Why the right uses 'class' against the left.

Cahill, Damien

The idea that there is a powerful 'new class' of tertiary educated cultural elites which pursues a radical, left-wing agenda whilst profiting from public monies, has been a feature of right-wing thought since the early 1970s. (1) In Australia this idea has been adopted by both neo-liberal and conservative writers and found a home within the pages of such journals as Quadrant and IPA Review. The new class thesis forms part of the conservative assault upon the radical movements of the 1960s. Whilst the 1960s has been de-radicalized through processes of commodification--the slogans, events and style of the times being turned into commodities--it has also been de-legitimized by the new class thesis. It holds the protest movements of the 1960s responsible for cultural decline and reduces the actions of the radicals to oedipal politics and middle-class self-interest. At the same time, the new class thesis has been an integral component of the hegemonic project of neo-liberalism--the assault upon the remnants of the welfare state and its political defenders.

How can it be that terms and concepts, traditionally the preserve of the Left, have been adopted with such vigour by the Right? This is the central question addressed in this article. I want to suggest some reasons for the Right's use of class and, specifically, its use of the term 'new class'. The contemporary Right's use of new class terminology is derived primarily from American neo-conservative intellectuals. (2) During the early 1970s, these intellectuals developed a critique of the radicalism of the 1960s which revolved around the idea of the new class.

Neo-conservatism in the United States was an intellectual movement centred around the likes of Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Peter Berger. Many were former liberals and socialists who had travelled the road to anti-communist conservatism during the 1950s and '60s. Journals such as The Public Interest and Commentary provided an ongoing forum for the articulation of the neo-conservative worldview, and it was primarily through these journals that the new class thesis was developed from the early to mid 1970s. (3) Although the precise definition of the new class varied from writer to writer, the following excerpts from Irving Kristol provide a sense of the argument: There are people 'out there' who find it convenient to believe the worst about business because they have certain adverse intentions toward the business community to begin with. They dislike business for what it is, not for what they mistakenly think it is. In other words, they are members of what we have called 'the new class'. This new class is not easily defined, but may be vaguely described. It consists of a goodly proportion of those college educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a 'post-industrial society'... We are talking about scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public sector, city planners and the staffs of the larger foundations and upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on. It is by now a quite numerous class; it is an indispensable class for our type of society; it is a disproportionately powerful class; it is also an ambitious and frustrated class. (4)

Business thus had much to fear from this powerful new class, according to Kristol, as: ... they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call 'the welfare state' toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfil many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left. (5)

According to the neo-conservatives, the new class has its origins in the radicalism of the '60s. The radicals hoped to bring about a revolution in US society, but the decade ended, as Norman Podhoretz writes, 'not with a revolution but with the election of Richard Nixon'. (6) The new class resulted from the confounded expectations of the student radicals who subsequently changed tactics and pursued their revolutionary ends with renewed vigour, 'this time working within the system'. (7)

The Fourth International

Ironically, the roots of the neo-conservative manifestation of new class discourse are located in the debates within the Fourth International around the time of the Second World War. (8) It was in and around US socialist politics of the 1930s and '40s that many neo-conservatives began their intellectual life. And it was the break with Trotskyism and the Fourth International which began the journey right-ward for a number of intellectuals.

Following his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929, and the formation of the Fourth International, Trotsky and his followers wrestled with a critique of the Soviet Union. Trotsky maintained that the Soviet Union remained a workers' state, because of its progressive socialization of industry. However under Stalin the revolution had been stymied, with the bureaucracy becoming, 'the sole privileged and commanding stratum in Soviet society'. (9) So although it was still a workers' state, it was a degenerated workers' state. What was needed, argued Trotsky, was a political revolution --overthrow of the Stalinist dictatorship--not a social revolution. Trotsky's contradiction revolved around his contention that Stalinism continued to play a partly progressive role within the Soviet Union, but worked totally against the forces of proletarian revolution internationally.

