Ordering Australian Capitalism: Property, Fetishism, Debt and Social Order

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No.11 Summer 2016

Ordering Australian capitalism: property,
fetishism, debt and social order
Written by Ben Hillier
Government must not form a counterpoint or a screenbetween society and

economic processes. It has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric and depth.
ISSUES Basically, it has to intervene on society so that competitive mechanisms can play a
regulatory role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this
No.1 Spring 2010 way its objective will become possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society
by the market.
No.2 Autumn 2011
Michel Foucault on the neoliberal project[2]
No.3 Spring 2011
This article is concerned with how social and economic stability are created and maintained
No.4 Winter 2012 in Australia, although some aspects draw on and are relevant to the situation in liberal
capitalist states internationally. It first looks at how private residential property creates a
No.5 Summer 2013
particular social structure, contributes to capital accumulation and enforces market
No.6 Winter 2013 dependency on the population. It then explores the way that property is only one aspect of a
broader market colonisation (viewed through the lens of commodity fetishism) of individual,
No.7 Summer 2014 society and the state; a process that shapes subjectivities and institutions to reflexively
mimic market operations. It looks at the role of financial debt in creating a disciplinary order
No.8 Winter 2014
that reinforces government of the self, understood as the way capital rules in liberal
No.9 Summer 2015 capitalist regimes, and outlines some political ramifications in the context of the collapse of
the workers movement.
No.10 Winter 2015
I try to navigate the tensions between the particularities of the neoliberal era and its political
No.11 Summer expressions, and the universal processes and problems immanent in free market
2016 capitalism. I suggest, following others, that while there have been significant intensifications
of certain processes, there has been no great rupture with the past. I also comment on
No.12 Winter 2016 some of the instabilities in Australia as the debt-fuelled quarter-century economic boom
approaches its limits.[3]
Property and market dependency

What the Australian cherishes most is a home of his own, a garden where he can
potter and a motorcar [A]s soon as he can buy a househe moves to the
suburbs A person who owns a house, a garden, a car and has a fair job is rarely an
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extremist or revolutionary.
1951 Australian government publication[4]
Private residential property is one of the most important institutions of Australian capitalism.
It geographically atomises the working class and structurally underpins the family. It is a
means of discipline and exploitation through mortgage debt. It is a site of capital investment
and speculation, and an engine of economic growth. Our cities are among the most
suburbanised and sprawling in the world. The urban maps were largely constructed in the
late nineteenth century, as corridors formed around newly-established train lines pushing
out of the CBDs. Detached housing with gardens soon became the model form of home,[5]
although the majority of the working class remained centrally concentrated, often in slums.
More than 40 percent of households were occupied by owner-occupiers by the turn of the
century.[6] The distribution of private allotments of land had always been part of the colonial
project, with varying degrees of success.[7] In Western Australia, the colonial secretary in
1911 described homes as fortified castles for the working man a gesture toward the
social and economic stability that property was meant to provide.[8] Private provision of
housing for the labouring class was institutionalised by the Harvester judgement of 1907,
which included the price of shelter in the basic wage and underpinned the wage earners
welfare state for the next century, establishing that workers would provide housing for
themselves through the market.[9]
The second Great Depression, the consolidation of the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia and
the rise of communist parties in the West prompted certain reformers to consider more fully
the role of property in social engineering. In the US, Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled his plan for
Broadacre City in 1935, proposing all redistribution of land a minimum of one acre going
to the childless family and more to the larger family as the basis for the idyllic rural city
wherein individualitymust thrive. Unwholesome life would get no encouragement.[10]
William Levitt, a real estate developer known as the father of American suburbia, allegedly
said: No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to
do.[11] Joseph Lyons and, above all, Robert Menzies were the political pioneers in this part
of the world. Menzies forgotten people address to the middle classes in 1942 (from
opposition, after serving his first term as PM) spoke of homes material, homes human, and
homes spiritual. In Menzies view, ownership was the way to foster patriotism through
people gaining a stake in the country, to promote self-reliance by self-sacrifice, by
frugality and saving and to create a material base for anti-collectivist individualism in a
society strictly ordered by the state. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety, he
said; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of
society as a whole. [12]
Sub-division, suburban sprawl and relatively high rates of ownership facilitated by

government subsidies predated the Second World War. Under Menzies, the ideal of the
self-sufficient home as locus of family and nation was given reality as post-war
reconstruction took shape and the long boom took off. Housing shortage and fears of a
relapse into economic crisis prompted the establishment of the Commonwealth State
Housing Agreement (CSHA), which dispersed funding for the construction of housing stock,
initially rental properties only, primarily on large suburban estates. From the mid-1950s, the
main aim of the CSHA was to encourage home ownership via the provision of low interest
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loans to home builders and the sale of houses on highly concessional terms.[13] Some 30
percent of all Commonwealth funds were set aside to promote owner-occupation. Between
1945 and 1960 about 900,000 new dwellings were completed. Public housing was also sold
to tenants at this time: between 1956 and 1963, the NSW Housing Commission sold 80
percent of all houses that it built.[14] Australia built the highest home ownership rate in the
world growing from just over 50 percent of households in 1947 to 70 percent 14 years
later; it has hovered around that level ever since, dropping only slightly to about 67 percent
in recent times.[15]
There was a tussle between traditionalist and modernist architecture (the latter championed
by Robin Boyd), which reflected the contradiction between the conservative aspiration to
domesticity and more progressive-thinking experimentation. The modernists pushed
open-plan living, which broke down the compartmentalised inner spaces within the home
and gestured to new ways of organising domestic life. Yet they still took for granted
cohabitation and home as a site of the nuclear family, albeit one which embraced
innovation. Architecture and town planning were regarded as scientific disciplines based on
principles that were unchallengeable, write Tony Dingle and Seamus OHanlon. Houses
should be, in Le Corbusiers famous phrase, machines for living in [each would] look
like a laboratory.[16] The point is that the way the housing stock has been structured
created stability in particular ways, regardless of the architectural design. Fiona Allon writes:
[H]ome became a central organising index of identity at multiple levels This

