Abstract
Australian democracy is largely defined by the character and function of the country’s political economy incorporated in the existing neoliberal corporate security state. Violence is built in a hegemonic order characterized by the concentration of private power and wealth, the commodification of people and nature, the construction and manipulation of antagonisms and enemies, and the politics of fear as a US client state. Australian politics is conducted as a one-party state, a new authoritarianism by privileged elites. Democratization requires a clearly defined opposing hegemonic order, a radical democracy, and a counter-culture to the existing one. Its potential exists in progressive non-violent movements, parties, unions, and other formations struggling for a new political economy based on social, economic, and political equality.
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Notes
- 1.
1. Australia’s neoliberal corporate state is a form of corporatism. Corporatism has to do with the fusion of state and corporate power. It is the coming together of the state and corporations to form an ongoing entity collaborating and working closely together to consolidate power in the pursuit of stated goals invariably coming under the rubric of ‘national interests’. Jacques Ellul studied the phenomenon in his work on techniques and technology in the construction of the technological society, which, he suggests, invariably leads to a form of totalitarianism (Ellul, 1964). Technique, he argued, ‘converts spontaneous and unreflective behaviour into behaviour that is deliberate and rationalised’ (Ellul, 1964:vi). In her analysis of the rise of disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein labels the US political regime as corporatist. She writes: ‘[A] system that erases the boundaries between big government and big business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the sizzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security’(Klein, 2008:15). Corporatism is moving advanced capitalist societies to a new phase in politics, further undermining democracy by morphing governmentality into the management of violence and inequality. This is made possible with the sophisticated tools of surveillance, the accumulation of metadata on society, and the use of algorithms. A data-based approach to governance—algorithmic regulation—is what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discusses in the transformation of democracy, ‘whereby the traditional hierarchical relation between causes and effects is inverted, so that, instead of governing the causes—a difficult and expensive undertaking—governments simply try to govern the effects’ (Morozov, 2014).
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2. Oxfam report that ‘85 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50% (3.5 billion people)’ and that by 2016, the ‘richest 1% would own more than 50% of the world’s wealth’ (Elliott & Pilkington, 2015).
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3. The militarization of social life and society is a process characterized by a number of developments such as the militarization of Australian history in the political indoctrination of school children and the general public by means of curricula, media coverage, and public activities; the militarization of the police force in its training and equipment; the waging of the politics of fear to control behaviour and gain consent for a foreign policy attuned to US global military strategy; and the construction of a military–surveillance–industrial complex in support of Australia’s role as a US client state. A recent development which illustrates the process is the emergence in 2015 of the Australian Border Force as the result of the merger of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection with the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. Its law enforcement arm, with more than 5000 officers in black uniform, has the power to stop and challenge anyone in Australia. Journalist Richard Flanagan depicts the country’s newest paramilitary force as an Orwellian ‘goon squad’ (Flanagan, 2015).
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4. Tariq Ali argues that democracy in the West has ‘taken the form of an extreme centre, in which centre-left and centre-right collude to preserve the status quo; a dictatorship of capital that has reduced political parties to the status of the living dead…the convergence of political choices…a new market extremism has come into play. The symbiosis between politics and corporate capital has become a model for the new-style democracies’ (Ali, 2015). A situation where there is no ideological differences between major political parties and a political class competing for the same jobs gives rise to forms of politics articulated by religious, nationalist, or other forms of political identification. In Australia, the loss of vision of the Australian Labor Party, except as an alternate leadership in guiding the neoliberal corporate security state, has led to the emergence of an increasing number of small parties, such as the Palmer United Party funded and headed by the billionaire Clive Palmer, who shares a number of characteristic with the US real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. Ian Buruma, writer and professor of Democracy at Bard College, diagnoses the emergence of ‘Trumpism’ in the 2015 US Republican presidential nomination as a revolt against political elites and explains his popularity as part of ‘a wider phenomenon throughout the democratic world. Disaffected voters are not only turning away from mainstream political parties and following populists who promise to clean out the corrupt elites; they also share a taste for political entertainers, or clowns if you like’ (Buruma, 2015).
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5. The national security state is increasingly dependent on subcontracting its activities to corporations, including activities such as surveillance, special operation, and assassination. In the case of the USA, where the process of outsourcing is most advanced, the use of torture in the wake of 9/11 was extensively subcontracted, as revealed by a US Senate report on detention and torture conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). One contractor was a company formed by two psychologists who received in excess of US$181 million for interrogating and torturing prisoners (US, 2014:11).
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6. Chantal Mouffe’s use of ‘passions’ denotes all the strivings and passions in oneself to find an answer to one’s existence, making sense of the social, economic, and political world, and of finding meaning in life. Passions are part of the internal strivings of the self to avoid insanity and suicide. Passions exhibit a survival response to crisis in the living process, demanding adaptation to minimize harm (violence) to oneself and others. Passions in that context are critical in the construction of one’s identity because they play an important role in the expression and resolution of conflicts in one’s relations with others. Conflict is about active hostility or opposition to someone, about something, that requires expression and resolution. One’s relations with others are largely based on unequal power relation; all individual relations in society are political and require political resolutions. Therefore, it is critical that passions be mobilized towards democratic designs. This requires activism and engagement on the part of the individual in politics. The danger is for passions to be mobilized and diverted away from the political by market forces, greed for more goods and services, and dependency on drugs. Another danger is the capture of passions by nationalistic and patriotic propaganda to hate and kill ‘others’. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warns of the danger of the rise of the politics of fear and of the hidden possibilities in modern society for another holocaust (Bauman, 2005).
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Paul, E. (2016). Violence. In: Australian Political Economy of Violence and Non-Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60214-5_1
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