The politics of denial and refusal in the working class
of the Australian state:
some (nearly random) notes on the composition of social
struggle
Bruce Lindsay
(36 Queen St, Williamstown Vic 3016)
AUSTRALIA
Table 2: "Our Worlds and Their World"
Abstract.
The social struggles of capital and the working class in Australia
have intensified in the past 18 months, as capital and the state have
sought to deepen austerity, control, and "flexploitation" over the
mass of the population. In the wake of ongoing crisis of the late
1980s/early 1990s, a "space" or "front" of resistance has developed
across differing social sectors, notably indigenous, civil/community,
workers, students. The state has shifted decisively to the right and
has become openly reactionary. The politics of the antagonism
*within* the working class have progressively become a refusal on the
one hand, and a denial on the other hand. These remain marginal
tendencies, but increasingly important, as the Power responds to
crisis by (at least sponsoring) a more violent exclusion. The
antagonistic refusal takes the form of a method of struggle
emphasizing "constitutional" and civil resistance; the denial takes
the form of suppression (beyond "management") of the diverse social
character of the class, captured in a racist or authoritarian
(fascist?) response to exclusion and despair.
Main text.
1. For nearly the last 18 months there has been a new phase and an
acceleration in the project of neoliberalism in Australia. This has
accompanied the rise of a neoconservative government at the Federal
level, alongside a majority of similar state governments, and this
period has witnessed the rapid implementation of new policies aimed
at social austerity, flexibilization of wage-labor and the offensive
against organized labor, further enclosure of collective or public
space, insulation of the state from class demands, etc. The same
period has largely coincided with a renewed, if uneven, cycle of
struggles, that is itself a moment in a longer development of
social-industrial antagonisms from c. late 1980s/early 1990s, and
that is focussed upon four principal sectors: the workers' movement,
the students and youth, the indigenous societies, and the ecological
and civil movements.
2. This phase is neoliberal and reactionary: it focusses on social
control and imposition of greater work through social exploitation
(of "social labor": the category representing the real breakdown of
any division between work and social action/activity) and
"flexpoitation" of wage-labor.
3. The previous phase - from about 1982/3 - focussed on social
management (of struggles) and autonomizing the (neoliberal) economy,
the global rule of money, austerity and flexibilization, etc. Toward
the end (from 1992) is progressively became more reactionary,
especially at the (constitutional) level of the states.
4. Capitalism within the Australian state suffered a period of
significant crisis between 1987 and 1992, firstly in financial
meltdown that produced debt and inflation crisis and focussed on the
corporate sector, and secondly in productive meltdown, in severe
recession and escalating unemployment and austerity after 1990. From
the early 1990s, in the wake of anti-Gulf War demonstrations,
significant industrial strikes against sectoral and general
austerity, periodic student agitation, and indigenous land rights'
gains, there began to be a broad-based recomposition of the class. It
was based on a collage of antagonism and struggle. It has been based
largely in activist networks. A new crisis began to emerge from early
1996 based on this recomposition, and possibly extends back to the
mineworkers (and dockworkers) strike sparked off by attacks on
unionization at Weipa in August-September 1995. It is still a crisis
without a definitive shape, except that it is a more generalized
social crisis.
5. If there is any sort of "vanguard," a "human vanguard" in the
terms of the Zapatistas, perhaps it lies in the Aboriginal and
Islander resistance, which is by and large a resistance of the
"Fourth World within the First World," and the civil and ecological
movements in alliance with this resistance. Its vanguard lies not in
an hegemony over the class but in the development of its methods of
struggle. This is a resistance that that circulates regionally, in
the epicentres of Bougainville, the Gulf, Newtown, Kamurajungk,
Wanganui, Tahiti, etc. In the epicentre of the community. At least in
the Australian state, its analytic epicentre is in history and the
historiography of indigenous struggle and resistance: this in a
public-intellectual epicentre. In the epicentre of the organized
networks. In the constituent power of custom, or of communal ethic.
