As of now, I do not have access to a PDF -- here is the text of the article, but a note states that some tables or figures were omitted. The article, "Political Correctness (and Courtesy) in Australia", appeared in Monthly Review, Volume 48, Number 10, March 1997. A PDF can be purchased for US$10 at https://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-048-10-1997-03/
Abstract: The conservative coalition government's and an overt racist's ascent to political power has ignited a lively debate on the definition and role of political correctness (PC) in Australia. The presence of dominant or elitist rather than egalitarian groups is the underlying problem linked to PC. The 1996 election of a conservative coalition government after 13 years of Labor Party rule has brought marked changes in the Australian political climate. The Prime Minister, John Howard, has attacked political correctness (PC) and claimed that his government has lifted the pall of censorship that hung over Australia. Also important in this context has been the election of independent Pauline Hanson, an overt racist, to the Federal Parliament. Standing for a traditional working class Labor seat, Hanson achieved a huge swing. Since her election she has continued to attack Aborigines and Asians. The elections of Howard and Hanson have sparked off discussion about the meaning and role of political correctness as well as a race debate. I think it is important to begin any discussion of PC with the acknowledgment that when we are discussing PC we are dealing with linguistic behavior and that there have always been rules, laws, conventions, restrictions, and regulations controlling such behavior. I want to stress the word "behavior" here. No one is talking about changing our language. They are simply discussing how we might change our use of it. The rules of language behavior are often quite complex and have only ever been partially written down or rendered explicit, but they are very real and very operative. I should also point out that these rules, etc., though they are largely implicit, are historical and as such they are subject to change and challenge. Now if we move from these general remarks to a specific territory, field, or domain such as that of politics, our first acknowledgment must again be that in the discussion of political matters there have always been rules, etc., governing language use. I want to argue in fact that there are three basic kinds of political correctness: dominant PC (DPC); residual PC (RPC); and emergent PC (EPC). This classification as you will recognize is based on Raymond Williams' notion of dominant, residual and emergent cultures.(1) I intend to say a little about each of these forms of political correctness. With regard to DPC I had originally been contemplating a reference to treason trials as an example of dominant political correctness in action. However fate in the form of the workers riot in Canberra in August then took a hand. While watching the television coverage of the workers storming parliament I felt a sense of pride and identity with the Irish worker who was urging on the other workers to smash down the gates of parliament. I was also full of joy that the workers had linked up with the Aborigines and students in their attack on Parliament. Certainly my response to the Canberra demonstration ran very counter to the coverage of the demonstration in the media, especially the public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). There the commentators were trembling in their eagerness to condemn the actions of the workers. On ABC Radio Prue Goward indulged in her very own brand of red baiting, blaming would you believe "Trotskyists" for leading the workers astray. Now I want to analyze the contrast between my remarks and those of the media commentators. They were articulating what I would characterize as dominant political correctness (DPC). As such they were giving voice to the common sense that constitutes the consensus on which our current set of social relations rest. Within the terms of this consensus violence against authority must always be seen to be "counter productive" and "illegitimate." Among the many things that remain undefined and taken for granted here are "authority," "violence," the legitimacy of a government that promised conservatism but is giving us radical right economic policies, and beyond all this the fact that social relations in Australia are marked by relations of exploitation, domination, and the uneven distribution of power and wealth. Above all I would argue that the pious consensus that rushed to condemn the riot in Canberra rests on the acceptance of the current dehumanizing status quo. There is another aspect of DPC which I wish to deal with briefly. This springs from what Roland Barthes called the ex-nomination (i.e., hiding an entity by hollowing out its name) of the dominant class in our society, namely the capitalist class or the bourgeoisie. As Barthes put it, the bourgeoisie uses the idea of the nation to achieve the situation where it itself is not named and where concepts like "bourgeois," "petit-bourgeois," "capitalism," "proletariat" are the locus of an unceasing haemorrhage: meaning flows out of them until their very name becomes unnecessary.