Auspol

The Reactionary Backslide Begins

With the Australian Defence Force being officially stationed in my local government area, the proto-fascist police state has emerged, quite literally overnight, to the thunderous applause of the Quiet Australians. Nary a peep of decrying a Rising (code for Eastern) Authoritarianism, nary a whimper from a milion citizens already in lockdown.

This spectacle, this farce, is interesting in nature as it reveals great detail of where the current administration’s priorities lie during crisis. At every stage of this unfolding “national emergency”, no real effort has been made to respond to the true nature of the Delta outbreak, only the facade of response. As breakdown continues, there is little reason to expect these core priorities to change, even with a change of party administrators.

Oh, and please stop kidding yourself, Australia is a one party state in every way but name: we are ruled by The Party of Capital. Anyway.

It should be apparant to all observers that the government’s health response has been utterly pathetic. After delaying the initial lockdown for far too long, it was too lax in enforcing public health measures in high socio-economic status areas, and responded to increasing cases by heavily increasing police patrols in western suburbs, where the multicultural population lives. Income support has only just begun at the time of writing, four long weeks into lockdown, but even that pittance is made as onerous as possible to receive.

Anti-lockdown protests, the first of which sadly looks to be many being last weekend, present in its purest form a primal reaction to what is perceived to be sudden reduction in liberty. Not letting a super-spreader event go to waste, the state police appealed for citizens to report on eachother, and over ten thousand reports were made.

That such a call was not only heeded, but indulged in happily, should send chills down the spine of anyone who dissents in this dying world. The mass electronic surveillance systems seem to not be production-ready yet, but the supplement of human-supplied intelligence by an easily manipulated public is even harder to manage.

Over the last two days, restrictions have been further tightened and the state police force formally requested assistance from the national defence force. They arrived yesterday.

Given the rather inconvenient (for the proto-fascists currently in charge) legal impediment to the defence force operating, each officer must be escorted by a police officer, their only apparent use in aiding public health being purely aesthetic. But that aesthetic of projected authority has a very real function in the fascism being constructed before our very eyes.

Whether or not an an authoritative action actually affects anything is irrelevant, so long as negative externalities are not experienced by the only demographic that matter: white property owners must not be inconvenienced, and their prejudices indulged, at every cost. This is a very clear indication of how the state is planning to handle subsequent collapses.

If you apply this analytical lense to any problem in contemporary Australian society, you may or may not be surprised that every act of government may align very well. There’s a saying about class society and democracy: bourgeois democracy is but dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Personally, I am completey shocked at how broad a slice of the population will so willingly lick the boots of bourgeois state enforcers. But take a glimpse at any social media platform and you can hardly deny such a torrent of servile reaction. Even the darlings of the liberal media elite could be seen kowtowing in public.

The response to a dying world differs amongst people. Some seek safety, some seek change. And so it is with politics, the trend being clear towards a further diminished opposition to the dominant values.

What are those values, you may ask?

So-called Australia was founded as the white supremacist wedding of labour and capital, and is now ruled by a corrupt cabal of elites who offer unscrupulous settlers and the weak minded the chance to sponsor and thus indulge in government corruption. That’s it, nothing more. Property interests pretending to be a country.

However weak a justification such a grotesquerie claims, it does so claim. And so the exact nature of Australian fascism will draw from a vast well of ugliness, savagery and unjust privilege extracted over a century or more. There is much to be understood, but we must understand the exact nature of that national consciousness. Especially that nature that may be present in all of us, as one borne of the colony.

Lest we be as clueless as a liberal journalist in the bourgeois media, as stupid a pawn as an anti-lockdown protester, or as malicious as a left-reactionary.

The old world is dying. A new world struggles to be born. This is the time of monsters. We must recognise that fascism is simply the pure expression of capitalism in decay.

Digital Monopolies and Digital Commons

What a flex of unrestrained power, to threaten to disable functionality for an entire population.

In its first response as the second digital platform named by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in its draft proposal to regulate the relationship between platform and news organisation, Facebook publically threatened to block all Australians from sharing all local and international news content.

If executed, approximately 16 million Australians will no longer be able to view content produced by registered news businesses. Undoubtably a drastic change in the perceived utility of the platform for many, despite the tranquility it may bring for some.

However, to view the debate on this regulation as blatant rentseeking/freeloading from either party is missing the deeper issue at hand, that being of our own complicity and passivity in maintaining our digital commons.

