The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  Crikey/Daily Review

  May Day: How the Left Was Lost

  Christos Tsiolkas

  It is May 2013, a week after Orthodox Easter, and for my final night in Athens my cousins have taken me out to dinner at a taverna in the working-class neighbourhood of Kipoupoli. It is a warm night in the Greek capital, the alcohol is flowing, and after finishing our meals we all take out our cigarettes and puff away under the English-language no-smoking sign.

  I have spent a fortnight in Greece, and every day has been a reminder of the social death brought on by the financial crisis and austerity measures: banks of homeless people sleeping on the streets near the university, the sullen and resentful faces of the refugee prostitutes soliciting clients behind the markets in Omonia, police in riot gear congregating on street corners in the Plaka, teenage heroin-users sharing needles in the parks, a pensioner blowing his brains out at Syntagma Square because he could no longer keep up with his bills. But tonight I am drinking, and I am reminded of the hospitality and anarchic spirit of the Greeks. Tonight, just for a few hours, in food, drink and song, we can forget the cuts to wages and the pensions, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank – that bloody Troika and its austerity. Tonight, I can feel proud of my Greek heritage.

  I find myself in an intense and exhilarating conversation with a nineteen-year-old law student. Dimitri is intelligent and erudite. He offers a devastating critique of both neoliberalism and social democracy, arguing that the global financial crisis has extinguished the post–World War II consensus between capital and labour. For Dimitri, the ideologies of the past century have little relevance and they no longer offer any social or economic value. His contempt not only for Greece’s parties of the centre-left and centre-right, PASOK and New Democracy respectively, but also for Syriza, the radical left coalition that he dismisses as social democracy cloaked in Marxist rhetoric, is matched by his distrust and abhorrence of the European Union. As I listen to him, I tell myself that even though youth unemployment is scraping sixty per cent, even though his generation is one that free-marketeers, social democrats and economists have collectively forsaken as ‘lost’, this cohort will defy the bankers, bureaucrats and politicians. I interrupt his impassioned flow to ask a question.

  ‘What does the European Union mean to you? Do you feel European?’

  He is taken aback. I have asked this question of cosmopolitan Germans, Brits, Dutch and Danes. Publishers, academics, human rights activists and artists, they have answered me with conviction, that yes, they are European and for them the EU is the future. But not for Dimitri.

  ‘Do you want to know what the EU means to me?’ He points his cigarette towards the no-smoking sign over my shoulder. ‘The EU means anti-smoking laws and copyright laws. That’s what the EU cares about. It doesn’t give a fuck about the people hungry in my country. It doesn’t care that my generation won’t know what it means to work.’

  I ask him another question. ‘So who did you vote for last year?’

  There is no hesitation this time. ‘Me? I voted for the Golden Dawn.’

  He voted for the Fascists.

  *

  Greece is radically and violently transformed into the land field of ‘wasted lives’ in the giant trashcan of global capitalism. Witnessing as I do this novel form of social necrophilia that eats alive every inch of human life, workspace and public space, I cringe at the sound of the words ‘sacrifice’, ‘rescue’ and making Greece, according to the claims of Greek PM Antonis Samaras, a ‘success story’. Whose sacrifice and whose rescue? Who succeeds and who loses?

  – PANAYOTA GOUNARI, ‘Neoliberalism as Social Necrophilia:

  The case of Greece’, 2014

  *

  My mother and my father, Greek immigrants to Australia, were Paul Keating’s ‘true believers’. Their commitment to the Australian Labor Party was unshakeable. For years I used to boast that I went to my first demonstration when I was ten years old. It was outside Melbourne Town Hall, where the governor-general, John Kerr, was to attend a function not long after the dismissal of the Whitlam government. My father took me along with a bag of tomatoes to throw at the miserable royalist dog – his words. It was only recently that my mother informed me that this wasn’t my ‘first’ demonstration, that when I was still a toddler she had taken me to one of the anti–Vietnam War marches. Thinking those protests the preserve of students and the radical Left, I expressed my surprise at her involvement.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she responded curtly. ‘I had two young sons. Of course I marched against that stupid imperialist war.’

  Unlike my generation, my parents had first-hand experience of war. First there was Germany’s occupation of Greece during World War II, and then the wicked testing ground of the emerging Cold War that was the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s. Those two calamities destroyed the rural peasant class of Greece, the class to which my parents belonged. Their families were on opposite sides of the tragedy, my mother’s Communist and my father’s anti-Communist. But though the tragedy of the civil war arguably poisoned Greek politics for three generations, my parents both believed that in the ‘new world’, whatever the cost of exile, those differences could be put aside and replaced by an affirmation of a political party, the ALP, that took seriously their status as immigrants and as workers. Both my parents were denied education – that was the privilege of the bourgeoisie in mid-twentieth-century Europe – so they did not speak in the language of social democracy. But their faith in the ALP centred on that party’s commitment to public education, to public health, to industrial rights for workers and to its opposition to imperialist power.

