Abstract
Class warfare apparently arises when the distribution of wealth and income in society is challenged by working people and their political representatives. It is allegedly driven by envy and a desire to cut down successful individuals and profitable businesses. Gross inequalities are not the result of class warfare successfully waged by elites, but are instead the consequences of anonymous market forces. The evidence in Australia suggests that this is not true. Political and commercial elites deny the suggestion that they are the beneficiaries of a successful class war in order to maintain both their wealth and the legitimacy of the system in the eyes of the entire population.
All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth Of Nations (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1976), Book III, Chapter IV, p. 437
Class is a Communist concept. It groups people together and sets them against each other.
Margaret Thatcher (quoted in Philip Mirowski, Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived The Financial Meltdown (Verso, London 2013), p. 117)
[Current opposition to free trade in the United States is] heavily influenced by perceptions that voters themselves now view trade issues in terms of a domestic class struggle, not as promoting exports and global integration.
David Hale , economist (quoted in the Australian Financial Review, 15 November 1997)
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995).
- 2.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995), p. 7.
- 3.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995), pp. 10 & 27.
- 4.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995), p. 87.
- 5.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995), p. 28.
- 6.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995), p. 47.
- 7.
Noam Chomsky, Optimism Over Despair (Haymarket Books, Chicago 2017), p. 88; Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen & Jie Chen, How Money Drives US Congressional Elections: More Evidence, Institute for New Economic Thinking Annual Conference, Paris April 2015—https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/How-Money-Drives-US-Congressional-Elections-More-Evidence.pdf/; Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, And Average Citizens, in Perspectives on Politics, Volume 12, Issue 3, September 2014. See also Thomas Ferguson, ‘Defying The Investors’, Jacobin, 28 June 2016—https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/ferguson-clinton-sanders-election-democratic-party-trump/; Martin Gilens, Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012) and Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press, Princeton 2016). On the global political and economic elite, see Peter Phillips, Giants: The Global Power Elite (Seven Stories Press, New York 2018).
- 8.
Joseph Stiglitz quoted in Andrew Clark, ‘Stiglitz criticizes Obama’s soft touch with struggling banks’, The Guardian 18 April 2009. See also Simon Johnson & James Kwak, 13 Bankers (Pantheon, New York 2010), pp. 180–88.
- 9.
Simon Johnson & James Kwak, 13 Bankers (Pantheon, New York 2010), p. 164.
- 10.
Simon Johnson, ‘The Quiet Coup’, The Atlantic, May 2009.
- 11.
Gretchen Morgenson & Don Van Natta Jr, ‘In Crisis, Banks Dig In for Fight Against Rules’, The New York Times, 1 June 2009.
- 12.
Leo Panitch & Sam Grindin, The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso, London 2012), p. 321.
- 13.
Simon Johnson & James Kwak, 13 Bankers (Pantheon, New York 2010), pp. 11–2.
- 14.
Simon Johnson, ‘The Quiet Coup’, The Atlantic, May 2009. For a detailed analysis, see Timothy Williams, The Banker’s Crisis and the Mobilisation Against Reforms (BA Honours thesis, Deakin University 2013—unpublished). See also Charles Gasparino, Bought And Paid For: The Hidden Relationship Between Wall Street And Washington (Portfolio, New York 2012).
- 15.
Ben Protess & Jessica Silver-Greenberg, ‘With an Obama Victory, Wall Street Pivots to Plan B’, The New York Times, 7 November 2012. Wall Street lobbied with much success, see Ben Protess, ‘Big Banks Get Break in Rules to Limit Risks’, The New York Times, 15 May 2013. See more recently Edward Luce, ‘Too big to resist: Wall Street’s comeback’, Financial Times, 14 December 2014. See also Charles Gasparino, Bought And Paid For (Portfolio Penguin, New York 2012), pp. 244–9. For a broader survey of class identity in the United States , see Benjamin I. Page & Lawrence R. Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2009). See also Stephen Labaton, ‘Ailing, Banks Still Field Strong Lobby at Capitol’, The New York Times, 4 June 2009.
