The idea that you can aspire to have more is a relatively new one. In fact I would suggest that it only really came into its own in Europe with the dawn of capitalism. Under feudalism you accepted the position in society that had been determined by god. It was futile to want to be a lord, for example, if you were born a serf. It was also blasphemous because to question the socio-economic order was to question the wisdom of god. And there was to be none of that, thank you!
With capitalism, a new narrative emerged. You didn't have to have noble blood to get on in the world. You could even, if you had enough nous and an enterprising spirit, get to the very top, even if you started with next to nothing.
We were all taught to love those rags to riches stories, much as we were taught to love the fabulous inversions of fate from the earlier feudal period, where the pauper discovers their hidden nobility and gets, at the end, to enjoy the life they so richly deserved. But while that trope was usually about fate, the emerging bourgeoisie at the dawn of capitalism explained their own rise as the fruit of their hard work, thrift, daring and superior intellects, as well, from time to time, as their luck.
So it is no surprise that the sacredness of aspiration is so entrenched in our political discourse. As the old satirical rendering of the socialist hymn, 'The Red Flag', puts it: 'The working class can kiss my arse. I've got a foreman's job at last.'
Last year there was a telling exchange on the subject between Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten. Shorten posed a question to Turnbull on whether a hypothetical 60 year old aged care worker should aspire to be an investment banker from Rose Bay to get a better tax cut. Completely unflustered, Turnbull answered: 'The 60 year old aged care worker in Burnie is entitled to aspire to get a better job, is entitled to get a promotion, is entitled to be able to earn more money,' adding, following a few jeers, 'No. Working in aged care is a good job, but you are entitled to seek to earn more. Every worker, every Australian is entitled to aspire to earn a better income.'
While Prime Minister Morrison speaks of aspiration reverentially as the touchstone of all that his government stands for, former Prime Minister Keating famously quipped a few years ago that Labor had 'lost the ability to speak aspirationally to people', a comment that Liberal front-benchers never tire of quoting and that represents a view that Labor needs to connect with working people who are purportedly more interested in the stock market than the labour market.
We're taught to think that aspiration means what you do alone, what sets you apart. As such it is a concept that is both lauded and loaded. Be it peddled by neoliberals or social liberals, its message is clear: the surest sign that you lack aspiration is that you're not already a few rungs up the ladder. In an interview back in 1977, the then 33 year old Paul Keating put it this way: 'It's no good pretending we're working class, down at the club socking it away, out at the footy. I reckon I'm lower middle class; I've made the move up which a lot of Australians have. Isn't that what we're all after?'
"We need to reframe aspiration as the oxygen that working people collectively breathe and evaluate the current attacks on unions and people experiencing unemployment, for example, in this light."
Aspiration, neoliberal style, is a secular version of the gospel of prosperity so loved by the prime minister. God, or the Market, smiles on those who aspire to greater things. Their prosperity is proof of their virtue. The flip-side is that if you are struggling to make ends meet it's because even though prosperity is there for the taking, you don't want it badly enough, you're not hungry enough for it, you don't really want to 'better yourself,' you lack aspiration.
Deep down, these ideological zealots even believe that our social security system stifles aspiration, with Social Services Minister Anne Ruston talking about people 'denying themselves the best opportunity to take advantage of the jobs we are creating'. The government has recently flagged the roll-out of mandatory drug-testing as well as the extension of the cashless welfare card, both designed not to help but to harass, not to deliver hope to people but to demonise and degrade them. In the meantime, Newstart and Youth Allowance payments are kept so low that they can only be described as a means of deliberate humiliation.
Making an artform out of cruelty to young people and people experiencing unemployment is a precondition for systematically disciplining the people who are in paid work, while whittling away at penalty rates, suppressing the minimum wage and undermining the role of unions as the means of organised advocacy for better pay and conditions. Witness the extremist Ensuring Integrity Bill, surely a centrepiece for the agenda assiduously promoted by the philosophers of aspiration and the theologians of prosperity.
Perhaps unions, and indeed progressive grass-roots social movements in general, are hated by neoliberal governments today precisely because they are a vehicle for collective aspiration, historically showing that the real improvements to the lives of ordinary working people come when they are fought for collectively. Rather than limiting aspiration, which is a common neoliberal claim, unions organise aspiration: the aspiration for better pay and conditions, health and safety regulations in the workplace, paid leave for when you are sick, when you need to care for someone you love, when you are having a child, when you need to deal with gendered violence, or when you need an annual break.
So too with every progressive social reform, not only in the field of industrial rights but also in the struggles for women's rights, tenants' rights, the rights of First Nations peoples, the rights of people experiencing unemployment, disability rights, climate action, marriage equality.
I cannot think of a single instance where, even though the legislation was fought for in parliament, the struggles that informed the legislation was not fought for by grass-roots movements for social justice and social change, movements that, like the union movement, collectively aspired to create a better society. Many of these achievements have been dismantled by successive governments that have prosecuted a neoliberal agenda, while reframing the concept of aspiration, making it appear as something that happens most authentically at the individual level, with collective activism and advocacy allegedly getting in its way.
There's a difference between aspiration and acquisition. We need to reframe aspiration as the oxygen that working people collectively breathe and evaluate the current attacks on unions and people experiencing unemployment, for example, in this light. Neoliberal-style aspiration is an ideological chimera used to veil the reality of marginalisation. For those of us who embrace the politics of hope, however, our collective aspiration and our daily struggle is to shape a society in which no one is left out.
Dr John Falzon is Senior Fellow, Inequality and Social Justice at Per Capita. He is a sociologist, poet and social justice advocate and was national CEO of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia from 2006 to 2018. He is a member of the Australian Services Union.