Sir Walter Murdoch Memorial Lecture (2013) Australian Citizenship, 1912 - a Model for the World? Lecture Delivered By: Dr Toby Miller
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Sir Walter Murdoch Memorial Lecture (2013) Australian Citizenship, 1912 - A Model for the World? Lecture delivered by: Dr Toby Miller THE GOOD CITIZEN Book throwing. It’s a joy to be here. Murdoch University has given me a very great deal, from the day I arrived as a graduate student in early 1986 to the day I left as a faculty member twenty years ago. When I came here, Murdoch was a powerhouse of cultural and media studies, semiotics, and discourse theory. It taught me that my auto-didactic Marxism-feminism and love of the popular could be in creative tension, and enabled me to understand the work I had been doing as a broadcaster, banker, speechwriter, cleaner, laborer, volunteer, warehouse worker, and Senate apparatchik. Above all, I learnt the importance of blending political economy with political theory to understand culture, and vice versa. Those lessons also came to me courtesy the University’s eponym, Walter Murdoch, whose writings I had first encountered as an undergraduate. So how does this relate to the notion of the good citizen? When people talk about that concept, they generally refer to republican ideals of the rule of law rather than personality or tradition, with the law responsive to the judiciary and representative government. The law relies not only on interdiction through formal policing, but on the small ways in which citizens control themselves and others in everyday life, such as how to behave in a public lecture as a speaker or questioner. Good republican citizens are supposedly dedicated to the public good. Unlike consumers, they are not just after their own needs - they think of others and their desires, too, as part of conceptualizing a collective interest. The republican ideal was actually forged, however, from very particular notions of the public good - as decreed by and for property-owning men. It prioritized the needs of a very particular class of person, both in antiquity and the nineteenth century. Much of that logic has passed into the mythology of citizenship. But new social movements have struggled for an expansion of the universal adult franchise, and we have seen not only a change in who can be a citizen, but also an expansion of what that entails. The idea that having male chromosomes, Page | 1 or owning real estate and people, qualifies you to rule is no longer as prevalent, and the notion that such qualities incarnate selflessness is well out of line. SLIDE 1 Walter Murdoch wrote about the general interest in his 1912 book The Australian Citizen. It addressed school pupils in the language of sophisticated but accessible political economy and theory. Frequently reprinted, this wee primer proved a roaring success and was a harbinger of Murdoch’s increasingly regular movements between academic and popular culture. The Australian Citizen is a product of its time - supportive of imperialism and laden with shibboleths about race and gender. But it is also and equally a work of our time, brilliantly rehearsing the dialectic between individualism and collectivism. Walter Murdoch’s nephew, the newspaper proprietor Keith Murdoch, encouraged him to write more often for a wide readership. Accepting the challenge, he became a much-admired public intellectual over many decades whose syndicated columns reached several hundred thousand readers each week. A liberal before that word was scarred in Australian political discourse, Murdoch wrote scholarly monographs and edited anthologies of fiction, verse, and politics, but also offered regular meditations on everyday life: a remarkable feat. I’ll draw on that legacy, and developments over the intervening century. SLIDES 2-7 CITIZENSHIP The last two hundred years have produced three zones of citizenship, with partially overlapping histories. They are: • the political (conferring the right to reside and vote) • the economic (the right to work and prosper); and • the cultural (the right to know and speak) These categories correspond to the French Revolutionary cry ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ [liberty, equality, solidarity] and the Argentine left’s contemporary version ‘ser ciudadano, tener trabajo, y ser alfabetizado’ [citizenship, employment, and literacy]. The first category concerns political rights; the second, material interests; and the third, cultural representation. Let’s examine the three forms. Political citizenship gives the right to vote, to be represented in government, and to enjoy physical security, in return for ceding the right of violence to the state. The founding paradox of political citizenship is that personal freedom is both the wellspring of good government and the source of its authority over individuals: what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called ‘making men free by making them subject.’ Democracy’s origin myths are the French and US Revolutions, where people recognize one another as political citizens, and use that status to invoke the greater good. An oft-quoted example of the primacy of political citizenship is that Western women’s gains in economic Page | 2 and cultural areas over the twentieth century generally followed their acquisition of political rights. These slides make the point: Slide 1: Political citizenship - cover of the old boy’s book Slide 2: Political citizenship - right to reside - more on this later Slide 3: Political citizenship – participation - right to vote - expansion The second type of citizenship, the economic, has also been alive for a very long time, via the collection and dissemination of information about the public through the census and related statistical devices. Such knowledge became an interventionist category in the 19th-century through what Karl Polanyi called ‘the discovery of society’ - there was a transformation of capitalism when the poor came to be marked as part of society, and hence deserving of aid and inclusion. Their wellbeing was defined as a right, a problem, a statistic, and a law. Society was held to be simultaneously more and less than the promises and precepts of the market. Along came public education, mothers’ pensions, and US Civil-War benefits. Welfarist economic citizenship really took off in the First World during the Depression and the Third World during decolonization. It addressed employment, health, and retirement security through the redistribution of capitalist gains. So for Western Australia’s World War II Prime Minister John Curtin, government was the means, and I quote, ‘whereby the masses should be lifted up.’ From about 1945, established and emergent governments promised to secure the political sovereignty and economic welfare of their citizens. Sovereignty required concerted international action to convince the extant colonial powers (principally Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Portugal) that the peoples they had enslaved should be given the right of self-determination. When that promise was made good, the resulting postcolonial governments undertook to deliver material wellbeing via state-based management of supply and demand and import- substitution industrialization (ISI), frequently via state enterprises or on the coattails of multinational corporations with local presences. But political post-colonialism rarely became economic, apart from a few Asian states that pursued Export-Oriented Industrialization or service-based expansion. Indeed, after the capitalist economic crises of the 1970s, even those Western states that had bourgeoisies with sufficient capital formation to fund welfare systems found that stagflation undermined their capacity to hedge employment against inflation. So they selectively turned away from ISI, and required less-developed countries to do the same. Development policies of the 1950s and ’60s were problematized and dismantled from the 1970s, a tendency that grew in velocity and scope with the erosion of state socialism over the past quarter of a century. During that period, Margaret Thatcher famously remarked in Woman’s Own magazine: Page | 3 “We have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or … ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ … they are casting their problems on society [-] and who is society? There is no such thing!” Her remark signified a massive shift towards the legitimation of the wealthy, not the poor. Economic citizenship was turned on its head by capital, the state, and rent-seeking political scientists and economists. Their interventions have redistributed income back to bourgeoisies and First World metropoles. Today’s privileged economic citizens are corporations, and individual citizens are increasingly conceived of as self-governing consumers. Slide 4: Economic Citizenship - Welfare Slide 5: Economic Citizenship - Transformation - Purchase And cultural citizenship? Cultural rights appear in many post-dictatorship 20th-century constitutions, in Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, Portugal, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Colombia, Peru, and Spain, inter alia. The meaning generally blends artistry and ethnicity. This is because concerns with language, heritage, religion, and identity are responses to histories structured in dominance through cultural power and the postcolonial incorporation of the periphery into an international system of “free” labor. Of the approximately two hundred sovereign-states in the world, over 160 are culturally heterogeneous, comprised of five thousand ethnic groups. Between 10 and 20% of the world’s population currently belongs to a racial/linguistic minority