(2) I would add here that we have progressed from it being "unnecessary" to talk of social class to a situation today where it has become close to impossible to get a hearing for a class-based analysis of society. Such is the strength of DPC. The true home of DPC is of course the financial pages of the mainstream media. There you will find that "the nation" cannot afford wages but is very happy about profits. You will also discover that things like "plagues," "bushfires," "riots," "dangerous criminals" and "wages" all break out, but profits rise. What then of the other forms of political correctness - residual and emergent? Let us take the residual one first. Again to help us get a grip on this concept Williams' definition of residual cultures proves very useful. He says: By "residual" I mean that some experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue - cultural as well as social - of some previous social formations.(3) So residual political correctness would be associated with a social formation or way of life which is no longer dominant. As such it will often have a distinctly oppositional flavor. However, due at least in part to the process of ex-nomination of the dominant elites, the oppositional impulses of the residual culture is often focused not vertically but horizontally. In other words the targets of residual political correctness are not the powerful but generally minority groups. I would suggest here that the leading proponent of residual political correctness is the Federal member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson, and that the social formation which she and her supporters long for is that of Deakenism. The Deakenite system is named after Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin (1856-1919) who, Bob Leach argues, was one of "the prime exponents and articulators of the internal 'class compromise' or social contract within Australia."(4) The process of the creation of the Deakenite settlement had three aspects: 1) Imperial/racial; 2) national; and 3) class. First, "imperial and racial" refer to the fact that Australia was positioned within the British Empire where it formed part of the semi-periphery within a constellation of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral nations. Australia's status as semi-peripheral was due at least in part to its status as a white settler nation. This development Leach explains had its origins in the "British colonial office's mid 19th century dreams of 'New Brittannias'." The periphery of the British Empire consisted of the non-white nations. Australia's privileged position visa vis the non-white periphery was the material base for what has been widely recognized as its national obsession with race. Second, the Deakenite settlement or social contract operated within national boundaries. It was the state which was responsible for the maintenance of what Leach terms the "boundaries of sentiment" that underpinned the Deakenite social contract. These were: a) Dependency on a Great Power. This was of course Britain in the first instance; b) Institutionalized racism in the form of the "White Australia Policy"; c) Protection in the form of tariffs for local industries; d) The award system of 1907 where the state acts as 'umpire' between Labor and Capital. The third aspect of the Deakenite social contract, class, provided material privileges for the white male worker and because of its dependence upon protectionism, it was vitally dependent upon the Empire's continuity for its maintenance. But the passing away of the British Empire and with it the old Deakenite certainties has only served to increase the irrational desire for a return to the so-called Golden Age of the 1950s when a poofter was a poofter, an Abo an Abo, a wog a wog, and a sheila a sheila. It is this reactionary nostalgia that Pauline Hanson has profited from. But she is not alone in this. Our good Prime Minister has been eyeing off the racist vote and going as far as he dare to court it. I used the word "dare" because there is a line which has been drawn by the dominant elites in our society. It says you can call aborigines anything you like but don't you dare endanger our Asian trade. Here Tim Hughes notes that "[t]oday Asian countries account for about 60 percent of Australia's exports. Over the past year, they have bought $45 billion worth of goods from us. They have also been a major source of capital for Australian business and major financiers of our current account deficit." (Hughes, The Courier Mail, Nov. 2, 1996). Prime Minister Howard's trouble in this area can be usefully accounted for by Nicos Poulantzas' distinction between hegemonic and reigning fractions of the power bloc.(5) Howard may reign in Canberra, Pauline Hanson may have massive support in her working-class electorate. But both will have their licenses withdrawn if they endanger the interests of the hegemonic bloc, or to put it in terms of the political correctness debate, Hanson and Howard will be forced to end their appeal to RPC if the direct attacks of one and the implicit jibes of the other have a negative impact on our trade relations with Asia. I would like to emphasize what I feel is a central feature of the residual political correctness. It is intrinsically anti-Asian because its roots are in the British Empire. However Australia now needs Asia. So residual political correctness is of limited use and may even harm the interests of the powerful. Already Hanson's attacks on Asian migrants have sparked off anti-Asian incidents within Australia and may even have begun to hurt our tourist trade. It is this factor that accounts for the recent all party declaration in the federal Parliament against racism. Generally ruling groups and elites like the social division that springs from right populists such as Hanson, but not if it hurts their own economic interests. It remains to be seen if Hanson can drop her obsession with Asians and begin to articulate a politics which does not threaten Australia's economic dependency on Asia. It is time now to say what I mean by emergent political correctness. This is of course what is normally understood by the term political correctness. Again let us turn to Williams. He says: By "emergent" I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences, are continually being created.... But there is then a much earlier attempt to incorporate them, just because they are part - and yet not a defined part - of effective contemporary practice. Indeed it is significant in our own period how very early this attempt is, how alert the dominant culture now is to anything that can be seen as emergent.