1988: the Celebration of the Nation *and* the Death of the Utopia of Industrial Society
part one of three
In 1988, I lived through a preoccupation with ‘The Bicentennial’, the uncritical nationalist celebration of two-hundred years since the arrival of a motley of convicts to what was then, as now, unconvincingly called New South Wales[1].
In the same year, André Gorz published his Critique of Economic Reason, regarded as his one of his three[2]masterpieces.
These two events are only seemingly disparate.
For on the one hand, in what had come to be known throughout most of the world as Australia, we find a society sitting in a happy paddle puddle of its own triumph. The Bicenntential was in many ways akin to Musil’s Parallelaktion, with the difference that it actually happened, and was proceeded with the end of the Cold War a year later, rather than the beginning of the Great War. And 1989 is not 1914; these are profoundly incommenurable realities, although one complexly produced the other’s enabling conditions.
Moreover: Australia’s ‘Celebration of a Nation’, – already an Marx-esque ‘second time as farce’ repetition of the US’ Bicentennial in 1976 – took place in a society dominated more than perhaps any other on earth by the utopia of economism as ‘golden soil and wealth for toil’; the complete domination of all other values by the dogged aspiration and quiet enjoyment of property, powered by industrial modernity, and mediated at all points by the central value of utility.
More than perhaps anywhere else at that precise moment, Australia in 1988 was a nation wrapped in a utopian blanket of its own self-supposed two hundred-year making[3], still predicated on the belief that the ownership of a suburban house and yard, purchased by three or so decades of hard work, and living for the weekend – as the reward for that – was both cause-and-effect of the good society. One might re-watch The Castle, or listen to the poetics evoked by Icehouse in ‘83, to get a sense of this lost world.
Standing at the limit of an endless ocean
Stranded like a runaway, lost at sea
City on a rainy day down in the harbour
Watching as the grey clouds shadow the bay
Looking everywhere 'cause I had to find you
This is not the way that I remember it here
Anyone will tell you it’s a prisoner island
Hidden in the summer for a million years
Gorz pinpoints 1988 as the collapse of the utopia of labour proper to the past two hundred years of industrial modernity, and evaluates it as a crisis, “more fundamental than any economic or social crises”. How could both the glib ‘celebratarianism’ of The Bicentennial and the big call in Gorz’ analysis both be resonant clarions of that two-hundred-year-in-the-making moment, as seen from a clearer now? What did Gorz mean, then, and what might this mean for us, now, looking back thirty-four years later? By using each point to look incongruously at the other, this post will begin to sketch the overlapping contours – and some key incoherences – of this squarecircle.
First, Gorz:
“The utopia which has informed industrial societies for the last two hundred years is collapsing. And I use the term utopia in its contemporary philosophical sense here, as the vision of the future on which a civilisation bases its projects, establishes its ideal goals and builds its hopes. When a utopia collapses in this way, it indicates that the entire circulation of values which regulates the social dynamic and the meaning of our activities is in crisis. This is the crisis we are faced with today. The industrialist utopia promised us that the development of the forces of production and the expansion of the economic sphere would liberate humanity from scarcity, injustice and misery; that these developments would bestow on humanity the sovereign power to dominate Nature, and with this the sovereign power of auto-determination; and that they would turn work into a demiurgic and auto-poetic activity in which the incomparably individual fulfilment of each was recognised – as both right and duty – as serving the emancipation of all.
Nothing remains of this utopia. This does not mean that all is lost and that we have no other option but to let events take their course. It means we must find a new utopia, for as long as we are the prisoners of the utopia collapsing around us, we will remain incapable of perceiving the potential for liberation offered by the changes happening now, or of turning them to our advantage by giving meaning to them”
(Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, Intro, 8).
What happened in Australia since 1988, such that we might see the collapse of this utopia, the slow death of this futurity, even in-and-through a period of astonishing prosperity and stability?