metaphorics of home was consciously and deliberately employed to construct ideas
of individual autonomy and self-actualisation as well as dominant narratives of
citizenship, national identity and nation-building. By conflating the inner values of the
personal self with the imagined community of the national self, these links allowed a
particular conception of national belonging to occupy a place of profound emotional
legitimacy.[17]
There is no evidence to suggest that home ownership provided the basis for political
conservatism in the way that Menzies and other right wing politicians hoped. (If it had, the
industrial upsurge of the late 1960s and early 1970s would not have been possible,
occurring as it did at the peak of owner-occupation). Residential property nevertheless has
become a key social anchor. As an atomised unit of society, it reinforces the alienated
existence of capitalism, encourages the fragmentation of the working class and shapes
domestic life in a way that is almost impossible to avoid. The structure of housing stock is
designed to entrench cohabitation and provide a material base for the family. For a long
time it went hand in glove with marriage. An important aspect of establishing capitalism was
embedding free contract socially to aid its economic naturalisation. Marriage, as a legal
agreement regulating inheritance, mirrors and helps naturalise the contractual nature of
capitalist life, underpinning the family as an economic unit that provides the next generation
of workers from whom profit is extracted. It often is said to be the cornerstone of the
family. That has not been true in the West for decades. Property is much more important.
Plenty of people choose not to get hitched and this by and large is irrelevant to social
reproduction because an urban geography built for cohabitation has been firmly
established. Those who proudly affirm their independence from the constraints of married
life, who eschew the formal recognition granted by the state or the church, nevertheless find
a partner and bow to the contract of the estate agent or the financial institution, whose
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endorsement is more difficult to obtain. (Any two drunks can have their nuptials witnessed
and confirmed by an Elvis impersonator in Vegas; the bank will make a much more sober
and detailed assessment of your life before approving a mortgage.)
As Lyn Richards notes, a home is a family home. Whilst family life changes rapidly, there
seems amazingly little change in the ways people link home to private family life, and the
proper steps on the family ladder.[18] If anything, propertys place in the national psyche
has been strengthened as it has become naturalised, even if the associated utopias, such
as domestic bliss and suburban paradises, have not often materialised. Richards surveyed
the composition and aspirations of inhabitants of a new suburb in a capital city in the 1990s.
She noted typical attitudes toward ownership. I suppose its the Great Australian Dream;
we always expected to own a house or own property, so we just bought, one respondent
said. Its the done thing It just sort of came naturally. The obvious thing is to buy a house
and own it. Another similarly said, I dont know that I could give you a reason for wanting
to. I suppose its just like, as they say, the Great Australian Dream. Its just something you
do.[19]
This is not simply a ruling class conspiracy. Many factors influenced the increase in
ownership. After the Second World War there was an estimated 300,000 dwelling shortage.
A 1949 Gallup Poll found that one quarter of metropolitan houses contained an extra family
or individual who would have moved out if alternative accommodation had been
available.[20] So people often had to fend for themselves (about one third of all houses
constructed in the 1950s were owner built).[21] Rent controls resulted in landlords selling
stock to make money in other ways. Full employment, cheap and expanding finance, cheap
and plentiful land, and, often, the desire to escape the slums, combined to make ownership
attractive and achievable for many workers. We might, then, view owner-occupation as a
rational choice in these circumstances. The point is that peoples choices were radically
constrained, and their preferences constructed by the age. The government was deliberate
in how it subsidised accommodation, and privileged private ownership above all other
options. The result, whether owning or renting, was market dependency. More than 90
percent of all households were dependent by 1970.[22]
Another way that the home provided stability was through property emerging as a
privileged or protected circuit of capital. Housing production, Mike Berry writes, was
cast as one element of a broad program of post-war reconstruction in which the new
Keynesian economic policy tools were to be directed towards managing the aggregate level
of economic activity in the economy as a whole.[23] About 80 percent of all building activity
in the first seven years after the war was housing construction.[24] The construction
industry had economic multipliers wholesale and retail trade and manufacturing in
particular as houses were fitted out with whitegoods, carpeting, furniture, etc. Lawns
required mowers and hoses. Manuel Castells noted that the family home was the perfect
design for maximising consumption, which was individualised and more fully commodified
as mass production reduced costs and diminished peoples need to maintain the
non-commodity domestic economy (such as vegetable gardens and chook runs).[25] The
finance, insurance and real estate industry expanded. So did advertising. A mass of
infrastructure to support the suburban expansion was established water, sewerage and
electricity although it didnt reach all areas.
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The inner suburbs remained overcrowded, primarily with newly-arrived migrants; there was
little space for the lower rungs of the working class in the suburban dreaming. While
ownership mostly remains out of reach for the bottom 40 percent of households (and
increasingly so), the determined structure of domestic life, the growing divide between the
private realm of the home and the social world of work, market dependency and the
commodification of the private sphere are a reality for all.
Commodity fetishism and governmentality

[I]n commodity-capitalist society separate individuals are related directly to each
otheras owners of determined things, as social representatives of different factors
of production. The capitalist is merely capital personified. The landlord appears as
the personification of one of the most essential conditions of production, land. This
personificationindicates a very real phenomenon: the dependence of production
relations among people on the social form of things (factors of production) which
belong to them, and which are personified by them.
Isaak Rubin[26]
The immanent logic of the commodity form is self-expansion. In late capitalism, the market
penetrates deep into our personal lives; a process which establishes a fractured world of
self-managed, self-interested social units. Michel Foucault, in one of his 1979 Collge de
France lectures on the writings of Alexander Rstow (the German economist who in the
1930s coined the term neoliberalism), commented on the latters goal of
constructing a social fabric in which precisely the basic units would have the form of
the enterprise, for what is private property if not an enterprise? What is a house if not
an enterprise? In other words, what is involved is the generalization of forms of
enterprise by diffusing and multiplying them as much as possible It is a matter of
making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the
formative power of society.[27]
This is a lasting vision. It is not simply that people are geographically organised and
atomised in housing units that can be accessed only through the market: home as
enterprise expresses market rationality through itself and its occupants. As an illustration,
take the twenty-first century explosion and mass following of home improvement-style
shows such as The Block, DIY Rescue, Backyard Blitz, Changing Rooms, Better Homes
and Gardens, Location Location, Auction Squad, Hot Auctions, Grand Designs Australia,
House Rules, Hot Property, Renovation Rescue, The Living Room and Reno Rumble. The
Block producers select couples (naturally) to transform dilapidated units into profitable
investments. These shows often highlight the difficulties many people face in gaining a
home, and the fact that financial security is fundamentally linked to property ownership
both as roof over the head and as capital gains. Yet the notion of improvement that
pervades the programs also has an internalised character. Its the emotional investment so
obviously outlaid by the couples that can be seen in the frequent tantrums, tears and tales
of the hardships of life that will be overcome with a stake in the market. Participants are not
simply improving the property. They believe that they are improving themselves by
improving their dwelling; proving their worth to society by adding to the economic value of a
home a sign of their entrepreneurship, efficiency and therefore value as human beings.
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The logic of self-expansion is intimately played out as Menzies homes human and homes
spiritual find expression through the augmentation of exchange value. This is the extreme
edge of commodity fetishism, the process by which the relationship between producers
takes on the character of a thing, and through which the objects of production come to
dominate their creators not only in the producers minds, but in reality as the market
dominates humanity. Residential property, at least in Australia due to the long established
commodification of housing, is one of the most important institutions through which this
fetishism operates because it is the site of social reproduction; a place of intimacy,
consumption and recuperation that people understandably want to be more than simply
habitable, but appealing.
A number of writers, including historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski, and political
theorists Wendy Brown and Maurizio Lazzarato, have drawn on the concept of
governmentality, derived via Foucaults exposition of the rationality of neoliberalism, to
explain the peculiar ways in which the market integrates human subjects.[28] Lazzarato, for
example, writes:
To governdoes not mean subjugating, commanding, managing, ordering,

normalising. Neither physical force nor a set of prohibitions, nor even a body of
norms or behaviours, governmentality incites the individual to establish an
environment that forces him, through a series of flexible, adaptable rules, to react in
one way instead of another.[29]
Governmentality is critiqued in different ways by those who use the concept. For the
purposes here, it is understood as the multiple ways that capital rules via, for want of better
words, infiltration or colonisation, which is another way of thinking about commodity
fetishism. To the extent that the latter concept has explanatory power in terms of a
governing rationality, I think it best understood as rule in the absence of great social and
economic crisis. The more the market becomes embedded in social life the more
internalised its relations become the more social stability is obtained via the automatic
reflexes of the subjects being ruled, rather than by more obvious means of coercion (such
as heavy policing, which still is deployed against groups that havent assimilated).
Private residential property clearly is not a unique expression of this process; market
rationality is disseminated throughout all areas of life. A peculiar feature of late capitalism is
the way a human being is its own object of production human capital becoming, in the
words of Mirowski, an arbitrary bundle of investments, skill sets, temporary alliances
(family, sex, race), and fungible body parts.[30] Workers are dominated by their own
attributes, which become defining characteristics of existence, thereby seemingly burying
humanity beneath curriculum vitae. The growth and evolution of education and training
partly illustrates this. Originally, higher education was opened to the working class because
of capitalisms increasing need for an educated and skilled labour force. Increasingly,
however, as demand increases and more certificates are required to find work, higher
education is degraded, stripped of its critical components, and students are churned out as
highly-indebted products. Wendy Brown writes:
[S]ubjectsare configured by the market metrics of our time as self-investing human

capital Human capital is constrained to self-invest in ways that contribute to its
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appreciation or at least prevent its depreciationknowledge, thought, and training

are valued and desired almost exclusively for their contribution to capital
enhancement.[31]
Each line on a CV is the systems measure of our worth not because the courses and
training are necessarily useful and have increased a prospective employees skills (though
of course many do), but because they are a marker of the entrepreneurial spirit of the
candidate: someone who is prepared to self-invest.
This process shifts the ground from older notions of the self as inner-essence or collective
identity, and unified, creating ever greater tension between what is inwardly experienced
and outwardly presented as true identity. All down to the most intimate aspects of human
existence are scrutinised over whether they can contribute to capital accumulation, human
or otherwise. The market and competition have become so deeply embedded in social life,
so seemingly natural, that it is difficult to disentangle humanity from commodities, human
nature from corporate operations. This underpins the callous behaviour that so often is on
display between one person and another even when money is not at stake the calculus of
seeing others only as things is pervasive because thats how everyone is treated in the
system. Because it is implicit in capitalist society that what is unmarketable is worthless, a
whole generation judges its worth by its capacity to match the artificial forms of fashion
models or the carefully cultivated images or skill sets of superstar athletes and singers. Yet
in the world of Photoshop and the new eugenics of the next top model or biggest loser,
everyone is found wanting. An example of the painful confidence trick human capital
represents is captured every other night on reality TV. Every third person breaks down in
the humiliation of finding out that what they privately love and enjoy so much that intimate
expression of the self, as many confide in the judges is considered a public horror due to
a perceived inability to move units. The impact of transforming human existence and
intimacy, as George Monbiot notes, has resulted in
a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders,