(6) What I take from this then is that there is a constant struggle between the dominant and the emergent cultures. Accordingly there is always the potential for tension between dominant political correctness and emergent political correctness. I say potential because it must be recognized that much of the language of the social movements can be incorporated within a liberal agenda which does not threaten the interests of capital. Emergent political correctness then is the language of those groups who have been, especially since the sixties, endeavoring to achieve in full the promise of citizenship. The groups I am referring to are of course gays, women, blacks, and lately the physically and mentally handicapped and the mentally ill. All these groups have been demanding that they be treated with respect and as part of this they have asked that we change our language behavior so as to recognize their humanity. Nothing more, nothing less, and it is this that I mean by the "courtesy" in the title of this article. I want to give here an example from a group I particularly sympathize with - those who suffer from schizophrenia. The recent Sixth Annual Mental Health Services Conference of Australia and New Zealand, which was held in Brisbane, was addressed by Dr. Pat Deegan, who herself suffers from schizophrenia. Rada Rouse gives us this report: I do not say, "I am a schizophrenic, I say I am Pat," she told applauding delegates.... Dr. Deegan, from Lawrence, Massachusetts, said people with disabilities were now part of a worldwide movement demanding freedom from discrimination and the stigma of labels. I think it is reasonable to say "people with mental illness" rather than "the mentally ill, as if we were a herd of cattle," she told AAP. Like any oppressed group of people - and I believe we are oppressed - we do not like being treated like objects; I think the notion of being politically correct has been distorted, and I say it is important that people in Australia, and in America, strive to be more politically correct. "We should use people-first language...." Mentalism would become as socially repugnant as sexism or racism, she said. (Rouse, Living with Schizophrenia Newsletter, September 13, 1996). I applaud and endorse what Dr. Deegan has said and I share her hopes but I have to say that since the election of the Coalition Government I am much less hopeful. I would like now to consider the various tensions that have arisen in this country since the Federal election. I want to analyze what the Prime Minister, John Howard, may have meant when he claimed to have made us all free from political correctness. In this context I will use a recent and I believe a very important article by Nancy Fraser in New Left Review (no. 212, 1995). Fraser describes the present situation as one where: The struggle for recognition is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century. Demands for "recognition of difference" fuel struggles of groups mobilised under the banners of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. In these "post-socialist" conflicts, group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilisation. Cultural domination supplants exploitation as the fundamental injustice. And cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and goal of political struggle. That, of course, is not the whole story. Struggles for recognition occur in a world of exacerbated material inequality.... (p.68) We are dealing here with what I feel would traditionally be characterized as 'glass ceiling issues' or 'movement politics.' For many on the Marxist left it has been a source of puzzlement and frustration that, while capitalism becomes more and more a zero sum game in which the bosses win and the rest of us lose, the politics of recognition has continued to dominate academic expression. The other side of the coin of course is that many gays, women, etc. who are confronting what they see as their oppression simply cannot make out why the old Marxist 'dinosaurs' want to talk about class conflict. The aim of Fraser's article is to bridge this gap and that is what, I feel, gives it its relevance and importance for us today. She has set for herself nothing less than the task of developing a "critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality." (p.69) She begins by outlining an abstract model which revolves around the axes of Redistribution and Recognition and then assigns to each axis that group which is most clearly interested in this politic. Redistribution can be thought of in terms of providing socioeconomic justice. Fraser leaves unspecified the exact nature of the Redistribution project, but we would think of this in Marxist terms as the abolition of the class structure. Recognition involves cultural-evaluation and it is of most concern to those who form a