The enclosure of the serf’s commons in 16th century England was a prime material catalyst in the historical development of capitalism. Previously shared space was encloused upon by a private owner, who was incentivised to maximise the productivity of the property. As with the common fields, the enclosure of the digital commons have both yielded vast amounts of wealth, and further shaped the behaviour of those lives of digital pastures to serve those owners.

The explosive success of the American technology giants and the dominant commercialisation model that followed has had a major effect of diminishing the products and culture of the digital commons: open, interoperable standards and applications.

Older technology enthusiasts may remember a time before ubiquity, where personal technology was not yet dominated by commerical interests. A wild west of handcrafted home pages and blogs, open chat protocols, constellations of interest-based communities, and a dark underbelly of content sharing.

It’s without question that Google’s and Facebook’s technology have brought us a level of convenience previously unimaginable.

What we should question is whether we should stand back and continue to allow the powerful forces of unregulated surveillance capitalism dictate the terms of use of our digital spaces, or whether we can imagine and create a new, healthier digital future for ourselves.

At this point in our technological history, every ubiquitous social media service, be it Instagram, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, has but one commercial model: capture attention to serve advertising. Billions are invested to ensure products are as addictive as possible. The value of each service is dependent on the efficiency and efficacy of its advertising machine.

Plenty has been written on the dynamic between the machines of the digital platforms, society, and the individual; opaque algorithmic recommendation, sophisticated political and commercial targeting, the unregulated spread of misinformation and the consequent cultivation of far-right terror are all at the forefront of the public consciousness.

Is this worth what we get from these services, stitched into the fabric of our lives, all to be held hostage to private interests? The ability to share content, comment on links, upload photos and livestream video were not invented by these companies. Digitised directory services and maps are not novel inventions brought to life by private genius, but machines operated by the labour of thousands and millions.

We need not suffer for them. We can build the future we want.

Google can rally its credulous users into supporting its interests. Facebook can neuter itself to avoid the ire of regulators. But to truly shape the platforms to serve our interests, we must reevaluate the personal value of these services, and we must reframe ourselves as the primary actor in our relationship with digital platforms. Not as a passive spectator experiencing the shockwaves of a titanic corporate struggle.

Fostering a sense and shared value of a digital commons in opposition to the deep capitalist realism of this era requires nothing short of a revolutionary shift in our existing relationship with technology; technical comprehension aside, it requires us to actively upend a deep-rooted consumerist attitude towards the product we build into our daily lives.

In order for our digital lives to serve the interests of the people, we must take ownership over the means of digital reproduction.

There is likely to be an element of sacrifice in acting towards this goal. The very appeal of the digital platforms is their simplicity and convenience. But that must always be balanced by the true cost, the externalised consequences.

The coming decade is set to be defined by struggle – the rising East and the fading West, the ascendant propertied and the suffering renters, those experiencing and those awaiting climate catastrophe. We are already being primed to accept many sacrifices to our living standards, as the supposedly post-industrial society turns to cannibalise itself.

That our digital struggles should take the same form as our material struggles and our political struggles should come as no surprise.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.

The Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg

Crusaders – Western Warrior Governance

I, like most observers, were astonished by the reporting last week that 6 million workers were accessing the JobKeeper salary subsidy; including up to 800,000 people finding themselves in winding Centrelink queues, 56% of the labour force were receiving government support.

If you count those uncounted in the labour force numbers, the April unemployment rate jumps from a somewhat rosy 6.2% to an astonishing 10.2%, but the subsidised percentage drops to 53%. Small comforts for the government, I’m sure.

But the Government yesterday revealed that an “accounting error” caused by the paperwork blunders of just 1000 companies (of a approximate 728,000+ companies accessing JobKeeper) left the scheme with $60 billion unused funds, and 3 million less workers covered than expected.

How on earth does such a glaring miscalculation happen? And how was it not immediately recognised?

First things first. From the Prime Minister’s own press release of JobKeeper:

The Morrison Government will provide a historic wage subsidy to around 6 million workers who will receive a flat payment of $1,500 per fortnight through their employer, before tax.

The $130 billion JobKeeper payment will help keep Australians in jobs as tackle the significant economic impact from the coronavirus.

Immediately, the cover story falls over. The Government announced both the costing of the scheme, and the expected number of eligible workers weeks before businesses began to apply for the scheme. So, the wild disparity cannot be the responsibility of dodgy paperwork.

It’s shameful for the Treasurer to hide behind a public servant patsy in trying to explain away this disparity. But, there has to be a reason why the initial modelled expectations have diverged so far from reality.

