The Postmodern Left

A certain version of the political left is at one with conservatives in misrepresenting ‘postmodernism’ in order to denounce it. For this ‘left’, which recoils from the left’s historically indivisible association with Marx, the purpose of politics is simply to win government for itself. Our argument here is that, ironically, such a purpose mirrors the very lack of purpose that conservatives define ‘postmodernism’ to represent. Hence the recent call by Clive Hamilton for the left to turn to the churches for moral guidance, in the absence of any meaningful political convictions.

Pomo-bashing, like dragon-hunting, is an activity best undertaken in the suspension of disbelief. By imagining a world in which winged, fire-breathing reptiles with magical powers are real, it is possible to imagine what it might be like to hunt such creatures. Similarly, once you accept that postmodernism holds there to be no such thing as truth, you can bash it.
In political terms, such acceptance turns 'postmodernism' into a dirty word. Conservatives use it to denigrate a version of the educated, middle-class left as dragon-hunting dreamers who believe that all cultures are equal and history is a myth. The left uses it to distinguish serious and practical concerns from the 'soft' ideas of dragon-hunting dreamers who selfidentify as left, or are made out to do so by the right. Attacking 'the postmodern left', as it were, is a bipartisan sport.
For most conservatives, 'postmodernism' is shorthand for any form of critical relation to the conservative idea that truth is absolute and universal. As Giles Auty tells it in a Quadrant essay for June 2000, postmodernism's hydra-like appearances take the shape of 'deconstruction, post-colonialism, revisionist history, gender theory, political correctness, multiculturalism and feminism', all of which are underpinned by 'neo-Marxist theory'. 2 Adopting an apocalyptic tone favoured by conservatives when contemplating the always inevitably into a powerful 'evangelical' movement belonging, unsurprisingly, to the 'middle-class, tertiary-educated Left, with its campaign for the three Rs of refugees, reconciliation and republic'. 3 Peddling a series of fabricated atrocity stories, such as the stolen generations, this movement has somehow managed to hoodwink an unspecified but putatively vast number of Australians into hating their country: The reasons why so many Australians today want to think so badly of their own country are hard to pin down. I don't pretend to understand them all. But it is clear that, for the past thirty years, the Evangelical Left has bloated itself on such a diet of myth, propaganda and atrocity stories about Australian history, about our role in the contemporary world, and especially about our chief ally and best friend, the United States, that it no longer believes in or cares about objective truth. 4 Such hyperbole (which is used to considered effect by other conservatives, from Miranda Devine, Kevin Donnelly and Luke Slattery to former prime minister John Howard) seeks to make it seem as though the postmodern left will stop at nothing short of laying Western civilisation to cataclysmic waste. Small wonder of late that conservatives are increasingly emboldened to associate postmodernism with jihadism. Yet beyond such hyperbole, where is 'the postmodern left'? Where, beyond the fear-mongering accusations and alarmist spin, would you find this new 'totalitarianism' that the 'middle-class, tertiary-educated Left' has produced, out of loathing for the West and hatred for Australia, from the utterly preposterous idea that there is no such thing as truth? Where is this movement' s manifesto? In which books, and on what pages, is it written or implied that the aim of postmodernism is 'the neo-Marxist Ultimately, for these groups the whole point of the left, the only 'realistic' point, is to win government for the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The best way of achieving this is to broaden the left' s popular appeal, requiring these groups to position themselves against the abstract, revolutionary and extremist views that 'postmodernism' is constructed to represent. For the third group, for instance, it' s an incontestable article of faith that ideas are subordinate to actions (as though somehow ideas are not actions in themselves); hence the shibboleth of 'the postmodern left' serves the useful function of making this group' s politics seem pragmatic and socially relevant in contrast to the self-serving obscurantism of the pomo elites. For the house reds, too, whose professional and political credibility rests on not being seen to be obviously 'biased', and whose discursive stock-in-trade is therefore one of temperate critique, the sorts of rhetorical and conceptual excesses that postmodernism is often accused of indulging in are eschewed, all the better to make the rhetorical and conceptual performances of the house reds seem measured, serious and reasonable. And as for the shape-shifting efforts of the ALP to be seen as 'relevant' to voters-as a viable 'alternative' to the Coalition, as a legitimate representative of 'popular' aspirations and interests-there could be no room even for a trace of sympathy with whacky ideas about the indeterminacy of meaning or the instability of truth.
But what these groups cannot afford to countenance is the possibility of having become the very thing they shun. What could be more 'postmodern', after all, than a political party that existed for the sole purpose of getting elected, or a political movement supported by social activists and commentators whose only function was to help that party to procure enough votes to win government? What kind of politics and what kind of political movement would that be?
The ironic point here is that this nominal 'left', which pins its faith on the re-election of the ALP, is a perfect image of what conservatives mean by postmodernism, exhibiting the alleged standard features of a lack of substance, a contempt for values and traditions, a denial of objective history, the absence of any purpose beyond self-reproduction and a refusal to accept that anything could be meaningful or true. But in the end what counts against postmodernism the most, for conservatives like Auty, Windschuttle and others, is the accusation that it' s always got something to do with Marx and therefore with the left. What conservatives call postmodernism is always understood as a project of the left. Why, then, aren't the groups we list above coming out in defence of it?
