HEARTS STARVE AS WELL AS BODIES

TOM O'LINCOLN ON CLIVE HAMILTON'S CRITIQUE OF WESTERN SOCIETY.

IN JUNE 2007 the Australian published a series of bizarre polemics against what it called the “psychotic Left”. Though the newspaper mentioned David Marr and Robert Manne and railed against “rebels without a cause still trapped in a dialectical Marxist maze”, it exhibited an overriding preoccupation with economist Clive Hamilton. Hamilton himself linked the attack to his analysis of bias in the Australian’s columns, but his general ability to put radical ideas on the public agenda surely also made him a target.

    “He’s an economist bucking against a material world,” wrote Adele Horin elsewhere. “No wonder Clive Hamilton causes a stir.”
    Hamilton is perhaps the only prominent political writer in Australia today arguing that there’s something fundamentally wrong with society as a whole. More than that, he dares to speak of liberation:

Is the prevailing system with a few of the rough edges knocked off all we can hope for? For me it’s not enough. I don’t believe such a society could provide the conditions for citizens to lead contented and fulfilling lives.

    Hamilton originally studied political economy under Left academics Ted Wheelwright and Frank Stilwell at Sydney University. His PhD thesis on Korean industrialisation established an expertise in economics which he applied to environmental issues, including during a stint as an adviser to the Indonesian government. While he had a successful career in the public service and the academy, he was dissatisfied with both. He first gained a reputation as a public intellectual by popularising the Genuine Progress Indicator, a socially aware alternative to GDP which has become influential in environmental circles.
    Concerned by the power of conservative think-tanks during the struggle between Indigenous people and miners over Coronation Hill, Hamilton created the Australia Institute in 1994. He developed a critique of the ‘Third Way’, expressed in a 2002 speech to ALP members and unionists that astonished delegates and infuriated Mark Latham.
    That address presented Hamilton’s signature themes: growth shouldn’t be an end in itself, obsessive consumption (‘affluenza’) not only fails to make us happy but actually makes us miserable, and a new paradigm is needed for Left politics. In a series of writings – Growth Fetish, Affluenza and his 2006 Quarterly Essay – he connects popular concern about environmental destruction to a deeper unease about how the world works.

A NEW PARADIGM?
Clive Hamilton identifies with the Left, yet insists its struggle for equality is misplaced:

For some social democrats … economic pressures to inequality must be countered by political activism designed to bring greater fairness to the system. For others, injustice is located in the domain of culture … Whether inequality is conceived in terms of distribution of resources or treatment of individuals and groups, it is the struggle against injustice that defines and gives enduring relevance to social democracy.
Against this, I maintain that the defining problem of modern industrial society is not injustice but alienation, and that the central task of progressive politics today is to achieve not equality, but liberation.

    Contrary to what some suggest, Hamilton neither thinks injustice no longer matters, nor denies that poverty and inequality persist.8 Deprivation is terrible, he says, but in an affluent society it only affects a minority, so it shouldn’t form the core of Left politics. The main game is elsewhere:

Never before has consumption activity so dominated daily life; never before has material acquisition as the path to happiness been so widely accepted; never before has the broad mass of people been able to aspire to a degree of luxury; never before have the values of the market penetrated so deeply into areas of social and private life; and never before has the culture been so interpenetrated with messages of marketing.

