Issue No 4 | 12 March 1999 | |
Guest ReportMcKenzie Wark on Labor in Cyberspace
In an extract from his new book, "Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace" (Pluto Press), McKenzie Wark looks at how Labor needs to understand the changing culture it purports to represent.
The changes Labor itself unleashed when in office created an economy, a polity and culture that were considerably more dynamic than the quiet backwater in which people of my age, who I'll call Generation Gough, were probably the last to experience. The sense that there may be profound qualitative changes afoot in the 90s contributed to the resistant mood of the information proletariat and the reactionary instincts of Hansonite populism. No less worrying were the signs of soft Hansonism, even in the Labor Party, which took the form of a desire to make up policies that kept as much of the old suburban way of life alive regardless of its intrinsic quality or sustainability. Resistance to the need to invent new concepts for a new situation, to find new ways of grappling with complex information, seem to me to form a part of the disdain Beazley voiced for the "intellectual pride" of those Labor figures who saw the need to think again � and who claimed the capacity to think it through. As Tanner wrote in 1991, a bad year for the Labor government, a division emerged in the Labor Party during the Hawke and Keating years. This was not the old division between left and right wing factions, but one that "straddles factional boundaries. The division is between those who may be described as 'rationalists' and others who may be seen as 'traditionalists' (or in each other's opinions, sellouts and troglodytes)." Tanner identified the slogan of the troglodyte traditionalists, as "returning to our traditional base" and that of the sell-outs, or rationalists, as "adapting in a changing world." In the 1998 Federal election campaign, it was clear that Labor's traditionalists were exerting a strong influence. The party did well with its "traditional base", piling up useless swings in outer suburban seats it already holds. The trouble was that Labor needed to appeal to both its traditional base and also to people who had benefited from the Hawke and Keating rationalisation of the economy. These appeared to be mutually exclusive goals. Labor needed to hang on to the loyalty of what had become the information proletariat, growing increasingly anxious and resistant in outer suburbia, and it needed to reposition itself as a forward looking party that understood the new agendas driven by urbane beneficiaries of an open and information intensive economy. It needed to be a party that could draw morals from its fabled past, but also that could draw lessons from the events of the present. The moral of Labor's 1998 defeat was that the past Labor needed to return to was not any particular sacred relic of policy. Instead it needed to review the way those policies had arisen in the first place � as the expression of an alliance of popular interests and desires. Labor proposes, but the electorate disposes. Party apparatchiks might write the policy, but the public knows how to read. It can read the qualities of the party's talking heads and savour the texture of their speech as well as it can read any other kind of celebrity or commercial. The lesson that Labor did not need to substitute a new catechism of rationalism for its old dogmas, but to become a more empirical user of information and accumulator of knowledge. When Paul Keating said on Labor in Power that he stopped relying on Treasury advice because while he thought it was well informed and intelligent, it "lacked guile", this was potentially an important moment in the party's understanding of itself as an information gathering organisation. I think Keating realised late in the game that power in the post-industrial age means being able to draw intellectual confidence from scepticism rather than from dogma. He chose the word guile carefully, and what I think he meant by it was a certain kind of cunning that comes from knowing that knowledge is artifice. If Labor is to survive in cyberspace it has to ask itself what its relation to information is, what kinds of knowledge it can claim to draw from the information it taps, that what kinds of skills it needs to communicate its knowledge. Anne Summers noted right at the start of the Hawke era that one kind of knowledge Labor was gathering with increasing effectiveness was survey polling data and focus group studies. "One hallmark of the reconstructed Labor party is its restrained and reassuring language... it would be possible to compile a glossary of key words... It would include such words as 'realistic', 'responsible' 'stable', 'moderate', 'careful', 'decent'. The words, and the themes they enunciate, come in a large part from the research on swinging voters and they thus reflect the values which significant sections of the Australian electorate respond to." Despite the populist rhetoric in the 90s to the effect that leaders were 'not listening' to suburbia, Summers marvelled at "the extent to which voters themselves are writing the speeches which the political leaders deliver. The notion that policies should be based on research rather than on an ideology and long-held principles used to be anathema to Labor politicians." It was progress to be able to make policy that drew on information about the desires of the public and the language in which it was expressed. This makes more sense