Humphrey McQueen

Temper Democratic: How Exceptional is Australia?

By Humphrey Mcqueen

Wakefield Press, 1998. 261 pp., $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/16575

Humphrey McQueen has been poking his Marxist nose into Australian society for nearly three decades now, sniffing out how class has shaped the structures of political, economic and cultural life. He has told the story with pungency and wit in a baker's dozen of books, from A New Britannia in 1970 to his latest, Temper Democratic, a collection of recent essays on historical and contemporary issues in Australia.

Australian democracy, and its enemies, is the thread that links McQueen's provocative gems of socialist political writing. He discerns the "near absence of pre-capitalist elements" in Australia. Princess Diana aside, those aristocratic/feudal relics of peasant societies that have lingered on in other countries to create a tradition of social deference to the upper crust have been few in Australia.

This, he argues, has created a political-cultural space for an Australian "exceptionalism" that has given Australia a real head start in the capitalist democracy stakes, as well as creating myths about a national character of anti-authoritarianism and radical egalitarianism.

Compared to the "slow dawning of bourgeois democracy in Western Europe", where authoritarian and military rule has historically held its own compared with peaceful transitions of parliamentary government, Australia has been exceptional in the avoidance of extra-parliamentary transitions of power.

The answer to why this head start has been wasted, and the fulfilment of popular sovereignty has not gone further, McQueen locates in the resistance of the ruling class with its propertied legislative councils, "states rights", the invisible government of secret police, secret treaties and secret government/corporation deals and conspiracies, Wall Street financiers and the assault on trade unions, which has weakened the labour movement's check on the rich and powerful.

"Australian exceptionalism is no warrant for complacency" — democratic gains must be constantly defended and reworked against a hostile and relentless enemy, he concludes.

The enemy ranks include the establishment media, whose control of "the news" and its presentation aims to neutralise political dissent by the working class and oppressed groups.

The most recent trend towards the "miniaturisation of information" — briefer items, news headlines, spot news (trends shared by the ABC as much as the corporate media) — further decontextualises the news and impedes an understanding of social reality. Depth is sacrificed for the sound-bite and the slogan, which by ceaseless repetition creates a "virtual" truth ("tax reform" is what everyone wants and needs, movements on the stock exchange are what matter in life).

"To make sense of what is happening", says McQueen, "it is necessary to avoid the news" and seek out alternative sources, an injunction that McQueen has followed since 1970, when he gave up reading newspapers, and since 1978, when his TV set joined the banished press.

Their absence from McQueen's information world has improved his analytical power vis-à-vis most bourgeois social commentators, a power resting on a Marxist base of historical materialism — an understanding of how economic forces shape institutions and social outcomes.

This approach informs McQueen's essay on the impact of market forces on the ABC, forces which pressure that organisation to emulate the formats of its commercial rivals, his essay on the much-hyped political freedom of the internet, which because of the structure of the concentration of corporate control "can never achieve any democratisation of social power", and his essay on the toy industry, which transforms play and shapes children's minds and imaginations to the end of consumption as the highest good with Barbie, for example, demonstrating that "a girl is what she wears, that personality is a matter of appearance and character a product of fashion".

Capitalist control of science, both for the ideological message and the dividends of corporations, is also, in McQueen's hands, shown to be an enemy of democracy.

The frenzy of speculation about genetic determinism — with breathless announcements about the discovery of a gay gene, a breast cancer gene, an alcoholism gene, even a rape gene — keeps alive the disempowering ideology that "biology is destiny" at the expense of the empowering ideology that social problems are caused by human (class) actions and can be redressed by the same source.

The concept of human "races" is anti-democratic pseudo-science, a political project based on superficial geographic variations (skin colour, eye-shape, etc) observable in all animal species.

A splendid essay on "political correctness" reveals the "anti-PC" campaign as a crusade "to limit the spectrum of opinions to those that suit the powerful" by left-bashing and re-legitimising prejudice.

By contrast, "economic correctness" (the worship of deregulation, privatisation and the market) has escaped scrutiny by the so-called defenders of freedom of expression, whose true allegiance lies with freedom to make profits untrammelled by any egalitarian infringements.

To the extent, however, that the "anti-PC" campaign does strike a chord, argues McQueen, it lies with the usurpation of popular involvement and activism on issues such as racism and sexism by an elite of experts.

Femocrats, for example, have abandoned their constituency. In academic women's studies, "many of the new staff succumbed to the view that the value of intellectual work depends on its degree of abstraction. The slump from demonstrating in favour of the right to choose abortion to the launching of journals to discuss the body as a site for linguistic analysis" was an abandonment of the idea and practice of women taking control of their own lives through a mass movement, one which was once strong enough to force the sexists into silence (if not repentance) but has weakened to allow the chauvinists to find voice again as champions of free speech.

Further essays explore, always with erudition and rarely straitjacketed within a vulgar Marxist orthodoxy on social and cultural phenomena, a wide range of other issues, from the barbarism and exploitation represented in museums and antiquities to D.H. Lawrence's novel Kangaroo, from "deep ecology" to a reflection on multiculturalism that deplores the multi-nationalism that debases the richness of ethnic diversity.

There remains in McQueen's writing, however, a rough edge of cultural nationalism. Whilst arguing for the end of flags, titles and national anthems, he reserves a place for "Waltzing Matilda" as the national song of Australia, even though this song has accreted a cross-class nationalist tone despite its anti-authority lyrical content. In discussing an Australian film/TV industry, the use of "we", "us" and "our", rather than "class", creeps into his considerations of "Australia".

This is a small diversion, however, as class always returns as a social category to counteract the nationalist drug. "Not all men are brothers, not all women are sisters", is an aphorism worth remembering when we consider why democratic power is under threat and who can defend and extend it.