The Best Australian Essays 2014 (30 page)

Multiculturalism was never part of the Greece I have been visiting over the past thirty years. It wasn't part of the Greek conception of nationhood before the global financial crisis, and it certainly isn't part of how Greeks have seen themselves since then. And not only in Greece: the antagonism towards multiculturalism is rife throughout the EU. The financial crisis has only exacerbated existing tensions over immigration in Europe. Here it is important to separate the politics of immigration from the politics of asylum. Immigrants in Europe, and their children, remain non-European in both political and popular language. The right-wing parties on the rise throughout the continent – in Holland and Denmark, Sweden and Hungary, the Czech Republic and France – are not only anti–asylum seeker but also anti–
immigrant.
In Australia, mired for more than fifteen years in the toxic politics of border security and asylum, we can easily disregard the importance of this distinction.

The argument propounded by the right in Europe is that immigration is one of the main reasons the social democratic consensus has shattered. Fears are largely directed towards Asian, Arab and African immigrants but there is also a resentment of Balkan and Eastern European immigrants. That resentment reveals a contradiction at the heart of the EU project that has never been successfully resolved: that the economic union that arose out of Cold War politics was about
Western
European nations rebuilding and reconstructing European identity after the calamities of the world wars. According to the right-wing propaganda, the notion of who is European was decided not in national parliaments but in Brussels.

In his 2009 memoir
Returning to Reims,
translated into English last year, the French cultural critic Didier Eribon writes of visiting his family home in north-eastern France thirty years after he deliberately turned his back on the working-class world from which he emerged. In that long period of exile from his family, Eribon took on academic postings in Paris, wrote a biography of Michel Foucault, and became a prominent critic of and from within the Left. Over those three decades, he effaced his working-class heritage, and understood this denial to be necessary in order to refashion himself as a leftist cultural critic in Europe.

A call from his mother prompts the return home. His father – a factory labourer, a drinker and, from what Eribon writes, a hard and sometimes abusive man – is dying. It is his father's sexism and homophobia that has engendered the long silence between them. During Eribon's youth, his family and their community were Communists. On his return to Reims, he is shocked to discover that his parents and his brothers have abandoned socialism and now vote for the far-right Front National.

Eribon never reconciles with his father. He does not attend the old man's funeral. He can't abandon the rage of his adolescence, and he seethes at the xenophobia, casual sexism and homophobia of his brothers. He finds it hard to understand how they have remained untouched by the liberating social movements that have defined his life after Reims. But what remains unanswered in the book is the question of how his family were to make sense of such cultural transformations if Eribon himself saw it as a precondition of his liberation that he break his link to family and to his class. Eribon's portrait of his family is not distant; it is familiar and recognisable. As is the paradox of his avowal of socialist and social democratic principles while at the same time deploring and rejecting the working class itself. I am not sure what the French term for ‘bogan' might be, or even if there exists an equivalent in the language, but the distaste, shame and fear that Eribon expresses when he writes about his family are contained in that word, in how it is used here in Australia.

Australia has escaped the worst manifestations of the global financial crisis. There is great wealth here, and unemployment levels are comparatively low. On returning to Melbourne from Athens, I found myself fulminating, in ways not too dissimilar to Eribon, at the complacency and entitlement of my nation. But my rage was tempered when I left the inner city to visit family and friends in outer suburbia.

If many of them were now indeed ‘cashed-up bogans', just as many were unemployed. Many were on welfare, many on drugs both illegal and prescribed. Even among the ‘cashed-up bogans', there was a real fear about how long this period of extended prosperity was going to last. And unlike my friends in the inner city, they worked in trades and jobs that still required hard physical labour, or they worked in retail, or as domestics, or in health services, where repetitive constant movement – from scanning a barcode to stripping and making up a bed to mopping a floor – could also lead to long-term physical damage. They were fearful of a rise in interest rates and in rents and of the loss of permanent jobs to casualisation. If I complained to them about so many of us entering the private health system or sending our children to private schools, they pointed out that the nearby public schools and the public hospitals were strained and over-committed.

Did they care about same-sex marriage? Some did, some didn't. Did they agree with the bipartisan insistence on offshore processing for asylum seekers? Most did, some didn't. Did they think that the media's treatment of Julia Gillard had been misogynistic? Some did, some didn't. Were they worried about climate change? Some were not, most keenly were. But none of these issues were central to their concerns. The cost of living, the uncertainty of employment, the erosion of public health and public education – that's what mattered.

*

*

It was on the drive from Athens airport to my aunt's house on the western outskirts of the city that the immense transformation wrought by the global financial crisis hit home. Along the motorway, the billboards were all bare; there was only mile after mile of skeletal scaffolding. The Greek economy had come to such a standstill that no one was bothering to advertise anymore. This was a first-world nation, part of the EU, and yet capital had drained from it. The empty billboards seemed to presage an apocalyptic future.

The architects of austerity promise that the advertising will eventually return, that the ruthless measures introduced are necessary and will result in a more productive and economically sustainable Greece. But as anyone who has lived through unemployment understands, the social cost of this economic experiment will be paid by the present generation and the generation to come.

It was a central component of the social democratic consensus across the Western world that parliamentary democracy, hand in hand with the welfare state, would guarantee productive and sustaining labour for working-class people. For all of our outrage and mockery when Gina Rinehart extols the cheapness of African labour compared to Australian labour, at its essence the sentiment is not so different to Christine Lagarde's privileging of a sub-Saharan child's poverty over that of an Athenian child. Of course, it is a matter of degree, and only a fool would deny it: the poverty in the developing world is incalculably more pernicious and inhumane. But the faith my parents placed in Hawke and Keating's neoliberal reforms was predicated on the promise not that they would democratise poverty but that they would democratise opportunity. That too was the promise of social democratic parties of Europe. That has been the promise that has been betrayed.

