Abstract
Australian progressive movements and formations are engaged in a major struggle against the country’s neoliberal hegemonic power but their forces are fragmented, lacking a unified and coherent front to challenge the neoliberal corporate and security project. The existing hegemonic order is on the ascendancy, with no alternative to endless economic growth, regardless of the cost to the social fabric of society and the poisoning of the human habitat. Under what circumstances are progressive movements likely to grow and join forces in Australia and successfully challenge the hegemony of the neoliberal corporate security state? It requires the emergence of universal junctures and points of convergence which can weld progressive movements in a common cause, such as the existential threat of climate change.
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Notes
- 1.
1. The acronym SLAPP stands for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation.
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2. The politics of panic and fear is a dominant theme in the political life of Australia since the invasion and occupation of the continent. After the ‘yellow peril’ and Communism came the ‘war on terror’ and the fear of Islam. Greg Barns argues that ‘the consequences of the Abbott’s scarce politics will be increased harassment of Australians from the Middle East and of Muslims’ (Barns, 2014). Among the interrelated aspects of the politics of fear is the secrecy and deceptions in the government’s control of information to manufacture consent in its military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. A case study is the Abbott government’s management of information about the level of killing inflicted by the Australian Defence Force in its operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) (Loewenstein 2015).
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3. The manipulation of morality by the state is a topic discussed at length in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust, where he writes: ‘Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates—exploits, re-directs, jams’ (Bauman, 2000:183). In her work Agonistics, Chantal Mouffe writes:
Morality has been promoted to the position of a master narrative; as such, it replaces discredited political and social discourses as a framework for collective action.Morality is rapidly becoming the only legitimate vocabulary: we are not urged to think not in terms of right and left, but of right and wrong. The displacement of politics by morality means that there is now no properly ‘agonistic’ debate in the democratic political public sphere about possible alternatives to the existing hegemonic order; as a consequence, this sphere has been seriously weakened. Hence the growing disaffection with liberal democratic institutions, a disaffection which manifest itself in declining electoral participation. (Mouffe, 2002:1)
4. Bauman and others are concerned about the hidden possibilities of a modern society to commit mass slaughter. These possibilities exist because of the creation of conditions, including the manipulation of emotions involving mass fear and humiliation, which make it possible for a modern society to engage in the mass killing of others (Bauman, 2000; Moїsi, 2009; Young, 1999).
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5. An example is the installation and funding by the Howard government and wealthy and influential conservative individuals of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney (Paul, 2012:38).
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Paul, E. (2016). Struggle for Democracy. In: Australian Political Economy of Violence and Non-Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60214-5_11
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