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Can the Left find a new vision? David McKnight responds to Geoff Sharp.

Article Excerpt
Though battered and bruised, the Left in Australia has good reason to be optimistic, or at least feel vindicated. The invasion of Iraq, as predicted, has turned into a murderous folly. Instead of being the seedbed of democracy in the Middle East, Iraq has sprouted toxic forms of inter-Islamic terrorism. Global warming, which the Left warned about as early as two decades ago, is now accepted as a major threat confronting humanity. Governments and corporations now grudgingly plan an economy less reliant on fossil fuel. The triumphalism associated with neo-liberal economics has passed as many now perceive its cost: longer working hours, damage to civil society, rising inequality.

At the level of national politics, things look brighter. Many ordinary Australians are now realising the new industrial relations laws will mean lower wages, and insecure jobs. Labor looks like it might just win the next federal election, introducing an element of desperation into the Howard Government.

Yet paradoxically, none of this marks a revival of the Left, however you define this shorthand term. There is no sense in which the tide has turned.

The problem is that in spite of telling criticisms, and even defeat on particular issues, the Right still holds an intellectual ascendancy in the world of politics and ideas. Essentially this is based on the Right's intellectual revolution of the 1980s which revived a form of liberalism, particularly economic liberalism. At the level of everyday politics this philosophy of choice and individualism combines with a consumerism which is deeply appealing to many people. Analysing this was one of the reasons that I wrote Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture War, which Geoff Sharp discussed in the last issues of Arena.

One of my conclusions, as Geoff Sharp rightly notes, is that there is at the heart of neo-liberalism an ethical void. The market mechanism takes little account of values which cannot be quantified or priced. Market logic is...

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