Dear Editor,

Congratulations to your recent prize winners: Tracy Ryan, Kevin Brophy and Jane Goodall. The superb work of these three writers demonstrates the importance of literary prizes for Australian writers and readers.

Without wanting to downplay the importance of the ABR Poetry Prize (which has brought to attention much outstanding poetry), I would like to say that the Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay is an exemplary literary award. There are many prizes for poetry and fiction, but the essay, which has become increasingly prominent in recent years, is given far less support. The essay has become more significant, in part because of the way it can cover an infinite variety of forms and occasions, from life writing to political commentary and cultural analysis. It is a form especially well able to bring together personal and public concerns, and as such is especially important to our literary culture.

I hope that the Calibre Prize continues to thrive and be supported for many years to come.

David McCooey, Highton, Vic.

‘Wadda yer doin’ about it?’

Dear Editor,

The events that Kevin Brophy records in ‘“What’re yer lookin’ at yer fuckin’ dog?”: Violence and Fear in Žižek’s Post-political Neighbourhood’ (April 2009) are more deeply tragic than he recognises. The worst tragedy is that, like most middle-class Australians, he never seems to feel the searing pain that is expressed in the words that provide him with the main title of his essay. Instead of reading the smart-arse Slavoj Žižek and focusing on violence, he should have looked at the sober old classic of Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972).

A century ago there was an Australian working class that was proud of its identity. Now we define ourselves, with egalitarian smugness, as middle class, or even as beyond all that class nonsense. So those that fail to convince themselves that they are middle class, acceptably Australian, come to see themselves as failures, rejects, despised and persecuted, hating themselves and one another. Desperation breeds violence in all animals. Just by looking at them, even with the best of intentions, we convey the message that we are looking down on them. Just by associating with ordinary Australians, as Halia complains, we endorse their perceptions of racism and condescension.

The same mechanisms operate in our relations with Aboriginal people. There is not much we can do about it as individuals, unless we happen to possess extraordinary gifts of empathy and generosity. There is a lot we could do structurally, but nobody is interested.

John Burnheim, Camperdown, NSW

Kevin Brophy replies:

Thank you for your corrective perspective. You are right, of course, in pointing out that questions of class are at work all the way through the essay, from my identification of myself as a relatively cosseted ‘anaemic liberal’ to the detailed descriptions of our neighbours. I am pleased that the essay prompted your thoughts in that direction. I will certainly seek out the sober book you recommend. I aimed in the essay to broaden and complicate the question of class with questions of family (tribe), ethnicity, gender, moral worlds, education, and the apparently universal problem of physical boundaries between groups of human beings.

It is interesting to me that you take at face value Halia’s accusation that our racism was evident because we associated with ‘Aussies’ in the street. The irony of this (and there were many layers of irony at work over those years) was that the immediate neighbours we were on speaking terms with included Polish, Italian, Greek, Indian and recently arrived British migrants – ordinary Aussies, for sure.

I agree with you that there must be systemic answers to reducing the effects of violence and racism in our society and that there is not a lot we can do as individuals. My partner’s employment as a literacy teacher to Aboriginal children goes some way to making a contribution.

As for my recognition of pain suffered by others, I accept that what small gift for empathy I possess has its limitations.

Paul Salzman replies to Peter Pierce:

Dear Editor,

Do Ken Gelder and I really disapprove of most of the 200-odd novels we discuss in After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007? I don’t think so. We offer detailed and, we assumed, appreciative accounts of fiction produced by an enormous range of writers from Gail Jones to Peter Temple. Are we really contemptuous of the seventy-odd critics we cite, including Peter Pierce? Well, no, we cite virtually all of them positively. We thought we were registering a darker and more politically engaged aspect of Australian fiction over the last twenty years, but Pierce reads this as sourness on our part (April 2009). I would urge people to read the book we actually wrote, not take at second hand Peter Pierce’s sour impressions of it.

Paul Salzman, Bundoora, Vic.

Fabian futures

Dear Editor,

Norman Abjorensen’s post-mortem on the death of socialism in the twentieth century (Letters, April 2009) is terse and bracing. Murder, he says. Socialism’s fate is more complicated than that, I would suggest, though I would certainly endorse a charge of attempted murder.

The collapse of the Soviet Union (prize corpse in the hit list of Western capitalist powers) seemed to offer the realisation of the dream of liberation for its variously ‘captive peoples’ – but liberation into what? Its effect on the rest of us, in removing such a formidable counter-model of collective behaviour and belief, has amounted to something of a moral tragedy. However deficient that model was in daily practice, however murderous were some of its own leading practitioners, it embodied a way of organising the world that was not relentlessly tied to materialist acquisition. Any such checks or brakes on rampant greed that religion might have provided have long lost their potency, in the Christian West at least. With the demise of the USSR, we were deprived of a foil for capitalism as well as a bulwark against its heedless global spread.

Once unleashed, there could be no stopping its grosser excesses. It swiftly proceeded to colonise (as Abjorensen puts it) all those institutions, large or small, that had hitherto managed to resist the complete embrace of its ‘corporate’ and ‘market’ values: the civil or public service, public utilities (as they were once called), the armed services, the universities, the churches and various organs of the press (down to some modest little literary magazines I could name that were suddenly pressured to behave and ‘present’ in the manner of commercial glossies).

The Age of Deregulation, as we might label the last two decades, could also be dubbed the Age of Compulsory Capitalism. Its destabilising strategies amounted to a kind of Trotskyism of the right: ‘permanent revolution’ by other means. Its beguiling mantra, ‘freedom of choice’, as I argued in a brief talk on the ABC a few years ago, cleverly disguised a mounting ‘tyranny of choice’, the baleful effects of which on every aspect of our lives, including the most private and intimate, are examined at much greater length (and rather less rhetorically) in Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence (2007). It is arguable even that so-called ‘Late Capitalism’ – capitalism in its most recent and rampant phase – was shaping up to be the most totalitarian régime the world has witnessed, all the more insidious for affecting to be the opposite. It appeared as if there could be no retreat from it: ‘TINA’, in the brutal Thatcherite acronym of which Abjorensen reminds us (‘There Is No Alternative’).

It may be clearer to all now, following the events of the last few months, that there has to be some alternative, but it would be premature either to mourn or to gloat. An important historical phase of capitalism is surely passing, but we can’t pronounce it dead – ‘late’ in that other sense – yet. Though not well, its condition is far from terminal.

Abjorensen finds it difficult to imagine any way of ‘accommodating’ such a resilient, seemingly ineluctable force and remaining consistently on the left. At the risk of incurring the scorn both of TINA-ites and leftier voices than mine, may I suggest a revisiting of the Fabian Essays in Socialism, originally published 120 years ago in the wake of a comparable crisis in capitalism? The seven essayists’ more specific tactics and targets could hardly help appearing outdated. But would this be any less so in the case of Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) or Keynes’s A General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), two works already poised to enjoy a return to fashionable discourse in our troubled times? Unlike either of them, what the Fabian Essays does provide is a comprehensive template for living with and in a capitalist system while at the same time working systematically to subvert it in highly pragmatic, undoctinaire and non-revolutionary ways. As a guide to action in the present, much of the detail of the template is beyond any obvious use or applicability, but as a general source of inspiration, a stirring counsel against both passive despair and equally ‘impossibilist’ utopian hope, it still has much to offer.

Ian Britain, Richmond, Vic.

Correction

Allan Gyngell reviewed Gareth Evans’s new book in the March 2009 issue. We gave the book’s title as The Responsibility to Protect: End Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All, but the correct subtitle is Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All.