    For Hamilton, the traditional project of the Left is out of date. It should abandon its focus on production, and develop a politics critiquing consumption and alienation – and therefore growth. Growth Fetish contends that economic growth, once important for reducing poverty, loses its rationale when most live in affluence.
    Capitalism, Hamilton argues, has created vast riches and thereby opened up the possibility of human liberation – but it wastes these resources on junk. An acceptance of the capitalist ‘growth fetish’ divides the Left from environmentalists (since growth comes at the expense of the planet) and reconciles it with business: a disaster because “a social democracy that does not strike fear in the boardrooms is no social democracy at all”.
    Hamilton’s texts offer an eloquent – even heart-rending – account of the damage caused by superficial abundance: wasted money, wasted time, obesity epidemics, emotional emptiness, depression.
    In working through the specifics, however, readers may feel a low-level yet persistent frustration. This is sometimes because Hamilton sounds arrogant, for example, when he ridicules people’s mortgage stress. More often it is because he seems to achieve his prolific output at the cost of sloppiness and contradiction. Thus he blames a “religious urge” for the economic dynamic driving environmental destruction, while wondering why “in popular culture, religious convictions are disparaged”. He acknowledges that developing countries need growth, yet belittles their leaders on the basis that they have “absorbed … the belief that the first objective of any state should be economic growth”. He idealises “the security and integration of pre-modern societies” even though today’s western societies are almost certainly more secure. He makes some important points about our alienated consumer culture, but then takes them to undue extremes, claiming “consumption no longer occurs to meet human needs” – as if people buy potatoes only to look cool.
    Odder still is the contradiction between his declared hostility to the market economy and his otherwise useful work on climate change which embraces carbon trading: a quintessential market solution. He can see possible administrative glitches, but largely ignores the dangers to humanity of commodifying pollution and relying on the profit motive to protect the environment. Yet there’s already substantial evidence about these dangers. Consider, for example, the Bisasar Road area in South Africa, where local authorities failed to clean up a cancer-causing landfill despite persistent campaigning by residents. They chose not to remove the tip because World Bank-sponsored ‘Clean Development Mechanisms’ made it more profitable to leave it there and capture the methane it emitted as a carbon offset. The October 2004 Durban Conference, which brought together activists from around the world, warned that carbon trading’s logic is closely linked to the broader social dynamics threatening the globe:

History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labour, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history. Through this process … the Earth’s ability and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate.

Yet when it comes to environment, Hamilton is strangely pro-market all round. It may be true that “those who move first on environmental regulation can enjoy significant economic advantages”, but why should this be a recommendation for the leading critic of ‘affluenza’?
    Most fundamentally, Hamilton betrays a noticeable uncertainty about the origins of the growth drive and its baleful environmental consequences. At one stage he suggests they reflect a “conquering spirit” relative to nature, then he describes a “religious urge” savaging the earth. Next he attempts psychological speculations, followed by philosophical considerations about humanity’s ‘instrumental’ attitudes to nature. But these attitudes emerged long before modern consumerism – so what is the connection with affluenza?

