(Image: Private Media; Scribe)

What Is to Be Done: Political Engagement And Saving The Planet. Barry Jones, Scribe, 2020

Of Labour and Liberty. Race Mathews, Monash University Press, 2017

Barry Jones, trim, crisp, salt ‘n’ pepper grey, in his eighties but looking decades younger, greets you from the cover of his new book What Is to Be Done: Political Engagement And Saving The Planet (Scribe, 2020)– the title invoking Lenin’s pamphlet calling for a party of professional revolutionaries, which itself invoked an 1860s Russian novel which had called the privileged young to put themselves in service to the people.

Jones’ arm is extended, he’s talking. It’s very much how he’s been seen by the progressive middle and working classes for more than half a century: the explainer, the clear-maker, the great representative of a hopeful Labor progressivism.

In What Is to Be Done Jones sets out a manifesto for a certain type of Labor progressive to act on in these straitened times. It’s a valuable armoury for anyone of that persuasion — but it also, through key blind spots, shows how seriously limited the prospects are for that specific form of progressivism in our era.

Some of that is remedied in a work of another Labor viceroy, Race Mathews, whose history of the Catholic social movement Of Labour and Liberty (Monash University Press, 2017) is also a manifesto for rebuilding that progressivism from the ground up — a case for deeper change which is not without possibility, but very much without probability — and points to the very deep problems humanity faces.

World War II cemented modern Labo(u)r progressivism. A mobilised and planned society defeated fascism and ushered in a liberal era, seeding ideas such as John F Kennedy’s “New Frontier”, and UK PM Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” to create a society of equality and flourishing. Jones’ contribution to this was Sleepers, Wake! a 1982 book published on the eve of the Hawke government’s accession to power.

Sleepers, Wake! was a national and international hit, and the first chapter consists of Jones restating its argument and cataloguing the influence of its argument that the fusion of comms and production technology would categorically shift the nature of western society in a way that progressives could steer and develop, or could let pass them by. In the still-settled world of the protectionist-industrial four-TV-channels Australia it was a bombshell, even if Labor never really got on board — instead crippling industry and segueing to a new resources boom.

As Jones notes honestly now, he was both our country’s longest serving science minister and the party’s Cassandra — Labor’s enthusiasm for radical reconstruction was limited, even as global recognition was forthcoming. He is also honest enough to acknowledge that things didn’t turn out exactly as he had thought they might. The tech revolution really happened, in as spectacular a fashion as expected. Things that were science-fictive 35 years ago — from home teleworking to brain-machine interface — are either commonplace or coming fast.

The result? Not technotopia but Amazon workslaves, Donald Trump, and Uber Eats delivering McDonalds.

There are six times as many tertiary graduates now as there were when Sleepers, Wake! was published, and yet then there was a near-universal respect for science and enlightenment, even by those without access to it as knowledge. Now the most basic tenets are disputed as part of a vast social-culture war, whose spread has had significant effects — the fiasco of our vaccine rollout, and the apparently consequence-free result for the government, for example.

What has occurred and what must be thoroughly explored and addressed, Jones notes, is the global decay of democracy, political engagement and the consequence of such. Without remedying that, a scientific civilisation will be distinctly incapable of even addressing the potential catastrophes it should be supremely capable of contesting.

Jones’ cataloguing of this, his history of how we got to here from there, and his documentation of the decline of our current state from the radiating energy of the enlightenment, is the core of the book. It will serve as a manifesto and program for those who share Jones’ form of progressivism, and for whom the events of the last decade or so mark a reactionary counter-revolution against the push of history; a counter-revolution powered by small elites manipulating fear through their control of media and political power.

But it is here that the book also serves, in an unintentional fashion, to show the limits of such progressivism’s ability to accurately analyse its own defeat. If there’s a major through-line to Jones’ argument about the evisceration of democracy it’s that changes in the media form — the online revolution — have broken down the relationship between truth, evidence and information that once existed and allowed populist demagogues (Trump the most prominent among them) to rise to power by pandering to the emotions of specific social sub-groups, which thus fatally diverts from the rational conversation that would otherwise take place, and which would underpin a renewed democracy.

Political disengagement from major parties is discussed, but not drawn into that framework. Nor is there any wider discussion about why people would disengage, when they are better educated and ostensibly more capable of accessing information than they have ever been.

Though he catalogues and anatomises the rise of right-wing populism ably, Jones has little to say as to why it has arisen, except as a reaction to the success of progressives such as Obama. But why would progressive success call out this reaction all around the world? What need would it be satisfying? Fear of immigration and the chronic physical pain of old age are also offered for the FOX News effect — of a steady rise in resentful right-wing politics.

This seems insufficient as an explanation of a social-political phenomenon that has stopped progressivism in its tracks across the world. It would appear to arise from the idea that any push back against progressivism cannot be something with any rational basis: it is simply a byproduct of other effects.

The alternative argument would be that this new anti-progressive wave arises precisely because the predictions in Sleepers, Wake! have come true. The knowledge revolution has occurred, industrial society in the West has been dismantled — but not in a rational and planned fashion. Instead, a new class has been empowered, for whom knowledge is a form of portable capital. Their particular values are universalist and cosmopolitan, and they impose them as if they were simply right, without question.

Those who’ve had their lifeworlds destroyed along with industry see knowledge and science as their oppressor, not liberator. That spreads from the techno-hell of the Amazon warehouse, to doubting medical science, an all-in deal. Conspiracy theories, concrete and mythical not abstract and complex, become a form of resistance. In another world, the internet would be a weapon against them. Now it’s their carrier. The argued cause of populism is really an effect.

In the final chapter, Jones usefully offers an itemised and expanded progressive agenda for a renewal of democracy, but his hope that this could become the ALP’s agenda is in vain, because the knowledge/”outsider” divide runs right down the party’s middle.

The manifesto, from radical action on climate change to a bill of rights and beyond is pretty much the party platform of the Greens, who go almost wholly unanalysed in the book. Why would Jones not simply endorse them, rather than talk of founding a new party as he does? The answer, I think, is that the Greens — as a class party of this new knowledge class — make the best and worst features of the progressive culture and personality visible, now that they’re not submerged in a larger Labor tradition.

That grand alliance was very real, and also a little fictional, but wherever its character it is not coming back. The question of what might serve to reground it is raised in Race Mathews’ Of Labour and Liberty, a history of the Catholic social movement in Australia; from its beginnings on the left — following the release of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum letter in 1893, which created a non-Marxist opposition to unrestrained capitalism — to its flip over to the right, under the Machiavellian and ultimately enigmatic BA Santamaria.

For Mathews, this history — eminently readable, but one for the specialists — is of a fall. His final chapters wheel round to a parallel movement that did not lose its social politics — the region-wide cooperative movement in Mondragon, in Spain’s Basque country. Here, a large network of factories, shops and businesses, employing tens of thousands, have been run collectively and democratically for decades, while still being commercial in form, offering a possible alternative.

Mathews’ exploration of this raises the question that Jones does not: of what the basis of social solidarity might be for a progressive renewal.

Alas, the spirit of Mondragon’s politics may be a necessary but not sufficient condition, and the distinct condition of the Basque/Euskara people — as effectively a European Indigenous people, culturally separate to all around them, their social identity rooted in interlaced clan forms — may explain the Mondragon system’s longevity, but also its limited portability.

A prior solidarity may be necessary for flourishing. The hard truth may be that atomisation and disengagement are deep structures of a society in which these technological revolutions have occurred, and any future mass progressive politics will have to take such as a given condition.

If true, that would mark the conclusion of a certain type of Labor progressivism… but that may be the least of our worries.