Arena (Australian Publishing Co-operative) - The 1970s: Critique of Social Democracy and The Development of A Post-Marxist Framework

The 1970s: Critique of Social Democracy and The Development of A Post-Marxist Framework

By the mid-1970s – as the radical Left faltered and social democracy became increasingly instrumentalised - Arena contributors were focusing on the degree to which social life could be seen not through a base/superstructure/ideology model, but as nested levels of material abstraction, from the least abstract – face-to-face daily life – to the most abstract, such as global commodity and image/media circulation. A focus on material abstraction had its origins in a redirection of the implications of both the critique of technology by figures like Jacques Ellul and the extension of its range by Marshall McLuhan. Marx's analysis of the commodity, particularly as reconstructed by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, consolidated that movement.

The dominant social contradiction was seen as no longer between labour and capital, but between deep-seated human cultural needs grounded in the less abstract levels of life and the drawing of ever-larger areas of life into the most abstracted, and instrumentalised levels of life. Contemporary life was held to be based on a widespread erroneous assumption that the elements of social life – identity stability, meaning, co-operative solidarity – could be 'taken-for-granted' and would survive intact through any process of technological development.

A re-radicalised emancipatory Left would thus be one in which society had a reflexive relationship to different levels of abstraction, maintaining all in a dynamic relationship – crucial to which was an overcoming of the split between intellectual and manual labour as separate class and culturally grounded activities. Although this approach took up some of the themes of the counter-culture, it was also critical of the counter-culture's excessive valorisation of less abstract levels of life and the belief that modern subjects could or should withdraw into anti-technological primitivism. In Arena’s immediate circles it found expression in a decision to establish Arena’s own printery and, from 1974 onwards, to typeset, print and publish their own journal and related publications.

Arena's distinctive approach can thus be seen as having some superficial similarities with post-Marxist and post-classical attempts to apply a levels analysis of social life as developed (differently) by Jurgen Habermas and Louis Althusser. Its critical account of instrumentalised abstraction also has some surface parallels with Slavoj Žižek's critique of postmodernism in The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, and Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of 'liquid modernity’ in his recent works. More generally, Arena’s distinctive approach is grounded in an emphasis on the constitutive role of abstraction both within the interpretive and the instrumental expression of rationality.

Though it continued to publish a great deal of conventional radical-left political economic and geopolitical material, it was at this point that its orientation began to diverge from other Australian left publications such as Overland, and the Australian Left Review.