Anthony Ashbolt

Is a US Marine base in Darwin really a good idea?

Anthony Ashbolt — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:26:00 PST

The American alliance is simply too costly for Australia both in terms of human lives and international relations. While our political leaders prattle on about “getting the job done”, an Orwellian nightmare persists in Afghanistan and the police we train torture detainees and are deeply enmeshed in the drug trade, the troops we train turn into Taliban and the Government we prop up is no better, in moral or philosophical terms, than its enemy in the field.

The American Century is well and truly over and it is time to forge new associations and to think not in terms of military alliances but rather in terms of alliances built upon peaceful relations. Our subservience to the United States does us no good in the eyes of growing powers like China, India and Brazil. Sending a hostile signal to China, as an expanded US military presence in Australia would do, is particularly foolhardy.

Falling everywhere: postmodern politics and American cultural mythologies

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:36:06 PST

History repeats itself, endlessly and sometimes tiresomely. Numerous writers and scholars have worried about the divisions - social, political and cultural - which began permeating American society in the 1960s. The unravelling of America, the coming apart of America, became familiar refrains. During the 'sixties itself, Daniel Boorstin's new left barbarians were at the gate threatening the very, genius of American politics which Boorstin had postulated in the previous decade. This genius, itself a cousin of American exceptionalism, revolved around the erosion of ideological division, and the lack of vigorous difference within the American polity. Rather than this producing a bland one dimensionality, it guaranteed the preservation of liberty, of individual freedom. Individuality and commonality, far from being somewhat contradictory forces, fed off each other, securing a happy consensus. This was pure mythology, of course, which is not to suggest there were no elements of truth in it, but rather that Boorstin's analysis was ideologically self-serving and more than a little immodest.

Symbolic politics and cultural history

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:35:58 PST

Transcript of an interview with Professor Michael Paul Rogin, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, conducted in the Cafe Grace, Berkeley, November 1, 1995.

Occupying Wall Street and Remembering the 1960s

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:17:41 PDT

When I was interviewed recently about the Wall Street protests by Triple J and Brisbane’s ZZZ, I stressed their significance as symbolic politics but expressed doubts about comparisons being made with both the Arab Spring revolts and the radical movements of the 1960s. Yet since these interviews the protests have grown and spread across America in a way that does compel some serious speculation that a new movement for social change is developing. Participants and commentators from my generation (broadly speaking the baby boomers) are heartened by the number of young people involved. These young people are witnessing a massive decline in job opportunities at the very time that many of them have increasing debt due to heightened student loans. They also face a world in which the richest 1% prosper while the middle class shrinks, working class salaries are effectively cut, the official poverty rate is now above 15% (whereas ten years ago it was at 11%) and black rates of poverty and incarceration signal an intensifying racial divide. The protestors in Wall St. want to turn that world around, want the financiers to be held accountable for the wreckage they have created, want a more equal society and one that does not squander its wealth on the military industrial complex and imperial adventures abroad. Sounds like the Sixties? At one level, yes, but at another not quite.

Public Education and the Public Good

Anthony Ashbolt — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:13:12 PDT

When Julia Gillard became Minister for Education and Everything Else That Moves, as well as de facto Prime Minister, she expressed a desire to have a conversation about school funding. This politics of inclusion (social inclusion is one of her many portfolios after all) was short-lived and it became clear that conversation was code for acceptance of the status quo. So Julia went off and had a conversation of her own with utopian dreamers whose vision of the good society revolves around testing regimes, job credentialism, disciplinary control of schools (particularly teachers), and whose heights of ecstasy are only achieved when public schools are closed down at a rapid rate. Their concept of worth, of good, is thoroughly corporatized and their utopia, of course, thus a nightmarish dystopia. That a social democrat, one who had genuine egalitarian tendencies, can become captive of such narrow thinking speaks volumes about our times. Gillard is now part of a political machine that grinds on relentlessly and strips policy-making of critical thought, rendering it ultimately an instrument of bureaucratic apparatchiks some of whom look and sound strangely like Godwin Gretch. Poor old Gretch, you see, is simply the embodiment of a soulless Public Service whose master in reality is the corporate dollar.

Save public schools, not corporate fat cats

Anthony Ashbolt — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:47:51 PDT

Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon "extreme capitalism" revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to challenge. This Government's persistent embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy in general.

Private funding has been taken to extremes

Anthony Ashbolt — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:47:49 PDT

Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon "extreme capitalism" revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to buck. This Government's embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy.

Review - Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left

Anthony Ashbolt — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:47:47 PDT

Perry Anderson is a towering figure in the annals of contemporary Marxism. As such, he deserves a special sort of intellectual history, one that engages and illuminates and challenges. Blackledge only succeeds in a partial and rather unsatisfactory way. In a sense this is a book in two parts, even though it is not divided as such. The first deals with the Anderson of the 1960s and 1970s, the second with Anderson’s later developments. The first part is very dry and somewhat confused intellectual history, the second has a few acute observations about the shifts in Anderson’s thinking. I suspect this division in the book reflects the fact that Blackledge came to political maturity in the 1980s and is able to engage with this period and beyond in a more direct fashion.