depression and personality disorders. Of the personality disorders, the most common
are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other
people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors the only roles for
society that market fundamentalism admits Those who end up at the bottom of the
pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just
as we congratulate ourselves for our success, we blame ourselves for our failure,
even if we have little to do with it.[32]
Even here, there is no escaping the logic of atomisation. Profound social alienation is
medicalised, attended through a psychological lens and thereby individualised. The
collapse of the labour movement means that many see no alternative to retreating into their
inner self. Remedial therapy is the order of the day. There is no escaping the inadequacies
which are the source of anguish yet, perversely, seem to offer potential salvation: where
imperfection exists, there is always a service or product available to improve it. Our smiles,
our skin tone, our body shapes, our insecurities everything can be improved to make it
exploitable to some commercial end: self-help, dieting, cosmetics, therapies, supplements
flourish as the new forms of individual government.[33] And the more inadequate people
feel, the more distant perfection seems, the more extreme the products become the total
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manipulation or effacement of bodies through extreme dietary and exercise regimes or

plastic surgery. This work on the self expresses the dynamic of commodity fetishism, but
here, the human, as object of manipulation, does not augment its economic value. Rather,
its perceived (and in a sense real) social worth is enhanced.
Debt, state and social control

Credit appears to run counter to the market and the capital-labour relation. It makes it
seem that social relations between people are no longer inversed in a social
relationship between things Commodity fetishism (the alien, material force) no
longer seems operative since man is directly confronted by his fellow man by giving
him trust With credit, Marx tells us, alienation is complete, since it is the ethical
work constitutive of the self and the community that is exploited. Trust, the condition
for action, becomes universal distrust, turning into a demand for security. The
circulation of private debtpresupposes, in the guise of another persons recognition,
a preliminary distrust, since the other person is a rival, a competitor and/or a debtor.
Maurizio Lazzarato[34]
The social power of the market is intensified through the accumulation of debt, which more
fully ties people to the exploitation of the workplace, restricts their freedom and transfers
wealth from labour to capital.[35] Ironically, while homeownership (and, increasingly,
education) is the key to most peoples financial security, the only way to enter is to become
burdened for life: debt has become the prime adjunct to property, through which the social
structuring mechanism is transformed into a financial chokehold. Lazzaratos work in this
area is valuable. The debtor is free, he writes, but his actions, his behaviour, are
confined to the limits defined by the debt he has entered into You are free insofar as you
assume the way of life (consumption, work, public spending, taxes, etc.) compatible with
reimbursement.[36] The debtor not only must strive for gainful and stable employment for
decades to come, but is at the mercy of fluctuating interest rates, small movements in
which, when debts are substantial, can add significantly to monthly repayments. Lazzarato
draws on Marxs 1844 Comments on James Mill, which is worth quoting from at length:
In the credit system, of which banking is the perfect expressionthe life of the poor
man and his talents and activity serve the rich man as a guarantee of the repayment
of the money lent. That means, therefore, that all the social virtues of the poor man,
the content of his vital activity, his existence itself, represent for the rich man the
reimbursement of his capital with the customary interest One ought to consider
how vile it is to estimate the value of a man in money, as happens in the credit
relationship
Credit is the economic judgment on the morality of a man. In credit, the man himself,
instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange, not however as a
man, but as the mode of existence of capital and interest. The medium of exchange,
therefore, has certainly returned out of its material form and been put back in man,
but only because the man himself has been put outside himself and has himself
assumed a material form.
Within the credit relationship, it is not the case that money is transcended in man, but
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that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated in him. Human
individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the
material in which money exists. Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal
existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and importance, which constitutes the
material, corporeal form of the spirit of money. Credit no longer resolves the value of
money into money but into human flesh and the human heart.[37]
This is an emphatic rendering of credit: consciousness shaper, ethically normative, and

leveller that seems to dissolve class divisions under its own social power; an affirmation of
Solomons quip that all things obey money.[38] Marxs recognition that debt becomes an
internalised social power conveys in a particular way the ever increasing domination of
capital. It is also testament to the fact that we are not looking at a qualitatively new
phenomenon. We are apt to think of the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s and early 1980s
as a specific and in many ways pragmatic response to the breakdown of Keynesianism in
the face of stagflation and depressed profitability in an increasingly globalised economy. On
one level, that is true, particularly if our gaze is focused on policy settings. Yet the rationality
that is a feature of this era is not so much a definitive break but an intensification of the
markets colonisation of the self particularly in Western societies where the enforcement
of neoliberal policy did not require dictatorship.
It can be objected that access to credit is a source, or reflection, of existing economic

power. This is true and can readily be seen in the distribution of household debt. For
example, 70 percent of mortgage debt and 80 percent of investment property debt in
Australia is held by the richest 40 percent of households (judged by income), while the
bottom 40 percent of households hold only 10 and 8 percent respectively.[39] These figures
highlight that the project of transforming each person into a stakeholder butts up against
capitalist reality. As Redgums Critique in G notes, Theres a bastard called the economy
and it keeps poor people poor.
It is not enough, however, to focus simply on individual or household debt. The domination
of finance and the reconfiguration of the state conspire to imbue debt with a social character
through the reconfiguration of the state into a creditor-type institution in its relation to
society, which imposes discipline arguably in a more coercive manner than private finance,
particularly over those pushed out of the labour force. Financial deregulation began in the
early 1970s. At the time, significant controls were in place to manage monetary policy, limit
bank lending, allocate credit to priority areas of the economy, direct funds to government
and maintain a stable exchange rate. The shift to market-oriented means of regulation
brought with it a certain path dependency. Ric Battellino, former deputy governor of the
RBA, noted in a 2007 speech that the removal of interest rate controls
ended up having far-reaching consequences. It led to a sequence of changes, each

one begetting the next, until 13 years later virtually all controls on banks had been
removed, foreign banks had been allowed to enter the market and the exchange rate
had been floated Our experience was that the removal of one set of controls often
put pressure on other controls. This meant that the reform process, once it had
begun, developed its own momentum.[40]
Since that time, the finance industry, trading debt and shifting value, has grown dramatically.
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Financial system assets as a proportion of GDP rose from about 100 percent in 1985 to 150
percent by the early 1990s and peaked at more than 350 percent around 2007.[41] There
was money to be made, but this wasnt simply about immediate profits. Peter Jonson,
former chair of the Life, Investment & Superannuation Association of Australia, noted in a
1996 speech that deregulation meant
[d]riving a financial wedge into an economy with endemic budget deficits and a highly
regulated labour market The reformers pushed on expecting the financial wedge
to discipline both governments and Australias entrenched industrial relations club
[F]inancial deregulation has linked us closely to international financial markets, and
participants in these markets provide unforgiving dispassionate evaluation of
domestic economic policy thus keeping the policy makers honest.[42]
The process was also internally driven, as governments adjusted their programs to suit the
needs of capital accumulation in an increasingly internationalised economy. Privatisations
were one part of a broader shift to bringing down tariff walls and capital controls and
opening up greater sections of the economy to competition and human life to its effects.
Powers were transferred from democratically accountable (in whatever limited way)
governments into the hands of unelected bureaucrats, whose mandates were narrowly set
by neoliberal managerial and economic prerogatives. Gabrielle Meagher and Susan
Goodwin write of this general reconfiguration of the state:
[R]ationalities and practices from the private sector are brought into the internal
operation of public sector organisations themselves. Often called the new public
management, these processes have sought to introduce market discipline into how
public sector organisations run themselves, and into their modes of coordinating their
relationships with the external organisations they increasingly fund and regulate to
provide services [Marketisation] is a process through which the institutional logic of
the market is crowding out the associational logic within (and carried by) non-profit
organisations and the bureaucratic and democratic logics within (and carried by) the
state.[43]
All major areas of state provision become subsumed: health, aged care, education,
retirement, welfare and community services.[44] Other institutions have emerged in the last
decade and a half, such as the Productivity Commission and the Parliamentary Budget
Office, which advise governments on how best to apply neoliberal calculus. On top of this is
the colonisation of the public service by adherents of neoclassical economics.[45] As
market logic penetrates the operation of the state, the latter acts to create social debt. The
power of international markets and the states increasing reliance on them for validation and
funding, combined with its own evolution, act to devolve responsibility for social welfare
down to the home, family and individual, recasting them in the process. Lazzarato writes:
[T]he welfare state not only intervenes in the biology of the population (birth, death,
illness, risks, etc.), it requires ethico-political work on the self, an individualisation
involving a mix of responsibility, guilt, hypocrisy and distrust. When social rights
(unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, healthcare, etc.) are transformed into
social debt and private debt, and beneficiaries into debtors whose repayment means
adopting prescribed behaviour, subjective relations between creditor institutions,
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which allocate rights, and debtors, who benefit from assistance or services, begin to
function in a radically different way, just as Marx foresaw In order for the power of
debt over the subjectivity of the welfare user to have its effect, the logic of individual
and collective rights must be replaced by a logic of credit (investments of human
capital)
Each individual is a particular case which must be studied carefully, because, as with
a loan application, it is the debtors future plans, his style of life, his solvency that
guarantees reimbursement of the social debt he owes. As with bank credit, rights are
granted on the basis of a personal application, following review, after information on
the individuals life, behaviour, and modes of existence has been obtained.[46]
Lazzarato for a period was a researcher and activist with the Coordination of Intermittent
and Precarious Workers of le-de-France. One welfare recipient related concretely how
being a client impacts even those who are resistant:
The skills assessments, for example, they ask you to do all the time and whatever
you might think its supposed to be about. There is always a part of it that intrudes on
your personal lifea kind of assessment of your life where you start to ask yourself
questions, you think about yourself, like a kind of invasion of privacy couched in really
appalling language, but that still makes you think.[47]
The new welfare management scheme introduced by the Australian government is

