Marooned on a traffic island in central London, Robert Maitland, the protagonist of JG Ballard's Concrete Island, comes to inhabit a world that he always, on some level, knew existed, but that he never really knew.
He drove past it everyday to and from the office, but its subaltern inhabitants were, until he too finds himself trapped there, as removed from his life as they are from 'civilisation'. He initially doesn't appreciate the gulf between these two worlds, but, unable to escape the traffic island, he comes to lose touch with the old world and is subsumed by the new one. 'I am an island,' he mutters to himself during a fit of delirium.
This inversion of John Donne's famous line could well suffice as a maxim for modernity: an increasingly atomised society, populated by alienated individuals who are beginning, like Maitland, to realise that all is not right, but are unable to conceive of any alternative.
As neoliberalism has emerged as the hegemonic worldview it's come to encompass far more than a market-centred economic theory — neoliberalism, for example, now shapes discourses about liberal rights, government bureaucracy and the rhetoric of choice.
So, when Paul Keating recently said it had 'run its course', he was articulating an economic reality that, for economists who've objectively analysed the post-GFC data, has long been self-evident.
Since 2008, Keating added, 'we have a comatose world economy held together by debt and central bank money'. Over at the Guardian, the always-meticulous Greg Jericho ran the numbers and, passing judgement on Keating's comments, determined the correct response to be: 'well, duh'.
What is more significant, though, is the second part of Keating's statement: 'Liberal economics has run into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise.' That the dominant responses by western governments, particularly in Europe, to the neoliberal crisis has been a series of neoliberal 'solutions' (austerity, business tax cuts, public sector job cuts) speaks to its ideological dominance.
Even now, nearly ten years on, centre-Left political parties can only offer solutions that fall somewhere between looking back to old Keynesian solutions and tinkering around the edges of the already existing neoliberal framework.
"The Left's failure is not so much that neoliberalism has failed, but that when it did there existed no alternative that could challenge its dominance."
It's staggering that such a profound systemic failure hasn't fomented any serious systemic change. The contrast with the rise of neoliberalism couldn't be more pronounced. It came to prominence during the 'stagflation' (rising inflation and rising unemployment) crisis of the 1970s; it provided an economic theory to deal with a problem in the absence of a Keynesian one.
The Left's failure is, therefore, not so much that neoliberalism has failed, but that when it did there existed no alternative that could challenge its dominance. Keating, even now, proposes no solutions; he offers, simply, a critique. This has long been more comfortable terrain for the Left, but with crises being the rule rather than the exception under capitalism, it's worth thinking about what such a response would entail.
One of the challenges for progressive parties is to look beyond the existing neoliberal framework for solutions to the current malaise. Labor's chief propagandist, Van Badham, suggests the ALP is uniquely positioned to do this because 'its union base is reinvigorated' (union membership is at historic lows), and it won an election in WA (hardly a ground-breaking result in a two-horse race), which has 're-consolidated its primary vote' (last federal election the ALP's primary vote was 34.9 per cent — its second lowest since 1949).
The inter-party discussion about the 'Buffet rule' isn't, as Van Badham spins it, a sign of Labor's progressivism; rather, the fact that what's essentially a redistributive tax isn't already part of their platform is a reflection of their inherent conservatism. These days Labor MPs have far more in common with their colleagues across the House than they do with the workers they claim to represent.
While much of the intellectual heavy lifting in forming a picture of what a post-neoliberal future may look like will be done outside organised politics, Labor remains completely unengaged with almost all of these debates. Books like Thomas Piketty's Capital, Paul Mason's Postcapitalism and Nick Srnicek's and Alex Williams' Inventing the Future, which have found far wider audiences in the last couple of years than economic tracts ordinarily would, present ideas for a future exponentially more radical than anything the nihilist technocrats of the Labor Party have shown a willingness to entertain.
The party is so steeped in neoliberal orthodoxy that, even if it was willing to evolve, it's likely incapable of doing so. One can see a version of this inability playing out in liberal democracies around the world — traditional political institution are unravelling apace. This is, in part, a result of the neoliberalisation of the bureaucracy — many of the roles traditionally filled by government have been outsourced. The irony is that this quest for efficiency has stripped governments of many of the levers they once had to adapt and deal with change — they're more inefficient now than ever before. Bill Shorten's response, to date, hasn't extended beyond doubling down on his economic nationalist rhetoric.
Labor is, undoubtedly, aware of the dystopia that exists just off the motorway. They're even aware that more people, like Maitland, who once moved in their world are finding themselves marooned there. They may even appreciate that it's almost impossible for him to escape. But these two worlds remain more separate than ever and, even if there was the will to rescue those trapped, they no longer have the tools.
By the close of Ballard's novel, Maitland, half deranged, still utters platitudes about getting off the island, but he's largely resigned to his new life. He's come to accept his own oppression.
Tim Robertson is an independent journalist and writer. He tweets @timrobertson12