- 16.
Quoted in Greg Sargent, ‘There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won’, Washington Post, 30 September 2011.
- 17.
Jason Wilson, ‘Class war in Australian politics? If only’, The Guardian, 6 May 2016.
- 18.
David Held, State and Societies (New York University Press, New York 1983), p. 25.
- 19.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Prometheus, New York 1966), pp. 40–1.
- 20.
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Lindsay Fortado & James Fontanella-Khan, ‘Elite gathering reveals anxiety over ‘class war’ and ‘revolution’, Financial Times, 2 May 2019.
- 21.
Dean Baker, ‘The Myth of Market Fundamentalism’, Counterpunch, 7 April 2010. For an extension of these arguments, see Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State (Centre For Economic and Policy Research, Washington 2006).
- 22.
Charles Gasparino, Bought and Paid For (Portfolio Penguin, New York 2012), pp. 19–20.
- 23.
On class in Australian history, see R.W. Connell, Ruling Class, Ruling Culture (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977); R.W. Connell & T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History (Longman Cheshire, Melbourne 1992); Craig McGregor, Class in Australia (re ed Penguin, Ringwood 2001).
- 24.
Brendan Trembath, ‘Maurice Newman laments spending cuts quarantine, slams Rudd, Gillard governments over ‘reckless’ spending’, ABC News Online, 12 November 2013.
- 25.
David Crowe, ‘We have become a business-bashing country’: BCA boss pins company tax cuts hopes on US mission, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 2018.
- 26.
Bernard Keane, ‘Amid denialism on company tax cuts, the ABC lets us all down’, Crikey, 19 February 2018—https://www.crikey.com.au/2018/02/19/amid-fake-news-on-company-tax-cuts-the-abc-lets-us-all-down
- 27.
Michael Stutchbury, ‘The class struggle that’s as dated as Downton Abbey’, Australian Financial Review, 30 May 2016.
- 28.
Paul Kelly, ‘The chasm between populist politics and cold financial reality’, The Australian, 21 May 2016; Dennis Shanahan, ‘Federal election 2016: Labor lays bare class warfare campaign’, The Australian, 5 May 2016.
- 29.
Peter Van Onselen, ‘Federal election 2016: If Shorten wages class war and wins, we all lose’, The Australian, 31 May 2016.
- 30.
Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring (Penguin, London 1954), p. 336.
- 31.
Philip Coorey, ‘Budget 2016: Class warfare will ruin the country: Scott Morrison’, Australian Financial Review, 4 May 2016.
- 32.
Peter Lewis, ‘We’re all class, and that matters in this election’, The Drum, 18 May 2016.
- 33.
Greg Jericho, ‘Turnbull’s attack on Emma Alberici’s tax-cut analysis doesn’t add up’, The Guardian, 18 February 2018.
- 34.
Judith Sloan, ‘Company tax cuts: let’s have a debate based on facts’, The Weekend Australian, 17 February 2018.
- 35.
Dennis Shanahan, ‘Bill Shorten tied to divide the country, says former prime minister John Howard’, The Australian, 19 May 2019.
- 36.
Michael Roddan, The People vs The Banks (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 2019), p. 61.
- 37.
Michael Roddan, The People vs The Banks (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 2019), p. 8.
- 38.
Rachel Baxendale, ‘Bank royal commission would be ‘rank socialism’: Howard, The Australian, 23 November 2017. See also Adele Ferguson, Banking Bad (ABC Books/Harper Collins, Sydney, 2019), p. 198.
- 39.
Adele Ferguson, Banking Bad (ABC Books/Harper Collins, Sydney, 2019), p. 378.
- 40.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth Of Nations (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1976), Book I, Chapter IX, p. 110. On wealth divisions in contemporary Australia, see Frank Stilwell, The Political Economy Of Inequality (Polity, Cambridge 2019).
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Burchill, S. (2020). Class Power in the United States and Australia. In: Misunderstanding International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1936-9_9
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