extending such intrusion into the lives of welfare recipients by introducing data mining
technology to monitor spending and instituting controls over entitlements. The Healthy
Welfare Card will, according to the government, render the cash system that preceded it an
irresponsible social experiment. The new social experiment being undertaken, proposes
a debit card through a responsible financial institution of choice, using the

MasterCard or Visa system, [which] would be issued to all people receiving welfare
payments. This would include these Australians in the mainstream financial world of
everyday life. The card would confine welfare and intended spending to essential
goods and services It would ensure that people enjoy inclusion in the mainstream
financial system and it would assist individual responsibility.[48]
Increasing marketisation does not mean the withdrawal of the state that is a misdiagnosis.
Tom Bramble, for example, in a previous article in this journal, was wrong when he wrote
that neoliberal theorists fantasise about the state retreating.[49] The neoliberal state does
not recoil; it is reconfigured under the rule of the economy. The German neoliberal pioneers
of the 1930s and 1940s espoused ordoliberalism (ordered liberalism), recognising that the
market is not a natural and spontaneously organised institution, but a fragile human
construction in need of protection. It is an objective, not a given. So we have economic
liberalism that is not laissez-faire, but legally ordered by an interventionist state. As Franz
Bhm put it in 1937: The principal requirement of any economic system worthy of the name
is that political direction becomes mistress of the economy in its totality as in its parts; the
economic policy of the state must master the whole of economic development both
intellectually and materially.[50]
The foregoing developments and processes undermine democracy by substituting
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economic and managerial prerogatives for political deliberation. We are familiar with the
phenomenon of corporate influence shaping government policy, illustrated, for example, by
the comments of a former policy adviser to the Victorian Liberal government: It is standard
practice that [government] staff are instructed to provide a list of the corporations that have
been consulted in the preparation of a policy brief. Ministers talk about new proposals
needing to have weight behind them. Weight here is just a euphemism for corporate
approval. Bring a proposal that has not been pre-approved by the business world to the
minister, and it will not get looked at.[51]
The broader issue, however, is the transformation of democracy. The late political scientist
Peter Mair labelled the process a hollowing out: a decline in engagement in official politics;
a decline in party identification and affiliation; declining voter turnout and rising electoral
volatility; policy convergence of the parties historically associated with the labour movement
with the conservative parties of the rich; and how governments have either ceded power to
or had their mandates undermined by unelected capitalist institutions such as the World
Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, etc. Just
as the population retreats into personal life, political parties and their leaders retreat into the
state for legitimation, financing and stability.[52] As they do so, Brown notes,
democracy becomes purely procedural and is detached from the powers that would
give it substance and meaning as a form of rule [It] becomes divested of politics,
defined either as the handling of power or as struggle over common fundamentals or
goals. Thus democracy reformulated by governance means that participants are
integrated into the process of benchmarking, consensus building, policy making, and
implementation.[53]
Political incorporation
Dont talk to me about politics, Im only interested in style.
James Joyce[54]
Perhaps the greatest triumph of the liberal regimes of late capitalism has been to infect
opposition to themselves with their own logic(s) anti-democratic, anti-political and
mirroring market operations. The embedding of market rationality in the social world, the
emptying of political content from the parliamentary sphere and its replacement with
managerial governance, the increased atomisation of society and the collapse of the labour
movement have created the conditions for expressions of resistance that are hyper-
personalised and, in the words of Wendy Brown, full of ranting and posturing, emptied of
intellectual seriousness.[55] These processes offer stability in a limited but purposive way,
by channelling resistance into strategic dead ends. Frequently, opposition appears as a
reflexive rendering of neoliberal economic rationality, substituting the arbitrary bundle of
investments as a measure of social worth with its particular bundle of oppressions (or
identities) as a measure of political legitimacy and tending to reflect the social alienation
and indifference (or outright hostility) to politics that neoliberalism has fostered:
Above all, governance reconceives the political as a field of management or

administration As problem solving replaces deliberation about social conditions and
possible political futures, as consensus replaces contestation among diverse
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perspectives, political life is emptied of what theorists such as Machiavelli took to be

its heart and the index of its health: robust expressions of different political positions
and desires. For Machiavelli, such expressions were the very essence of political
liberty and also prevented the differences and the energies inherent in the political
body from becoming toxic.[56]
Those involved in progressive activism will recognise immediately the effects politics
absorbed with process, devoid of any contest of ideas and mimicking the contentless
proceduralism of technocratic governance, through which everyone is conceived as a
stakeholder and conflict avoidance is paramount. I recall the tail end of the short-lived
radicalisation of the anti-capitalist mood of the early 2000s. A significant section of the
activists were hostile to applauding speakers (both in meetings and on platforms) because it
was deemed intimidating for those who didnt get clapped. Instead, there was the
phenomenon of clicking fingers a far less offensive gesture of approval. This was not the
end of it. Next was jazz hands as a sign of agreement. What should have been serious
political deliberation degenerated into what must have appeared to an outside observer as
some sort of chorus rehearsal for a Broadway musical. Or take the Occupy movement as it
manifested in Australia. In Melbourne, there was an infatuation with consensus, which led to
hours-long group meetings that went nowhere justified by appeals to real democracy,
but in effect an exclusionary mechanism guaranteeing that those with the time to spare
could empty the majority of participants from the theatre of debate. It also guaranteed that
when the left introduced arguments for a specific course of action, they could be rendered
inconsequential through a right wing minority paralysing proceedings. This anti-political
authoritarianism reportedly found its ultimate expression in Spain and Greece, where left
groups and even unions were banned from bringing their banners or distributing their
publications in some of the square occupations during the Indignados and Movement of the
Squares. Everyone was to be the depoliticised individual, in a move that channelled Milton
Friedmans dictum that, in a truly liberal society, [y]ou can have a high degree of social
freedom, and a high degree of economic freedom, without any political freedom.[57]
Today, it seems as though any serious debate threatens to challenge the framework of
administrative order that has been constructed by those claiming the greatest stake in a
campaigns outcome. The debilitating results are tragic, as the so-called maturity of calm,
process-led meetings turn into their opposite everyone wounded by someone elses
opinion. This is the poison of anti-politics. Louise OShea writes, This trend is ubiquitous at
Australian universities. For example, it is now standard practice at the National Union of
Students annual Queer Collaborations conference for participants to be required to sign an
undertaking that they will not argue with other participants at the conference, because such
behaviour might cause offence or make others feel unsafe.[58]
The situation often is a swamp full of moralistic insincerity that is obsessed with identity and
spends its time calling out the imperfect attitudes of working people as a precondition for
political collaboration or solidarity. US campuses seem to be where these processes have
reached their extreme. Activist and blogger Fredrik deBoer noted with frustration concrete
examples of how these toxic politics can play out:
I have seena 19-year-old white woman smart, well-meaning, passionate literally