This thesis came under increasing pressure from within the Fourth International in the lead-up to World War Two. Trotsky continued to maintain that Stalinism was a temporary phenomenon, however the evidence of Stalin's purges, the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939, and Stalin's annexation of Poland and the Ukraine all contributed towards Trotsky's thesis being increasingly untenable for many within the Fourth International. In the same year Bruno Rizzi responded to the debates within Trotskyism with his The Bureaucratization of the World. (10) Rizzi argued that the Soviet Union had passed into a new form of social organization--that of 'bureaucratic collectivism'. The Soviet bureaucracy, argued Rizzi, owned the means of production and thus constituted a new ruling class. Rizzi viewed this transformation as a necessary stage on the path to socialism, and found evidence of similar trends within Fascist and democratic states alike.

Rizzi's thesis was important because Trotsky repudiated it in his In Defence of Marxism, (11) and it seems to have influenced dissident Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman and James Burnham. (12) Both Shachtman and Burnham were leaders of the US Trotskyist movement and neither accepted Trotsky's defence against Rizzi. They split with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party and Shachtman developed his own thesis of the rise of bureaucratic collectivism within the Soviet Union. Shachtman argued that the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy had created a new form of social organization, 'neither capitalist nor proletarian', (13) in which a new class ruled over, and in the name of, the proletariat. Burnham, too, (who was to move sharply to the Right) developed his own theory. Similar to Rizzi's, it demonstrated a break with marxism. In The Managerial Revolution, published in 1942, Burnham argues that industrialized societies are undergoing a transformation from bourgeois society to a society in which the managerial class will be the new ruling class. This transformation, Burnham argues, is occurring not just in capitalist societies such as the United States, but also in Fascist Germany and Communist Russia. To Burnham, the New Deal was a manifestation of a logic similar to that which brought about the totalitarian societies of Germany and the Soviet Union. (14)

Djilas' thesis

Adding to this context was the publication in the West in 1957 of Milovan Djilas' The New Class. Djilas, former leader of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, was gaoled for expressing views similar to those contained in the book, which was written from gaol and smuggled to the West. The climate of the Cold War and a growing disillusionment with the Soviet Union felt by many on the Left at the time of its release helps to explain the book's subsequent popularity. Djilas' thesis is that the Soviet Union and other communist states are no longer workers' states in any meaningful sense of the word. Rather, they had become societies in which power is monopolized by a 'new class of owners and exploiters', (15) the origins of which were to be found in the professional revolutionary cadre of the pre-October 1917 Bolshevik Party. (16) Through control over the apparatuses of the state, the new class was said to monopolize both political and economic power and, echoing the neo-conservative deployment of the term, the new class are, 'parasites at the expense of others'. (17)

Adoption by the Right

Thus by the late 1950s the label 'new class' was being used to describe a new kind of class formation: a parasitic, bureaucratic elite which claimed to work in the public interest. Crucially, although people like Shachtman and Djilas saw themselves as socialists, their theses had obvious affinities with the anti-communist critiques of the Cold War. Further, by the end of the 1960s, a number of treatises had appeared proclaiming the ascendancy of student radicals, civil rights activists and mental labourers in the form of either the 'new class' or the 'new working class'. (18) So, by the early 1970s, the 'new class' was an idea with currency and imagery. But why did it become the term around which the neo-conservative assault upon the 1960s revolved? I would suggest three factors that shaped this:

Anti-communism

Central to the neo-conservative worldview was an unconditional anti-communism. Indeed it was the lack of this quality within the American Left that facilitated many neo-conservatives' move to the Right during the 1950s and '60s. The new class thesis allowed this anti-communist sentiment to be focused on the home-front. There was already a suspicion that the intelligentsia was sympathetic towards communism, (19) and at least partially responsible for the campus revolts of the 1960s through their lack of moral leadership. These two ideas were combined in the neo-conservatives' new class thesis. The former radicals of the '60s and new intellectuals were mirroring the flaws and self-aggrandisement of the communist apparatchiks they implicitly or explicitly supported. Both the imagery and recent history of the idea of the new class as employed by Rizzi, Shachtman and Djilas resonated with the idea of collusion, self-interest and political motivation, and thus it expressed the neo-conservatives' sentiments succinctly and evocatively.

