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David 
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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| Post subject: Where are the 21st century political parties? |  |
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Great article from The Drum:
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-01/dean-its-time-to-let-political-dinosaurs-go-extinct/5930350
| Quote: | 20th century political dinosaurs are tackling 21st century problems with obsolete ideologies from the 19th century, writes Tim Dean. Where is the party of the future?
As a plethora of pundits have recently pointed out, the Abbott Government is in something of a funk. The Libs have even been criticised by their own cheer squad for lacking a narrative and for an inability to sell their vision.
Lack of narrative and crappy sales pitch ... sound familiar? You don't need an elephantine memory to recall the same charges being levelled at the recent Rudd and Gillard governments.
And it's not like Shorten has changed his tune from his predecessors enough to look much different. I mean, could you articulate Labor's vision for the Australia of tomorrow?
So it's not just the Liberals who are in a funk. It's politics in general. And I'm not alone in thinking that the problem is not just with the sales pitches, it's the products themselves that are on the nose.
A lot has been said about the malaise afflicting contemporary politics, but most of it is tactical. It's also probably true, but I reckon there's a deeper dimension to our political ennui that isn't being talked about nearly enough.
Simply put: we're currently governed by 20th century political dinosaurs that are offering ill-fitting solutions to 21st century problems based on obsolete ideologies from the 19th century. It's not just about a lack of narrative or vision, it's that whatever vision either party can muster is tailored for the wrong century.
I suspect that many of us have sensed a growing disconnect between the ideologies of the major parties and the challenges we face today, even if we might not all frame it in this way.
This fundamental disconnect could account for some of our perpetual dissatisfaction with both side of politics. It might account for why we keep switching between the two parties at both state and federal levels, only to become disillusioned with who we've placed in charge shortly thereafter.
It might also account for why so many people under 30 have simply tuned out the major parties - after all, both parties are at odds with their very 21st century values and worldview.
This is the generation that grew up with the internet expanding their world beyond their national borders. They grew up with multiculturalism, with friends and relatives of all sexual orientations, and with casual (and largely harmless) recreational drugs. Few go to church and even fewer belong to unions.
This is also the generation that will bear the burden of climate change, and they are sick of Baby Boomers eating their carbon cake and having their grandkids pick up the bill.
So maybe what we need now is not just more of the same with a few tactical tweaks. Maybe what we really need is a genuinely 21st century party - preferably more than one - that understands the dynamics of this century and is willing to offer better solutions to the social and economic problems of tomorrow.
And I doubt that's going to be in the guise of the Labor or Liberal parties, at least not without some existential revisions to their underlying ideologies.
It's worth remembering that both the Labor and the Liberal parties were born in the first decades of the 20th century, and both have ideologies that were forged even earlier in the 19th century.
Both came into being in response to the social and economic dynamics that emerged following the industrial revolution, when rapid economic growth came at the cost of the welfare of low-skilled workers.
Simply speaking, where Labor favoured the rights of workers over unbridled economic growth, the Liberals emphasised economic growth with a conviction that it would eventually benefit all.
The good news is they both won. Over the last 100 years our civilisation has enjoyed explosive economic growth and many of the protections fought for by unions in the 19th and early 20th centuries are now enshrined in law.
So, in a sense, both the Labor and Liberal parties have lost much of their core raison d'être. Their very relevance has been eroded by their own success. And yet, while they have fiddled around the edges in an attempt to modernise, they both tout economic visions true to their origins: vote Labor for workers; vote Liberal for economic growth.
However, it's not what they disagree on that is even terribly relevant any more. We all agree that a healthy economy is a good thing and that workers ought to be treated fairly. It's actually the things that both parties agree on that puts them out of touch with this century.
The thing is, the 21st century is shaping up to be not just slightly different to the 20th century but radically different.
For a start, economics has grown up. It no longer assumes that resources are effectively limitless or that the Earth has an infinite carrying capacity. It no longer ignores all those inconvenient externalities like pollution or climate change.
And, possibly most important of all, it is starting to adapt to the fact that we've virtually solved the problem of material scarcity. Consider that our world produces enough food and material goods to satisfy the needs of every human on the planet. So our problem now isn't one of staving off scarcity, it's of fair distribution and how high we can elevate standards of living.