TRAGEDIES OF THE MARKET
In places, Clive Hamilton identifies openly with anti-capitalism, labelling the market as “intensely impersonal” and condemning it for allowing “the full expression of instrumentalist desire”.
    Yet while he quotes Karl Marx on “the fetishism of commodities”, he never investigates Marx’s argument that in commodities the social character of work is objectified, that “the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour”. For Marx, capitalism commodifies the human ability to work, so that those who sell it enter an alienated production process. That process is driven by competition amongst firms, in which each capital must accumulate or die. In this account, the growth fetish (understood as a drive to accumulate) is inherent in the system.
    Thus a critique of market relations needs to include the labour market, which is in turn inseparable from the consumption of labour during production. Alienation pervades all of these; they are all part of the malaise.
    Hamilton apparently recognises or glimpses this point, but never seriously explores it.
    Instead, in an oscillating assessment, he argues that most workers enjoy “some degree of autonomy that makes them much less subject to the dictates of the boss”, even though he later laments that “workers are free-floating commodities in the labour market” and the “future of each worker in the firm counts for little”. Neither formulation captures the complex reality: market uncertainties make workers vulnerable to greater exploitation at work, while a supposed autonomy on the job becomes a way of making workers exploit themselves.
    Thus a review of Australian case studies about industrial ‘best practice’ found only a “small number of workplaces where teams with a significant degree of autonomy emerged”. For the most part, ‘best practice’ brought weakened union representation, work intensification, casualisation and stress. A similar analysis of a New Zealand ‘manufacturing excellence’ program indicated that worker autonomy was seen by the workers themselves as a myth, that key decisions came from the top, and employees cooperated because, as they put it, “unless we continue to improve performance our jobs won’t be secure”. Even a determinedly cheery consulting firm like Chiumento in the UK found that happiness “clearly declines the further away you are from the top of the organisation”.
    Given that Hamilton recognises ‘consumer sovereignty’ as a myth, it is a pity he accepts similar fables about the workplace, because employees’ vulnerability on the job helps explain the growth fetish. Working people’s acceptance of the need for GDP growth today partly reflects the painful experience of recessions from 1974 through 1992.
    Hamilton criticises an (alleged) Left belief that capitalism always leads to greater inequality, and he counters by pointing out that, since the Second World War, “the distribution of income has at times become more equal and at times less equal”. Yet closer examination shows this is no random fluctuation – the ups and downs of distribution reflect the relative strength of capital and labour. Inequality was at a low point between 1975 and 1979, following strike waves. It rose again after recessions and union defeats, and remained high through 2001. It is likely to have risen further since, with labour’s income share falling and the tax system increasingly regressive.
    Inequality in income is only part of the picture, because those on high incomes can also accumulate wealth, so that disparities in wealth are greater: a few years back “the top ten per cent of the population control[led] half or more of the country’s wealth-generating assets”. This too has probably worsened: Business Review Weekly notes that the wealth of the mega-rich rose by around 27 per cent in 2006–07, well ahead of society as a whole.
    The industrial retreats of the past quarter-century have done more than worsen inequality: the experience of mass unemployment between 1975 and 1996 (which, as Hamilton recognises, “eats away at one’s sense of self”) and the decline in union protection are factors creating a dependency on growth, for nothing else seems able to secure jobs.
    And alienation at work meshes with estrangement elsewhere. Unhappy employees resort to retail therapy, which embodies yet another side of the objectification inherent in commodities: consumers seldom know who has created what they buy. The goods and their prices take on a life of their own. The world economy is in one sense a great cooperative effort, yet, within it, each actor is tragically alone.

WHAT TO DO?
Given the breadth of Clive Hamilton’s analysis, he might be expected to offer ambitious plans for liberation. Yet his proposals are never systematic, ranging from individual actions (ethical investment) to mental adjustments (consuming more ‘consciously’ or staging a “psychological withdrawal from the market economy”) to steps governments could take (such as limiting advertising).
    How and why will any of these things happen?
    In general, Hamilton pins his hopes on the social trend called downshifting, where people make “a conscious decision to accept a lower income and a lower level of consumption in order to pursue other life goals”. Yet he acknowledges that many people only downshift against their will. Some are “real estate refugees”, pushed out of cities by rising house prices. Many are women, perhaps unable to sustain the superwoman role, for whom abandoning a career may represent defeat. Moreover, downshifting doesn’t necessarily free people from a desire for money: few downshifters are motivated primarily by post-materialist values and some “find the loss of income very hard”.
    Furthermore, despite talk of a “strategy [called] political downshifting”, the few pages Hamilton devotes to this in Growth Fetish scarcely constitute a course of action – in fact, it often seems that the strategy amounts to little more than waiting for spontaneous sea-changing to prevail.
    Much of Hamilton’s strategic thinking is strangely passive. “Whereas Marxism called for the power of capital to be destroyed”, Hamilton argues, “[my philosophy] calls for it to be ignored.” Growth Fetish offers as role model a person who surrenders to unemployment, settling for unpaid volunteer work – with no recognition that such a choice might actually help governments privatise and cut welfare. The book’s final passage celebrates the collapse of apartheid while ignoring the mass struggle that actually ended the racist system.
    In his Quarterly Essay, Hamilton argues for a more progressive Labor Party but provides no inkling of how, in the context of its current Rightward shift, this might be achieved. He disputes the Left critique of the family, arguing for something called a “democratic household”, but gives no indication how this will be achieved without a wider democratisation of society.
    Passivity doesn’t have to flow from Hamilton’s analysis, however. Again he contradicts himself, calling elsewhere for government to legislate a thirty-five hour week, and insisting that citizens can best provide services collectively via democratic government:

