So let me start on my subject, working-class politics in the contemporary world, with a quote from Ralph Miliband:

“All concepts of politics, of whatever kind, are about conflict - how to contain it, or abolish it.”

That is how I understand politics based on my own experiences, and on my own reading of our history. I say that not to celebrate conflict – still less violence – but merely to state a fact.

Politics is about struggle, about the clash of interests and, for me, ultimately about how to create a society and a world where there really are common interests.

After the Second World War, the pressure of the countermovement made decommodification the unacknowledged motor of domestic politics throughout the industrialised world. Parties of the working class, acutely vulnerable to pressure from below, were in government more than 40% of the time in the postwar decades – compared to about 10% in the interwar years, and almost never before that – and “contagion from the Left” forced parties of the right into defensive acquiescence. Schooling, medical treatment, housing, retirement, leisure, child care, subsistence itself, but most importantly, wage-labor: these were to be gradually removed from the sphere of market pressure, transformed from goods requiring money, or articles bought and sold on the basis of supply and demand, into social rights and objects of democratic decision.

This, at least, was the maximal social-democratic program — and in certain times and places in the postwar era its achievements were dramatic.

But the social democratic solution is unstable — and this is where the Marxist conception comes in, with its stress on pursuit of profit as the motor of the capitalist system. There’s a fundamental contradiction between accepting that capitalists’ pursuit of profit will be the motor of the system, and believing you can systematically tame and repress it through policies and regulations. In the classical Marxist account, the contradiction is straightforwardly economic: policies that reduce profit rates too much will lead to underinvestment and economic crisis. But the contradiction can also be political: profit-hungry capitalists will use their social power to obstruct the necessary policies. How can you have a system driven by individuals maximizing their profit cash-flows and still expect to maintain the profit-repressing norms, rules, laws, and regulations necessary to uphold the common welfare?

It would be a great error for the Left to confine its concern about the Government to the latter’s actions during the life of the present Parliament: for there are crucial questions about Labour policy which lie in a longer perspective. No doubt, the Left does have to concern itself with questions of immediate policy and with the Government’s actions; and it must do all it can to make its influence felt on present issues. But it also needs, and needs very badly, to direct its attention to Labour’s longer-range aims and prospects. In any case, the immediate and the more distant are obviously related; the Left’s present attitudes and reactions to Government policy can only have coherence and vigour if they are part of a broader perspective; and such a perspective is important not only in terms of the Government’s present actions, but even more in terms of its tendencies for the future. These tendencies, it will be argued here, make it essential for the Left to work out a clear set of policies and alternatives. The Left does not at present have such policies. Its failure to develop them in the next year or so would have crippling consequences for itself and for the Labour movement for many years to come.

Properly understood, multiculturalism doesn’t sanction a form of relativism. In practice, as I’ve shown, multicultural policy in Australia has been circumscribed by the civic values of liberal democracy. Culture isn’t a blanket excuse. Any right to express one’s cultural identity has been accompanied by a responsibility to adhere to the rule of law and parliamentary democracy, and to respect individual liberty and equality in its various forms.
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In a liberal democracy that protects individual liberty and is governed by equality, there are some cases where we must decline to endorse some forms of diversity. What multiculturalism requires – this is the nuance that isn’t always understood – is that any refusal is done in the right way. Namely, it must be done with what Taylor calls a ‘presumption’ that we owe equal respect to all cultures; that all cultures may have something important to say to all human beings.28 That we are talking only about a presumption is the key point: it is something that may be rebutted. Multiculturalism doesn’t ask for an automatic judgement of equal value and worth.