Yet both our major parties remain wedded to the outdated notion that GDP growth is of primary importance, that it somehow represents our progress as a nation. That is a problematic notion. And the longer they remain obsessed with GDP, the harder it will be to shift the economy to a more sensible and sustainable footing that actually serves our wellbeing rather than the other way around.
Furthermore, both Labor and the Liberals continue to be obsessed with jobs. Labor because of its commitment to a rather Marxist idea that work is intrinsically fulfilling, the Libs because of its view that hard work is a signal of solid moral fibre - hence their "lifters and leaners" rhetoric.
Yet, whether we like it or not, the 21st century will come to be defined by rising unemployment. Automation has already eaten many unskilled jobs, but that's nothing compared to what artificial intelligence and robotics are about to do.
ATMs instead of bank tellers and self-service machines instead of checkout operators are only the beginning. Imagine the number of unemployed truck, bus and taxi drivers there'll be once driverless cars have a better safety record than humans. Or the number of GPs out of a job once Watson moves into the clinic.
The thing neither the Labor or Liberal parties understand is that this is actually a good thing. It means technology will produce wealth for us and we can afford to work less. We might even be able to afford a universal basic income. And we'll still work, but it'll be doing the stuff we love rather than toiling for a wage. Even Marx would be happy with that.
However, if we continue to obsess over jobs, we'll actually resist this shift rather than help it along. We'll end up working longer and harder than we need to just because our political leaders can't shake the idea that life must centre around paid employment.
And it's not just economics that have changed over the last century. Social dynamics have changed as well.
When the Labor and Liberal parties were in their infancy, the world was yet to be globalised. People typically lived their entire lives within walking distance of where they were born. Society was more class-based and stultifyingly conformist. Cultures and religion didn't intermix. No-one admitted they were gay.
The social policies that were considered appropriate in that world simply don't gel in today's globalised, cosmopolitan and multicultural world. Tolerance and pluralism are the watchwords of the 21st century. Abortion and euthanasia are seen as rights rather than offences against god. On this count, at least Labor is more in line with 21st century values, although elements of the Liberal party seem to want to return to the middle ages.
So what I reckon we need now is some 21st century political parties. Ones that are based on modern notions of economic sustainability, wellbeing and tolerance. Parties that are not wedded to unions or churches, or in the pocket of the big businesses who were the beneficiaries of the 20th century economic paradigm.
There remain some tremendous political, economic and social problems to be solved as we transition our society into one fit for the 21st century. It we continue to apply 20th century solutions to these problems, it will only end in disaster.
Maybe it's time to let the dinosaurs go extinct and find a new species of political party to take their place.
Tim Dean is a science writer and philosopher with a PhD in ethics. |
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"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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Yes, after reading this I can safely say young Tim should stick to science.
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough†Kinky Friedman |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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What part of it do you disagree with? The fact that automation will reduce manual labour and thus be good for social progress?
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"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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I know plenty of people that wont use self check outs because it takes jobs away. what are all those out of work labourers going to do?
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| Rise up and fight the machines. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | Rise up and fight the machines. |
yup, even Arnie switched sides!!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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The theory is that in a post scarcity society there is no need for useless labor just to keep up 'productivity', that people are free to do what they like as enough is produced through automation/robotics to sustain everybody. Think 'Star Trek' where nobody needs money and they work for the betterment of themselves and society.
A pipe dream at this stage, but why do you need people working if enough is produced by 10% to sustain everybody? This would free up artists, writers, philosophers and video gaming bludgers to do what they want with the scope for the more industrious, intelligent and ambitious to innovate and grow humanity.
It's all just philosophy and science fiction right now, but we may need to take a more practical look at post scarcity politics in the near future (assuming the powers that be don't succeed in keeping humans as economic units and drone labour like we've been since industrialization). |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| watt price tully wrote: | | Yes, after reading this I can safely say young Tim should stick to science. |
Young Tim should extract his head from his self absorbed sphincter and realise that it not all about him.
The amount of technological change that has happened since the 80's has been more than at any stage in human society including the industrial revolution. (opinion.).