Could it be that the Government’s explicit crusade against migrant workers, casuals, the arts and education sectors prevented 3 million fewer workers from accessing the scheme than predicted?

It is well known that the Government explicitly rewrote, three times, the JobKeeper criteria to exclude universities, now facing existential threat and cuts of staff and offered courses.

As seems to be the case with this Government, its policy is designed to reward those it deems worthy, and to mercilessly punish those that it views as ideologically despicable.

Investment fund managers, barristers, doctors and pensioners who reported a temporary dip in income are among the growing list of people being paid the federal government’s JobKeeper subsidy.

Fundies join barristers on JobKeeper, AFR

This week brought another fresh example of rabid Government ideology taking precedence over cooler heads – the absolute nadir of the Australia-China relationship. While the Australian press fawned over a propaganda victory for the small Pacific power, careful examination of the timeline and actors involved shows how fraught and poorly executed this Washington whisper was.

The propaganda angle of WHA73 cannot be understated: the key results being that that China supported the resolution for a global review of pandemic response, but the USA did not. Xi Jinping pledged $2 billion USD funding to the WHO and pledged the COVID vaccine as a global public good. The USA and UK, in sharp contrast, are fighting against contributing to a global pool of patents.

But you won’t hear a whisper of that in Western press.

Let’s be clear – Australia’s proposals for an explicit investigation of China’s pandemic handling, conducted by an empowered WHO “weapons-inspector”-esque team, was completely rejected. The only thing heard was a loud foghorn in Beijing, signalling that Australian policymakers are completely captured by Washington’s interests.

And this is just the latest example of a long list of actions that demonstrate this – the most salient being Turnbull’s Huawei 5G ban. Malcolm Turnbull himself admitted in his memoir that there was “no smoking gun” evidence to ban Huawei. At the very least, there are inklings of some deeper reflective, concillatory thinking appearing.

As if we needed more evidence that the intelligence agencies are deeply driven by red-yellow peril.

The fallout of acting the imperial vanguard is starting to appear, in the form of a crumbling trade relationship. Despite media assertions that trade restrictions on barley and beef are retaliatory, while certainly a potential motivation, there exists a bilaterial equality element to China’s trade policy that is consistently downplayed, poorly understood, and potentially justified.

A damaged economic relationship with China would be detrimental to the Australian economy. China purchases 30% of our exports, and is vital for the tourism and education sectors. We, on the other hand, do not have nearly so much leverage. It is frankly suicidal to sabotage this for an ideological crusade. But we are being dragged into a struggle that is not our own.

Each diplomatic blunder drags the country more and more into an alignment with the US-capitalist bloc, of those hawks that would eventually condemn us to war in order to protect white Western supremacy, and the profit of capital. This is clearly, in my view, not in any peace-loving people’s best interest. And it must be resisted in the strongest terms.

Given this climate, it certainly is an uphill battle.

Ideological Doona

The Prime Minister likes to frame the unwinding of pandemic health and economic measures as “coming out from under the doona, the infantilising implication being that we’re cowering from the ficticious boogeyman. Scott Morrison and the Government, the clear-eyed adults gently beckoning us to come out, into reaity and normalcy.

However, the Government are stuck under their own ideological doona, from which they steadfastly refuse to emerge from, the consequences of such disengagement left for those of us outside to compensate.

Primarily, the primacy of neoliberal economic ideology prevents the Government from any activity that may subvert the primacy of the market-based economy.

Clearly, they were forced to intervene once it became clear that the pandemic-induced demand contraction would wreak total havoc on the base structure of the economy.

The April Labour Force statistics, along with JobKeeper and JobSeeker data illustrate this starkly. Six million out of the 12.4 million employed in Australia are on the JobKeeper salary subsidy. That is, six million Australians have their salary of up to $750 a week paid for by the Government, in order to keep them officially employed.

This is possibly the most radical government intervention in the economy in Australian history, and is commensurate to the degree of this particular crisis of capitalism.

There are two fundamental questions.

Firstly: The minimum wage in Australia is $740 a week, the median wage (August 2019) $1100 a week. There are a significant portion of workers subsidised at a rate far less than their salaried remuneration – how will this affect post-lockdown sentiment and consumption?

Secondly: Given pre-existing economic pessimism, variability of lockdown easing across the nation, the timeboxed nature of enhanced government subsidies, and the uncertain possiblity of a snap-back recovery, how many of those precariously receiving JobKeeper will find themselves miserably queueing for JobSeeker?

That is, can this economy survive without crutches?