Conservative nationalism

The Cold War produced a specific kind of anti-communist identification with the United States. For some, such identification was expressed as a celebration of all things American. For others, such as left-wing anti-communist Dwight Macdonald, the identification was more critical. (20) For some anti-communists not choosing a side in the struggle between capitalism and communism was tantamount to choosing communism, and choosing the West, as Macdonald put it, meant choosing America. This is expressed is Malcolm Muggeridge's statement: If I accept, as millions of other Western Europeans do, that America is destined to be the mainstay of freedom in this mid-twentieth century world, it does not follow that Americans are invariably well behaved, or that the American way of life is flawless. It only means that in one of the most terrible conflicts in human history, I have chosen my side, as all will have to choose sooner or later, and propose to stick by the side I have chosen through thick and thin, hoping to have sufficient courage not to lose heart, sufficient sense not to allow myself to be confused or deflected from this purpose, and sufficient faith in the civilization to which I belong, and in the religion on which that civilisation is based, to follow Bunyan's advice and endure the hazards and humiliations of the way because of the worth of the destination. (21)

In the United States, similar attitudes contributed to a virulent nationalism, a feature of neo-conservative writing.

The student New Left was thus viewed as treasonous. It had turned its back on the traditional institutions of American society and had supported the communist enemy in Vietnam and elsewhere. This was interpreted by the neo-conservatives as a crisis of legitimacy for the liberal state, which could be only countered through cultural and moral authority, and through a return to the traditional values of American society (individualism, religion, respect for authority). As Steinfels argues, it is primarily at the level of culture and cultural values that the neo-conservative critique operates. This is why the construction of the new class is as cultural elites with different cultural values to those of ordinary Americans. (22)

Although a number of neo-conservatives had identified themselves as being on the 'democratic Left', they were unsympathetic to the student radicals of the 1960s who worked outside of the legitimate political structures and means of protest. (23) Further, one gets the sense that underlying the neo-conservative worldview was the comforting view that with the growth of the US economy and expansion of the knowledge class, the major contradictions of US society had been solved. The 'End of Ideology' had arrived. Workers no longer struggled for a socialist utopia but rather, for the best returns afforded by technological advance and the new affluence. Thus, the demands of the New Left of students and intellectuals did not reflect the legitimate demands of ordinary Americans, but the interests of the intellectuals themselves. As Bell writes: The irony ... for those who seek 'causes' is that the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals. The workers have not achieved utopia, but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals, and the gains correspondingly larger. (24)

By the early 1970s, these intellectuals and former student radicals were being identified as the new class--a cosmopolitan group unto themselves, removed from the everyday concerns, interests and working experience of ordinary Americans.

Intellectual contexts

When the neo-conservatives spoke of contradictions within American society, they weren't referring to the contradictions identified by the New Left. The problem was not that American university students were pursuing education in relative comfort whilst their government killed thousands in Vietnam. It wasn't that the government spoke of upholding freedom whilst forcing the American youth to deny it to those in foreign countries. It wasn't the fact that the university system was geared to the maintenance of a permanent war economy. Rather, the contradiction neo-conservatives spoke about was the revolt middle-class students against the culture and institutions that had provided them with unprecedented opportunities. This was at the heart of the new class thesis, and it echoed themes developed by Joesph Schumpeter in his influential Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. One of Schumpeter's central contentions was that, '... capitalism is being killed by its own achievements'. (25) With regard to intellectuals, it is the success of the capitalist system in legitimizing liberal freedoms and expanding the systems of education and academic pursuit through public funds, that transforms what was traditionally a critical culture into a hostile one. Intellectuals perpetuate their profession, Schumpeter argues, through social criticism and dissent: ... unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest. (26)

They develop group interests, and the enlargement of this group (their antagonisms toward the dominant culture exacerbated by relatively low-incomes compared with other professions), creates the seeds of a hostile, institutionalized culture. Such hostility cannot legitimately be quelled through authoritarian means (only in a non-bourgeois society could such actions be legitimized), and so capitalism undermines its own authority through its successes in extending bourgeois freedoms and expanding its productivity and knowledge base. (27)

These sentiments are echoed by Irving Kristol in his essay 'Business and the "New Class"': ... there is a sense in which capitalism may yet turn out to be its own gravedigger, since it is capitalism that creates this 'new class'--through economic growth, affluence, mass higher education, the proliferation of new technologies of communication, and in a hundred other ways. (28)

Neo-conservatives could point to the large body of literature theorizing the expansion of the knowledge class, such as Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, as further proof of the new class thesis. Although they tried to ground their thesis in structural terms, it was always at the level of ideology that the new class is identified. As Daniel Bell was later to write: In short, if there is any meaning to the idea of a 'new class'... it cannot be located in social structural terms; it must be found in cultural attitudes. It is a mentality, not a class. (29)

Decline of Class on the Left

The rise of the new class thesis on the Right should also be viewed in the context of the decline in importance of class analysis on the Left.