Book Review - George Irvin, Super rich: the rise of inequality in Britain and the United States

Anthony Ashbolt — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:47:44 PDT

In a splendid essay in The London Review of Books (11 September, 2008), Ross McKibbon took the hatchet to New Labour. He expressed particular distaste for the ‘democracy of manners’ that has made Britain resemble Australian and American society. This democracy of manners is, of course, all surface egalitarianism concealing profound inequality. He bemoaned ‘the moral exclusion of those who were once considered part of Labour’s constituency – the social underdogs’ (p. 22). The government, in particular, sidelined young working class men, portraying them as outside ‘the sphere of moral worth’. McKibbon acknowledged that Britain ‘is a very much more unequal and less socially mobile society than it was thirty years ago’ (p. 22). This perspective is supported in George Irvin’s rich and detailed comparative study of Britain and the United States.

Review: A time for choosing: the rise of modern American conservatism

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:02:05 PDT

The steady rise of the radical Republican right as an electoral force since the mid 1960s is an intriguing, albeit chilling, feature of contemporary politics. What was once considered fringe and unacceptable, to the point where Goldwater was decimated by Johnson in 1964, has now become mainstream. We now have an administration that compels National Parks bookstores to stock a book which argues that the Grand Canyon is only 4500 years old, being the result of the global flood described in Genesis. This reflects both the persistence of fundamentalist beliefs in ordinary Americans and a dramatic transformation in American political culture. The seeds of this transformation were sown in the 1950s but really took root with Reagan's victory in the 1966 Californian gubernatorial race.

Reviews: Suburban Warriors - The origins of the New American Right; The Book of Jerry Falwell - fundamentalist language and politics; Blinded by the Right - the conscience of an ex-conservative

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:02:03 PDT

The triumph of a neoliberal economic doctrine in America has been accompanied by, indeed partly propelled by, a conservative social and moral agenda. The paradox is this - as neoliberalism cuts its swathe through tradition, remaking the social order out of the ruins of a New Deal consensus, it removes the material conditions that can sustain social and moral conservatism. Thus it is that the Supreme Court recently upheld the doctrine of privacy in Lawrence vs. Texas and effectively challenged state laws banning sodomy. In a dissenting decision, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the Court had taken the wrong side in the "culture war". What Scalia failed to realize was that the culture war (or a significant part of it) becomes significant now only when it suits the architects of economic policy.

Illawarra Unity: Editorial & Contents 2010

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:01:59 PDT

Since the last issue of Illawarra Unity, the labour movement has been shaken to its core. The leadership coup in the Labor Party and subsequent election highlighted problems so severe within the organization that it is still descending slowly into a hell of its own making. It is tempting to wax eloquent about a once great Party being dragged into the mud by self-serving factional hacks; tempting but insufficient. Singling out a few nasty creatures here or tendencies there does nothing to explain the thorough decay. Even those within Labor who acknowledge something is wrong are themselves part of the problem. They launch blistering critiques of a Party without soul or substance. They speak about parliamentarians silenced like zombies and unable to stand up for the things that matter. Yet when the crunch comes – whether it be electricity privatisation in New South Wales, railway privatisation in Queensland, the war in Afghanistan – guess where they line up? The Labor Government had not really lost its way at all – it was doing the sorts of things that right-wing social democratic Governments do. It had, however, lost its mind and its spirit and its ideals and its vision and anything else it might once have had. This, after all, was and is a Government that saw nothing amiss with keeping the Australian Building and Construction Commission in place with draconian powers to pursue and prosecute those, like Ark Tribe, struggling for the rights of workers. Line that up with the maintenance of the school funding rort manufactured by the previous Liberal Government, continued commitment to the Afghanistan disaster (and our endorsement, along the way, of torture, drone attacks and other crimes of war), the brazen support for whatever illegal and immoral actions Israel undertakes … the list could go on but this is more than enough to signal a deep malaise.

Review - Ill fares the land

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:01:56 PDT

Putting aside for a moment his wonderful autobiographical reminiscences in The New York Review of Books, this is Tony Judt’s last major work. And it is an extended essay of immense significance. It constitutes a clarion call for the resuscitation of a genuine social democracy committed to equality and social justice. It is simultaneously an appeal to resist the fetishism of “small” government, the deification of budget surplus, the pathetic passion for privatization, the capitulation to markets whose freedom is measured purely by profits. We need, argues Judt, a commitment to the commonweal, a shared goal rather than one divided into special interests and identities, a public sphere that is vibrant and egalitarian.