Australia in 1988 (pop. 16 mill.) was conspicuous as the Anglocapitalist economy that might appear, on first blush, to be as far from disintegration as one might imagine any place to have been in the twentieth century: less unequal and class-bound than perennially declining Britain, less polite and boring (and with cuter animals and more beach days) than Canada, and (in its own self-mystified mirror) with ‘little’ of the structural racism of South Africa or the United States – and comparatively little of the latter’s issues with gun violence and God bothering and Brimstone, Positive Thinking presidents, and Great Power Rivalry. The New Zealand of Rogernomics (1984-88) might have been comparable, yet it was even further away and smaller (3.2 mill. in ‘88), giving late 80s Australians another reason to feel good about themselves. We had beaten the US in the America’s Cup in ‘83; we had Duncan Armstrong in the pool in Seoul; we usually won the cricket and both types of rugby; we were still okay at tennis (Pat Cash won Wimbledon in ‘87), and even hosted one of the four Opens – what more could a young and free country possibly achieve?
On closer examination, however, the façade of prosperity and almost unreasonably cocky confidence projected by the late 80s – which you can hear best expressed in the saxophone solos in INXS’ (who toured Kick in ‘88) singles from those years – Australia had been purchased (or sold) at great cost. The cost was the societal value of labour, and the meaning was the meaning of work itself, its status and purchasing power, and eventually (as of writing) its purpose and future.
From the election of the Hawke government in 1983, the 80s Labor Party gave way on – or gave away – its constituent value (labour). And it also traded the primacy of its most-valued constituents (the rural, regional and industrial working class, and the labour movement), for the primacy of ‘the economy’, and the betterment of Australia’s place in the international pecking order – via competitive advantage, and increases in productivity though ‘microeconomic reforms’. In essence, the Hawke-Keating government had sought an early mover advantage by neoliberalising its second-rate, small-medium-sized economy (the kind of place that produced the Holden Camira under the Button Plan): floating the dollar, removing tariffs and protections, and beginning the processes of offshoring, outsourcing, and inducing individualist competition and subcontracting in organisations. Computers (and INXS-level confidence) were then supposed to do the rest.
Key in all of this was Prime Minister Hawke using his cross-sectoral popularity, charismatic authority and credentials as a trade unionist to convince the workers to come along for the ride: just trust us… let us do this, don’t go on strike or arc up, and we can all get rich; you can have a speedboat or jet ski, go to Bali on holiday, buy a Harley or a caravan, and we promise we’ll keep Medicare and granny’s pension.
As a prudent judgement of Australia’s pragmatic chances of ‘avoiding losing prosperity’ at that conjuncture, the structural-economic transformations set in train by Hawke-Keating made complete sense; at the same time, in retrospect, one could say there was, at least, a Jack and the Beanstalk aspect to all of this, and the superb irony of the Labor Party trading away labour for a total alignment of the government and population with capital, the better to ride the wave of “the forces of production and the expansion of the economic sphere”. At the very least, it was a trade off and a massive gamble, and a one-way transaction – with no prospect of exchange or refund.
Australia is still in the grip of this neo-social compact, although what most people have not quite noticed – we know it, but most do not notice it – is that it none of its current prosperity, which *is* the prosperity of the last few decades, is about labour. Rather, it has been almost entirely powered by the ‘nation’s’ collective and individual relation to different forms of capital: mining exports, capital, property, migration, higher education, and the urban-infrastructural expansion and renovations required to keep this expansion expanding smoothly.
Can we really see the collapse of the utopia of labour in all of this?
To be sure, ‘all of the above’ requires a lot labour: as Barbara Kreuger noticed, it’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it. Yet, in line with the fundamental thesis of The Critique of Economic Reason, a closer glance shows that labour’s meaning and significance have been eclipsed. In 2022, any Australian individual can trace their success or failure, their life chances, their prospects, their place in the global birth lottery, to their relation to their exclusive possession and an entitlement to gain on the basis of what they derive from their capital: success in Australia now is *about* money and property, not “wealth for toil”. How ‘hard’ you work, or for that matter ‘merit’, or ‘career’ – these are secondary and actually usually incidental factors.
(It is only the Baby Boomers who selfishly and myopically continue believe that they ‘earned’ any of the prosperity that has attended this three-decade high tide.)
Based on the co-expansion of these unleashed factors, between 1993 and 2020 (pop. 17-25 mill.), Australia experienced a globally unparalleled twenty-seven consecutive years of growth, no recessions. This was in large measure powered by skilled migration to Sydney and Melbourne (now roughly 40% of the population and roughly 66% of GDP), successive mining booms (2003-2010ish), real estate speculation (still going), and the economies and markets supporting it, whose sectors were usually a bit average and flabby, but good enough in global relative terms to keep on chugging along. Contemporary Australia seems like a utopia for ‘spiv’ bankers and real estate agents and rude tradies who don’t call you back or show up on time, and it is, but only because they service an extraction-based rentier economy that, in a deep sense, sits ‘somewhere between’ Norway and Nigeria. Gina Reinhart is our true totemic animal.