run crying from a classroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using the
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word disabled. Not repeatedly. Not with malice. Not because of privilege. She used
the word once and was excoriated for it. She never came back
I have seena 20-year-old black man, a track athlete who tried to fit organising
meetings around classes and his ridiculous practice schedule (for which he received
a scholarship worth a quarter of tuition), be told not to return to those meetings
because he said he thought there were [sic] such a thing as innate gender
differences. He wasnt a homophobe, or transphobic, or a misogynist. It turns out that
20 year olds from rural South Carolina arent born with an innate understanding of the
intersectionality playbook. But those were the terms deployed against him, those and
worse. So that was it; he was gone.
I have seena 33-year-old Hispanic man, an Iraq war veteran who had served three
tours and had become an outspoken critic of our presence there, be lectured about
patriarchy by an affluent 22-year-old white liberal arts college student, because he
had said that other vets have to man up and speak out about the war. Because
apparently we have to pretend that we dont know how metaphorical language works
or else were bad people. I watched his eyes glaze over as this woman with $300
shoes berated him.[59]
Alternatively there is the demobilised and disorganised be the change you want to see
liberal ethos the politics of self-help dressed up as social intervention. This is a
manifestation of powerlessness. In the absence of mass social struggle, it can seem more
meaningful to just address those things within our control, which are limited and local. Yet it
can also be interpreted as an economic reflex, the political expression of the classical
economists moral justification for greed: that when every individual pursues their own
self-interest, the greatest welfare will accrue to society as a whole. Worse is the reflexive
appeal of sections of the broad left to the authority of the very institutions that embody
capitalist power the police and university administrations, for example to shut down the
offending subjects.
We are apt to frame identity politics within the bounds of the destitution of organised
labour. But just as neoliberalism should not be viewed as a total rupture with capitalisms
past, so should identity formation and its politicisation be viewed with reference to the
universalism of the liberal regime, rather than with reference to our particular period. Wendy
Brown, in a stunning piece penned in the early 1990s, with great insight problematises
identity formation under the liberal state. She poses questions:
[W]hat are the logics of pain in subject formation within late modernity that might
contain or subvert [the aim of achieving emancipatory political recognition]? What are
the particular constituencies specific to our time, yet roughly generic for a diverse
spectrum of identities of identitys desire for recognition that seem as often to breed
a politics of recrimination and rancour, of culturally dispersed paralysis and suffering,
to disdain power rather than aspire to it, to disdain freedom rather than practice it?
[What are the] ways in which certain emancipatory aims of politicised identity are
subverted not only by the constraints of the political discourses in which its operations
transpire but by its own wounded attachments[?][60]
Her argument is that the naturalisation of capitalism combined with a liberal order that
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constructs a plurality of identities which remain oppressed under the lie of we the mirage
of unity under the liberal (capitalist) state results in an identity politicstethered to a
formulation of justice which, ironically, reinscribes a bourgeois ideal as its measure:
[T]he articulation of politicised identitiesrequire, rather than incidentally produce, a

limited identification through class. They necessarily rather than incidentally abjure a
critique of class power and class norms precisely because the injuries suffered by
these identities are measured by bourgeois norms of social acceptance, legal
protectionand social independence. The problem is that when not only economic
stratification but other injuries to body and psyche enacted by capitalism (alienation,
commodification, exploitation, displacement, disintegration of sustaining, albeit
contradictory, social forms such as families and neighbourhoods) are discursively
normalised and thus depoliticised, other markers of social difference may come to
bear an inordinate weight. Absent an articulation of capitalism in the political
discourse of identity, the marked identity bears all the weight of the sufferings
produced by capitalism in addition to that bound to the explicitly politicised
marking.[61]
These realities the particularly toxic nature of progressive politics in the twenty-first
century and the universal problem of politicised identity formation in liberal capitalist states
pose challenges for the left. Most social struggles today display the same fragmentation
as exists in the social world each struggle seemingly isolated and competing for public
attention. The world is experienced as multiple oppressing forces; grievances and
oppressions proliferate due to capitals atomising, dividing and compartmentalising powers,
which are nevertheless underpinned by a singular goal: capital accumulation. Marxisms
totalising theory in this context can be equated with authoritarianism by those who are blind
to the ways in which neoliberal economic totalitarianism has become deeply imbedded in
their own political outlooks and practices. The problem is not of Marxism, but is one that
Marxists must confront: the fact that unity in our society is deployed cynically, and whose
content is always assimilation to the capitalist order under or within the capitalist state.
The radical left can see that the problems with current political culture are linked to the
broader collapse of the labour movement, but our forces are too small and marginalised to
have an impact on the objective situation. Apart from localised campaigning, important but
insignificant in the scheme of things, our job is to react to developments and argue for an
alternative politics that fosters hostility to capitalist institutions and the ruling class, and
pushes toward working class unity. The task of theory/resistance is to understand, not
accommodate to, let alone reinforce the logics of anti-politics and politicised identity. The
dominant progressive political culture often pushes against such a project because it
reflects the broader decay of social solidarity.
Bubble, toil and trouble

There are a number of areas of instability that have been generated over the last decades
as a result of the forgoing developments. Here it is worth mentioning three.
Menzies foundation of sanity and sobriety for family and national life has generated
significant stress and vulnerability due to the tremendous amount of debt that has been
taken on by households. The Hawke-Keating governments increased both the amount a
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household could borrow and the number of households eligible to take out a loan. And from
the late 1980s interest rates began falling. Along with the increased supply and availability
of credit, a series of tax changes and government incentives over the next decades,
combined with rising real wages, pushed more and more money into residential property.
Negative gearing was reintroduced in 1987, capital gains tax was halved for property sales
in 1999 and first homeowner grants were introduced in 2000. Today, annual indirect housing
subsidies total more than $12 billion per year as governments continue to push people into
market dependency.[62] The result has been increased speculation and increased prices.
Economists Ryan Fox and Richard Finlay noted in 2012:
Nationwide, dwelling prices in Australia have risen significantly over the past four
decades, with particularly rapid increases over the periods 1987-1988 and
2001-2003. Over 1987 and 1988, average dwelling prices increased by around 30
per cent relative to consumer prices, while from 2001 to 2003 they increased by 50
per cent relative to consumer prices. Moreover, the cumulative rise in dwelling prices
since 1970 has been more than twice that for construction costs, indicating that
factors besides the cost of building a dwelling have driven up dwelling prices.[63]
Between 2012 and 2015, the total value of residential dwelling stock rose by 22.7 percent
or more than $1 trillion, about $1 billion per day on average.[64] Thats extraordinary given
Australias GDP is just $1.6 trillion.
The price rises in turn created greater demand for credit. Private debt as a proportion of
GDP had been rising from the late 1960s. From the late 1980s it climbed faster. From
having one of the lowest household debt-to-income ratios in the 1980s, Australian
households now are among the most indebted in the world. Before the long expansion
began in 1991, the average household debt-to-income ratio was less than 50 percent.
Today it is more than 150 percent. Until recently, when the Australian Prudential Regulation
Authority announced limited measures to reduce the amount of lending for speculation,
none of this had been considered particularly problematic.
The Reserve Bank has fuelled the growth in credit by maintaining low interest rates in
response to low levels of investment in other areas of the economy and because the wealth
effect generated by rising prices created a virtuous circle as the commercial and residential
construction industries boomed. Corporate profits in the construction and rental and real
estate service industries increased ninefold between 2000 and 2014.[65] In the years prior
to the financial crisis of 2008-09, annual housing and business credit growth both peaked at
more than 20 percent. Retail and supplier businesses were beneficiaries, both of the
increase in total income and the spending driven by rising asset prices. Wholesale trade
profits have quadrupled, and in retail they have grown five-fold since the early 2000s. The
boom was sustained by rising real wages for every segment of society and strong
population growth, and supplemented by the mining expansion. A 2014 Reserve Bank
research paper estimated that the latter, over the course of a decade, increased real per
capita household disposable income by 13 percent.[66]
Yet the growth model has some characteristics of Ponzi finance: debt-driven speculation
based on rising asset prices. With debt servicing costs lower than the capital gains of the
assets, more money floods into the market, further inflating prices and the amount of debt
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required to buy in. In Ponzi finance, the exuberance continues only as long as the asset
prices continue to appreciate. If and when they fall, the virtuous circle becomes a vicious
one as assets are sold off while debts are called in. The scale of debt is astronomical.
Between 2002 and 2015, the mortgage holdings of National Australia Bank, ANZ,
Commonwealth Bank and Westpac increased by 388 percent, 435 percent, 475 percent
and 554 percent respectively.[67] The Commonwealths Financial system inquiry reported in
2014:
An overall asset value shockwithin the range of shocks experienced overseas