By the early 1970s, the New Left had fragmented into myriad groups, causes, campaigns and political activity. People's energies were directed into various community projects, feminist organizing and environmental concerns. Although this political activity was often informed by class analysis, it did not comprise a mass movement. Marxist scholarship and research began to flourish within the academy, boosted by the influx of former student radicals, but it was not matched by the growth of a strong marxist-based movement outside of this narrow universe of discourse. (30) Those movements and campaigns which did grow in the 1970s and early 1980s, the new social movements were, generally speaking, based around identity politics rather than a universalist analysis of class. As Christopher Lasch writes: The hope that 'new social movements' would take its place in the struggle against capitalism, which briefly sustained the left in the late seventies and early eighties, has come to nothing. Not only do the new social movements--feminism, gay rights, welfare rights, agitation against racial discrimination--have nothing in common, but their only coherent demand aims at inclusion in the dominant structures rather than at a revolutionary transformation of social relations. (31)

At the same time, from the mid1970s onwards, the world-wide economic crisis was creating conditions under which the Right was able to grow and flourish. A combination of increasing unemployment and rising inflation, facilitated by rising oil prices and American spending in Vietnam, led to a questioning of the assumptions underpinning Keynesian economic planning and to neo-liberal economic solutions gaining a foothold. Monetarism provided a philosophical rationale for policies that accorded with the profit maximization goals of key sections of capital. (32) The rise of identity politics meant that no mass movement informed by an analysis of class was likely to take the place of the anti-war movement or challenge the discursive and ideological ground beginning to be occupied by the Right.

The rise within the academy of postmodernism constituted an assault on class as the primary tool of analysis within the humanities. This led to a fragmentation of marxism itself into postmodernist categories, and a decline in marxist scholarship and class-based analysis in general. Some former New Leftists have even adopted the populist rhetoric of the Right, embracing the new class thesis, whilst largely jettisoning marxist class analysis. (33) As Eagleton writes, by the 1980s: '... Marxism could be seen as at best a set of valid responses to a set of questions which were no longer on the political agenda'. (34)

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and rise to popularity of 'end of history' theses, such as Fukuyama's, (35) has ensured that class, for the most part, has stayed off the agenda.

Finally, the embrace by the labour movement and social democratic parties of the major principles of neo-liberalism has undermined class as a public rallying call for the Left. Both neo-liberals and 'Third Way' proponents eschew class analysis, class being replaced with vague notions of community and inclusion. The 'Third Way' pronouncements of Tony Blair, Anthony Giddens, Mark Latham and Lindsay Tanner are but the latest stage in the capitulation of social democratic parties to globalized neo-liberalism. (36) Even some in the labour movement have adopted the Right's new class thesis and turned it upon the Left, relegating class to a cultural and stylistic category. (37)

However these contextual factors have shaped the course of neo-liberal politics, the success of new class theory rests significantly on the power of the 'new class' rhetoric itself. Above all, it has been successful because it is evocative. It suggests collusion and self-interest. The new class is different from the working class and the capitalist class. Implicit in the term is the idea that these old class distinctions are no longer relevant. Power today is held by a new class, a class unto itself, not tied to older, traditional values, but rather, to cosmopolitanism. It is testament to the ascendancy of the Right, but also to the relative weakness of the Left, that such terms as the 'New McCarthyism' and the 'New Totalitarianism' have been employed by conservatives to support their claims of new class dominance of cultural institutions. The language of the Left is being turned upon itself in a perverse example of political amnesia. (38)

