control of our immigration policy is completely misguided. Because failing to understand what's actually going on that comprehensively almost always ensures you'll seek out the least effective response. You're most certainly going to respond with the least persuasive discourse for your actual target audience.

Explaining to people how this is neither true, nor the source of their insecurity should be the easiest thing in the world if political classes took their role as PERSUADORS seriously. Instead our political cultures seek out great "revelators" and autodidacts, our internal party processes do everything BUT reward persuasion and argument as a skill. Why the hell would you need either of THOSE qualities to secure an ALP safe seat preselection? All you need is the tap from George Seitz ...

We urgently need to change this tune, because there are as many people in Australia as in the UK looking for something more substantial than just putting Pauline Hanson back in Parliament to bash us about the head with. Who can say for sure they'll never have a wrecker's moment on a Brexit scale?

And who would declare they entirely blame them?

Is Global Capital Building A New Socialism? 5 Astonishing Charts ...

PART 1. On Misery as the Human Condition

The pace of human advancement is increasing exponentially.

Most human beings who have ever lived have not enjoyed what we would today consider the most basic of freedoms. The vast majority of human beings that have EVER lived have NEVER been active participants in a democratic society or even in an effective economy.

Democracy as we today understand it, has largely been a privilege accorded only the citizens of wealthy western nations during the past approximately hundred years. The franchise until the French and US revolutions was the privilege of only wealthy male landowners in very few societies, and was only extended to women anywhere in the twentieth century. The concept has been basically alien to the experience of every arab born to this earth and not inclined to emigrate.

Over the 2.6 million years humans have existed on this planet, democracy has been a defining and significant factor for at best the last 100 of those, and even then far from universally. So using a VERY rough calculation, that's 0.038% of the human lifespan which has operated even broadly speaking under democratic conditions.

In 1820, with the main economic impact of the Industrial revolution still to be realised, the vast majority of people still lived in extreme poverty, with only a very small number of social elites possessing any appreciable wealth at all.

Since 1820, the human population has increased SEVENFOLD, yet measures of both absolute and relative poverty have proceeded BACKWARDS pretty much continuously over the same time.

The UN's Milennium Development Goal was to HALVE the numbers living in extreme poverty by 2015. In other words in the year 2000, the aim was to HALVE the numbers of the world's extreme poor, a status that the majority of human beings have lived under for 2.6 MILLION years in just the next FIFTEEN.

It sounds impossibly ambitious,  but now 2015 is with us, what's been the upshot? How far short did we fall? Well, the target, you may be surprised to hear was MET, and was actually met FIVE YEARS EARLY in 2010.

The absolute number of the world's extreme poor has been HALVED in the space of just ONE DECADE, and the foundations of Capitalism weren't shaken by one solitary micron in the process.

Now, if the elimination of poverty is not the one core goal at the heart of socialism, then socialism possesses no goal at all. But every significant reduction we've ever seen in levels of human poverty over a sustained (better than ten year) period has taken place under capitalist regimes. Socialist systems might prevent relative inequalities within societies, but not between societies, which is why we need to look to absolute rather than relative measures of poverty to assess what has truly occurred.

Chart One - The Recent and Rapid Rise of Democracy

So, chart one highlights this most particularly if you consider there's 2.59 million years missing at the left end of the chart. But you can extrapolate those.

It also highlights just how great a tipping point World War Two, or more correctly its end, has been for human advancement. We'll return to this date time and time again when we look at the historical patterns across several key metrics.

PART 2. On the Advent of Global Capital

It comes as no accident that historians identify the period following the second world war as a distinct and crucial "second wave" in the process of globalisation. Chart one shows us that as the planet has become more globalised in its interactions, so it has become more democratic too, and at a rate that appears to coincide with this same proliferation of more globally mobile capital.

Many have struggled for generations to achieve things any being on earth can now do at the touch of a button. And this has been a direct function of the exponential advancements in human science and technology that have occurred since the Enlightenment, but which we feel even now are only just beginning to escalate around us. The rate of advancement was positively glacial from the Enlightenment to the Victorian era when viewed relative to what we've achieved since, and we certainly don't have a sense this is slowing down.