In the past (in a time before postmodernism, let' s say) the whole point of the ALP, the only point, was to serve as the parliamentary arm of a big idea: democracy, in the radical sense of a project forever without end and always remaining to come. 5 This idea (to revive a dead language momentarily) was based on the view that modern capitalist societies were unjust, since the interests of working-class people were subordinate to those of the propertied ruling class. The only democratic thing to do about this was not to seek justice through reconciliation, in some fanciful 'middle ground' between the warring classes, but rather to further the interests of ordinary working people at the expense of ruling-class interests. The idea was to give more power to working people by taking power away from bosses and owners.
So labour got the eight-hour day, the right to strike, work-free weekends, sick pay, penalty We're not so naive as to think that the category, or the concept, of class is stable and universal. While acknowledging, though, that class is not a grand narrative or a transcendental signified, this is not to say that therefore there is no such thing as class. Like a dragon, which may not be real but is still a very powerful idea, the idea of class cannot be emptied With 'Marx' having been made so unpopular, present-day Labor pins its electoral hopes on other candidates (both real, as it were, and discursive). Yet in its makeover as the party for all seasons, while it remembered to banish Marx it forgot to ban Brian Burke. This may be far from Labor' s first act of forgetfulness (the retreat from Marx stretches back, indeed, to the beginning), but by now the memory loss is almost total. In its simulated politics of conversation and consensus-never to be confused with a politics of conflict and contempttoday' s ALP plays the game of posing as an alternative to conservatism through the cynical appointment of voter-friendly celebrity candidates dressed up as just the sort of compromised 'lefties' an electorate might be persuaded to buy. There are many people in the churches who still cleave to that stream of progressive thought. Although I have no connection with it, it seems to me that this is particularly true in the Catholic Church.
What the Left desperately needs is a new approach to morality. The error of postmodernism, which grew out of the broad academic Left and now dominates Western society, is that it has no metaphysical foundation for a moral critique. Without a metaphysics that is common to humanity, any moral stance must be relative and therefore be contestable and lacking in conviction. 9 Let' s be perfectly clear about the political path Hamilton seeks to take us back down in this passage, in the name of the left: at the end of it lies the church as the ultimate authority on the meaning of life. This points against not only everything in Marx and the entire left history of the labour movement (a movement inspired by the idea and the ideal of democracy to come, despite its history of failures and betrayals), but also the politics and philosophy of the Enlightenment. The superstitious idea that we should all put our faith in religious decrees is profoundly anti-modern and therefore undemocratic, having nothing whatsoever to do with the left.
Marx' s views on the church are well known and we don't need to repeat them here. But before Marx, writing in 1784, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted that knowledge and understanding, as opposed to superstition, must be sought 'without guidance from another'. 'Sapere Aude!' he famously wrote: dare to know-'that is the motto of enlightenment'. 10 So what Marx inherited was a deeply sceptical attitude to superstition, including the superstitious idea that there could be any such thing as an ultimate authority, like the church. Before Marx, in other words, the Enlightenment was already on the side of secular freedom, at the expense of church power. By imploring the left to give itself over to the moral guidance of the church today, therefore, Hamilton is calling on it to renounce not only Marx but also the ideas, values and cultural heritage of the Enlightenment-a very big call indeed.
Instead of answering the Enlightenment challenge to go on daring to know, Hamilton timidly betrays that inheritance by calling for a return to certitude in the form of a 'metaphysical foundation' residing with the church (as a real-historical institution or an abstract, a-historical idea). He is entitled to do so, we acknowledge, but not in the name of Of course, a rock is still a rock if it' s called a stone. The Catholic Church is still the Catholic Church, whether it is called a repository of truth … or a repository of sexual abuse. Words, signs, representations, semiotic systems, texts: none of these things matters. All that matters is the metaphysical foundation of meaning invested in the authority of religious institutions or the ideas that underwrite them. Obviously, then, it' s possible to mount a critique of the church only by submitting critical thought to the higher authority of church law, which enshrines a 'metaphysics that is common to humanity'-and not by means of some abstract, non-journalistic, smart-arse idea like 'there is nothing outside of the text'. 12 Only by submitting to the authority of the church could it be possible to speak out against a global event as scandalous as the church' s cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests and other clergy Marxism, Derrida reminds us, and by 'Marxism' he means the promise of democracy, of democracy to come, is 'heir to a spirit of the Enlightenment which must not be renounced'. 13 Through its cowardly renunciation of that spirit, the postmodern left puts the future at risk of returning to the past.
In Mighell, for espousing the use of industrial action to achieve industry-wide wage rises; and in its pledge to prolong the existence of the unionbusting Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner till 2010. 8. We're not unaware of various religious, political, philosophical and other currents of ALP history, from Methodism to Keynesianism and so forth, but these aren't the currents that haunt presentday Labor. To the extent that any of them has any continuing influence, indeed, they are among the haunted. The point is that any meaningful idea of the left is indissociable from a relationship, which could take many forms, to an idea of Marx. This is why, for instance, Derrida wrote Specters of Marx and not Specters of Wesley.