despised minority such as gays. There are also groups which have an interest both in Redistribution and Recognition. These Fraser terms "bivalent communities" and the example she gives are of women and ethnic or racial groups. There are two main political remedies employed here, Affirmation or Transformation. Fraser combines these with four political orientations (the Liberal welfare State, Mainstream - Multiculturalism, Socialism, and Deconstruction) in a four-celled matrix. This gives Fraser two contrasting political strategies: Affirmative Redistribution plus Affirmative Recognition versus Transformative Redistribution plus Transformative Recognition (deconstruction). In her comparison of the merits of these two strategies Fraser argues strongly for Transformative Redistribution plus Transformative Recognition, as this strategy alone addresses the problem of the deep structures of social injustice and discrimination. While the deep structure of the problems remain unaddressed the phenomenon of backlash or misrecognition is a recurring danger. In the case of gender Fraser explains: Affirmative redistribution fails to engage the deep level at which the political economy is gendered. Aimed primarily at combating attitudinal discrimination, it does not attack the gendered division of paid and unpaid labour, nor the gendered division of masculine and feminine occupations within paid labour. Leaving intact the deep structures that generate gender disadvantage, it must make surface allocations again and again. The result is not only to underline gender differentiation. It is also to mark women as deficient and insatiable, as always needing more and more. In time women can even come to appear privileged, recipients of special treatment and undeserved largesse. Thus an approach aimed at redressing injustices of distribution can end up fueling backlash injustices of recognition. (p.89) The same processes are at work with the category of race. Again affirmative action and recognition policies fail "to engage the deep level at which the political economy is ritualised." (p.90) As a consequence surface reallocations have to be constantly made and the disadvantaged group can even be made to appear privileged. The instance of the Federal Member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson, and her attacks on Aboriginal Australians is a clear example of this process. Hanson has argued for instance that the fact that Aborigines receive free Hepatitis B vaccine injections is a sign that they are more privileged than white Australians. She did not of course address the question of how it is that Aboriginal Australians are a high risk group for Hepatitis B and many other illnesses. Fraser's critiques of the limits of the politics of affirmation are I believe very useful. We should add to her account the realization that only a program of Transformative Redistribution and Recognition will address the power of those elites who continually benefit from social and racial divisions in society. I should note here though that Fraser is very aware that the politics of transformative - recognition (deconstruction) are far from non-problematic for oppressed groups in that deconstruction destabilizes all identities. For example, demonstrating the fact of the historical and social construction of the categories 'race' or 'sexual orientation' may appear inconsistent with a new found pride won at no small cost. Oppressed groups may neither want nor be able to take this path. Finally these remarks bring me back to what I consider are the real problems of political correctness; it is not the existence of residual political correctness nor the groups that cling to this type of language behavior. Rather the real problems in our society are caused I believe by the existence of dominant groups and elites. Our society is characterized above all by relations of power and domination and to argue in such a context that we should simply show each other respect is little short of hypocritical. It is only when we have a society which organizes itself along egalitarian lines that we will achieve the kind of world sought by those who support emergent political correctness. NOTES 1. Williams, R. Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), pp.38-42. 2. Barthes, R. Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973), p.138. 3. Williams, ibid., p.40. 4. Leach, R. The World System and the Social Contract: The Rise and Fall of a Privileged Mode of Production, Unpublished Thesis, QUT Brisbane, 1996. 5. Poulantzas, N. "On Social Classes," ??78, March-April 1973. 6. Williams, ibid., p.41. Gary MacLennan teaches at the School of Media and Journalism of Queensland University of Technology. This article is based on a paper given at a November 1996 seminar at Griffith University, Brisbane. This article is dedicated to Lisa Rogers, friend and cyber comrade, who died 1996. ---------- Please note: Some tables or figures were omitted from this article. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1997 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc. http://monthlyreview.org/ Source Citation --------------- *Source Citation* * MacLennan, Gary. "Political correctness (and courtesy) in Australia." Monthly Review , vol. 48, no. 10, Mar. 1997, p. 33+. Gale Academic OneFile , link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19344901/AONE?u=nypl&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=b64ef611. Accessed 26 June 2021. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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