Chart Two - The Recent and Rapid Rise in Human Life Expectancy

Average human life expectancy at birth in the Paleolithic is estimated to have been around 27-31 years. By the year 1900 it was still around just 31 years. So that's no appreciable progress in one of the core metrics of human development for the first 2.6 million years of humanity's history.

By 1950, life expectancy had finally begun to rise for the first time, and has grown exponentially since. In 1950 we expected to live 48 years, come 2010 and we're now living on average over 67. And of course the average is even higher for advanced western economies.

The overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived died unpleasant and by our standards premature deaths. So few old men have ever passed comfortably in their sleep. The mass of people down the ages who have passed what we would recognise as miserable and uncomfortable existences is just unfathomable, and  modern socialists would rail at the injustice of every one.

But after 2.6 million years of no change, we've more than doubled human life expectancy in the last 100 years, with over half of that occurring in the last 60, again accelerating at a similar pace. It appears by any rational analysis as though it took the enabling complexities of advanced global capitalism that were ushered in after World War I to achieve this, and those of the second wave of globalisation to truly accelerate it.

However, by way of secondary evidence, these life expectancy tables are vastly uneven, dominated in the upper ranks by wealthy mostly western nations and in the lower conspicuously by the world's poorest. The number of sub-saharan African nations performing below par is staggering.

Charts Three and Four -
The Highest Life Expectancies Worldwide are Found in the Most Advanced Economies

If this is somehow a message that capitalism is failing the world, I'm missing something. A country's level of economic activity appears to directly and positively correlate with the health welfare of the nation's population. And once again, if this metric isn't at the very heart of socialist concerns, what are we even doing here?

But even allowing for this relative inequality, and even lagging against outcomes in the developed world, we've still seen an enormous and significant improvement in African life expectancy over the same period, just not at the same pace.

And one doesn't need to dig too deep into the development literature in explaining this. The enormous recent improvements in African health are widely regarded as a function mostly of global welfarism, as delivered via NGOs and the WHO, rather than a direct function of economic development, which in this part of the world has lagged behind the trend improvements in life expectancy.

PART 3. On Socialism Under Postmodernity

So, perhaps there is a message here about capitalism and its failings. If a globalised welfarism is driving improvements in key measures of equity in the developing world, and if it is doing that because economic development in this part of the world is structurally ill-equipped to the task (being artificially constrained by factors political, technological, environmental or structural to below global trend rates of development), and if it's the surplus wealth found in advanced western economies that is necessary to enable this welfarism, and let's not understate the contributions of Bill and Melinda Gates here by way of a mere example, what happens to our objectives as socialists if we lift our eyes to the internationalist rather than the local sphere?

It seems incontrovertible to me that the issues tomorrow's socialists are going to be concerned with revolve around issues like

• Ensuring global corporate tax compliance, and effective global corporate regulation
• Ensuring factors like the level of corporate taxation and regulation do not become a 'race to the bottom' between nation states, for a strong and capable state will be core to enabling the fullest possibilities of a 'new socialism'
• Building unionism internationally, rather than in a geographically-constrained locality
• Developing measures for the global taxation burden to be shifted from personal incomes and corporate revenue towards CAPITAL ACCUMULATION, where in a post-Piketty world it's the higher sanctioned returns on capital versus on labor that can be seen to be driving global inequality

We are accustomed to being told that by the clock of the earth's lifetime, if it were compressed into a single day, then our existence on earth represents the final minute of that day, and our modern existence the final second.

The lesson of this seems to be that the enabling dimensions of complexity can be powerful drivers for the advancement of any species, so the complexity of the human brain has enabled our development from tribal to modern society, but our exponential latter day development has seemingly been enabled by the increasingly global level of interconnetedness.

It's the fact that all these brains are able to communicate, to pass information to one another, to develop systems for the retention of and access to the accumulated weight of human knowledge, that has essentially driven the formation of modernity. And it's from this point that we've witnessed our lifespans and collective welfare increase exponentially.

So, if socialism's goal is human advancement, the enhanced global complexity and interconnectedness of human interactions must be a key objective towards attaining that goal. And that of course prescribes support for enhanced globalisation, and for internationalist, in contrast to regional modes of organisation.

