A 'Voice' for Indigenous Australians (Part 1): Setting the scene

I'm on vacation over the Christmas break. But that doesn't mean the blogging has to stop. Over the next four weeks, I've queued up a four-part series on the contemporary debate in Australia over an Indigenous 'Voice' to parliament (which I originally submitted for my coursework this semester). Very few people back home seem to be paying attention to the latest twists and turns in our country's (mis)treatment of its indigenous population. Needless to say, the usual caveat applies: the views expressed this paper are the author’s own and do not reflect the views or positions of the Commonwealth Government or its agencies. 

Setting the Scene

In June 2017, Australia’s Referendum Council (a bipartisan body of indigenous representatives and experts) issued its final report to cabinet recommending constitutional amendment to grant indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders a representative body that would serve as their ‘Voice’ to parliament . That recommendation arose out of a summit at Uluru earlier in May, at which assembled indigenous representatives stated urgent reform was needed to realise indigenous Australia’s ‘rightful’ claims to self-determination and political representation. The Statement was the product of lengthy consultations between a government insistent on purely symbolic recognition of indigenous Australians, and an indigenous movement seeking effective constitutional protections against racial discrimination.

In a joint statement announcing cabinet’s rejection of the Council’s recommendation, Prime Minister Turnbull and Attorney-General Brandis responded that the proposed system of special indigenous representation would violate the principle of equal political rights. The Government claimed that “democracy is built on the foundation of all citizens having equal civic rights” and differential representation was inconsistent with this ‘fundamental principle’. Labelling the proposal ‘radical’ and divisive, the Government’s position was that it “undermined the universal principles of unity, equality and “one person one vote”.” It argued that electing indigenous MPs from ordinary electorates was a preferable path to enhanced representation. 

These two narratives display fundamentally contrary notions of what rights are in a liberal democratic state, who may claim them and why. In Levy’s well-known classification scheme, the Uluru Statement is a claim not for self-determination but for differentiated representation rights. The key question is whether special group rights to political representation are inconsistent with the formal electoral equality of all citizens in a democracy. Whereas indigenous Australians claim parliament is blind to their interests, the Government’s case is that this difference-blindness is a feature, not a bug. Further, satisfaction of indigenous Australians’ claims, they argue, would create difference by making some citizens more equal than others. 

This series will argue that this debate is a novel development in the ongoing conflict over indigenous citizens’ place in the Commonwealth. The debate is moreover an unfamiliar for the voting public, who operate in a legal and social environment characterised by the absence of legally protected rights or even an implicit liberal discourse. It is unusual for Australian politicians, used to operating without the constraint of a domestic Bill of Rights, to make philosophical claims about liberalism democracy and this creates additional challenges for indigenous activists unused to engaging with such claims. 

The Politics of ‘Recognise’: From Beginning to End

For the last thirty years, indigenous Australians appear to have focused their political and social advocacy on what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called the politics of recognition. Taylor argues that the nonrecognition or misrecognition of identity by others constitutes a form of harm or oppression, and that group identity claims are best understood as claims to reduce or ameliorate this harm. Using a constructivist understanding of identity, Taylor argues that since the individual sense of self is developed through dialogue with others, failure to receive equal recognition from others generates harmful individual and social stresses and the internalisation of an inferior or demeaned identity. 

Taylor’s primary critique against the universalism and difference-blindness of the liberal ideal is that it ignores the way that identities shape the individual experience of law. While most left-leaning, egalitarian liberals will accept that differential (material) outcomes may justify differential treatment, the politics of recognition implies that differential identities require differential treatment. This critique is often coupled with the observation that liberalism is rarely difference-neutral in practice, but rather acts as a hegemonic and colonising culture. Taylor (and others) have argued that minority cultural groups in fact have a shared interest in their continued survival as a group , an interest that may be at odds with the majority culture. 

In 1992, the shift from a discourse of self-determination towards a discourse of recognition began when the High Court decided Mabo v Queensland, establishing three legal facts: first, that indigenous Australians had been in sovereign possession of Australia at the time of conquest; secondly, that indigenous Australians had a body of law and custom which continued to be practised; and lastly, that British sovereignty did not entirely extinguish the legal rights and privileges established by that body of law. After two centuries of attempted genocide and assimilation, the nascent politics of recognition initiated a strong backlash from conservative Australia. 