during the GFC, would be sufficient to render Australias major banks insolvent in the
absence of further capital raising. In reality, a bank is non-viable well before
insolvency, so even a smaller shock could pose a significant threat.[68]
The IMF estimates that a 10 percent fall in house prices would reduce household wealth by
30 percent.[69] It was noted earlier that debt is distributed unevenly, with most held by
wealthy households. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the working class (often
referred to as middle Australia, which we can loosely define as households with an income
above the bottom 40 percent and below the top 20 percent) is highly indebted. Reserve
Bank figures show that more than 40 percent of these households have a home mortgage
and one in 10 hold investment property debt.[70] According to a joint report by Digital
Finance Analytics and Monash University Centre for Commercial Law and Regulatory
Studies, the proportion of households that are not able to meet their financial commitments
as they fall due jumped from 23.5 percent to 31.8 percent between 2005 and 2015. The
proportion that are financially distressed, (those that are not meeting their financial
commitments as they fall due, and are also exhibiting chronic repeat behaviour, and have
limited financial resources available) has increased from 13.5 percent to 21.3 percent.[71]
One saving grace of the housing market is that, because many of the buyers are in it for a
home, rather than a portfolio, they wont necessarily turn into sellers if prices drop. Another
is that there has been no proliferation of low doc loans and therefore no development of a
subprime time bomb. However, investment loans now make up close to 40 percent of all
home loan approvals. And nearly two-thirds of those are interest-only loans.[72] Home and
market intertwined as enterprise threatens the current model of accumulation if capital gains
turn into capital losses (as has been the case in Perth and Darwin), if wage growth stalls, or
if interest rates or unemployment rise significantly.
There are risks even outside of Ponzi finance. Luci Ellis, head of the Royal Bank of
Scotland Financial Stability Department, told a 2015 real estate symposium:
Something can pose systemic risk even if it is not that risky in and of itself, because
its impact on the system is large. That is certainly the case for the housing market
[which] is a large fraction of household wealth; the housing services provided by the
housing stock represent more than 20 per cent of household consumption, much of it
implicit in home ownership
The sheer size of these asset classes helps explain their interconnection with the
financial system, another aspect of their systemic risk. Property is not just a large part
of household and business balance sheets. Property-related exposures of various
kinds are often large parts of bank balance sheets And since the financial sector
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touches every other in some way, the sectors that matter to the financial sector will
have disproportionate ultimate effects on the rest of the economy
We do know that there are strong correlations between strong upswings in credit,
measured in a variety of ways, strong growth in property prices, and subsequent bad
events.[73]
A second aspect of instability is related to the urban geography of class. Suburbs are not
simply sites of home security, they are class-structuring centres. Some years ago, Leonie
Sandercock wrote:
If we define real income as command over resources, it is clear that real income is a
function of locational accessibility how close you live to employment opportunities,
schools, beaches, welfare services. Access to these can only be obtained at a cost
Poorer households have a very limited choice of location. As the spatial form of a city
is changedso also is the cost of access to different things for a household at a
given location and hence both the distribution of real income and property values in
different locations.[74]
Working class communities, within which existed natural bonds and associations, were long
ago fragmented by the geographical expansion of suburbs. The twenty-first century boom
has accelerated the process in our largest cities, where people have been priced out of the
inner areas.
The sprawl is creating suburbs with few amenities and which can be more than an hours
drive from the CBD. Often they were packaged as oases of certainty and security. But in
these isolated satellites, peoples frustrations often are inaudible to the rest of the city. The
2015 Delivering Sustainable Urban Mobility report notes that Australian cities particularly
Melbourne, Sydney and Perth face deteriorating conditions of life due to the ever-growing
infrastructure deficit, estimated to reach $350 billion by 2025, and the poorest being pushed
to the margins. Fringe developments are characterised by low housing and low
employment density, limited (if any) mixed-use development and poor access to public
transport, the report notes. Together this increases distances between where people live
and where they need to travel for work, shopping, socialising and recreating.[75] An SGS
Economics & Planning paper estimates that [f]or those in Sydneys inner-east and lower
North Shore more than 40 percent of the citys jobs are within a 30-minute drive at peak
hour. But for those in large areas of the citys west and south-west just 5 percent of the
citys jobs are within a 30-minute peak hour drive.[76] The growing segregation between
the gentrifying inner-urban areas and those of the beltways will likely be exacerbated in the
coming decade as government revenues face increasing pressures particularly if
government housing policies continue to generate glaring inequalities, which are noticeable
in the dramatic declines in home ownership rates among the bottom 20 percent of the
population over the last 30 years: a more than 30 percent drop for those aged between 25
and 34, almost 20 percent for the 35-44 segment and more than 10 percent for 45 to 54
year olds.[77] Ghettoisation is a potential result.
A third aspect of instability relates to the democratic hollowing. The result is most
noticeable in the ALP, the branch structure of which former leader Mark Latham described
as an empty shell.[78] It is reflected in Australian Electoral Commission figures, which
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show that the federal minor party vote has steadily climbed from the 1970s to be one in five
votes in the House and one in three in the Senate. Along with that expression of
dissatisfaction, the informal vote has risen and the voter turnout declined. If the 1990s
average for these had been maintained, there would have been some 700,000 extra valid
votes cast at the 2013 election. These figures tally with other surveys and indicators
showing high levels of indifference towards or disaffection with what passes as official
politics. The Australian National Universitys Trends in Australian Political Opinion survey
finds that fewer and fewer people bother discussing election campaigns or try to convince
others how to vote, and that volatility (judged by the percentage of people who always vote
for the same party) has significantly increased.[79]
The hollowing is also illustrated by popular political attitudes. The annual Lowy Institute Poll
of social attitudes has for a number of years found that only a minority of 18-29 year olds
prefer democratic government. One quarter to one third say that in some circumstances, a
nondemocratic government can be preferable; another quarter say it doesnt matter what
kind of government we have.[80] In the 2014 poll, the 40 percent of respondents (all age
groups) who disagreed with the statement that democracy is preferable to any other form
of government were asked why. Three quarters agreed that Democracy is not working
because there is no real difference between the policies of the major parties and
Democracy only serves the interests of a few and not the majority of society. Sixty-four
percent agreed in some way with the statement I have become disillusioned with Australian
politics and think another system might work better. Almost 10 percent of the population
agreed that a more authoritarian system where leaders can make decisions without the
processes of democracy achieves better results; another 16 percent had sympathy with
that statement. In one of the most affluent and stable countries in the world, several million
people prefer authoritarian government and others, particularly young people, are open to it
because they think it might be more responsive to the needs of the people.
Politically, this makes for a potent mix: anti-democratic leanings combined with increasing
resentments linked to disaffection and disengagement with the political system and the
state, high and rising youth unemployment and lack of opportunity in the suburbs. The mix
could manifest in different ways: drug abuse, suicides, interpersonal violence, riots and rage
not simply moral rage against a world that should be better for everyone, but the
destitution-fuelled rage against an impossible situation or against scapegoated minorities.
The anti-political sentiments noted previously, and one-sidedly, as toxicity, do have the
potential to be expressed as anti-system politics (and acknowledged by anti-establishment
rhetoric from politicians). The insincerity and hypocrisy of liberal democratic rhetoric has
created in many peoples minds a link between dishonesty and politics. More space could
open to the left if anti-representative democracy sentiments combine with progressive social
struggles as has been the case in Europe.[81] However, as philosopher Jason Stanley
points out:
[T]here is a way a politician could appear to be honest and nonhypocritical without

