Lloyd Cox

The Antipodean social laboratory, labour and the transformation of the welfare state

The Australian and New Zealand welfare states have undergone dramatic transformations since the early 1980s. This has led some commentators to redeploy the ‘social laboratory’ metaphor widely used to describe Australasia at the turn of the 19th century. This article analyses the disjunctures in Australia’s and New Zealand’s experience of transforming the welfare state, and seeks to account for them. Drawing inspiration from comparative political sociology, it suggests that the differences can be explained with reference to variations in the political-economic starting point of transformation, variations in the institutional context of political decision-making, and variations in the balance of social and political power in the two countries

Review Essay: Settler Capitalism Revisited

Over the last quarter of a century, Australian historiography and political analysis has witnessed a significant shift in the dominant terms of reference for thinking about the past, and about its relationship to the present and future. By the early 1980s an influential body of thought had coalesced around the proposition that Australia’s political economy could be best understood through the lens of ‘settler’ or ‘dominion’ capitalism. These terms denote the distinctive forms that capitalism took in the white settler colonies of the British Empire and the temperate zones of South America (Ehrensaft and Armstrong, 1978; Denoon, 1983; Head, 1983; McMichael, 1984; Gerardi, 1985). The key argument was that Australia carried a pattern of family resemblances with these other settler colonies, which arose from their shared historical experience as both colonizers and colonized (Macintyre, 1989: 11). These resemblances included an early and significant degree of political autonomy from the imperial power out of which they were established; the early commodification of land and hence labour, with a corresponding absence of a large peasantry; relative economic prosperity for white settlers, including workers, despite or perhaps because of a highly dependent form of economic development that was disproportionately centred on primary production for the imperial market; mass immigration of white settlers from the metropolitan power and the attendant physical and cultural destruction, or at least the brutal subjugation, of indigenous populations. This final characteristic was the original presupposition and condition for all the other features noted. These contributed to distinctive patterns of interand intraclass relations and political institutions, which continued to shape realities in the settler colonies long after the conditions that gave rise to them had

The Value of Values? Debating Identity, Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australia

It is the lot of immigrant societies to experience periodic bouts of identity anxiety. This refers to collective apprehension by a named population about what distinguishes it from other named populations. Identity anxiety is manifested in a public discourse that is preoccupied with notions of authenticity (what constitutes the real ‘us’?), signs of demarcation (what are the external signifiers that distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’?) and the dangers of border transgressions (what will be the negative consequences of our borders — understood in territorial and symbolic senses — being breached?). It is a condition that is both exploited and reproduced by politicians, impacting on policy formation and political positioning alike. In recent years, this condition has revealed itself locally in the controversy over Australian values and citizenship testing.

'Got him': revenge, emotions, and the killing of Osama bin Laden

The extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden (OBL) on 2 May 2011 was greeted with jubilation in the United States. The dominant interpretation of the event – expressed in US media, by US political elites, and on the streets of US cities – was that justice had been served on the perpetrator of the 9/11 atrocity and thereby a great historical wrong had been righted. This article argues that the ‘justice’ deployed was a proxy for revenge, understood as the infliction of harm on those who had inflicted harm on the avenger. The argument is situated in a broader discussion of the emotional topography on which acts of state revenge are politically premised. The bin Laden case is used to explore some issues raised by the growing literature on emotions in politics and International Relations including, most importantly, how emotions are collectivised and made public.

Review Essay: Revisiting the Labour Question in the United States: Robin Archer, Why Is There no Labor Party in the United States? The United States and Australia Compared (Princeton University Press, 2007)

The fate of socialism in the United States has long been central to debates about American exceptionalism. In 1906, Werner Sombart famously posed the question of why socialism had failed to establish deep roots in the United States, unlike Western Europe. The answers that he provided have shaped the terms of the debate for the past century. Amongst other things, Sombart emphasized the ways in which the material rewards of American capitalism, with its promise of ‘roast beef and apple pie’ for all, were able to seduce the American worker (1976 [1906]) But, contra inattentive and reductionist readings of his work, there was much more than simple material reward to explain the absence of socialism (Beilharz, 2009). In addition, egalitarianism, social and geographic mobility, civic integration secured by voting rights, and the strength of the prevailing two-party system together constituted formidable obstacles for socialists to overcome in the United States. Capitalism in its most advanced national form did not so much produce its own grave diggers as its own proletarian accomplices and institutional supports. While Sombart’s original theses have been subject to searching empirical and conceptual scrutiny over the past century, they remain the point of departure and the inspiration for much of the ensuing discussion about US socialist and labour history. This is certainly the case with political sociologist Robin