Public education and the public good

Anthony Ashbolt — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:01:53 PDT

When Julia Gillard became Minister for Education and Everything Else That Moves, as well as de facto Prime Minister, she expressed a desire to have a conversation about school funding. This politics of inclusion (social inclusion is one of her many portfolios after all) was short-lived and it became clear that conversation was code for acceptance of the status quo. So Julia went off and had a conversation of her own with utopian dreamers whose vision of the good society revolves around testing regimes, job credentialism, disciplinary control of schools (particularly teachers), and whose heights of ecstasy are only achieved when public schools are closed down at a rapid rate. Their concept of worth, of good, is thoroughly corporatised and their utopia, of course, thus a nightmarish dystopia. That a social democrat, one who had genuine egalitarian tendencies, can become captive of such narrow thinking speaks volumes about our times. Gillard is now part of a political machine that grinds on relentlessly and strips policy-making of critical thought, rendering it ultimately an instrument of bureaucratic apparatchiks some of whom look and sound strangely like Godwin Gretch. Poor old Gretch, you see, is simply the embodiment of a soulless Public Service whose master in reality is the corporate dollar. Patients running the asylum becomes the order of the day not an aberration.

Public education for our future

Anthony Ashbolt — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:34:16 PST

Anthony Ashbolt examines the funding inequalities in education and problems with policies of social exclusion.

Labor’s education policy buried by an untrue tale

A. Ashbolt — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:35:11 PDT

There is a perplexing myth pervading journalistic commentary and even Labor party thinking. The persistence and predominance of this myth not only illustrates the power that the media wield and the ignorance they fuel but also shows how a certain mode of thought, including key terms and phrases, saturates public discussion.

Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2009

A. Ashbolt — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:53:01 PDT

As brand Labor, otherwise known as Rudd Labor, begins to look more and more like an extension of the Howard administration, things get stranger and stranger. In one week we had the appointment of Peter Costello to the board overseeing the Future Fund. This so enraged Paul Keating he almost sounded like a class warrior. We had Martin Ferguson telling Sharon Burrow that the ACTU only represented a sectional interest whereas the Government had to act for everyone. We had an unholy squabble between the soft left and the hard left about the future of Martin’s brother Laurie Ferguson. It is most amusing to see factions operating under ideological labels that now have absolutely no meaning – brand Labor has removed ideology and along with it most ideas – battling about a politician whose contribution to Australian political life has been entirely forgettable (and that is putting it mildly). And what is it about family dynasties in the Labor Party? They serve as another useful reminder of Robert Michels’ observation over 100 years ago that the tendency towards aristocracy can be found in all political parties. And then in a truly nauseating moment, we had Defence Minister John Faulkner awarding General David Petraeus an honorary Order of Australia for his brilliant contribution to Iraq. This not only legitimized the invasion of Iraq and its continuing occupation but also confirmed Australia’s role as the cheer squad for American imperialism. A lot of mythology surrounds Petraeus because his surge policy happened to coincide with dramatic changes internally in Iraqi politics. It was those changes more than the surge that produced a marginally less murderous Iraq but only correspondents like Patrick Cockburn of The Independent have pointed that out consistently – much of the media simply replicates the mythology. It must be stressed that this mythology is also meant to obscure the absolute devastation and destruction that the United States has brought to Iraq.

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill: Woodstock, 1969/Berlin, 1989

A. Ashbolt — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:52:59 PDT

The fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Woodstock music festival have gone dangerously close to transforming it into another commodified spectacle. Yet the spirit of the original Woodstock lives on to remind us of another way of thinking about the world. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969 featured a galaxy of performers who had contributed significantly to the alternative zeitgeist that spoke of peace and love in ways that may sound corny now. The peace and love of the Sixties was grounded in a strong antiwar sensibility and a sense of collective solidarity against the American war in Vietnam. When Joan Baez spoke about her husband – draft resister David Harris – introducing “The Ballad of Joe Hill”, the link between the struggles of the working class and the antiwar struggles of the day was apparent.

Time for a real education revolution

A. Ashbolt — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:04:23 PST

News that elite private school fess are becoming increasingly less affordable hardly comes as a surprise. What would be genuinely surprising is news that they had become increasingly accessible to poorer sections of the community. That, of course, is not going to happen. Elite private schools service the elite. Forget the occasional dramatic publicity about Aboriginal scholarship students. They are publicity tokens propping up the illusion that social justice informs these school's charters. Elite Catholic schools are particularly good at manufacturing images of social concern and commitment. The images disappear at the front door. Rigorous selection criteria, based now more upon class or status than faith, take over.

Education aims to nurture a thinking world

A. Ashbolt — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:53:19 PDT

One of the main tasks of education is to nurture inquiring minds. Equipping students with a capacity to think about the world is as important as gaining a formal qualification. Indeed, the two should not be separated - what use is a qualification which has not also enabled you to be a thoughtful citizen? A democratic system is dependant upon an educated and informed public. When both education and information are restricted, democracy suffers accordingly.