In 1999, conservative Prime Minister John Howard put up a referendum question, asking voters to insert a preamble into the constitution honouring “Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and ancient and continuing cultures”. Howard’s motives were mixed at best; a constitutional monarchist who had risen to power opposing native land rights, his main objective may have been to insert a ‘poison pill’ into the simultaneous vote on a Republic. The referendum’s failure led to the establishment of Reconciliation Australia, a government body which a decade later would organise the ‘Recognise’ campaign. In the meantime, Howard abolished the existing indigenous representative body (‘ATSIC’, in 2004) and initiated the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (‘the intervention’, in 2007) which stripped indigenous communities of their autonomy, imposed paternalistic social controls (especially on welfare recipients), and flooded communities with federal police and bureaucrats. The intervention also suspended the application of the Racial Discrimination Act (‘RDA’), which has led the UN to repeatedly express concern. The intervention is still in effect in 2017. 

With successive governments unable or unwilling to politically challenge the substance of indigenous policy, they increasingly came to rely on symbolism and gesture. Prime Minister Rudd’s well-known Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples changed little, and regular “Closing the Gap” reports dutifully trace the ongoing stagnation in indigenous Australians’ standards of living. Perennial culture clashes, such as over the dual celebration of Australia Day as ‘Invasion Day’ by indigenous people, highlight the ongoing frustration of both sides. In this context, the bipartisan plan to hold a second referendum on recognition of indigenous Australians in the constitution must have seemed like the ideal circuit-breaker. 

Indigenous Australians disagreed. Indigenous communities overwhelmingly rejected a statement of acknowledgement on the basis that it failed to offer substantive, structural reform. According to the dissenting statement of former conservative Minister Amanda Vanstone, attached to the Referendum Council report, while (majority) Australians “understand the importance of . . . recognition’ she had been surprised to learn that ‘indigenous Australians do not attach [to it] the same importance . . .and in fact reject it.” While indigenous groups were also strongly supportive of a constitutional prohibition on racial discrimination (to stop the Government suspending the RDA at will), the final Uluru Statement dropped it as a demand after the Government declared it unfeasible and some activists claimed it failed to go far enough. 

Next week, in Part 2, we'll look at the philosophy of liberal multiculturalism, and what it has to say about representation in a liberal democracy.

What marriage equality means to me (a personal reflection)

Marriage equality is now law in Australia. The first legal same-sex marriages will take place on 9 January 2018, after a drawn-out and often ugly debate during which the conservative right expended every arrow in their quiver in a last-ditch attempt to resist change. Maybe, as Prime Minister Turnbull believes, it had to go this way: that change is only possible when it's inevitable and can not longer be resisted. I don't believe that. Change is both desirable and necessary, and each moment of change resisted is a moment of unnecessary injustice. 

On the website side of things, blogging is going to to slow down as we head towards Christmas, and I get ready for exams and winter holidays. So forgive the personal nature of this week's entry, but I'm going to tell you all a story about what marriage equality means to me.

Once upon a time . . . 

I came to politics late. I was middle-class kid with scientists for parents who never talked about politics and never really showed an interest in social policy. They were prototypical Uninvolved. History was my gateway drug. The past was filled with heroic figures and world-shaking events in faraway places. To this day, "Lawrence of Arabia" remains my favourite movie: the capacity of an individual, no matter how flawed, to change the world was revelatory to a kid in the Australian suburbs. It probably helped that Lawrence was increasingly coming to be seen a queer figure. I obsessed over the Second World War (aided in part by my grandparents memories ), intensively studying the epic that shaped the modern world. I came out the other side something of an enthusiast for the Soviet aesthetic, a teenage 'tankie'.

Thanks to a scholarship, I was educated a private boys school in Melbourne. The atmosphere was blatantly homophobic, if not outright reactionary. Hard as it may be to understand only twenty years later, but it was a very different time: the internet and social media barely existed; kids didn't have phones and bullying and inter-student violence was commonplace; teachers could and did employ corporal punishment, even if it was slowly falling out of use. Although kids I went to school with came out later in life, I only knew of only one 'bisexual' guy at the time. He cut himself with glass pieces that lay around the school ground. That was a real thing, that neither I nor anyone around me was equipped to acknowledge, much less deal with. This was an environment in which putting gay people in concentration camps was considered a 'humane' policy: cruelty against those who were different was a way of life. 

