It seems that Australia is dominated by a parochial, racist and colonialist past, the legacy of which poisons the present and leaches into any conceivable future. The signs are there in the vituperative condemnation heaped on refugees, in the excesses of greed and consumption assumed by the assertion of aspiration. But equally dispiriting is the contemporary language that reduces working-class expression and experience to that of the ‘bogan’. Just as the right-wing disavowal of the terminology of class is revealing of conservative politics, there is also something revealing about the evasions and fears of the bourgeois Left in the contempt for the ‘bogan’. A smug, easy term; again, it lets us off the hook, and it deflects us from the real work that needs to be done. It is as if in losing our ideological certainties since the end of the Cold War, the Left resentfully creates a monster of the working-class people who didn’t play out the historical role assigned to them.
…Words such as ‘bogan’, ‘aspirational’ and ‘redneck’ hide and confuse tensions that in an older politics might correctly have been addressed as class antagonisms. Such terminology obscures the radical nature of the changes inflicted on relations of labour, production and economics in a globalised neoliberal world. They also confuse politics and morality, and further alienate working people from engagement and participation within the Left.
The danger of confusing morality with politics is that it appropriates categories of sin, guilt and redemption that are more appropriate to the language of religion than they are to the elucidation of political economy. And the result? The criminalisation of a range of working-class experiences and lives. Moral panics underlie the fear of any congregation of working-class people, whether on the street or at a post-football match barbecue on a Saturday night. I don’t want to dismiss the real and brutal effects of misogyny or homophobia or racism that do occur and need to be challenged in a great deal of Australian working-class culture, but I do want to claim there is much in that culture to be defended and respected. Misogyny and homophobia and racism also occur in the bourgeois classes with monotonous regularity. But wealth and property, education and privilege allow for opportunity, for escape. They also act as protection against the most coercive, intrusive and punishing forms of state intervention.
—Christos Tsiolkas, The Toxicity of Smugness (via leonrw)
(via a-wingspan-unbelievable)
