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The postmodern left: part one

By Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler - posted Wednesday, 28 March 2007


Ultimately, for these groups the whole point of the left, the only “realistic” point, is to win government for the ALP.

The best way of achieving this is to broaden the left’s popular appeal, requiring these groups to position themselves against the abstract, revolutionary and extremist views that “postmodernism” is constructed to represent.

For the third group, for instance, it’s an incontestable article of faith that ideas are subordinate to actions (as though somehow ideas are not actions in themselves); hence the shibboleth of “the postmodern left” serves the useful function of making this group’s politics seem pragmatic and socially relevant in contrast to the self-serving obscurantism of the pomo elites.

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For the house reds, too, whose professional and political credibility rests on not being seen to be obviously “biased”, and whose discursive stock-in-trade is therefore one of temperate critique, the sorts of rhetorical and conceptual excesses that postmodernism is often accused of indulging in are eschewed, all the better to make the rhetorical and conceptual performances of the “house reds” seem measured, serious and reasonable.

And as for the shape-shifting efforts of the ALP to be seen as “relevant” to voters - as a viable “alternative” to the Coalition, as a legitimate representative of “popular” aspirations and interests - there could be no room even for a trace of sympathy with whacky ideas about the indeterminacy of meaning or the instability of truth.

But what these groups cannot afford to countenance is the possibility of having become the very thing they shun. What could be more “postmodern”, after all, than a political party that existed for the sole purpose of getting elected, or a political movement supported by social activists and commentators whose only function was to help that party to procure enough votes to win government? What kind of politics and what kind of political movement would that be?

The ironic point here is that this nominal “left”, which pins its faith on the re-election of the ALP, is a perfect image of what conservatives mean by postmodernism, exhibiting the alleged standard features of a lack of substance, a contempt for values and traditions, a denial of objective history, the absence of any purpose beyond self-reproduction and a refusal to accept that anything could be meaningful or true.

But in the end what counts against postmodernism the most, for conservatives like Auty, Windshuttle and others, is the accusation that it’s always got something to do with Marx and therefore with the left. What conservatives call postmodernism is always understood as a project of the left. Why, then, aren’t the groups we list above coming out in defence of it?

In the past (in a time before postmodernism, let’s say) the whole point of the ALP, the only point, was to serve as the parliamentary arm of a big idea: democracy, in the radical sense of a project forever without end and always remaining to come (see Lucy and Mickler, The War on Democracy).

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This idea (to revive a dead language momentarily) was based on the view that modern capitalist societies were unjust, since the interests of working-class people were subordinate to those of the propertied ruling class. The only democratic thing to do about this was not to seek justice through reconciliation, in some fanciful “middle ground” between the warring classes, but rather to further the interests of ordinary working people at the expense of ruling-class interests.

The idea was to give more power to working people by taking power away from bosses and owners. So labour got the eight-hour day, the right to strike, work-free weekends, sick pay, penalty rates, inflation-indexed wages, annual holidays and other rights and benefits (which have all since come under attack by conservatives), at the expense of capital’s interest in exploiting labour without restraint.

With increased leisure time and better wages, the spending power of working-class families fuelled the development of mass consumer society and gave rise to modern living standards that nowadays conservatives try to pass off as the result of some originary free market design rather than the outcome of organised, political labour struggles which forced capital into an historic compromise.

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About the Authors

Niall Lucy is a professor in the humanities at Curtin University. He hosts weekly music/culture show The Comfort Zone on 720 ABC Perth, Wednesdays @ 1.30pm. His latest book is Pomo Oz: Fear and Loathing Downunder (Fremantle Press). He co-edited Vagabond Holes: David McComb and The Triffids.

Steve Mickler is Head of Media and Information at Curtin University. His latest book, with Niall Lucy, is The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press (UWA Press, 2006).

Other articles by these Authors

All articles by Niall Lucy
All articles by Steve Mickler
Related Links
A travesty of logic - On Line Opinion
Right wing columnists - anti-democratic? - On Line Opinion
The postmodern left: part two - On Line Opinion

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