fascism
Dear friends,
It is happening here. The polarisation, the extremism, growing xenophobia and racism, anti-intellectualism, hatred, violence and climate-denialism. These are not “forthcoming” ideas in the Australian context, but rather actively festering features of contemporary society. Because of the way content is conglomerated under a singular social media corporation, lots of the proliferation of this kind of thinking is hidden. Algorithmic systems tailor content specifically for the viewer, and they deliberately cultivate extremist views – because extremist views garner more attention. In an “artificially intelligent system” trained on the KPIs of the CEO, it matters not if hate speech, right-wing extremism, and general villainy are promoted. All that matters is the cultivation of “attention”. As the yogi influencers like to put it: “Attention is currency”.
The republican party appealed to the American voting base on two key fronts: they told compelling lies about the significance of the economy and the role of the “others” in preventing its flourishing and they spoke the same hateful language that their supporters consume exclusively online and via fox news. The combination of hegemonic forces, here, manufacturing consent for fascism is a powerful combination. And this is the same combination that the Liberal-National coalition leverage every election in Australia. Look no further than the anti-abortion rhetoric of the LNP at the Queensland state election – and if you were kidding yourself into thinking that Australia is “more sophisticated” and “it couldn’t happen here” you are dead wrong. Australia’s particular cultural configuration around politics means that extremism festers far more quietly than it does in the states, but the increasing prevalence of vitriolic, hate filled, and vile bullshit from the LNP will attract mass voter support.
The problem is, and this is the big one, that the economy is fake. It is a deliberately abstract construct that distracts people from the reality of their exploitation. We discussed this in depth in the last post on mind reader [1]. The source of oppression of working people is capitalism, the capitalists, and their political subclass. The cultural institutions – the (social) media companies, schools and universities, and religious organisations play active yet ever “apolitical” roles in re-perpetuating exploitation and expropriation as natural and necessary. The masking of this – the exploitation of working people – as the “elite” is a cover for fearmongering or racist or nihilistic politicians latch onto to exploit. We know, as a global force of billions, that something is very wrong with our social order. It’s just that the system was designed from the start to prevent access to the knowledge of why the system is so broken. Those cultural institutions? They both inform and reinforce the views espoused by the ruling class. In the classical neoliberal system in the west, for middle-class white-ish able-bodied cisgender hetero kids, the journey goes something like this: born into relative comfort → educated through capitalist epistemology → university graduate → employment in culturally reinforcing institutions and businesses, with moderate if meagre reward affording housing security → the wife stays home looking after babies, and around the cycle goes. Of course, over time, the endless growth demanded by capitalism has eroded parts of that cycle, and with the inherent massive inequality, sexism, ableism and so on required to continue accumulation for the 1% division becomes a necessary tool to keep driving capitalism headlong towards the cliff.
Here, and you can guess where I’m going, the treacherous Australian Labor Party enters the scene. Simultaneously deeply involved in bringing neoliberalism to Australia, and allying with the unions to disempower any genuine revolutionary movement. As with the Democrats in the US, the Labor party is supported by the elite as the veneer of social progress, while true transformation (read: fascism) is supported by the more extreme position of the LNP or Republicans. The ALP’s role in this political theatre is critical to the perpetuation of the status quo. Noting that the status quo is ever more objectionable to anyone with a value system of compassion. While positioning themselves as the “progressive” option, they actively participate in the rightward march of Australian politics. Like the Republican/Democrat ratchet system, ours is similarly pernicious – and worse, because people still think that Labour represents the unions – but these unions only represent bourgeois leadership, not the worker. It doesn’t take much to judge them on their actions – from supporting genocidal regimes abroad to implementing increasingly draconian domestic surveillance measures, from funding military expansion while driving hate for China through stripping workers of their rights while professing a “right to disconnect” (recognition stolen from the Greens) the ALP demonstrate their fundamental allegiance to capital over human wellbeing. The party’s willingness to eject members who speak against genocide illustrates how thoroughly they have abandoned even the pretence of left-wing politics in favour of maintaining the status quo for their capitalist masters.