Conclusion

It is important to trace the sources of the new class thesis because they inform how the neo-conservative rhetorical arsenal is deployed in the present. More importantly, discussion of the Right's class discourse reveals a powerful set of arguments, accusations and assumptions that resonate beyond the pages of academic debate. By caricaturing the Left, and social justice claims in general, the Right can claim to represent the 'ordinary' citizen, in opposition to the left-wing or liberal cosmopolitan elites. This argument relies upon a selective memory of the 1960s and a nostalgia for pre-'60s prosperity and values. The same principles behind Robert Menzies' construction of the 'forgotten people' of Australian society can be seen in John Howard's rhetoric of the battlers versus the elites. (39) Crucially, it is cultural values that are said to define the new class. This is why the Right's use of class is an integral component of the neo-liberal hegemonic project. Neo-liberalism is not merely an economic program--it is an assault upon the economic, political and cultural organization that underpinned the welfare state. The rhetoric of 'powerful new class elites' helps to undermine potential oppositional forces to neo-liberalism by portraying them as other than 'ordinary', and represents publicly funded bodies as hostage to self-serving interests, thus helping to legitimize moves towards privatization and de-regulation.

The majority of new class theorists are not anti-intellectual per se. After all, those who articulate the thesis are themselves intellectuals. Their populist appeal to the rhetoric of the 'masses versus the elites' serves to mask the power and privilege of the very conservatives who bemoan the influence of the new class--the policy adviser, recipient of think-tank and foundation funding and syndicated columnist. More than that, by defining class according to vague cultural and ideological criteria, real forms of class domination are obscured. (40)

(1.) I would like to thank Anthony Ashbolt for comments on an earlier draft. An earlier version of this article was originally delivered at the Retrospections conference, University of New South Wales, 1999.

(2.) For a more detailed discussion of the neo-conservatives' and New Right's use of the idea of the 'new class', see B. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, New York, Harper Perennial, 1990, pp. 144-95.

(3.) See, for example, D. Bell, 'The Corporation and Society in the 1970s', The Public Interest, Summer, 1971; I. Kristol, 'About Equality', Commentary, November 1972, pp. 41-7; Kristol, 'On Corporate Capitalism in America', The Public Interest, Fall 1975, pp. 124-41; S. M. Lipset, 'The Paradox of American Politics', The Public Interest, Fall 1975, pp. 142-63; D. P. Moynihan, 'Equalizing Education: in Whose Benefit?', The Public Interest, Fall 1972, pp. 69-89; N. Podhoretz, 'Between Nixon and the New Politics', Commentary, September 1972, pp. 4-8; Podhoretz, 'Laureate of the New Class', Commentary, December 1972, pp. 4-7.

(4.) Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, New York, Mentor Books, 1978, p. 25

(5.) Kristol, 'On Corporate Capitalism in America', p.134

(6.) Podhoretz, The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1986, pp. 130-1

(7.) Podhoretz, The Bloody Crossroads, p. 31.

(8.) Although not impacting directly upon neo-conservative thought, perhaps the first articulation of the idea of a 'new class' can be found in Bakunin's critique of marxism. See, for example, G. P. Maximoff (ed.), The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, New York, The Free Press, 1953, pp. 283-9, and Jan Waclaw Machajski, a radical left-wing critic of marxism and the Bolshevik revolution, 'On the Expropriation of the Capitalists', in V. F. Calverton, The Making of Society: An Outline of Sociology, New York, The Modern Library, 1937, pp. 427-436; also, P. Avrich, 'What is "Makhaevism"?', Soviet Studies, July 1965, pp. 66-75; M. Nomad, Aspects of Revolt: A Study in Revolutionary Theories and Techniques, New York, Noonday Press, 1961, pp. 96-117. Daniel Bell has acknowledged these earlier uses of the term, in D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (2nd edn), New York, Collier Books, 1961, pp. 355-8, 433.

(9.) L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?, Garden City, Doubleday, 1937, p. 249.

(10.) B. Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, New York, The Free Press, 1985.

(11.) Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism: Against the Petty Bourgeois Opposition, New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1942.

(12.) I. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929-1940, London, Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 471-477.

(13.) M. Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State, New York, The Donald Press, 1962, p. 62.

(14.) J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, London, Penguin, 1962, pp. 229-31.

(15.) M. Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1957, p. 58.

(16.) Djilas, p. 39.

(17.) Djilas, p. 46.