I've lived through working with a total paper system to watching how computers and technology came in and removed jobs.
Want to know how your phone bill was determined back in the 80's? No computer read out, people went out with cameras to exchanges and photographed metres that clicked over on manual exchanges.
I've recruited people for jobs that no longer exist and at the moment in my job I'm working on systemising and simplifying processes.
People born in the late 80's and onward grew up with the technology, they take it for granted. People of my generation had to learn how to adapt and change.
Wonder if he got a participation prize for writing the article. |
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ronrat
Joined: 22 May 2006
Location: Thailand
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Saw an program on Asia channel last night on rural Japan. Villages are dying and farmland lies fallow because the kids want to work in the cities and don't want to do farm work. Houses in the thousands lie vacant and shops and schools are closing. In the meantime how many refugees, many of them from Myanmar, now in Malaysia or Indonesia . would be happy to work on a rice farm and live in a house. One prefecture needs 20000 new people a year. Seems a pretty easy thing to bring in a swag of these people in family units and use the existing empty schools to teach Japanese and allocate a few houses for religious and community activities.In the future some of these people would be carers for the aging Japanese rural population and help Japan become self sufficient in food,something they are way behind in.
You wonder what they discussed in Brisbane. It seems better than shipping them off to Cambodia which has no infrastructure.
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Annoying opposition supporters since 1967. |
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| stui magpie wrote: | | The amount of technological change that has happened since the 80's has been more than at any stage in human society including the industrial revolution. (opinion.). |
Fact, I should think, doubtless easily verifiable. However, the sheer mass of technological change doesn't necessarily reflect the impact of that change on daily life, particularly working life. There is no real room to doubt that the changes brought about during the Industrial Revolution, in total, had far more impact than the changes we have seen since, say, 1980. Yes, we have seen massive changes in the workplace, including a vast number of jobs simply disappearing and an even greater number being offshored, but these changes pale into insignificance compared to the all-pervading changes which took place during the Industrial Revolution, which not only forced an even larger proportion of ordinary people out of their traditional ways of life and work, but thrust them into completely new roles.
Two key points about this transition are commonly misunderstood.
First, most people didn't move from one job (farming, say) to another (such as working a loom in a cotton factory), the whole idea of paid employment in the sense we think of it today was new. Never before had most of these people been subjected to the timeclock and required to follow detailed instructions in a regimented way. Before the Industrial Revolution, most people worked in their own way and their own time. This is not to say that they were wealthy! Most were hard-working and very poor before the revolution, and just as hard-working but even poorer afterwards. There was a huge transfer of wealth from the populace as a whole to a small number of particularly wealthy capitalists. Over time - and it took a very long time indeed - the standard of living in countries like England increased and even the poor became better off, partly as a byproduct of the new production methods, partly as a result of huge wealth transfers from overseas at the expense of millions of people in Africa, Asia, and Central America. Whether the overall standard of living for ordinary people improved (once you average out the winners and the losers on the global scale European economies were now operating in) is an open question. Certainly it didn't until (at earliest) the start of the 20th Century; after that I am not sure, though I suspect it did.
Second, these huge changes were not the result of technological innovation. They were social changes, changes in the way we organised our society and particulary in the way we thought about and organised money, capital, and above all work. The reorganisation into factory production systems and into paid labour for money rather than mutual obligations between different types of people enabled and caused the development of new machinery, and came about first.
Two further points need making:
(1) The changes we are seeing are not simply technological. Just as with the previous revolution, many of them are social and political with the technology simply acting as a servant to the main thrust. Technology change is important, of course - ask an unemployed bank teller! - but quite probably the greater dislocation is social/political in nature, in particular the massive trend to offshore everything that isn't nailed down to wherever production is cheapest, wages lowest, and things like safety and environmental standards least honoured. Add to that the huge trend to casual, part-time and individual contract labour. Together, the effect of these purely social changes is probably significantly greater than that of the (neverless huge) technological changes. Consider (for example) the demise of the car industry, the steel industry, the oil industry, and the clothing industry. Not one of these has been brought about by technology change. In each case, the cause has been purely political.