This attitude didn't necessarily take its cues from official policy. The school was religious, but overall rather progressive by those standards. Nor was it the result of cultural or racial values: the student body was extremely multicultural, as most in Australia are. No, this was a homophobia bred entirely through adolescent male macho culture that punished deviance and perceived weakness. What a shock then to realise that adult society was no different: that high politics, law and policy embodied these same reactionary values. This awareness dawned for me in 2000, when the conservative Australian government petulantly sought to cut gay couples off from IVF and medically-assissted conception. These adult debates were mirrored in the classroom: one of the jocks threw a chair at me for daring to argue the other side.  

Pop culture also played an important role. Joss Whedon and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will always remain an important influence on progressives of a certain age, and "New Moon Rising", the fourth-season episode in which one of the main characters came out as gay, floored me. The narrative of coming out was unlike anything I had experienced before: it was a personalised heroic epic, the individual taking charge of their own fate and making a conscious break with the established rules and customs of society. It also personalised the broader political struggle in a way reading the news never did: I didn't know any out people, but thanks to fictionalised characters I felt like I did. I wrote an extremely personal essay at the time, trying to explain how much influence the 'coming out' narrative was having on my political worldview, the only upshot of which is that my English teacher probably thought I was gay. 

So I came to politics late, but I came to it through gay rights. Inequalities based on sexual preference made the abstract aesthetics of progress personal in a way that a cis-, white middle class kid would otherwise not have experienced. To realise that everyone is the hero of their own story, and that we all have barriers and oppression to overcome, is a powerful thing. It's served as a lodestar for me these last twenty years (I almost quit the Labor Party in 2004 over their disgraceful cowardice on the issue) and reaching this point therefore feels like a moment of both culmination and release.  I can't claim to have played any role - better men and women than I have made it their life work, and it's they who now deserve all the credit. But I think a lot of us are going to to feel a bit unmoored, directionless and adrift now that it's done. 

Where, then, do we go next? Obviously, trans rights are going to be hard fought the next few years, but there too, social change feels inevitable. I think the path I've taken, and the advice I'd give to others, is this: whatever brings you to progressivism, stay a while and listen. Ask your comrades what brought them there and offer your support. Listen and learn, build ties between your struggle and theirs and come to see the connections and structures that unite them. It may take a while, but eventually I like to think we can generalise our identities from the initial struggles that motivate us: to recognise that it was not this injustice that made us angry, but this injustice. And one by one, working together, they will be overcome. 

The colour analogy

In this 'dark age' of intense political and ideological contestation, it's inevitable that some people should express (again) a strong desire for universal ’truth’ in social and political life. Genuine ideologues are immune to such concerns: for us, discourses create narratives for our moral instincts and power is the explanatory variable which mediates between ideas and reality.

Centrists also have moral intuitions but often appear to lack confidence that the narrative justifications for their instincts provide sufficient epistemological certainty. Such 'skeptics' dismiss ideology as a social contruct unsuitable for ethical inquiry, but often end up replacing it with appeals to authority and nature in the form of scientism or 'realism'. Not all centrists are skeptics in this definition: many are ideological utilitarians who believe they can calculate optimum social outcomes. But in philosophical terms, the so-called skeptics argue that certain kinds of intuitions (i.e. their own) have ethical consequences because they can be demonstrated scientifically. 

This appeal to the empirical comes at a potentially dangerous time for the infant sciences of evolutionary sociology and psychology. For the first time, the social and biological sciences can offer coherent accounts of the origins and evolution of human culture. While the default philosophical position is that natural facts do not create moral ones, this distinction may be break down when culture is (correctly) understood as part of, rather than distinct from, the natural world. And it should worry the left that right-leaning centrists have noticed and begun to mis-apply cultural evolution to discredit and devalue other positions. To my mind, such people oversimplify the complex implications of cultural evolutionary theory, and in particular the idea of gene-culture co-evolution. This blog attempts to correct those misconceptions, and it does so using a device I'm rather fond of: the colour analogy. 

The colour analogy

The electromagetic spectrum is continuous and infinite; light can possess almost any wavelength and no wavelength is particularly differentiated from any other. Out of this infinite variety, we can think of the visible spectrum as those wavelengths which convery potentially useful information on a planet like Earth, which is composed of certain elements at certain temperatures. What this implies is that it's useful for agents to know, for example, that most plants are 'green'; but linguistic colour categories ike red, blue and green are arbitrary linguistic constructs with no basis in physics. Firstly, since wavelengths are continuous, where we draw dividing lines between categories is completely random (or so it seems). And secondly, we have no way of guaranteeing that two agents see a colour distinction in the same place. We can agree that a plant is the same colour, but experience that colour in relation to others completely differently.