I came to claim a very different left-wing politics to the faith of my parents. My mother's politics were forged from a personal experience of superpowers meddling in the political affairs of Greece. Her anti-imperialism grew stronger here, both from Australia's involvement in Vietnam and watching from afar as the United States supported the military junta in Greece in the late'60s and early'70s. Subsequently, it was my parents' experience of a migrant working-class life that determined their alliance with the party that represented labour. My politics, on the other hand, emerged from an intellectual and university-trained engagement with the identity movements of feminism, queer, anti-racism and anti-colonialism. These were forms of politics that, to put it most simply, replaced the idea of empowerment based on labour rights with principles of empowerment founded on human rights. It is neither my want nor my belief that a choice needs to be made between these two forms of political alliance, but it is clear that social democratic and labour parties have for a quarter of a century increasingly privileged the latter over the former.

There is a reasonable logic to that privileging: there has been the collapse of Communism and with it the collapse of faith in state control over economies, the inexorable pace of globalisation, the obduracy of sections of the union movement (best exemplified by the suicidal lunacies of the UK unions in the 1960s and'70s, which laid the ground for Thatcherism to emerge and smash them). And yes, the success of social democracies in educating and professionalising the children of workers
has
led to substantially increased mobility in terms of aspiration and identity. But a politics of rights, classically liberal and universalist, has never been adequate in addressing the conflicts between labour and capital. I might have a right to work, but what is the nature of the work available to me? Have I a right to a minimum wage? Then how and by whom is that minimum to be decided? The EU has a Charter of Fundamental Rights, including industrial rights, given force by the Treaty of Lisbon in December 2007. One can read through this document and applaud the language of dignity that suffuses it. But as my friends and family in Greece have discovered, including those who are still working though their wages are only intermittently paid, the document, for all its splendid rhetoric, is chicken shit.

In
Returning to Reims,
Eribon can't answer the question he poses at the beginning of his book: Why has his traditional working-class family turned from the left, instead supporting Marine Le Pen? In part, he can't answer it because he refuses to hold himself accountable for the thirty years he spent rejecting his roots. Still wedded to his allegiance to the sexual politics of identity, he wants his family to ‘return' to him, to reconstruct themselves as feminist, queer-friendly, Green and anti-racist. But surely there was a possibility beyond estrangement?

Maybe a clue to the paralysis of contemporary social democracy lies in our very use of the word ‘traditional' to describe people whose life choices and experiences are defined by labour and by familial and communal kinship rather than by professionalism, tertiary education and cosmopolitanism. Tradition assumes conservatism, and that is the preserve of the Right, whereas we progressives claim a politics of consistent change. That this change has seen a possibility for greater mobility and opportunity is undeniable, but so is the fact – made clear by the financial crisis – that this mobility and these opportunities are not evenly shared.

The austerity measures in Greece may well result in greater future economic productivity, but the fear that animates many of my friends and family there is the suspicion that it will also destroy aspects of their ‘Greekness' that may not be quantifiable but are just as important to them: family obligation taking precedence over work, a notion of time that isn't held hostage to the twenty-four-hour clock of globalisation, and a pride in the historic and cultural specificity of their national identity.

For too long, like Didier Eribon, I didn't listen to the questions and fears my parents and their generation of the working class were expressing. I pounced on any yearning for traditional values as being inherently right-wing, as counter to progress. But I now consider the silencing of such voices to be a disastrous mistake. It has meant that as far as working-class people are concerned, the mainstream parties – whether of the left, right or centre – are all advocates for markets
first.
Real fears for job security and unemployment are dismissed or papered over by talk of ‘green jobs' or ‘service jobs' as if such euphemisms need no further explanation. But what skills will be required in these new jobs? What opportunities exist? For whom do they exist? Are these jobs permanent or casual?

Working-class people are repeatedly being told that the welfare state can no longer function as it has, that the age of entitlement is over, but what is ignored is that this questioning of its efficacy has been occurring in working-class communities for decades now. If we had been listening, we'd have realised that the talk isn't of cutting the dole or pensions but of how to reverse the penalties built into welfare for those who depend on casual or intermittent work or for single mothers who enter relationships.

As Noel Pearson has most eloquently expressed about the indigenous community, the conversation about welfare dependency, its dangers and tragedies has been occurring for years. The answer is not abolishing welfare but tackling the cycle of dependency. And if we had been listening, we'd have heard that people do want better schools but they know that it takes more than increased funding or increased teacher salaries to halt the deterioration of public schools, that we also must take seriously people's concerns over discipline, curriculum and streaming. The knee-jerk reaction to such questions – as conservative or right-wing or traditionalist – is an indictment of the Left. Why has the traditional working class here and in Europe turned against social democratic parties? Maybe because we haven't been listening.

Listening cuts both ways, and in contrast to Eribon's experiences, I found a way to speak about my politics to my parents, to have them listen to me. They initially had little sympathy for the identity politics that are part of my leftist heritage. But in time they came to understand my commitments to anti-racism, to feminism and sexual identity. They might not have agreed with all of my positions, but nor did I agree with all of theirs. I describe my politics as socialist but equally as libertarian, and the latter doesn't always find favour with many of my own peers.