As death sentences go, the line from Melbourne University Publishing explaining the axing of Meanjin spoke volumes: “The decision was made on purely financial grounds.”

Whatever the merits of the second-oldest literary journal in Australia – and there are plenty of people who have come out in support of it since the news broke on Thursday – that line might equally apply to the entirety of cultural production in this country. And its impact is chilling.

Meanjin will soon be no more.

The value of culture, it implies, is to be assessed in monetary terms purely.

But is money pure? Is that store of value paradoxically value-free, uninformed by ideology or personal interest or shadowy motivations? Hardly.

MUP chair Professor Warren Bebbington this week defended the decision to axe Meanjin by saying the journal was “no longer viable to produce”. That presumably has something to do with the equation between readership, circulation and costs. But for all that, this was a “purely financial” decision, there has been no disclosure about numbers, leading some to speculate at other shadowy motives.

The economic rationalists who have held sway over political discourse in the West for the past 40 years (largely regardless of which “side” was in power) would have us believe “the market will decide” is the only mantra we should pay heed to. But that would be the same market that has decided to turn our universities into degree factories where the barely literate can still earn a qualification because to fail them risks jeopardising the........

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