For the sake of the further analogy, consider light's wavelength a natural, scientific fact and subjective categorisation of that colour (a cultural construct) as their social construction of its meaning. 

For a long time in the twentieth century, this insight was the central underpinning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that language categories were essentially arbitrary, and moreover these arbitrary categorical differences altered how individuals perceived the world. Anthropologists showed how different cultures described and experience colour in vastly different ways, and historians also noted the relatively paucity of words and concepts describing colour in the ancient world. This was a view of culture and language at home with the then-dominant 'blank slate' thesis of human psychology and the strict separation enforced between biology and culture in the aftermath of the discrediting of Social Darwinism. 

Yet in 1969 (and in continuing work since), Berlin & Kay showed that there was an underlying pattern to all this diversity. Colour terms did not emerge randomly, but appeared to follow patterns that the researchers believed corresponded with economic and social development. First, a society distinguished between light and dark, then red, then yellow and green, then blue, then brown, and finally orange, purple and grey. There were exceptions within this pattern, of course: some variation caused by randomness, others by specific adaption to particular ecologies. But on the whole, Berlin & Key had discovered that colour terms evolved in a common way amongst humans, suggesting an underlying structural pattern. The following explainer from Vox does the topic some justice:

In fact, this universality amongst the human experience of colour may be hard-wired into our biology. Like all Old World primates, but unlike most mammals, humans are trichomats - with three types of colour receptors in our visual system attuned to short- (blue), medium (green), and long- (yellow-red) wavelengths. It would uncontroversial to assert that the particular combination of visual receptors found in our biology are the product of adaption to the natural environment through natural selection: being a trichromat at these wavelengths conveys an evolutionary advantage (in the form of electromagnetic data) at acceptable cost. Similarly, it should be uncontroversial to state that the way we use and analyse that data socially is subject to selection effects based on whether our categorisations of colour convey socially and environmentally useful information at acceptable cost. 

Gene-culture coevolution contains both these premises, but also something extra: the types of colour category that can emerge culturally are constrained by our common biological inheritance (and vice-versa). In other words, cultural variation and adaption is not infinite, but shaped by genetic factors common to all homo sapiens - cultural evolution is path dependent and part of that path is a universal biological inheritance. Any human society, pre-loaded with red, green and blue colour visual receptors and operating in an Earth-like natural environment will develop colour terms in a (relatively) predictable fashion depending on its level of social complexity. The same is true of all culture: tolerable variations in behaviour must be suited to a bipedal, social animal with consistent biological needs such as food, water and shelter.

Sex and Gender

Let's consider what these insights mean for social policy, choosing an example with clear biological and cultural elements. Opponents of so-called 'gender ideology', a.k.a. the completely obvious conclusion that sex and gender are different things and gender is socially constructed, argue that biological categoriesof sex create an inarguable moral case against culturally recognising non-binary genders. Yet sex, like light wavelength, is not a strictly binominal category: biological sex is made up of a number of different indicators (i.e. reproductive role, secondary sexual characteristics etc) each of which in turn encloses some degree of variation. When these variances are given weights and summed for a species like humans that reproduces sexually, we would likely see two clusters of sexual characteristics with distinct statistical peaks but some variation and potential for overlap. Not a binary, but bimodal. 

Scientists can treat these clusters of biological averages as distinct 'sexes', and we can think of our day-to-day ability to distinguish between them our 'sex receptors'. While gender roles are a social construct, evidence that even very young children are sensitive to sex differences in adults suggests that there is at least some part of our developmental biology that is tuned to probabilistically distinguish sex categories. Thus, most (but far from all) human societies have developed binary gender roles because the cultural evolution of gender is influenced (but not dictated) by sexual dimorphism. But what's important is that there is clearly no barrier to recognising additional gender(role)s or different ones or none altogether - plenty of cultures have done so.  As societies become more open and tolerant of individual self-expression and definition, we can and should re-examine our existing social categories of gender and be more tolerant of categorical innovation. This really isn't that hard! 