In the "political" and "legal" method of struggle, ie. a
"constitutional" method, fused with civil resistance, even uprising^
(eg. the anti-racism movement, periodic uprisings in apartheid towns
in rural Australia, also land occupations in New Zealand, and
anti-colonial uprising in French Polynesia). This is a vanguard on a
national level, within the national project, of the Australian state.
Its resistance is a resistance to effective genocide, deriving from
the "final enclosure" of land, culture and community, from the social
extermination of "unprofitable" populations, at the core of the
neoliberal project.
6. There is a sense that this resistance, this method of struggle,
is extending to other social sectors. The confines of the
"constitutional" channels are breaking down. This refers to formal
political and legal channels of resistance, but also to other
channels of extracting concessions from capital and the state. The
latter had been progressively regularized in the "social contract"
that, for example, allowed workers limited right to strike and after
the 1960s limited rights to occupy public space (eg. mass
demonstrations and student occupations). This "constitution" was
absorbed, as an industrial and social project, within the State
between 1975-95, especially in the period of "neocorporatism" and
Labor governments (1972-5, 1983-96). It has been progressively
limited and wound back in relation to the needs of the neoliberal
project. It is the indigenous movement that has pushed the
political-legal channels of this constitution to breaking point,
through the acceptance of the courts of "native title" (ie. customary
Aboriginal ownership of land and sea), through acceptance of state
commissions of official genocidal policies (ie. through
criminalization, social and health crisis, and the "stolen
generation" of separation of Aboriginal children from their society).
Now is the time for the reaction to shore up neoliberal Power.
Racism, new waves of enclosures, the rise of fascism. The rapidly
diminishing space of state-sanctioned resistance, and the opening of
a space of effective civil resistance: this is a pattern beginning to
reproduce itself across the social sectors. The union heirarchies,
the civic and community "leaders," the student union functionaries,
etc, still attempt to contain and control the resistance within the
impotent "constitution." But activists are being made out of
"ordinary people" and they are doing new things: in my state
(Victoria) there have been blockaded highways and strikes in support
of these community movements, student occupations are becoming
endemic and even "guerrilla" in form, there have been mass
anti-racist mobilizations to physically stop the neo-fascist
"juggernaut."
7. The spectacular moment of this constitution's crisis occurred
in the national rally on the capital (Canberra) in August 1996.
30,000 converged on the Parliament to protest the new austerity and
repressive labor laws. The careful orchestration of the union
hierarchy came to pieces with the aid of police harassment. More than
a thousand people, led by construction workers and Aborigines, laid
seige to the Parliament building for hours in a battle with Federal
Police, chanting "Let the workers in!", making a material unity
between black and white, exposing the farce of the "People's House."
The politicians (and reporters) cowered behind the police lines in
this enormous bunker, later spitting fanatical statements. The
speeches of the union hacks drifted off inaudibly into the air.
8. The matrix of struggle has become more intensified, notably as
a greater tension opens up between social-liberal strategies
(building means of mediating/managing antagonism) and more autonomous
organization and action. A summary investigation of leading social
struggles:
a) the indigenous struggles and the appropriation of juridical
functions of the state (relating to native title and land rights,
"deaths in custody" and repression/criminalization, "stolen
generation" and reconstruction of community);
b) the student movement and reappropriation of space, relating to
occupations over university fees, strikes of high school students and
parents;
c) unions and the strike: general strikes of WA workers against
labor laws, Weipa, Parliament House seige, strikes of industrial
workers for unconditional wage increases and for collective
bargaining;
d) civil movements and the reappropriation of space and
communications: forest and urban occupations, solidarity
(Bougainville, Timor, Burma, etc) and civil disobedience, public
services and public sphere of the state (La Trobe Valley,
anticorruption in police and government, secrecy of the state, etc)
and public intellectual movements (from liberal academics and
journalists to socialist-liberal parties).
