
And so we march on blindly, striding robot-like ever closer towards the precipice. For those who care to listen, the point of no return is rapidly approaching.
The bellicose US Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is hell bent on waging wars and is ever willing to use the terms socialist and communist to justify the continued toppling of governments, in order to establish the American version of democracy. But is the motivation altruism or is it greed?
It can be pretty convincingly argued that China’s and Russia’s elite and their burgeoning middle class is now more capitalist than communist. The American dream that anyone can be a millionaire is becoming a reality, even in a communist country.
The ongoing western media campaign to denigrate China, to demonise a world power that has had the temerity to overtake the US as a supplier of goods and services, is readily evident. A country that has now surpassed America and assumed the mantle of the world’s leading economic power. This doesn’t sit at all well with the United States. Whilst China isn’t a military threat to the US, in spite of what the mainstream media says, it is an economic one. And it certainly does have the nuclear capability, and the right to defend itself against American aggression.
During Biden’s ABC News interview last Friday, the anchor George Stephanopoulos received the following response. At one point Biden said, “I’m running the world.” This widely held belief among Americans that the world begins and ends with them, only serves to underpin their global arrogance, and that the rest of us exist simply to do their bidding.
China’s crime is in dislodging America from the pole position as the world’s economic powerhouse, one that the USA has held in the decades following the second world war.
Historically the left-right division was born out of the socialist-capitalist dichotomy. But with the two major socialist countries, China and Russia now both embracing capitalism, does this division really still exist? Does the ‘domino theory’ and the ‘red under the bed’ scare campaign that the baby boomers grew up with, fuelled by the Catholic Church’s obsessive and hysterical opposition to communism, still justify the continuation of this arguably illusory, pied piper’s song and dance?
If it can be widely demonstrated that the left-right socialist-capitalist polemics are no longer politically relevant, the MIC will have nothing to hide behind. There will then be no ideological justification for the US to provoke a war with China, or with Russia. Going to war in an attempt to reassert the US as the world’s leading economic power is a much harder sell, even with the mainstream media in the west fervently pushing the MIC line.
But simply exposing the ideological irrelevance today of the terms left and right, won’t stop the machine. We need a 21st century means of talking politics.
With the MIC gearing up for a war with China, the initial retaliation to a first strike by the US will more than likely be felt on Australian shores. The US spy installations at Pine Gap and North West Cape will be the two primary targets. And if that doesn’t do the job, then it would be immediately followed by strikes on the 35 or so other military installations across the country that the US has the use of.
Neither China nor the US will be in the least concerned about the possibility of the nuclear devastation that it could cause here. We are in the firing line simply because we are so tightly tied to America’s apron strings. The ill-conceived AUKUS debacle is Morrison’s bastard child, born out of Harold Holt’s utterance, “All the way with LBJ”.
The US won’t be at all worried either. The desolation that awaits us here is so far removed geographically from the US mainland that any nuclear fallout will have negligible impact in the States.
How many nations today can say that they truly control their own destiny, if indeed they ever did. At least 14% of Australia’s agricultural land is now foreign owned. Powerful mega nationals also control a sizeable chunk of the means of production, distribution and exchange. The tax avoidance industry ensures that little, if any tax is paid, and the profits generated here are siphoned offshore. The environmental damage sustained during the production and manufacture of goods and agricultural produce here and in other countries by these global megacorporations, they see as utterly irrelevant. As is the impact on the climate crisis. It’s all about the bottom line.
There is an undeniable logic in the belief that the essential services of a nation should belong to and be controlled by that nation. It is in the national interest that education, health, finance, communication, defence, energy, and transportation are nationalised and administered as not for profit public enterprises.
Is it unreasonable that citizens individually and collectively own their own country?
Just as a household has both the responsibility, and the right, to make decisions that are in its best interest, without harming others, so too does a nation. If citizens are reduced to tenants in their own land, their destiny is no longer within their control. And just as a landlord can evict a family in order to relet a property at an increased rental, absentee multinational landlords have no qualms at all about making social, economic and environmental decisions that are contrary to the interests of the nations that they operate in. They take little to no responsibility for the deleterious impact of their activities.
In the fifty or so years that have passed since my brief flirtation with the Australian Labor Party, I’m yet to see any policy from the ALP designed to democratically socialise the means of production, distribution and exchange. So much for the pledge on the back of every ALP member’s ticket. These are just weasel words. The ALP, much to its embarrassment, has embraced privatisation almost as enthusiastically as the Thatcher inspired neoliberals, and in so doing has irretrievably weakened its historic association with, and blunted the aspirations of the working class.
In ‘The demise of the nation state’ Rana Dasgupta writes, ‘Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans’.
This political innovation has to begin with the recognition that left-right terminology belongs in the 20th century. And there it should remain. It no longer has any real ideological relevance, and it guarantees that the duopoly is maintained. The left-right dichotomy is both polarising and divisive. It makes certain that political debate will remain forever mired, ensuring that intelligent, effective and egalitarian decision making is practically impossible.
How then do we go about dismantling the left-right, barking mad, marching machine? And what do we replace it with?
The best suggestion came from Germany nearly fifty years ago. The idea that political discourse should neither be couched in terms of left nor right was articulated by Petra Kelly who simply said, “We should be straight ahead”.
And Petra wasn’t being centrist. She made it very clear that the merit of every political decision needs to be first measured by its impact on the environment; in the recognition that violence against humans, animals and plants is a universal problem – it is never a solution; that hierarchical and delegated party based decision making denies input from, and so alienates the grass roots; and that true social justice remains a very long way from being a realised aspiration.
Until those with an interest in politics set about addressing the question of 21st century political innovation, we will continue to stumble back and forth, from left to right and back again, while the pollies in the bear pit exchange ever more vitriolic polemics.
And so we march on blindly, striding robot-like ever closer towards the precipice. For those who care to listen, the planet is telling us that the point of no return is rapidly approaching.