Technological advances in the twenty first century are now able to achieve global scale almost instantaneously. Immunisation programs now draw on years of accumulated research into their effective deployment. Powerful globalised organisations like NGOs have been able to deliver welfarism to the African continent in the ABSENCE of effective local governance and welfare.

UNESCO has calculated that in the next 30 years more people will receive formal education than in all of human history thus far.^[72]

Chart Five -
The Dovetailing of Rising Education with Countries Attaining Advanced Economy Status

In 1870 more than 3 quarters of the world’s people never had the chance to go to school, and only 19% were literate. Let's be clear, these people are destined under capitalism to either unemployment, subsustence living, or doing capital's dirtiest, most drudgerous, dangerous and unpleasant work. The importance of education to the socialist project should barely even need mentioning.

Today, in spite of the massive growth in global population since 1870, those percentages have reversed. 83% of the world's peoples are now literate, almost identical to the global school attendance rate. So capitalism has done socialism's work precisely because the needs of capital and society are not in conflict. Capitalism requires and benefits from an educated workforce, and those workers in turn benefit because the division of labor means that workers can improve their position by acquiring skills that are in relative scarcity, and thereby increase the amount they are able to charge for their labour.

It's less evident here that this is being driven or much accelerated by the processes of globalisation, and that makes some intuitive sense. Where other graphs we've seen "hockey sticking" after the second world war, in line with advancing globalisation, this one offers more of a plateau. The developed world ended the war with literacy levels north of 90%, and took the next forty years to roughly attain full literacy.

The developed world started from a much lower base, but has advanced particularly since the 1960s at a rate that roughly matches long run trend economic growth. The lesson here is clearly that a certain level of economic development is required in order to support a state strong enough to provide comprehensive education to all citizens, but within the span of around a single human lifetime can be transformative to the entire society.

In my next post, I'll turn more specifically to the question of the potential risks and downsides to socialism under global capital. What I've presented here is the "good side" of the story, but as we've seen, unless global capital is otherwise constrained, its operation will tend to increase RELATIVE inequality within and between economies. And that should concern the capitalist set as thoroughly as it should all socialists.

Conversations with Mr Corbyn - Towards a New Socialism

Socialists: Have Beard, Will Travel. Picture excludes Luke Foley.

I suppose there comes a time in the life of a blog where it needs to come out from behind its mother's forelocks, be brave and start playing with all the other blogs.

Mr Tristan Ewins, proprietor of the ALP Socialist Left blog, recently posted up some big picture riffing on the question of socialism's mission there, and I did promise him a comprehensive reply in blog form. This is the first part in a series of posts which will attempt to address Tristan, in addressing Kim Carr, in addressing Luke Foley, in squeaky-voice henny-pennying over the edge of a political cliff with all the gravitas of a drowning ballerina.

But I also emerge here in hypothetical conversation with the hashtag of the moment Mr Jeremy Corbyn, whose elevation to the leadership of British Labour has offered socialism the prospect of a real elevation within the spheres of global political discourse.

THIS is an opportune moment that for socialists worldwide must not be missed. Now, the window of history is open enough and allows enough perspective, as divorced from the ideological blinkers that the Cold War fastened us in to, to actually learn history's lessons well,

The trouble, I think with this discussion is that it doesn't go deep enough. The questions here are really "What is Socialism?" and "is the ALP/Labour on a socialist project or not?" The first problem is one of definition, and an extensive exercise at that. The second problem is merely one of ideology once the first is answered.

So let's focus on the first, but I'd like to suggest a unit of analysis even bigger-picture. Because the point of asking these questions is locating from where on the political hillside Labor's light calls to it. The point here is surely not so much to map the present, as chart the future. The light on the hill is as a beacon, not a point of arrival. It guides us forward, rather than telling us where to stop.

"What can socialism be?" and "what COULD it mean for Labor in giving it political purpose?" These are the salient questions to be asking today.

Because we are in a moment, as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have stellarly proven, when suddenly enough time has passed since cold war mores held sway. There is now a generation of particularly younger folk in advanced western economies who are reaching out almost in desperation for a better brand of politics, one that displays considerably more of the heart and the humanism that 20 years of neoliberal discourse has expunged from the system.