Moreover, during these same years, although Australia was involved in its longest ever military deployment (Operation Slipper, Afghanistan, 2001-14) it experienced no war, no famine, no energy or food shortages, no civil unrest, and (with caveats) no ‘natural’ disasters of a nation-crippling scale. By anyone’s luck in the global-relative shitheap, these are incredible tailwinds.
The years since The Bicenenntial might have seemed like the best of times, not the blurst: they might have been lived by you as the best of times, if you already owned property and were established, and didn’t spunk it all at the casino or lose it on horses, meth, coke, or crypto. If the old utopia was no longer operational, one might reply to Gorz that this was because it had been bested by the post-industrial utopia of capital, property, services, tourism, spectacles, and global sporting events. Thus in a sense, Australia in the 2000s and 2010s could be proof positive that the eclipse of Gorz’ utopia happened, but didn’t matter: French missive as red herring or dead letter.
But then: could it also be the precisely the case that in these same years, when everything seemed amazing – to anyone old or white enough to have a tranche or a trough to snout in– that Australia was also living through the collapse of the ‘utopia of labour’ of industrial society, a collapse that actually really matters, a crisis of meaning with great and consequential societal-economic meaning, a collapse that was brought on by the totalisation of the very economic reason driving the rationalisation of everything during the three decades between 1988-2018?
I think this is also possible…
– and not only as a person who believes that Australia’s ‘true’ utopia is the dystopia of Mad Max (another post for another day).
Yet we can only see it once we peer past the tranches and the troughs and all the rackets powered by mineral exports, capital gains and property rents – whose common ground is land appropriation that is also-always the expropriation of indigenous peoples and relations to country – and look to what’s happened to to labour in Australia from 1988-2022.
To give this a tight enough focus, I think we can see Gorz’ argument playing out now through the banal, concrete materialities of labour playing out in the ordinary events of everyday life. In the second part of this two part post, I’ll explore this in greater contemporary detail. But to summarise it here and conclude before the words continue to percolate, we might follow Gorz’ intuitions a little further and really look at is the uneven distribution of rewards and free time that attend different classes of employment, the labour one actually has to perform to do these jobs, and the rewards one gets in exchange for them. For recall, the two hundred year utopia of industrial labour was supposed to give all of us the “the sovereign power of auto-determination… that… would turn work into a demiurgic and auto-poetic activity in which the incomparably individual fulfilment of each was recognised – as both right and duty – as serving the emancipation of all”. As Keynes mused in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in 1930, automation was supposed to ‘solve the economic problem’, giving us, the grandchildren of 1930, ‘our destination of economic bliss’. Yet by 2009, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sloganised the social fact for younger people: one had to be earning or learning in order to be getting by in 21C Australia. Australia by 2009, a country that was also burning (Black Saturday) had no place for any form of non-economically directed yearning.
How can we sleep while our beds are burnin’?
How can we dance while the earth is turnin’?
What strikes me now in 2022, after the two lockdown years – fifteen years on from the deadlock choice of either wage slavery OR indebting oneself in order to get credentialed enough for one’s geographico-socioecomically appropriate level of wage slavery – is that Australians live in a job market marked by the profoundly unequal distribution of work-conditions, workload, and work-reward. And interestingly, this is exactly the reality that Gorz managed to spy from France by 1988, which I’ll focus on in posts to come over the Australian summer, provided we are not flooded or on fire. It is exactly the differential, dismal, servile reality on offer by Uber in its injunction to ‘Start driving —>’
The utopia of capital, and our collective-differential relation has produced a labour-differential apartheid. In turn, this produces cities in which we live separated yet co-dependent worlds – operationally closed yet structurally coupled, as Luhmann would say. These walled worlds, in contact across Gorilla Glass, are inhabited by different classes of people who pass like ships in the night as they drive, or drive around, or are driven around, servicing one another. These groups inhabit incommensurable expectational horizons, for no other reason that while one group makes $21.38/hour (state minimum wage) making coffees or pouring 15 dollar pints, there are others who make 75/hour doing institutional work (middle class professionals), while those who make the decisions for everyone in the above categories might earn as much as 500/hour (corporate executives), excluding bonuses, travel allowances, and superannuation. Recall that, in these cities, there are also kitchens, cafes, brothels and aged care premises where international students and other denizens work off the books for 8/hour or less.