Moral Colours

So let's bring this back to moral philosophy. I've mentioned Jon Haidt, his Moral Foundations Theory, and my problems with both him and it before. Haidt is becoming something of a guru to centre-rightists and 'classical liberals', but I feel this is because he has drawn the wrong ethical conclusions from his own research (a risk for any scientist). To summarize briefly, Haidt and his collaborators posit that humans are equipped with modular cognitive capabilities relating to ethical and social reasoning. The most well-studied of which are our aversion to physical harm (i.e. 'care'); our biases towards fair outcomes (or 'proportionality'); mechanisms for resolving stresses caused by social hierarchy (i.e. 'loyalty'); a slider for resolving the Omninove's Dilemma (i.e. 'openness to experience'); and a sensor to avoid potentially harmful substances (disgust or 'sanctity'). All of these biological modules make sense for a social species operating in a potentially hostile environment, and can be demonstrated in human populations of all levels of social organisation. 

Where Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychologists, Haidt and their respective followers go wrong, however, is to leap immediately from these universal biological constraints to ethical rules, without considering culture or evolutionary history as intermediary variables. They believe, like sex-essentialists, that science has provided them with universal and objective 'truths' that can and should form the basis for universal ethical philosophy. Because Popperian science provides standards of falsifiability and objectivity, they believe their ethical conclusions are superior to conventional philosophy and ideologies. But all they have done is cloak their naive intuitionism with a naturalist fallacy.

The correct response to such claims is not to keep human culture and ethics separate from biology, but to understand that biological and cultural evolution both partially (and validly) contribute to social norms and practices. In other words, we can accept Haidt's claim that certain moral instincts (with both genetic and environment-driven variability) are universal to the human species. But we must also recognise that these merely weight the sorts of cultural systems humans can develop and do not determine them. In philosophical terms, our evolved intuitions may provide a useful short-hand way of resolving simple ethical questions, but complex societies require more complex and nuanced rules. Cultural rules and norms must always contend with these intuitions and biases (as the behaviourial economists believe), but they work together as often as against one another. Whether genes and culture are complementary or antagonistic depends on the types of social problem a society is trying to solve. 

As is common with sorts of enquiry, it turns out that complex philosophical and ethical problems don't actually have simple solutions. Reasonable people can and will disagree about what the categories of 'right' and 'wrong' include, in much the same way as we might disagree on distinguishing 'purple', 'magenta' and 'mauve'. While evolutionary science may be putting the intuitive case on firmer foundations, a full appreciation of cultural evolution must also recognise and knowledge that ideologies and culture are no less adapted to solving the sorts of social problems we face as a society.

The Politics of Solidarity

This blog is a follow-up to my earlier rumination on "Identity Politics". In that piece, I expressed comfort with identity politics as a progressive practice, but some dissatisfaction with its theoretical underpinnings (putting me squarely in line with most of the socialist left). This piece offers a deeper dive into the underpinnings of the politics of solidarity, coming to stronger and firmer conclusions. 

Radicalism, then and now

My book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" presents in its early chapters an overview of liberalism using as a device the slogan of (parts of) the French Revolution (and later the French Republic): liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although right-libertarians may disagree, it is wholly uncontroversial amongst serious liberal philosphers (and many Marxist ones) than equality and liberty are twinned objectives. We cannot rigorously justify liberty without accepting an original position of equality, and we (non-authoritarian socialists) also accept that the ethical purpose of equality is to maximise individual liberty. The core blindspot of right-libertarianism is failing to recognise that under conditions of inequality some will always be more free than others. 

Fraternity, then as now, is a trickier propostion. In Chapter III, I argue for the need for the left to reclaim fraternity, and since the word and some of the concepts underlying it are potentially problematic, I will instead substitute "solidarity" in this blog to refer to the progressive version of the concept. In the book, I write that solidarity is "the sense of belonging we can find in sharing values with and trust in our fellow citizens", and argue that this trust finds expression through the laws, norms and institutions which bind a society together. Trust, as readers will know, is an important resource to solve collective action problems and we will return to it later.

Liberal philosophy, in attempting to reconcile the twin goals of liberty and equality, has on the main settled on equality of opportunity as its guiding principle. The egalitarianism of even left-liberals is what Elisabeth Anderson calls "luck egalitarianism": it attempts to correct for some forms of inequality, but only arbitrary differences in personal circumstance and not differences cause by 'choice'. If original conditions are equal and equality of opportunity exists, then social outcomes, even if unequal, are to be considered 'just'. What all liberals, from both the 'egalitarian' and 'libertarian' ends of the spectrum, share is an emphasis on methodological individualism and agency. In other words, once just rules, norms and institutions are in place, society should be blind in practice as well as theory to the consequences of individual choice. 