The act of collective provision is something that citizens do for one another. In contrast with the comatose sovereign consumer of neoliberalism,
democracy needs something to do. By ceding so much decision making to the private choices of consumers in markets, electors have been transformed into political automatons.

    This is one of Hamilton’s better passages – splendidly provocative and almost correct. But actually it is people who need something to do, and it is in the course of mobilising to do it that they cease to be ‘automatons’.
    This is the key to a radical democratisation, which could begin as a mobilisation in that dictatorship called the workplace. After all, work is not uniformly oppressive. It offers comfort too, bringing people together into a cooperative environment. Most workers have, at some point, escaped to their job from a difficult home environment. For some people, work is a source of status; most invest their lives with meaning by providing goods and services for others. This side of production underpins Chiumento’s half-truths about contented employees. Out of ten things making people happy at work, they found number one is “friendly, supportive colleagues”. Others include “doing something worthwhile” and “being part of a successful team”.
    Mobilisation is easier in the collective environment of the workplace which is why – contra Hamilton – even today’s weakened unions are a more significant social force than consumer groups or Greenpeace. Union membership has decreased but survey evidence suggests the decline comes less from rampant individualism than from employer attacks on unions and passivity by union leaderships in the face of those attacks. Workplace mobilisation plays an important part in rebuilding people’s confidence and self-respect since – also contra Hamilton – work still shapes identity more than consumption. Ask someone what they do and, in most cases, they will tell you their job.
    This is why it’s seriously mistaken to dismiss workers’ desire for better living standards. In times when workers have felt confident on the wages front, they have also engaged in struggles for control, demanding gender equality and displaying self-sacrificing solidarity on a mass scale. They have waged important environmental campaigns as well.
    It is incorrect to say “the central task of progressive politics today is to achieve not equality, but liberation”. The two are inseparable, because both inequality and alienation derive from social powerlessness – and so it is not just out of pity that any worthwhile liberation movement embraces those to whom equality is denied. Without the 1960s equal pay campaigns, for example, there would be no discussion of democratic households today.
    Hamilton is right to suggest “the fruits of growth have provided the means to seize emancipation”, but mistaken to confine the insight to the sphere of consumption. Underpinning the outpouring of goods is capitalism’s greatest, though deeply ambiguous, accomplishment: a transforming rise in productivity at the workplace.
    Hamilton thinks that “to discover true individuality it is necessary to stage a psychological withdrawal from the market economy” – but a psychological withdrawal would still leave the market economy standing. Even if sufficient people withdrew to bring the economy crashing down, what would replace it? An alternative economics is impossible without an alternative mode of production, and since (as Hamilton says elsewhere) “people naturally pursue a sense of community”, logic suggests that both should focus less on individuality and more on creating a more communal society.
    Understandably, the twin failures of Stalinism and western state enterprises have discredited collectivism for a time in most people’s eyes. The fatal flaws in both centred on their top-down, bureaucratic nature, which is why it is important to base a new radical vision on the democratisation of all of social life.
    Hamilton’s weaknesses should not prevent the Left learning from him. Neither, however, should it abandon its traditional values. The Left has never been just about cash and ‘stuff’; neither is it estranged from the environmental movement. The core objective of sensible Leftists has always been a society geared to every dimension of human need. As the old union song goes: “Hearts starve as well as bodies/Give us bread, but give us roses!”

Tom O’Lincoln has published a number of books on Australian Left and labour history.

© Tom O'Lincoln

For footnote references please see print magazine.

Overland 189 – summer 2007, pp.28–33.

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