(18.) D. Bazelon, Power in America: The Politics of the New Class, New York, Plume, 1971. See also the work of Marcuse, Gorz and Mallet, all of whom were popularized amongst the New Left and all of whom at various times claimed a vanguard role for students in the overthrow of capitalist society: H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969; A. Gorz, Strategy for Labour: A Radical Proposal, Boston, Beacon Press, 1967; 'May-June 1968--The First Strike For Control', in S. Mallet, The New Working Class, Nottingham, The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1975, pp. 1-32.

(19.) See, for example, R. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, New York, W. W. Norton and Co., 1962 and S. M. Lipset, Political Man, (1959), London, Heinemann, 1976.

(20.) D. Macdonald, 'I Choose the West', in Macdonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism, New York, Meridian Books, 1958, pp. 197-201.

(21.) M. Muggeridge, in F. Stonnor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London, Granta Books, 1999, p.174.

(22.) P. Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men who are Changing America's Politics, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 55.

(23.) Habermas argues that a feature of neo-conservative thought is the belief in the theory of democratic rule by elites, J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989, pp. 23-5.

(24.) Bell, End of Ideology, p. 404.

(25.) J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1943, p. x.

(26.) Schumpeter, p. 146.

(27.) Schumpeter, pp. 143-55.

(28.) Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, p. 27.

(29.) Bell, 'The New Class: A Muddled Concept', in B. Briggs (ed.), The New Class?, New Brunswick, Transaction Books, 1979, p. 186.

(30.) A good discussion of the growth of academic 'Marxology' and the problems confronted by the New Left in the United States during the 1970s can be found in B. and J. Ehrenreich, 'Rejoinder', in P. Walker (ed.), Between Labor and Capital, Boston, South End Press, 1979.

(31.) C. Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 1995, p. 27.

(32.) T. Battin, Abandoning Keynes: Australia's Capital Mistake, London, Macmillan, 1997, pp. 211-40; M. Beresford and B. McFarlane, 'Economic Theory as Ideology: A Kaleckian Analysis of the Australian Economic Crisis', in P. Boreham and G. Dow, Work and Inequality in Australia: Workers, Economic Crisis and the State, Vol. 1, South Melbourne, Macmillan, p. 216.

(33.) For an example of the Left's adoption of the Right's new class terminology. see P. Piccone, 'Artificial Negativity as a Bureaucratic Tool? Reply to Roe', Telos, no. 86, Winter 1990-1, pp. 127-143. Not only does Telos adopt such language, it has also falled in behind key elements of the neo-liberal program and provided a platform for the French New Right. See, for example, Piccone, 'The End of Public Education?', Telos, no. 111, Spring 1998, p. 138 in which Piccone gives qualified support for the neo-liberal concept of educational vouchers; also, A. de Benoist and C. Chompetier, 'The French New Right in the Year 2000', Telos, no. 115, Spring 1999, pp. 117-44.

(34.) T. Eagleton, 'Introduction Part 1', in T. Eagleton and D. Milne (eds), Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, Cambridge, Blackwell, 1996, p. 2.

(35.) F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, London, Penguin, 1992.

(36.) S. Bell, 'Is the Third Way the Right Way?', Just Policy, 18 April 2000, pp. 52-55; R. Green and A. Wilson, 'Labor's Trojan Horse: The 'Third Way' on Employment Policy', in G. Patmore and D. Glover (eds), New Voices for Social Democracy, Annandale, Pluto Press, 1999, pp. 63-85.

(37.) See, for example, M. Thompson, Labor Without Class: The Gentrification of the ALP, Annandale, Pluto Press, 1999; and P. Walsh (Cassandra), 'New Class is Just More of the Same', Financial Review, 28 August 1990, p. 13.

(38.) For a discussion of neo-conservative 'political amnesia', see A. Ashbolt, 'Prodigal Sons and Political Amnesia: American Radicalism, Jewish Identity, Israel', The Australasian Journal of American Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, July 1992, pp. 15-26.

(39.) See J. Brett, Robert Menzies' Forgotten People, Chippendale, Pan Macmillan, 1993 and S. Scalmer, 'The Battlers versus the Elites: The Australian Right's Language of Class', Overland, no. 154, 1999, pp. 9-13.

(40.) Hermann makes a similar point in E. Hermann, Triumph of the Market: Essays in Economics, Politics and the Media, Boston, South End Press, 1995, p. 69.