having to vie against other candidates pursing the same strategy: by standing for
division and conflict without apology In short, one could signal honesty by openly
and explicitly rejecting what are presumed to be sacrosanct political values. Such
politicians would be a breath of fresh air in a political culture that seems dominated by
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real and imagined hypocrisy. They would be especially compelling if they

demonstrated their supposed honesty and sincerity by explicitly targeting groups that
are disliked by the voters they seek to attract. Such open rejection of democratic
values would be taken as political bravery, as a signal of sincerity.[82]
Clearly, far right populism and, in some areas, fascism, have made ground in the West over
the last decade. In Australia there could now be an opening for a return of far right populism
the space for which, since the rise of One Nation in the 1990s, has been squeezed by the
Liberal Partys turn to extreme racism in its immigration policies. Inequality is high and
rising, living standards for the poor are projected to fall in the coming decade and
Islamophobic bile in the media is out of control.[83] The latter is having a significant impact.
The Australian Human Rights Commission 2015 consultation report notes:
Discrimination and vilification directed at Muslim Australians was consistently raised

as significant concerns in the consultations. Many participants labelled anti-Muslim
discrimination a daily or regular occurrence The level of anti-Muslim sentiment in
Australia is highlighted by the Scanlon Foundations 2014 Mapping Social Cohesion
report, which indicated that 25 percent of respondents self-report as having
somewhat negative or very negative attitudes towards Muslims Other research
suggests that this number may be as high as 50 per cent.[84]
Exactly how politics plays out is hard to tell. Certainly there would seem to be the potential
for greater political polarisation as the boom ends.
If you dont fight, you lose

The structuring of the class and capitals colonisation of the self through property, market
dependency, commodity fetishism, debt, and so on appears as the dissolution of class
beneath the weight of multiplying grievances. It may be the case that people are
increasingly encouraged to view themselves as individual entrepreneurs whose identities
are shaped by the conglomeration of attributes we inherit or put on our resume. But there
are definite limits to the social power of capital. Our wants and desires have been
constructed in multiple ways. But, fundamentally, our consciousness is moulded collectively
by work, which remains a social act that tends to break down individualism and open the
potential for solidarity and resistance to exploitation and oppression.
Popular attitudes to particular government policies are also crucial. Former Labor prime
minister Bob Hawke talked about the need to reform deeply entrenched attitudes.[85]
Those attitudes demands for spending on public hospitals and education and for decent
pensions, etc. have never been fundamentally recast in Australia. Just as the project of
transforming each person into a stakeholder butts up against entrenched inequality, the
pushing of market rationality to extremes butts up against collective sensibilities, which are
the legacy of past struggles witness the upsurge of hostility to former prime minister Tony
Abbotts 2014 class war budget and the shock it delivered to the establishment, which all
but deserted the government when it became clear that it wouldnt get the measures
through the Senate.[86]
The obvious problem is that the decline of the workers movement has left our side with a
serious deficit in institutional weight organisations with some sort of infrastructure that
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can channel discontent, give it theoretical coherence and organise large numbers of people
to fight. The decline leaves a sense of powerlessness and reinforces peoples isolation.
One ramification is that, within the working class, there is less ability to push back against
the ideological assault. The effects are noticeable in many parts of the West. Take the
testimony of Jayne Maltman, one of 30,000 sacked Woolworths workers in Britain in 2009,
who told Guardian reporter Stephen Moss: We found out on TVthat we were going to
close. We just carried on as normal, and it wasnt until we actually came out and we were all
upset when we signed our last bits of paper that we thought, Well, why did we go quietly?
Why did 30,000 of us go quietly?[87]
On the other hand, when peoples expectations of how the world should be are dramatically
at odds with how they experience it, they can be propelled to action. Today there is
potentially more energy available for new rounds of struggle. Those who are more politically
inexperienced, disorganised and less disciplined can move more freely. They might harbour
fewer concerns about the ramifications of losing a fight, whereas more experienced hands
might remember previous defeats and be more cautious about kicking back against the
bosses. Capital seems to always be winning, but its rule is shown to be precarious every
time resistance rears its head. There is immense power bestowed on those who engage in
a simple refusal. The localised no, which might be uttered collectively in a small strike,
shows that even seemingly insignificant examples furnish extraordinary results in terms of
reviving confidence. One worker who participated in a four-day wildcat strike in a Melbourne
warehouse in 2015 related the transformative effect:
The computer is recording how much work you do. So if you stop for a couple of
minutes, you have to make it up at the end of the shift. The computer tells you which
box to pick and where, so your interactions with workmates are limited. If you happen
to be passing each other you might say a few words. But if you dont pick enough
boxes, then your performance rate will be under 100 percent and potentially you will
be targeted by management.
It was completely different after the strike and it was only a partial victory. I cant
imagine what the mood and the level of confidence would have been like if we had
carried through what we actually had the industrial strength to do: win all our
demands.
But the mood was still just unbelievably electric. People who you didnt really know
before, who you had just met on the picket one person will see someone they have
just met [on the picket] and go over there and just talk to them. A couple of others will
want to know whats going on, and before you know it youve got four or five
transporters sitting at an intersection that nobody can pass. So theres an impromptu
stop work already. That would have happened 20, 30, 40 times on the first day we
went back.
And management just humiliated themselves. It was like they were just grovelling
coming around, telling embarrassing jokes, trying to get in on the were all friends
now atmosphere. I mean they were going around offering lollies! Usually, it is a
sackable offence to get caught eating on the floor.
It was slightly less like that the following day and slightly less the day after that and so
21 of 28 12/18/16 8:18 PM
on. If you dont maintain some sort of organisation going back into the workplace, the
mood will inevitably drift back from the high of the picket because, well, the boss still
owns the workplace, and manages it, and controls you to the extent that you do or
dont have that organisation. If we could maintain that organisation, people could
maintain their confidence because they would have real power.[88]
The generalised refusal on display in mass struggle bears its own particularity , ,
Ya basta! yet conveys a universal human yearning. In these outbursts we witness the
promise of a unity that reaches beyond the limits of liberal capitalisms false we unity in
diversity (race, sex, gender, religion, language, colour and so on) through the actual
struggle for workers power. In Australia, the key task is to stoke the spirit of defiance and
resistance that points in this direction. The will to fight is usually there, somewhere, in
everyone. Its just that sometimes it has gone quiet, is underconfident or overwhelmed.
Thats why things can so quickly turn in the right circumstances when someone gives a
lead, others can be stirred to action. Even if the results are not world shattering, they can
help lay the basis for the future by drawing in new people who would otherwise have few
options but to turn inward and accept things as they are.
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Minister and Cabinet.
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marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill.
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Australia different?, Housing Studies, 26 (7-8).
[1] This is the first part of a two-part analysis of Australian capitalism.
[2] Foucault 2008, p145.
[3] My thanks to Dave Eden for pointing me in the direction of the writings of Maurizio
Lazzarato and Wendy Brown, who have already articulated better than I could some of the
things I have been trying to think through. Dave, Alison Pennington, Sandra Bloodworth and
Louise OShea also offered valuable comments after reading the draft.
[4] Quoted in Allon 2008, p66.
[5] Troy 2004, p6.
[6] Berry 1999, p106.
[7] Hillier and OLincoln 2013, pp149-80.
[8] Government of Western Australia Housing Authority 2012.
[9] Ex parte H. V. McKay, Transcript of Proceedings in an Application to the Commonwealth