These disparate realities –and above all what one ‘did’ in them, and got for the doing– became very conspicuous as class privilege during the covid lockdown years. Ask yourself:
were you working from home and having wine delivered to you, in a job where you were salaried and earned a steady $50-500/hour, every hour, all year (excluding superannuation and other incomes from investments, rents, and the bare fact of your property appreciating beneath your feet)?
Were you continuing to drive and ride through the emptied streets of the city delivering things, or your body or time, to property-owning professionals in their renovated houses for $20-30/hour?
Were you unable to even do your casual or part-time work (where you formerly had to commute on public transport to attend a distant campus or premises)?
Were you stuck in a sharehouse with housemates whose mental health was collapsing, and maybe setting up your OnlyFans account ($0-500/hour),
or were you attending a meatpacking warehouse or aged care home, where covid was rampant ($8-30/hour), or
were you couch surfing – or sleeping rough in the emptied CBD?
As these snapshots help us begin to glimpse, Contemporary Australia under the utopia of capital is comprised of an aggregation of bubbles, interpenetrated by functions and communication devices, such that one group can ensure the other group is delivering it WFH computer monitors, burritos and wine in a polite and timely way – a society structured more like Sloterdijk’s co-immunism than the commun-ism at the end of the labour-utopian rainbow.
The death of labour, and the victory of all forms of capital over labour and living in this country, then, has traded the value of progress through work for a life differential worked out through one’s inherited privilege and established status, what one owns or gains, and how one is rewarded based on the seniority and (perversely) the physical ease of one’s work: for as a general tendency, the cushier your job conditions during the lockdown years, whatever the hours, the more you were paid to sit at home and sigh.
In the part two of this post, I’ll continue to sketch the patterns of this profoundly uneven distribution of reward and work, by looking at the fate of free time. Aside from the uneven distribution of reward, the curious social fact that attends the ‘fulfilments’ of contemporary society is that everyone is overburdened: no one has any free time, least of all the ‘winners’, those creaming the most from this hierarchy-and-unevenness producing distributional system. For above all, the utopia at the heart of *communism* – Marx’ communism, not the Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism it became in most places – was a utopia of free time.
[1] If you google ‘Australia, celebration of the nation’, you’ll find the terrible theme song, shot in front of Uluru (still called Ayers Rock by most of my family at that time), and a video transfer of the full free-to-air 3.5 hour broadcast, all on YouTube.
[2] The Traitor and Letter to D being the other two.
[3] Of course, it’s not historically coherent to trace any of this back to 1788, a time in which the British had no clear sense that New South Wales and Van Diemens Land would become a going concern or a nation. The very word Australia was not in circulation until after Flinders’ circumnavigation in 1815, and conquest did not become an explicit aim – to the limit of the territorial landmass – until the 1830s. If one were to paint in less incoherent historical brushstrokes, then it’s more correct to say that ‘The Bicentennial’ was looking back at 1835 and onwards, and especially when things truly took off from 1851, when gold was discovered around Clunes and Warrandyte. So then: ‘nowhere else on earth had the dreams at the heart of *Victorianism* come to greater fruition’, would be a less historically incoherent statement. One could follow James Boyce and trace the coalescence of this ‘wealth for toil’ utopia from the intentional conquest from 1835 and especially the way in which the foundation of Melbourne was then turbocharged by the Victorian Goldrush and ensuing real estate speculation of the 1870s-1880s, entrenching by 140 years of almost undeniable ‘progress’ – if you’re not indigenous. But actually, 1988 was more of a ‘Centennial’, from the self-congratulatory high point of the Exhibition in Melbourne in 1888: and yet, admitting this admits that the whole project of Australia was in essence an excrescence of the British Imperial nineteenth century (that happened to ‘come off’ and work out okay in the long run, based on luck), which leads Austalians into a set of admissions they are usually not quite comfortable tarrying with.