There are also a good body of older people for whom the ideas of socialism never died, but were swamped under a sea of pragmatism when the Cold War ended. We all had to concede planned economies don't work, as if THAT was actually a core tenet of socialism that needed shameful jettisoning, and somehow that turned into a repudiation of the discipline, the word, the everything.

With an inescapable cloaking of anyone who went near the concept with all things Stalinist, grey, bleak and inhuman, we conceded effective defeat. And we were desperately wrong to do so.

Wrong, because we let our opponents, as victors, define the history of the battle. But if we can turn now, with 20 years of hindsight and say "Actually the metrics were wrong, the goalposts were never set around massive state ownership and related ideas, or at least they never had to be".

Because we are talking about OBJECTIVES here. How did we ever become so terminally focused on specific processes to attain them? The socialist objective must be to deliver OUTCOMES that adhere to socialist values, rather than known socialist STRUCTURES like state ownership of trading enterprises, whose outcomes do not. And when you start defining things in those terms, you wind up talking about things that actually fold very neatly into economic orthodoxy.

But it's not just we who need to become reconstructed, because the same deep untruths have become gospel to swathes of people who stand outside socialism's discourse. They think they've seen a corpse interred, but they're about to find out they only seeded Lazarus.

Where and when was socialism born? The correct answer is that it's been born and reborn a million times over. Why are we so obsessed by the writings of one German Jew on the matter? Because he ushered in socialism's greatest "modern/pre-modern" upsurge is perhaps understandable, but I feel this resultant obsession with Marxist structures and analytics has been a stright-jacket we've let define the meaning of the movement for too long.

I believe socialism is as much John Lilburne's as it is Karl Marx's to define. Or for that matter, MINE!

Socialism, like basically all great political ideas has its origins concommitant with the fitful birth of British democracy. And the location is no accident, because the conditions that made the land rife for socialism were all the byproducts of early capitalism. In part because England was the most developed economy on earth in its age, because with the complexities of interactions under capitalism, the complexities of the intellectual and public life were advanced also.

Socialism requires profound faculties of analysis - it requires that those at the tail end of a complex series of interactions to have a consciousness of the complete set of discourses they are operating under. It requires that they are able to mentally step outside their own conditions and radically conceive of something better.

It is time for a "New Socialism", one that takes as its foundation the restoration of the very set of values that huge swathes of modern society is clamouring for the political sphere to deliver, but one which has as much in common with ideas like state ownership as it does with laissez-faire capitalism.

It is essential that we succeed in the quest to define a new, post-modern form for socialism, and one which gives real effect to the movement’s long-abiding objectives, albeit through new forms.

Forms that would be completely alien to socialism’s architects and original dreamers, but which are in turn so because the tools I want to talk about ARE very much a product of and accepting of MANY of the precepts of modern, advanced, globalised market capitalism.

I want to disrupt the idea that any of these ideas exist in opposition to socialism. If socialism is the instinct to regulate capitalism, then we have learned some clear lessons about how best to do this.

• Command economies are stupid. Really, really stupid.
• This precept extends to government direct intervention in markets through ownership of bodies other than those which are natural monopolies.
• So the role of government becomes not a tool for intervention in markets, but regulation of them. And provision of services and infrastructure the market would not otherwise provide. And democratic representation in all these areas.
• And government could be far more aggressive in all these areas, and it’s socialism’s mission to ensure this happens.
• And in the opinion of this writer it needs to be vastly more aggressive in its pursuit of socialist outcomes, and the feedback to the political system is screaming this at present.

So much of the criticism flung Mr Corbyn's way so far starts with the assumption that these lessons haven't been learned. We have the duty, in seizing the historical moment of opportunity to ensure that they have. We must ask of the likes of Jeremy Corbyn to drive the debate towards a "New Socialism", a globalised, post-modern, post-neoliberal, thoroughly refreshed idea.

Socialism is at its heart nothing more than the inclination to regulate capitalism. The tools to do so have never been more complex, global or powerful. Nor have they been ever more needed.

An exciting new era for socialists sits poised, waiting for us to march towards it. Who else can see this new light on our collective hill?