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CURRENT POLITICS - Threat from Individualism |
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The threat that individualism
poses to individual liberties [Humphrey
McQueen, November 13th, 2013, Wheeler Centre, Melbourne. Sponsored
by Spirit of Eureka, Victorian Trades Hall and Liberty Victoria.] One part of the answer is the
organising through its sponsors. The
other part is so obvious that it is usually forgotten. We can debate human
rights because we learnt to speak. That is, our ability to discuss this topic
is not innate. We don’t come from the womb screaming: ‘I want a lawyer’. Almost
all human beings are born with the physiological equipment that lets us learn
to speak and to understand others. If we are not socialised, those capacities
wither and die. It might not be possible to pick them up after a certain age – it’s
certainly much harder. This situation also applies to maths. Four
hundred years ago, almost no one could divide four by two. In 1959, it was possible
for me to pass calculus in year 12. Our species was not several times more
intelligent than we were before Newton and Leibniz. Rather I’d been through a
system of compulsory instruction – I won’t say ‘education’. Again, the
difference is ‘social’, not a proliferation of ‘individual’ geniuses. Relating ourselves to what is innate
in human beings opens up two interrelated matters. Instead of talking about the
rights of animals, we should say other animals. Peter Singer points out that no
other animal can have rights in the way we are expressing this evening. Only our
species can hold a meeting like this one. Human speech, however, has stimulated
acceptance of our responsibility towards other animals. We are part of nature, but our rights
are not innate. Moreover, there’s nothing universal or eternal about our
rights. Universal, eternal and natural are useful as rhetoric. We use those
terms to suggest that rights should be universal and eternal. But to imply that
they are ‘innate’ is to weaken our claims to them by severing our rights from
the ceaseless struggle needed to preserve them. Indeed, human rights are a recent
creation. For example, until the mid- 18th century, almost no one opposed
slavery as such. Except for the slave revolts - from Spartacus to the West
Indies - there was no movement against chattel slavery. Christianity might have
begun as the religion of slaves, but it kept a sharp line between body and soul,
and found no theological grounds for declaring slavery to be sinful. No social
movement arose against chattel slavery until that form of enforced labour ceased
to serve the general interest of property-owners. The Masters then switched to
wage-slavery and to bonded-labour. The latter gave Gandhi his start as a human-rights
lawyer in South Africa. Most of the rights we have now came
with the organisation of working people. For example, a free press came after a
thousand London printers went to prison in the 1820s. Such actions inspired
Hobart union official Samuel Champ in 1916 to respond to wartime propaganda
about the defence of British liberties: Our liberties were not won by mining
magnates and stock-exchange jobbers, but by genuine men of the working-class
movement who had died on gallows and rotted in dungeons and are buried in nameless
graves. These were the men to whom we owe the liberties we enjoyed today. Sam’s
historical understanding informed the labour movement. When I joined the ALP in
1957, I was given a badge which read ‘The unity of labour is the hope of the
world’. Today, the Labor Club in the ACT has a recruitment slogan: ‘It’s all
about you.’ No longer “All about US’’. That is just one example of how a
debased version of individualism is threatening the rights that working people
struggled and died to uphold. Other examples are ‘Me Medicine’, not
vaccination and potable water, those two great preventatives from nineteenth century.
Instead, we face a clamour for tax-deductible health insurance. What we need is
our social, preventive and community-based wellness programs. In
relation to ‘art’, we encounter the notion of a golden nugget or a blood
diamond of creativity which will shine forth if only other people would get out
of one’s light. The cry of ‘I just want to be myself’ is like the scream of
teenagers: ‘Keep out of my bedroom’. In truth, art is social labour. Take the example
of a sole painter in a solitary studio. How many dig up their own pigments? How
many grow the flax and weave it into linen for a canvas? How many nurture
seedlings before waiting twenty years for the timber to make the frames? The Encarta dictionary offers this
definition: ‘A belief that a particular event is the result of a secret plot
rather than the action of an individual or chance.’ If that definition is
adequate then we have to assume that Dick Pratt chanced upon a second
‘individual’ corporate executive with whom to fix prices. That is a conspiracy
fact. This
key plank in corporate propaganda is constructed on the fantasy that Robinson
Crusoe can serve the model for all of economic life. Accordingly, undergraduates
are taught that prices are determined by individual choices at the margin of our
preferences. Social labour and the wealth of nature go missing in accounting
for ‘value added’. Corporations
became persons thanks to the US Supreme Court in the 1880s when the judges
twisted the Fourteenth Amendment which had been adopted to free chattel slaves.