9. The forms of action spelt out within these sectors are
generally representative of struggle at the public level, and
therefore must be qualified by the development of struggle at the
"clandestine" level, the microstruggles, which may well be both
massive and of intense antagonism at closer investigation. The public
form of social life is, at the same time, the subject of struggle and
does not represent a neutral terrain, indeed the public condition is
itself a key focus of reappropriation by the broad sectors of the
class. Of course, this reappropriation is, on the one hand, unevenly
poised between positions equating "public" with the
(social-constitutional, welfare, etc?) State and the (social?) market
and those that tend to push the question of the "public" into more
antagonistic directions (through direct appropriations, collectivist
organization, subversive/guerrilla tactics of struggle, and so
forth). Insofar as the antagonism may deepen on a mass scale, the
"public" and "clandestine" or private forms of resistance become
increasingly difficult to distinguish, precisely because the "public"
space is recomposed out of the mass of particular, localized
resistances. This recomposed "public sphere" tends to exist without
necessarily being articulated as such, in series of networks and
organizations. What is notable in particular is that there is a
generalized antagonistic tendency within the specific struggles, that
is irreconcilable to neoliberalism in either its content or its form
(eg. unconditional wage increases, autonomous media, militant direct
action, refusal of user-pays structures, community or customary
control of land or space).
10. The "archipeligo" of struggles. With a few exceptions, the
limits of these struggles lie in the absence of direct relations
between the spaces of social antagonism and the means for organizing
this. Rather these relations are mediated by the need to pressurize
the state (or other institution) and the apparatuses established for
this process, including the market (eg. media/PR, emphasis on
fundraising and commercialism, consumer boycotts). Alternately, there
is a real possibility of struggles becoming isolated and marginalized
and even ghettoized. Considerable energy that is consumed in the
rallying of "support" and "solidarity" tends to reproduce politics
and social struggle as a commodity, as an appeal either to the state
or to the "public" (that simulacrum of civil society defined and
measured in opinion polls, so often derided by the "Left" as
"apathetic") in which its value - the real, expropriated activity -
can be realized and determined. Perhaps it has been described
elsewhere, but Marcos' analysis of "politics as a commodity" remains
a most eloquent representation of this.
12. The society is increasingly organized in the "dual economy" of
the included and the "excluded," where the latter are represented by
precarious work and income, eroding conditions of work and living,
shrinking spaces of conviviality and self-determined time, and so on.
The social existence of the working class is broadly attacked by
capital through long-term erosion of wages, the social wage, and
control over collective/public/semi-public spaces. At the same time,
neoliberalism continues its push to subordinate all aspects of social
life and space to commodification and to processes instrumental in
this. The rule of the market and the measure of profitability are
symptomatic to developments everywhere. Among the mass of people,
precariousness, dislocation and the "struggle to survive" contribute
to a real social force of despair, anger, exhaustion, cynicism and
fear, which is productive of the system of command generally
speaking.
13. The election of the rightist government fuses hardline
technocratic-neoliberalism with a developing conservative reaction.
At the state level it mingles with a straight-out authoritarianism
and even dictatorial style. A neoconservative alliance of "new right"
and "old right" constitutes the dominant faction within the national
government. This reaction has exposed a more intense field of
antagonism, notably in the advances of the racist and fascist
right-wing that is now crystallizing around the "One Nation" movement
at the political level. Its social base would seem to be somewhat
fragmented and perhaps unstable, grouping middle-class elements
(Christian fundamentalist, etc) with the rural petty-bourgeoisie
(small farmers, etc, who are more accurately proletarians within
social capital), traditional "lumpen-proles," and industrial workers
(notably white men). At least the latter sectors represent
populations in crisis, who very existence is threatened by
globalization and industrial restructuring, and subject to long-term
economic depression. It is possible that real and significant
divisions are emerging among sectors of the elite over this movement
and the affect it is having on the government's policy (which, in the
ruling coalition, seems to have ideologically been resolved in favour
of conservative reaction over liberal sections). There are a number
of overlapping lines of possible tension: between liberal and
conservative ideology, between judicial and governmental power,
between nationalist and multinationalist projects, between the Power
that lies in - "represents" - the "public" and that which lies in
money, etc.