  The neoliberal economic reforms ushered in by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments were never explained to my parents and their peers. They extended a faith in both Bob Hawke and Keating, a faith in the ALP, that these reforms were necessary and would not undermine their conditions as workers. But these men and women, who supplied labour for the so-called ‘unskilled’ textile, car parts and manufacturing industries of the post-war boom, distrusted the language of competition and globalisation that accompanied the reforms. In the late’90s, I interviewed my father and a few of his colleagues, long after they had retired, and all of them expressed a preference for collective bargaining, for a system of arbitration that negotiated between capital and labour as equal partners. It wasn’t that they assumed all bosses would be mercenary and unjust but they knew that plenty were. My father could never understand the logic where the shareholder took priority over the worker; he saw the share market as analogous to the gambling table upon which he and his mates used to play poker or manila. People who moaned over losses on the stock market made him laugh. ‘It’s gambling,’ he would say. ‘You win some, you lose some.’

  I emerged a relative winner in the era of globalisation. I had to confront the enervating reality of recession in the early 1990s, but by the end of that decade I was part of a cosmopolitan, educated professional class that assumed mobility and flexibility in work, education, living standards, technology and travel. I didn’t say it to their faces, but I thought the old people’s anxieties and concerns were merely nostalgic, and that they were too uneducated to understand how Keating had saved us from descending into a ‘banana republic’.

  What I didn’t understand then was how crucial that extension of faith from working-class constituencies had been in opening up our markets and ushering in the globalised era. This ‘faith’ was extended to social-democratic parliamentary parties across the Western world. Towards the end of his life, my father lamented how the public education and health systems had been undermined, and he mistrusted the consensus among democratic parliamentary parties to privilege productivity over equity and the market over civic and community life. He believed that the faith he had placed in the ALP had been betrayed.

  I too experienced a betrayal, years later, but for my peers and myself the betrayal was the result of the party’s vacilla
tions over asylum-seeker policy and its muted response to climate change, especially when contrasted to the urgency and passion of the Greens. It wasn’t that I thought education, health and industrial rights were unimportant – far from it – but in some sense I took them for granted. Unlike my parents, I hadn’t known a social order in which they hadn’t existed. And as I took them for granted, they were no longer the focus of my political belief, my political commitment.

  *

  But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to ‘quantify’ the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidised public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify ‘humiliation’? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers?

  – TONY JUDT, ‘What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?’, 2009

  *

  In 2007 I escorted my mother to the Greek consulate in Melbourne. Her sister was involved in a property dispute in Athens, and my mother needed to sign an affidavit of support, to be witnessed by a member of the consulate staff. We were eventually ushered into a small office where a young Greek man obsessively texted throughout my mother’s appointment. He had a bulky gold watch strapped across one wrist; his shirt was neatly pressed and clearly expensive. He hardly said a word to my mother, and I had to stop myself leaning across the desk, grabbing the phone and throwing it against the wall. At one point, my mother, in an attempt to be friendly, asked him what part of Greece he was from. The question made him look up at her for the first time.

  ‘Why? What does it matter?’

  My mother, humiliated, mumbled a response.

  ‘I’m Athenian,’ he answered shortly, returning his gaze to the screen.

  My mother started telling him of when she was a young woman in Athens in the early 1960s, of how hard it was to leave and migrate to Australia, how much she still missed the city. He interrupted her.

  ‘Look, that was a different time,’ he said. ‘I really can’t be bothered with all these old migrant stories. We’re European now. The Greece you are referring to doesn’t exist anymore.’

  My mother and I were both so shocked at his rudeness that we were speechless. She was shaking as we left the consulate.

  ‘They really don’t care about us, do they?’ she said to me, meekly, and meekness had never been something I had associated with my mother.

  A year later, when the global financial crisis had hit, and the news of the human cost of the turmoil in Greece began to filter through to Australia, my first thought was of this young man with his expensive shirt and his gold watch. I wondered if he still had his job. I wondered if he was still proud of being European.

  The political tumult of contemporary Greece cannot be separated from the economic turmoil across Europe. But unlike those of Iceland, Ireland and to some extent even Italy, Portugal and Spain, the crisis that Greece now finds itself enduring is also existential. There is a language of retribution directed towards the nation, an accusation that the Greeks had it coming. Stories of wholesale tax avoidance, overly generous pensions and a moribund and bloated public sector have been integral to the reporting of the crisis and its effects. In Australia, it doesn’t matter how much I attempt to steer conversations towards questions of Eu culpability in blindly bankrolling the Greek state, of how decades-long deregulation of financial markets precipitated the economic collapse, of how social cohesion in Greece is being destroyed by the Dublin Regulation of 2003 (a directive that forces asylum seekers to be returned to the country through which they first entered the Eu, which has meant that the countries of southern Europe have had to deal with a disproportionate number of asylum seekers and refugees). In the end, I am always challenged to defend the culpability of the Greek people themselves.