Court of Conciliation & Arbitration, Melbourne, October 1907; Yates and Berry 2011, p1133;
Pennington 2015, p26.
[10] Quoted in LeGates and Stout 1996, pp378-9, 381.
[11] Narefsky 2014.
[12] Menzies 1942.
[13] McIntosh and Phillips 2001.
[14] Greig 1995, p38.
[15] ABS 2013-14; Kryger 2009, table 1, p2.
[16] Dingle and OHanlon 1997, pp34-5.
[17] Allon 2014, p14.
[18] Lyn Richards, Suburbia: domestic dreaming, in Johnson 1994, pp115-6.
[19] Richards, Suburbia: domestic dreaming, p116.
[20] Dingle and OHanlon 1997, p41.
25 of 28 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[21] Greig 1995, p71.
[22] Berry 1999, p111.
[23] Berry 1999, pp108, 109.
[24] Greig 1995, p36.
[25] Quoted in Greig 1995, p17.
[26] Rubin 1990, p21.
[27] Foucault 2008, p148.
[28] See Mirowski 2013; Brown 1993; Brown 2015; Lazzarato 2011; Lazzarato 2013.
[29] Lazzarato 2013, p11.
[30] Mirowski 2013, p59.
[31] Brown 2015, p177. Emphasis in original.
[32] George Monbiot, Sick of this market-driven world? You should be, The Guardian, 6
August 2014.
[33] Lazzarato 2011, p95.
[34] Lazzarato 2011, pp56-7.
[35] The average home loan size in New South Wales, for example, is about $380,000.
According to the National Australia Bank online loan repayments calculator, paying that
money back at just 4 percent interest over 30 years costs $653,000. Thats an additional
$273,000 almost four years work for someone on the average full-time male wage.
[36] Lazzarato 2011, pp29, 31.
[37] Marx 1844.
[38] Ecclesiastes 10:19: For laughter they make bread, and wine that the living may feast:
and all things obey money. An alternative rendering of the passage carries the more
sarcastic and money has an answer for everything.
[39] International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2015, p15; Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) 2015.
[40] Battellino 2007.
[41] Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) 2006, p50; Donovan and Gorajek 2011, p29.
[42] Jonson 1996.
[43] Meagher and Goodwin 2015, pp4-6.
[44] See, for example, Meagher and Goodwin 2015.
26 of 28 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[45] Cottle and Collins 2008, p4.
[46] Lazzarato 2011, pp130-1.
[47] Lazzarato 2011, p134.
[48] Commonwealth of Australia 2014b, pp104, 107.
[49] Bramble 2014, p68.
[50] Quoted in Foucault 2008, fn18, p153.
[51] Katie Wood, Who really rules Australia?, Red Flag, 26 June, 2013.
[52] Mair 2013.
[53] Brown 2015, p127.
[54] Quoted in Brown 1997, p49.
[55] Brown 2015, p39.
[56] Brown 2015, p127.
[57] Quoted in Mirowski 2013, p40.
[58] Louise OShea, Germaine Greer and the new left authoritarianism, Red Flag, 3
November 2015.
[59] Fredrik deBoer, I dont know what to do, you guys, fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/29
/i-dont-know-what-to-do-you-guys.
[60] Brown 1993, pp390, 391.
[61] Brown 1993, pp394-5.
[62] Lucy Groenhart and Nicole Gurran, Home security, table 7.1, figure 7.1, pp237, 242,
in Meagher and Goodwin 2015.
[63] Fox and Finlay 2012, p15.
[64] ABS 2015b, table 6, p16.
[65] ABS 2015a.
[66] Downes, Hanslow and Tulip 2014, figure 4, p10.
[67] Lindsay David, Banks have treated our housing market like a Ponzi scheme and its
about to bust, The Guardian, 20 August 2015.
[68] Commonwealth of Australia 2014a, pp42-3.
[69] IMF 2015, p19.
[70] RBA 2015.
27 of 28 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[71] Digital Finance Analytics and Monash University Centre for Commercial Law and
Regulatory Studies 2015, table 1, p7.
[72] RBA 2014, p49.
[73] Ellis 2015.
[74] Sandercock 1975, p2.
[75] Armstrong et al 2015, p21.
[76] Matt Wade, Life in Sydney is getting better for some, Sydney Morning Herald, 13
October 2015.
[77] Pennington 2015, figures 3.8 and 3.9, p39.
[78] Latham 2005, p40.
[79] McAllister and Cameron 2014, pp9, 14.
[80] See the Lowy Institute polls for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. lowyinstitute.org/ programs-
and-projects/programs/polling.
[81] See, for example, Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli, Anti-representative
democracy and oligarchic capture, OpenDemocracy, 16 August 2014.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/lorenzo-del-savio-matteo-mameli/ antirepresentative-
democracy-and-oligarchic-capture.
[82] Jason Stanley, Democracy and the demagogue, New York Times, 11 October 2015.
[83] Ben Hillier, Murdoch hates speech goes proto-fascist, Red Flag, 27 April 2015.
[84] Soutphommasane et al 2015, p60.
[85] Quoted in Cottle and Collins 2008, p4.
[86] Ben Hillier, Even the Liberals mates are turning, Red Flag, 29 August 2014.
[87] Stephen Moss, It wasnt until we signed our last bits of paper that we thought, why did
we all go so quietly?, The Guardian, 6 February 2009.
[88] In conversation with the author. For an account of the strike see Jerome Small, Inside
a Melbourne warehouse strike, Red Flag, 16 August 2015.
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Ordering Australian Capitalism: Property, Fetishism, Debt and Social Order

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Ordering Australian capitalism: property, fetishism, debt and social... http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no-11-summer-2016/128-ord...

No.11 Summer 2016

Government must not form a counterpoint or a screenbetween society and

Property and market dependency

1951 Australian government publication[4]

Sub-division, suburban sprawl and relatively high rates of ownership facilitated by

[H]ome became a central organising index of identity at multiple levels This

Commodity fetishism and governmentality

To governdoes not mean subjugating, commanding, managing, ordering,

[S]ubjectsare configured by the market metrics of our time as self-investing human

appreciation or at least prevent its depreciationknowledge, thought, and training

a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders,

manipulation or effacement of bodies through extreme dietary and exercise regimes or

Debt, state and social control

This is an emphatic rendering of credit: consciousness shaper, ethically normative, and

It can be objected that access to credit is a source, or reflection, of existing economic

ended up having far-reaching consequences. It led to a sequence of changes, each

The new welfare management scheme introduced by the Australian government is

a debit card through a responsible financial institution of choice, using the

The foregoing developments and processes undermine democracy by substituting

Above all, governance reconceives the political as a field of management or

perspectives, political life is emptied of what theorists such as Machiavelli took to be

I have seena 19-year-old white woman smart, well-meaning, passionate literally

[T]he articulation of politicised identitiesrequire, rather than incidentally produce, a

Bubble, toil and trouble

An overall asset value shockwithin the range of shocks experienced overseas

[T]here is a way a politician could appear to be honest and nonhypocritical without

real and imagined hypocrisy. They would be especially compelling if they

Discrimination and vilification directed at Muslim Australians was consistently raised

If you dont fight, you lose

ABS 2015a, Business indicators, Australia, cat. no. 5676.0.

ABS 2015b, Residential property price indexes, cat. no. 6416.0.

Brown, Wendy 1993, Wounded attachments, Political Theory, 21 (3).

Brown, Wendy 2015, Undoing the Demos, Zone Books.

Commonwealth of Australia 2014a, Financial System Inquiry Final Report.

Commonwealth of Australia 2014b, The Forrest Review, Department of the Prime

Foucault, Michel 2008, The Birth of Biopolitics, Palgrave Macmillan.

Government of Western Australia Housing Authority 2012, Celebrating 100 years of

Johnson, Louise (ed) 1994, Suburban Dreaming, Deakin University Press.

Latham, Mark 2005, The Latham Diaries, Melbourne University Press.

Lazzarato, Maurizio 2011, The Making of the Indebted Man, Semiotext(e).

Lazzarato, Maurizio 2013, Governing by Debt, Semiotext(e).

Mair, Peter 2013, Ruling the Void, Verso.

Marx, Karl 1844, Comments on James Mill, lments Dconomie Politique,

Menzies, Robert 1942, The forgotten people, liberals.net/ theforgottenpeople.htm.

Mirowski, Philip 2013, Never Let a Serious Crisis go to Waste, Verso.

Reserve Bank of Australia 2006, Financial Stability Review, March.

Reserve Bank of Australia 2014, Financial Stability Review, September.

Sandercock, Leonie 1975, Cities for Sale, Melbourne University Press.

[1] This is the first part of a two-part analysis of Australian capitalism.

[2] Foucault 2008, p145.

[4] Quoted in Allon 2008, p66.

[5] Troy 2004, p6.

[6] Berry 1999, p106.

[7] Hillier and OLincoln 2013, pp149-80.

[8] Government of Western Australia Housing Authority 2012.

[9] Ex parte H. V. McKay, Transcript of Proceedings in an Application to the Commonwealth

[10] Quoted in LeGates and Stout 1996, pp378-9, 381.

[11] Narefsky 2014.

[12] Menzies 1942.

[13] McIntosh and Phillips 2001.

[14] Greig 1995, p38.

[15] ABS 2013-14; Kryger 2009, table 1, p2.

[16] Dingle and OHanlon 1997, pp34-5.