14. The institutions of the traditional incorporation, especially
the unions, the parties, and the large organized social lobbies (from
aid organizations to ATSIC to NUS), would seem to be in or on the
verge of a period of "restructuring," in which they intensify their
"social production": there is an increasing competition for the
commodity of "public opinion" (or "membership") on the one hand, and,
and they "rationalize" and "entrepreneurialize," for new markets on
the other hand. In the rise of "public" weariness or apathy or
indifference, these institutions must not only get more work out of
their employees for the same or less, but they must in turn make "the
public" (or the electorate, or the "community," or whatever) work
harder also, to extract more and more "living" emotion, intellect and
action. Representative democracy is hard-sell marketing.
15. The opposing strategies of refusal and denial of neoliberal
Power are developed by the mass of the population, by the working
class extended throughout every part of the society, and are means of
their existence within capitalism. That is, they are strategies of
and by both individual labor-power and social labor-power.
16. Refusal of the politics of the neoliberal project: in the most
antagonistic of our social sectors, the struggles to free themselves
from a politics of "public opinion" and entrepreneurialism, from the
spectacular "15 minutes" (on TV or in the minister's office - by
invitation or by occupation - or in the ballot box) and from the
fetish of the balance sheet (ie. the command of money). It remains a
struggle in and against this politics, which is an overwhelmingly
superior "political" machinery: it cannot be defeated on the terrain
of public opinion (or "consciousness" to the Left) or money
(membership or papers sold, to the Left). The refusal is a
"protracted war" on the social terrain, no matter whether our
specific struggle arms itself with guns or schools or our bodies or
strikes or words. In many cases we already have the "autonomous"
spaces to withdraw to - of our organization, our respite, our ideas,
our dignity and love, our bodies, our power - even if they are under
assault. And we already collectively coordinate some attacks on the
political, economic, repressive/military, ideological, etc Power of
the system. The coordination is not centralist and delegated but
democratic and recalleable. It is built upon deals that represent our
collective needs and desires, or upon the possibility of such deals.
17. Denial of the politics of neoliberalism: in the most
reactionary and despairing and violent of the social sectors, the
struggles to reinsert themselves within the terrain of public opinion
and entrepreneurialism. It is a struggle to realign and recompose
this politics in the terms of the process of suppression. The
reaction of suppression on the political level, represented by
conservatism, racism and repressiveness within the state (incremental
dictatorship?), is made all the more intense by the increased rate of
exploitation on the social level, by the intensifying mobilization of
public opinion and of money within the political process, and by the
sense of (individual or collective) loss accompanying this. This
"loss" - which may be represented religiously as in fundamentalism or
secularly as in racism and nationalism - substitutes a violent
abstraction of decline and corruption (eg. of "family values," or
"national sovereignty" or "public and personal integrity") for what
is in fact a real expropriation of sensuous and concrete social
activity. The denial also assumes the form of a "protracted war," but
one whose "zones of autonomy" are simulations of democratic and
collective relations across the social terrain. And its attacks on
neoliberal politics are calculated and determined to "revolutionize"
those politics, to reorganize the deal within the capitalist
social-economy, and to pose as the dominant form of the State not
management but suppression (and repression adequate to this). In our
context, this suppression is particularly aimed at
1. cultural relations, and oppression of indigenous
and ethnic peoples,
2. industrial relations, and intensification of wage-labor,
3. civil relations, and dismantling of rights,
4. political relations, and insulation of the state from popular
demand,
5. personal relations, and the tendency of compulsive
(heterosexual, familial) sexuality and emotional life.
Bruce Lindsay June 1997