The pre-pandemic economy was rife with structural issues, many exacerbated by its own policies, that the Governemnt sought to downplay or ignore. Instead, it repeated and repeated its own view of reality, as if to throw its ideological doona over its mess.

In this unfolding catastrophe, who exactly needs to come out into the cold?

Those living precariously, barely affording rent, not knowing whether their job will exist when September ends? The millions finally receiving enough welfare to eat three meals a day, who have Poverty Day marked on their calendars?

Or those neoliberal warriors in the government and commentariat who demand human sacrifice to appease The Line?

Gender Markers Underpin The Fabric Of The Universe, Or Crazy Shit Religious Nuts Actually Believe

Gender whispers on the queer wind reached my ear this week. A lamentation on how a dastardly sabotage was unraveled, cast to all the people’s hearts through the airwaves. A clip below of the revelation.

How! The Culture Warriors had learned of the Post Modern Neo Marxist plot to tear apart the fabric of the universe. Worse, that incorrigible knight, Andrew Hastie MP, has identified exactly how the deed was to be done – through the Tasmanian State Parliament.

And the mechanism of that forbidden power over the natural forces that keep space-time from unravelling into itself, a thread intertwining through space-time as the exact sequence of all the M’s and F’s printed on old growth forest paper. Deja vu is just when a Tasmanian birth certificate accidentally gets destroyed.

That Hastie considers the Tasmanian administration so supreme in its command of the universe has to be some sort of heresy.

But my absolute favourite line of all has to be this.

“No one ever considers the rights of the child in this. The child has the right to know what gender they are when they’re born, biologically, that is.”

Yeah, because no child would ever be able to tell which gender they were assigned born into, biologically, that is. I remember how I rushed to check my birth certificate, the sole arbiter of truth in this unknowable world, to see if there was a mistake. *sarcasm*

It’s hard to know if Sky News is attracted to the utter density of its presenters and guests, or if they’re attracted to the sheer weight of their viewership. Given their published ratings, I’d bet on the former.

Not satisfied with, or perhaps confused by, other people’s ability to consider two ideas at once, our esteemed leader angrily micro-blogged his displeasure. I guess he wants us to know that, like all Australians stuck in an office all day, that he too spends too much time on Twitter, and reading news websites.

It’s unsurprising that this merry band of buffoons think like this, these fools who need the flag pinned to their fucking chest just to remember what they’re doing.

I leave you with an observation.

Here is the proposed legislation. It updates state law for marriage equality, ends forced divorce for transgender people, and some other tidbits. It is okay.

Here is the official transcript of Cassy O’Connor MP, leader of the Tasmania Greens, in the second reading of the legislation, detailing some proposed amendments. It is very good.

Silver Linings Of A Cloud

If you’re as hyper-connected as I am, and just slightly empathetic to marginalised struggle, the present day stream of news can be hard to bear. Bad news never seems to end nowadays, and it provably has detrimental effects on our mental health. And while it’s our civic responsibility to engage with current affairs, it’s also important to keep things in perspective, to understand exactly our position.

And it is possible to see a glimmer of hope. It’s important to remember that here in Australia, where I’m writing from, things are nowhere near as bad. Yes, It’s Bad. But it’s not USA bad.

We haven’t elected a fascist to the highest office with almost total control of federal power. Our proto-fascist leadership is trampling towards electoral oblivion as fast as it can manage, and if there’s any divine justice, will stay in opposition until their party fades into history.

The Australian public’s stance towards queer rights is strong. Marriage equality was made law with majority support. The appetite to tolerate any still-legal discrimination towards any queer person is very low, low enough to force the religious reactionaries in charge to pretend to care (this is a positive, I promise). And education and exposure will only change hearts more.

Our pluralistic, multicultural society is as strong and cohesive as ever. The heart of modern Australia is that of every country on Earth, beating as one. The hideous face of white nationalism, while built deep into the fabric of the country, will be beaten deep into darkness.

The struggles of the First Nations are being heard more every day, the false mythos of invasion is unraveling. Treaties are being negotiated across the land, and a First Nation’s Voice will be established. Change is coming.

Most of all, we still have our democracy. And the more people that engage in democracy within their experience of life, the faster that our society will change for the better.

Yes, international fascism is mobilising. Yes, economic injustice is pervasive, as capitalism grinds through all life on the planet. Yes, a significant percentage of the population is captured and energised through simple bigotries of the past.

And yes, there is work to do. These changes don’t make themselves, and we can regress if we don’t pay attention. But it’s not too late. As long as we share a dream, and sing with one voice, we will win. That’s the silver lining to this cloud.