Needless to say, this is an incomplete theory of justice: the fairness of outcomes matters to individual liberty and happiness, and some material needs (housing, healthcare, food, clean air & water) are so important to our wellbeing that they have the status of fundamental right. Even liberals like Will Kymlicka have been forced to admit that the current approach is counterproductive, forcing the disadvantaged to engage in what he calls 'shameful revelation' in order to qualify for social sympathy (which contributes to the construction of a hierarchy of moral worth).  Yet Kymlicka's own support for multiculturalism is justified similarly: if a social group can demonstrate that the impartial application of law leads to an injustice in fact, then the law should craft special assistance or exemptions for members of that group.

Charles Taylor famously labels this 'the politics of difference' and the resulting hybridity between liberalism and identarian claims of culture leads to what I have called in the past the 'second form' of identity politics: adapting laws and institutions so that arbitrary differences such as race, gender and sexuality no longer systematically disadvantage individuals. It is dialectical middle ground between communitarians who hold that groups and cultures are ontologically prior to the individual; and liberals who seek to merely 'correct' for arbitrary differences in individual characteristics. The liberal fantasy is that everyone regardless of group membershio or disadvantaged status has a formal opportunity to 'rise to the top'; failing to question why we have a top or why people would want to be there in the first place. 

Socialism is liberalism plus structure

In a broad sense, the left (which I prefer to call socialist but which others may label differently) is liberalism plus structure. What I mean by that is we share with liberals a common foundation in humanism and much of the philosophy of the social contract. And to a point, we can also share their methodological individualism. Where we part ways, however, is by positing social structure as an intervening variable between individual choice and outcomes. To us, difference neutrality looks alot like taking sides in favour of the status quo. Feminists label the structure 'patriarchy', because it systematically differentiates between genders; I call it social and economic interdependence, because my focus is on how the nature of games creates collective action problems; anti-rascism activists similarly use the concept of systematic rascism. 

Iris Young provides a useful definition of structure: 

"Basic social structures consist [of] determinate social positions that people occupy which condition their opportunities and life chances. These life chances are constituted by the ways [social] positions are related to one another to create systemic constraints or opportunities that relate to one another . . . Structure[s] are constituted through the social organisation of labour and production, the organisation of desire and sexuality, the institutionalized rules of authority and subordination and the constitution of prestige. Structural social groups are relationally constituted, in the sense that one position in the social structure does not exist apart from differentiated relation to other positions."

Thus, as I write in Chapter VIII of my book, poverty only exists in relation to the standard of living of the rest of society (i.e. 'absolute' poverty is an arbitrary, albeit sometimes useful, category). Similarly, gender[s] does not exist objectively outside the social relations defined between them; and race is junk science but conveys powerful social advantages and disadvantages. Any individual's access to social goods in the context of these structures is distributed probabilistically, and so it is therefore analytically relevant to define groups by their collective advantage or disadvantage and to conduct activism on that basis - even if some individuals from a disadvantaged class have the opportunity to rise to the top. 

Laws, rules and institutions cannot be value-neutral because they are imbedded in deeper cultural and economic patterns. Laws, rules and institutions cannot produce just outcomes on their own because they are blind to these patterns or explicitly take them for granted (see: Gramsci). And as I have written before, people often experience a powerful backlash bias when these social relations are threatened. If individuals or groups need to claim disadvantage (or perjoratively: 'victimhood') in order to receive compensation for that disadvantage, the act of both claim-making and claim-granting merely re-enforces existing social patterns and fails to challenge the underlying base structure.

Critics of "identity politics" often fail to differentiate between the two sets of arguments. Challenging structural racism, the patriarchy, or the class structure of the economy is not a claim of victimhood and for special treatment: quite the opposite. It is an empowered attempt to change society so that structural inequality no longer exists. This is precisely why Marxists, who critique the class structure of society as being bad for the individual worker, were so often accused during the Cold War of being collectivists. And why critics of multiculturalism or feminism misinterpret claims for equality as attempts to secure special treatment: they are operating under complete different philosophical understandings. If structural inequality magically ceased to exist, we could all be some type of liberal. But it does, so we aren't. 