  There is a peculiar dissonance between, on one hand, this understanding of the Greek character as lazy, entitled and culpable for the economic mess they now find themselves in and, on the other hand, Australia’s recognition of the hardworking Greek migrants who helped build and transform our nation. Is it the challenge and experience of migration itself that defines the Greek Australian? A recurrent cliché of multiculturalism is that migrant communities, wrenched geographically, linguistically and temporally from their homes, maintain a nostalgic and an ahistorical conception of their cultures of origin. When I first returned home to Australia after visiting Greece as a young adult, I crowed mercilessly to my parents that the stories they had told me were no longer true, that the history that had formed them had now vanished. My cousins in Athens had laughed at me when I called older people théa and théo, auntie and uncle. They saw this as residue of an old peasant and rural past that was irrelevant to their highly urbanised late-twentieth-century nation. ‘You’re stuck in the past, Mamá and Papá,’ I insisted. ‘Greece has moved on.’

  But just as the Greeks in Greece have changed over the last quarter of a century, so have the Greeks in Australia. The successive waves of immigrants and refugees who came to this country over the past fifty years didn’t bring multiculturalism with them. Multiculturalism emerged as a consensus within the body politic of the nation, as it negotiated the changing demographics once the White Australia Policy, and the legacy of colonial nationhood, had begun to be dismantled. Multiculturalism has had an impact as much on migrants and refugees as it has on indigenous Australians and Anglo-Celtic Australians. Whatever the contest over what the concept means, whatever the petty or serious racisms still expressed in our country, it’s a given now that we’re a multi-ethnic society home to numerous religions.

  Multiculturalism was never part of the Greece I have been visiting over the past thirty years. It wasn’t part of the Greek conception of nationhood before the global financial crisis, and it certainly isn’t part of how Greeks have seen themselves since then. And not only in Greece: the antagonism towards multiculturalism is rife throughout the EU. The financial crisis has only exacerbated existing tensions over immigration in Europe. Here it is important to separate the politics of immigration from the politics of asylum. Immigrants in Europe, and their children, remain non-European in both political and popular language. The right-wing parties on the rise throughout the continent – in Holland and Denmark, Sweden and Hungary, the Czech Republic and France – are not only anti–asylum seeker but also anti–immigrant. In Australia, mired for more than fifteen years in the toxic politics of border security and asylum, we can easily disregard the importance of this distinction.

  The argument propounded by the right in Europe is that immigration is one of the main reasons the social democratic consensus has shattered. Fears are largely directed towards Asian, Arab and African immigrants but there is also a resentment of Balkan and Eastern European immigrants. That resentment reveals a contradiction at the heart of the EU project that has never been successfully resolved: that the economic union that arose out of Cold War politics was about Western European nations rebuilding and reconstructing European identity after the calamities of the world wars. According to the right-wing propaganda, the notion of who is European was decided not in national parliaments but in Brussels.

  In his 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, translated into English last year, the French cultural critic Didier Eribon writes of visiting his family home in north-eastern France thirty years after he deliberately turned his back on the working-class world from which he emerged. In that long period of exile from his family, Eribon took on academic postings in Paris, wrote a biography of Mic
hel Foucault, and became a prominent critic of and from within the Left. Over those three decades, he effaced his working-class heritage, and understood this denial to be necessary in order to refashion himself as a leftist cultural critic in Europe.

  A call from his mother prompts the return home. His father – a factory labourer, a drinker and, from what Eribon writes, a hard and sometimes abusive man – is dying. It is his father’s sexism and homophobia that has engendered the long silence between them. During Eribon’s youth, his family and their community were Communists. On his return to Reims, he is shocked to discover that his parents and his brothers have abandoned socialism and now vote for the far-right Front National.

  Eribon never reconciles with his father. He does not attend the old man’s funeral. He can’t abandon the rage of his adolescence, and he seethes at the xenophobia, casual sexism and homophobia of his brothers. He finds it hard to understand how they have remained untouched by the liberating social movements that have defined his life after Reims. But what remains unanswered in the book is the question of how his family were to make sense of such cultural transformations if Eribon himself saw it as a precondition of his liberation that he break his link to family and to his class. Eribon’s portrait of his family is not distant; it is familiar and recognisable. As is the paradox of his avowal of socialist and social democratic principles while at the same time deploring and rejecting the working class itself. I am not sure what the French term for ‘bogan’ might be, or even if there exists an equivalent in the language, but the distaste, shame and fear that Eribon expresses when he writes about his family are contained in that word, in how it is used here in Australia.