than the authoritarian practice of rationalising from belief, given that what counts as the catechism of true belief in the Labor Party was usually a matter of ideological control by functionaries rather than democratic information gathering. What Latham objected to in the party's attempt to formulate a soft Hansonite election policy platform in 1998 was that what the public wanted was not filtered through any serious attempt to conceptualise the sources of popular opinion, or how opinion could be moved to sound policy. A successful party cannot inform its policies solely by dogma or the polls. On the other side of the process, all of the major parties acquired elaborate machines for grabbing space in the media vectors to communicate in as carefully managed a way as possible whatever policy was decided. As much as this too is an object of complaint within the electorate, the density of the vectors of cyberspace make it inevitable. As Summers wrote of the 1983 election campaign, "the parties were geared to monitor what politicians were saying and to blow any little phrase up into a political storm. The technique was totally dependent on the technology of the tape recorder, the transcribing machine and the vocadex." And of course such technologies have improved remarkably since 1983. So on one side, any Labor politician and any Labor policy or slogan will be road-tested by the polling and focus group process � as long as the party apparatchiks have anything to do with it. And on the other side, any Labor politician and any Labor personality, policy or slogan will also have to get out to the people via a professional media apparatus. As John Button remarked, "in Chifley's days there were armies of passionate true believers... they turned out in their thousands for political meetings in public halls. Today's politics are filtered through television and radio. Elections are more like contests between rival management teams." All of this is bolted rather unhappily onto Labor's old industrial age machinery of decision making, and the historic culture of the branches. Some of those branches are strong. In Sydney's inner west, where I live, they have been an evolving part of the neighbourhood for a century. Party branches have not exactly spread outwards evenly as the city has layered ring after ring of suburbs around itself. There is a dedicated and intelligent membership of the party, but the resources Labor devotes to its education are minimal. The only consolation is that this ossification of the branch structure is not unique to Labor, but is shared by all of the major parties. One thing that does mark out the Labor Party as a unique culture is its longevity. It survived longer than any of the other major political cultures. It survived far worse times than the defeat of 1996 � I've only presented a few fables from the second half century of Labor's saga. That history should provide some confidence, and also some lessons and morals for a reinvented Labor's second century. Labor made the transition from an agrarian to an industrial labour movement party. The, as yet, unacknowledged challenge is to make it also the party of those who work with information, without forgetting those left behind in cyberspace, the information proletariat. If Labor is a culture then it is flanked on one side by the problem of celebrity and on the other by the problem of cyberspace. By celebrity, I mean the need to create an image for the vectors of the media, through which the public reads proposals for what it could desire. By cyberspace, I mean the need to learn empirically from the great wealth of information available and create the peculiar kind of specialised knowledge that is the guile of the political generalist. For while Barry Jones is right in complaining of the capture of power by well-educated specialists dedicated to discrete kinds of information. Labor politics is also a kind of education in a kind of specialised knowledge � specialising in putting different kinds of speciality together. One thing that Labor may have to integrate is a more forward-looking knowledge about the media, and not just the current affairs media that focuses on politics, but also the wider cultural significance of the media. If the basic idea of the previous chapter is even partly right, then it is increasingly from the media that people get the raw material out of which to shape their values and sensibilities. If the media is edging out the family as a locus of identity and self-awareness, then it must surely be overtaking less pervasive institutions such as the political party.
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Interview: Jennie George - Eyeing 2000 The ACTU President looks to the future and erects a few new signposts for her last 12 months in office and beyond. Unions: Trade Unions Thinking Globally How do you put people first in a global economy? That's the question for an international trade union conference in Sydney this week. History: The Pioneers: Trade Unions Before 1850 Labour historian Greg Patmore looks at the early days of unions in Australia Review: Opening Spaces For a New Labor A new book by Sydney academic McKenzie Wark looks at how Labor must adapt to the popular culture. Campaign Diary: On The Bus - A Tale Of Two Campaigns As the State election campaign moves into full swing, Workers Online looks at how the management of the media by the two main parties is reflecting their strategies.
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