The Politics of Solidarity

As I write in Chapter IX, in a totally different context, "If the state is thought of only as a redistribution machine, we can blind ourselves to ways cooperative social institutions can prevent inequality from occurring in the first place. Better to stop inequality from growing than seek to cure it after it occurred." In that chapter I'm talking about the economy, but the principle applies equally to all forms of social hierarchy and structural difference. Redistribution does not generate social trust; in fact, it may be corrosive of it. Much better if we address our activism at the root causes of difference, recognising that formal equality of opportunity does not in and of itself generate egalitarian outcomes. So if right-wingers really don't like paying taxes or the recognising special group rights, then the only logical solution should be to join a union or cooperative, support feminism and the movement for black lives. 

And here we return at last to the concept of solidarity. If unequal and hierarchical structure is the problem, then the solution is solidarity that transcends that structure and undermines it. That's why sexism, rascism and other forms of discrimination, especially paternalistic versions thereof, have no place in any progressive movement. Solidarity means pursuing cooperative solutions to the problem of generating social trust, without which we cannot transform and prevent inegalitarian structural structures.  

Solidarity means trusting others in at least three important ways. First of all, it  requires working across group boundaries to build ties between social classes, rather than seeing politics as a battle for the scarce control of social resources (i.e. identarianism). Importantly, this acknowledges that deconstructing hierarchies will also be of benefit to those currently privileged by them. Secondly, it means trusting others' claims about the sources of their own disadvantage, and not expressing skeptical or paternalistic beliefs about the moral value of their claims. If an individual is unable to access their fundamental rights, the course of events leading them there are not relevant to the inquiry. Lastly, and most radically, it means trusting that if our fellow human beings are in need, that we should offer help, and not make judgements about their own capacity for or skill at autonomous decision-making.

Myths of the Old Order: The automation illusion (part two)

In today's blog, I will continue last week's discussion of the automation myth.

Chapter XII of my book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” provides a lay introduction to productivity, and its role in generating long-term growth. The fact of the matter is when it comes to the technological miracles promised by Silicon Valley, we can see them everywhere except in the economic statistics (the Solow paradox). Since the 1980s, labour’s contribution to economic output per hour work has remained flat, while the return on capital has grown by leaps and bounds. If labour productivity had continued expanding over the last forty years, we’d already be working shorted hours for higher wages. Instead, we have seen the opposite: low productivity, flat or declining real wages, and chronic levels of employment stress.

What’s really going on?

Automation, then, does not made us more productive. So what is it?  My answer is that the drive for automation now, as sometimes in the past, is capital intensification. Think of the difference between productivity and intensity like this: productivity increases output if either your workers or equipment become more efficient; intensity increases output when you add either more workers or more equipment to the production process. It is intensity rather than productivity gains that we have seen under neoliberalism: the outsourcing of labour, de-unionisation and greater labour uncertainty leading to modes of production that rely more and more on expensive capital equipment (including IP) and finance and less on labour input.

Capital intensification is not necessarily a bad thing: in the 1700s, capital needed to be concentrated out of the landed aristocracy and into the bourgeois banks in order to facilitate loans to the first factories (in both the trading and manufacturing sense of that word). Sometimes, productivity leaps do require capital to be concentrated. In an era of low labour productivity, when eighty per cent of labour worked farmland, capital intensification created new industries that in turn soaked up workers. It paid them for their increased productivity and expanded output to match, creating the middle-class consumer out of nothing and increasing prosperity for all. But that’s not what’s happening today, especially post-GFC. Consumer demand remains weak everywhere, and rates of return on expanded output are at historic lows. 

Automation in the modern era, then, is being driven by capital intensification in existing workplaces (especially wholesale, healthcare and other essential services). High levels of inequality mean that capital-owners have historic financial reserves and no productive outlet for investment. Governments bailed out the banks, keeping them flush, and in some places began a historic era of quantitative easing, literally showering banks and the corporate sector with cash in an effort to get them to invest in the real economy. Governments across the world are trying and failing to get corporations to spur growth by investing these savings, rather than using them to big up their stock proces and private wealth. The savviest businesses discovered that they could use this cheap credit, not to expand output, but to produce the same output using more capital and less labour. By doing so, they maintain or increase their share of profit in an era in which economies as a whole are growing slowly.