Now corporations in the US of A have free speech rights. In Australia, they
want the right to sue for libel. It used to be said that a corporation as a
legal person had ‘No soul to damn and no arse to kick’. That is still true, but
there is no shortage of arse-holes running them and lying on their behalf. S.
W. Griffith drafted the Constitution in 1891. He became first Chief Justice in
1903. Constitutional Monarchists named their society after him. But they don’t
like to be reminded of his 1889 article on the ‘Distribution of Wealth’. That
principle underpins the Common-Wealth of Australia. Griffith wrote that it is notorious that there is not any
equality of contract between the employer and the employed. ‘ To the extent
that ‘a measure of freedom of contract exists, it has been obtained by
combination on the part of labourers. Griffith’s
insight is in contrast to the individual contracts today promoted by the Constitutional
Monarchists. What a farce it is to suggest that BHP Billiton and a casual cleaner
can negotiate as equals. The corporates holler for lawyers such as Freehills. As
Griffith said, it is ‘notorious’ that no equality exists in labour contracts. Only
collective action – ‘combination’ - ensures individual choice. We
see the mass murderers in the tobacco corporations relying on free-trade
treaties to prevent plain packaging of cigarettes. Their paid liars say that a
nanny state is BAD but are silent on the nagging market. Just compare the size
of their marketing budgets with government spending on wellness messages. When Transfats
were banned a few weeks back, a US libertarian protested that the state should
not tell him what to eat. Rather, food should be the free choice of each individual.
This argument ignores marketing – which is more than the adverts. Super-market
shelves are the most expensive real estate in the world. That explains why
chocolates and not apples are at the checkout. That everyday encounter in
supermarkets is an instance of market totalitarianism. Here we need to distinguish
totalitarian from authoritarian. Authoritarian involves physical force. Totalitarian
means total penetration of the social order and the psyche. We live in a
supersaturated solution of signals to BUY BUY BUY. Where there is no outside
the market, we have totalitarianism. How did we get to this impoverishment? How
has individualism been hollowed out? From creativity, to use, to mere possession
and now to our being defined our the latest purchase. If the ‘Me Generation’ is
a threat to our liberties, that threat is not the fault of individuals. The
danger comes through the nagging market. Fear of the state is well grounded.
The state is not our friend since it operates in partnership with the marketers.
At best, the state is a site for conflict in which rights can be won and
defended. Let’s contrast how leadership on two
issues resulted in opposite responses among large sections of the public. During
the recent long drought, all voices of authority supported water restrictions.
The public welcomed the need to limit their household needs as part of a social
connectedness. How different has been the situation with refugees arriving by
boat. From 1993, the ALP locked them up. That decision told the casual observer
that these people must be dangerous. Why else would you put them behind razor
wire? Despite the pollution of ideas by
corporates and the state, most people are still more than capable of being ‘social’
in a responsible way. The reason is because we have been socialised since birth.
Thatcher is notorious for saying ‘there
is no such thing as ‘society’. That much of what she claimed is right. There is
no such ‘thing’. There are social relationships. But she went on to claim that
there are only families and individuals. Well, there are families,
households, and they contribute to the creation of individualism - as we saw
about learning to speak. But she was wrong to say there are ‘only’
families and individuals. There is also the state, as she well knew as its
chief executive for Britain. And there are corporates, whose interests she was
promoting through the British state. But there is much more besides. For
instance, there was the Miners’ Union against which she used the state to
smash, and there were the communities that defeated her Poll Tax. How
are we to overcome the threat that corporatised individualism poses to
individual liberties? In brief we have to enrich individualism. That aim is not
a matter of ever more connections. The threat will not be vanquished by having
10,000 Facebook friends instead of a mere 1,100. Quality tells. Whatever is
peculiar to our personalities is the outcome of our relationships with other
people and with the rest of nature. From these facts of life, we can recognise
that it is the quality of relationships that enriches individuality. Our task therefore is to advance the
social relationships we value, personal and political, by joining the Spirit of
Eureka, Refugee Action and one’s union. More importantly, once we join we have
to provide our active support. Our individuality is guaranteed through
engagement with others on a basis of social justice and social equality. That
is why it is appropriate to conclude with the Eureka Oath We swear by the Southern Cross, to stand
truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.
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