DUCKPOND

I have two degrees, yet I am still working class. People seem confused about class membership in our society, partly I suppose due to the egalitarian myth, to the extent that it is realized a very desirable attribute of Australian society, and partly due to sociological ignorance. Such lack of social intelligence, if true, is cultivated rather than accidental.

What are the most important factors that determine life chances? To extract a person from their social contexts is to make them, if abstractly, partially deaf and fully dumb. Speech and language define as social beings. Jacob Bronowski points out, at least to me, as he observes that Rene Descarte observed if implicitly, that the main characteristic of human language is that it is self referential. Our family and our immediate society are the petri dish in which we develop, or fail to grow. I suppose that we as electors and citizens can exercise an influence, hopefully a positive and constructive one, as well. I guess the extension of the analogy is that society is a laboratory, not a new idea or a wholly barren one. My example, is Mozart. His father was a musician, and was able to train and teach all his children, who were all capable. Opportunities for musicians were very much a function of 18th Century Austria. (And yes I should read more closely the several sociological texts I have on the shelf.)

Our higher education was in part based on the American system, in which there are many good institutions, including excellent community colleges (or so it seems to me), but that system was, according to Joe Bageant, based on credentialism. I wonder what alternative there is in a mass production system, and I would claim it is not as if these pieces of paper are meaningless. It is more that employers cannot relate, do not even try to understand, what those results might mean, or simply do not care because such individuality is irrelevant to the standard task at hand. As several commentators have observed, including Joe Bargeant, standardization has advanced with the application of information technology to effectively deskill jobs, and marginalize the workforce simultaneously increasing control over them. There is nothing new here. I saw this in place in the old Redfern Mail Exchange. (This clip is dated, about 20 years before the newer version I saw, but as a record of working life it is still interesting, and part of a trend of technological development.)

There is a flaw in education in my opinion, and I do not claim to have a fully informed opinion. It seems to me that education should be based on the growing individual, and that work and employment should be a continuation of that process. Managers might be leaders and leaders should be educators. You would still have to hit the right notes, add the subtle cadences and colouring, keep the books simple and accurate, be more focused on revenue than costs, and so forth. The view of leaders as educators is somewhat a surprising concept, but it is one proposed, for example, by Louise Richardson.

I should add I have a personality defect – I take exception to being treated like excrement. Of course, I would claim in my self defence that there must be something wrong in the wiring in the head of people who behave in such a manner. I see the Work Choices legislation as application of social power in the crudest kind, so I extend the argument to the enablers as much as much, even more so, than their crude agents.

Joe Bageant makes, it seem to me, the salient point about class that is primarily defined by power, not income. Of course, power is to some extent a product of education, but Kerry Packer and his son, for example, seem to have avoided such an unnecessary human development, and at least the father was given a State funeral by the Howard Government.

Andrew Norton has views on class membership in Australia. People living in the same society will have different daily experiences and frames of reference. In my view, such plurality should be represented in parliament, not that will be achieved, but rather a wider plurality of opinion needs representation. Representative democracy is not unproblematic, but we can do better than a two party system, which presages, what we see, polarized debate and dialogue, along with triangulation and wedge politics, rather than a set of spectrum views.

Of course, I am acutely aware, that the American military industrial complex, for example, despite the devotion of its promoters to “economic rationalism“, or liberal economics, is not only a generator of scientific research and technology, think internet, and producing a number of satisfying jobs, in academia and elsewhere. I sometimes see people talking about clearing out markets, and I wonder how that has not happened to the coal industry, and other major contributors to green house gases that is steadily and inexorably suffocating the planet.

Postscript:

ABC interviews are closed very quickly, but the interview between Phillip Adams and Joe Bageant is still available. Move the button past the half-way mark and you will be close to the beginning, following “the bit of music”.