Automation is, therefore, a capital bubble (Chapter XIII of my book) that will only increase inequality and lead to further capital accumulation. It is for this reason that pushing tax cuts as a spur for economic growth (as governments in Australia and the US are trying to do) is catastrophically ill-timed on both a micro- and macro- level. Since new investments are normally tax-deductible, lowering marginal corporate tax rates will decrease the incentive to invest; higher tax rates increase the incentive for employing additional workers and equipment. At the macro-level, increasing the rate of corporate profit while impoverishing the social programs propping up what remains of consumer spending will only increase capital concentration, slow the economy and increase inequality. Why would governments do this?

Automation is leading to permanent job losses but is doing so for the same social and policy reasons that labour productivity has remained stagnant for forty years. Power in the workplace has shifted decisively in favour of capital (with government assistance) and employment is less secure than at any other time in a century or more. While a minority of those laid off will find new employment as technicians or programmers, the majority are being forced into the retail or ‘gig’ economy as low-skilled personal service workers: Walmart ‘greeters’ and Uber drivers, for example. Such jobs are not only less secure, lower paid and offer fewer benefits than the jobs they replaced, but actively alienate workers from one another and de-skill them, further reducing their collective bargaining power. 

Speculating about the future of work

While the service sector may be the most important part of a highly developed economy, transitioning everyone to a service sector job will not be our saviour from automation because not all services are high-productivity and high-wage. A totally service-dominated economy with flat levels of production and consumption would look very much like a feudal aristocracy. Those who control capital (once upon a time: land; now: financial assets) will live very handsomely indeed on the rents they extract. Everyone else will eek out an existence predicated on hierarchical personal service to such individuals: a true ‘trickle down’ economy. Not only would such an economy be technologically and socially stagnant, I argue it would be prone to potentially revolutionary social disruption.

Truly forward-thinking prophets (or fantasists) of the automation apocalypse warn us that the true threat to the contemporary economic and social order is not automation but AI. AI algorithms that will not only replace high-skilled service sector employees such as doctors, lawyers and teachers, but also manage capital better and more effectively than humans and produce cultural goods on their own. Quite frankly, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. True AI would lead to such a profound re-structuring of human life on Earth that the question of economic organisation might seem like a second- or third-order problem. 

An optimistic response to the possibility of hyper-competent decision algorithms is that it would increase the value of non-analytical, emotional and social skills that humans are likely to continue to hold and advantage in, a point Ezra Klein puts emphasis on. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that humanity has a unique social and emotional toolkit that would be hard for us to [reliably] replicate in an artificial intelligence, we presently compensate such skills poorly. The modern cult which privileges rationality as the basis of competence would have to change pretty dramatically, and if we could somehow create a discourse that privileged humanity’s social nature so highly, there would much better uses we could put it.

Policy consequences and responses

From my perspective, the policy solution for the automation dilemma is obvious. Increasing the labour share of income (either through higher wages or greater redistribution) would soak up additional production and create new demand so that the capital intensification of the last decade doesn’t go to waste. Increasing labour power and giving workers a democratic say over the workplace decisions that affect their lives is the best way to manage the transition to new forms of production: if automation is truly unavoidable, then let’s make it work for the many and not the few.

Unfortunately, the automation debate is not intensifying calls for democratising the means of production. Quite the contrary: the right is using it as a cudgel to threaten workers and the centre-left appears paralysed with indecision and fear. For centrists, the policy consequences of automation are expressed in terms of anxiety about its consequences for social stability and the political consensus underpinning the continuation of status quo policies of de-regulation and unrestricted trade. The reason for the sudden surge of interest in harebrained schemes like universal basic income is that the centre is looking for ways to buy off revolution and discharge its social responsibilities to the economic losers without having to re-examine or change the fundamental ways in which production is organised.

For the centre-left in particular, there is a second aspect to their obsession with the automation narrative. For well-educated elites in the public sector and media, there is a fantasy that if the working class comprises enterprising, globally-open “knowledge-workers” (like themselves) then it will also come to share in their elite culture. Under this narrative, elites don’t have to close the gap that has opened between themselves and the proletariat: instead, the workers will come to them. But they mistake labour flexibility for labour uncertainty, and their enthusiasm for using Uber is not necessarily matched by the desire of former manufacturing worker forced to drive a taxi for uncertain wages. The bourgeoise thought this way about the disciplining effect of manufacturing too; as did the feudal landlords and slaveholders before them. Sadly, while culture is in fact a function of economic patterns of production, so long as those production patterns contain exploiters and exploited, the interests of elites and the working class will remain divergent.