FOUNDING CONFERENCE

CHAIRPERSON'S INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

MINH NGUYEN

FRIDAY NIGHT, APRIL 19, 2002

[Revised: 4/9/02]

Guests, delegates and friends,

The great historian Eric Hobsbawm once observed at the end of what he calls the "short twentieth century," that the world "is in a state of social breakdown rather than any revolutionary crisis".

Such a conclusion is hard to avoid.

World politics at the early twenty-first century appears to be in a condition of turbulent stagnation with little hope of calm and no prospect of fundamental change. Despite manifest violence of the contemporary order, rather than an in-house rethink, the discourse of what Susan Strange calls the "business civilisation" continues in its oblivious trajectory, pausing only to consider whether to implement more of the same.

In this Utopian vision, business is held to perform a civilising mission of market competition and the ceaseless search for profit. The concept of business civilisation is part of the wider neoliberal discourse suggesting that through the growth of an "enterprise culture" and through "market discipline" the virtues of prudence, responsibility, good governance, and social progress will arise in a partly automatic fashion.

Market forces are represented here as deity, objective, and beyond and above nature or politics. As a Catholic I sometimes feel inadequate when I see such level of faith in any deity!

But what is a concern about the robustness of market dogmatism is that we are now witnessing a bankruptcy of conventional political alternatives. The result is an increase in cynicism, apathy and non-participation of people in politics and social action. It is creating what Stephen Gill calls a culture of mass passivity or absenteeism.

Perhaps this is analogous to the state within the Catholic Church for as long as anyone can remember.

Paulo Freire, one of the most influential modem theorists of education, once recounted the story of a Chilean priest who visited several families living in shanties in indescribable poverty, asking how they could bear to live in such conditions. The replies from these families were always the same: "What can I do? It is the will of God and I must accept it."

Oppression is thus mystified in terms of divine will or human infirmity.

Antonio Gramsci once noted from within the confines of a Fascist prison, the condition that sustains an oppressive regime is a state of social disintegration of the people, and the passivity of the majority among them.

This is where Gramsci's understanding of "the intellectual" is so pertinent for us tonight. Here, the term "intellectual" is not used in the elitist or Platonic sense as if "non-intellectuals" do not matter. In fact one cannot even speak of non-intellectuals. What we have however, are intellectuals with the socio-professional function of intellectuals. These are the people at the forefront of articulating the conditions of the time.

For Gramsci, there are two types of intellectuals: those whose work sustains the status quo and those that challenges it. The role of what Gramsci calls the "organic intellectual" is one of counter-cultural production. Their work involves the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at different degrees of development. Theirs is the pursuit of new means of collective action informed by the development of a new consciousness that would help transcend the immediate corporate instincts of the marginalised and excluded. In today's times, it is the pursuit of what Richard Neville has described in last week's Good Weekend as an "ongoing, unconditional fairness revolution".

This is why we value the two speakers represented here tonight. They represent the very best of organic intellectual traditions. We hope tonight they will challenge us as we think in the context of our Catholic faith of the very issues that will enable us to confront the status quo and its violence with a good intellectual foundation in our way of thinking and thus acting.

[Chairperson introduces speakers Marc Williams and Sallie Saunders]