(2) The post-industrial revolution we are going through now is ongoing. It is easy enough to look back at the period between (say) 1600 and 1850 and see an overall pattern to events. When we look at the totality of changes over that time - not forgetting that the roots of the Industrial Revolution go back even further than that and you need to understand the impact of things like changes in the nature of warfare during (particularly) the 100 Years War (1337 to 1453) and the massive demographic impact of the Black Death (mid-14th Century with frequent repeats for the next 300 years or so) in order to understand the causes and progress of the Industrial Revolution - easy enough to look back at that period and see the pattern. It as much, much harder to see that pattern while it was still ongoing! It wasn't until the late 18th and early-mid 19th Century - i.e., not until the transition was nearly over - that anybody first started to understand the process, particularly through the pioneering work of Adam Smith (key work 1776), Ricardo (1817), Marx (1848) and JS Mill (1863).
(Not proofread. Sorry!)
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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Tannin writes a first year History essay 
Now all you need are your footnotes or endnotes with all your citations and I'll happily give you a distinction. :lo:
Seriously though, nice piece of off the cuff education. Now you need to write on the Tragedy of the Commons and the emigration from a rural to an industrial city based workforce. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| stui magpie wrote: | | watt price tully wrote: | | Yes, after reading this I can safely say young Tim should stick to science. |
Young Tim should extract his head from his self absorbed sphincter and realise that it not all about him.
The amount of technological change that has happened since the 80's has been more than at any stage in human society including the industrial revolution. (opinion.).
I've lived through working with a total paper system to watching how computers and technology came in and removed jobs.
Want to know how your phone bill was determined back in the 80's? No computer read out, people went out with cameras to exchanges and photographed metres that clicked over on manual exchanges.
I've recruited people for jobs that no longer exist and at the moment in my job I'm working on systemising and simplifying processes.
People born in the late 80's and onward grew up with the technology, they take it for granted. People of my generation had to learn how to adapt and change.
Wonder if he got a participation prize for writing the article. |
hehehe! no way should that slip through to the keeper!! love it!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Technological change has seriously driven social change, it's just not as overtly obvious as in the industrial revolution.
Has online shopping had an impact on bricks and mortar shops?
The old ATM replaced tellers, then banking apps on tablets and smartphones went past that, then banks went to a value proposition and allowing for the transactional services to be online and offering a personal service for the more personalised ones.
A favourite line of mine that I use often at work is, "if you want to see how far we've come, you need to stop and look back to where we were"
I say it a bit different depending on mood, I don't know if the intent is a quote by someone else or not, I'm claiming it as it's something I use and it works.
It's the old argument about not being able to see the forest for the trees. When you step back and look at the bigger picture, and see how things have changed, you can actually appreciate it. |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Wokko wrote: | | Tannin writes a first year History essay |
I doubt too many would be covering this stuff in first year, Wokko, not beyond the bare-bones-with-little-understanding level, certainly not any more. It used to be solid second or third year stuff back in the day; now, with the standard of education being so retarded across the board, it's probably regarded as difficult honours year material, which it isn't. The facts are all there and all well evidenced. You only have to get beyond the clueless kings-and-queens-did-stuff-and-then-Watt-invented-the-steam-engine level of shallow historical understanding that still dominates so much uninformed discussion even in some academic circles, but most people never do, and it's not their fault. Over the past few decades we have ripped the guts out of every sort of education bar things which are thought (often wrongly) to provide economic benefit (accounting, marketing, law, engineering if we are so lucky), and the nation is very much the poorer because of that.
(So much for the "clever country". Sob.)
| Wokko wrote: | | Now you need to write on the Tragedy of the Commons and the emigration from a rural to an industrial city based workforce. |
I took that for granted and mentioned none of it. You are quite right to pull me up on it.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Technological change has seriously driven social change, it's just not as overtly obvious as in the industrial revolution. |
Indeed, Stui. My point however - well, one of my points - is that social change also drives technological change. It's difficult to disentangle the relative importance of the two in this current period of transition, but our past experience shows very clearly that social change was the prime mover and technological changes followed along afterwards. That is probably still the case today, but as always with current events, it's difficult to stand far enough back to get a clear picture. Ask again in 2114, the answer will be obvious by then. 
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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