Ideological “flexibility” of supposedly left-wing parties is part of the theatrics that supports an appearance of democracy under contemporary capitalism. As the contradictions of capital become more apparent – through climate catastrophe, growing inequality, and social breakdown – the political apparatus works harder to maintain hegemonic control. Here, parties like the ALP and Democrats serve offer superficial reforms which fail to connect with working people because all they do is perpetuate the same violent, broken, and dispossessive system that brought us here in the first place. While “moderate” parties exist we will never see a challenge to capitalist relations emerge. And currently we have a moderate party led by a fascist, an extreme-right party led by a fascist, and then the Greens whose political messaging fails to align with the workers because they are routinely denied fair representation in the extreme-right wing media duopoly and social media algorithm. Between deliberate intensification of deployment of identity politics, stripped of any class analysis, and the march towards ever more property owning, shareholding, and other economics scum – the ALP, LNP, as with the Democrats and Republicans only aid fragmentation of working class solidarity leaving structural power relations untouched. It’s just one party is much, much, worse in both instances for human rights – particularly at the margins.
Fundamentally, the media landscape, dominated by the extreme right-wing Murdoch empire in Australia, plays a crucial role in manufacturing consent for the ratchet. Ensuring that the LNP can move politics, issues, identity, and so on to the right, ever distracting from the crushing destruction of capitalism, and positioning any real opposition (read: the Greens) as bourgeois they move the goalposts time and again. Through careful curation of “acceptable” discourse, they – and their distant social media cousins – present fascism as a reasonable response to social problems created by capitalism itself. The algorithmic amplification of extremist content concomitantly accelerates these normalised, socialised, perspectives and the holistic process of creating filter bubbles of hatred and division for every single individual in the nation becomes par for the course. Yep, digital acceleration of fascist ideology builds on decades of traditional media conditioning – cheery.
What makes this situation particularly dangerous is how the appearance of choice, between Labor and Liberal, masks the fundamental unity of their commitment to capital behind supposedly differing social reforms. While they may differ on social issues or, perhaps more accurately, the speed at which they wish to implement reactionary policies, both major parties are fully committed to maintaining the extractive, exploitative system that is destroying human and ecological wellbeing. Here, political theatre replacing religion as the opium of the masses, as individualised AI generated slop directs the micro-political battles of fake social media forums flooded with Russian State actors under the guise of “parliamentary democracy”. Don’t get me wrong, the ALP is a better option than the LNP, just as the Democrats are better than the Republicans, but to suggest either party offers any genuine solutions to the 99% is a farce. Reductionist commentators on “both sides” of belonging politics seek only to legitimate this false choice, preventing more radical alternatives from emerging, and maintaining capitalist hegemony – and in cases such as the US, and increasingly in Australia, the rapid installation of fascism over democracy as modus operandi for maintaining the status quo.
As climate collapse accelerates and inequality reaches unprecedented levels, we can expect this drift toward fascism to intensify. People are being told the reason they can’t afford to feed or home themselves is Albanese’s failures in “the economy” – at the same time, their social media feeds show them how migrants and queer people are personally responsible for that situation. The hate, anger and intentional division of the human population of this planet driving Meta’s share-prices ever higher – and “attention is currency” paralleling “line must go up” as the drivers of global destruction, heat death, and the end of any semblance of care for one another. A social contract? Nah, social media, mate. As the ruling class abandon liberal democratic pretences in favour of more direct forms of control and violence, fearing an anti-capitalist awakening amongst a slightly better educated populous, the ALP’s active participation in stripping education, driving hate and division, and attacking worker’s rights only enable the cycle to continue and amplify. Moreover, through expanded surveillance powers, anti-protest laws, and the criminalisation of dissent, we have seen the extremist groundwork laid for overtly authoritarian governance from the LNP at our next federal elections. Unless the working class can develop genuine solidarity and class consciousness to resist this trajectory, Australia’s inevitable march toward fascism will only accelerate. With Albo’s commitment to the United States of Australia, sorry, “working with trump” [2] in a paramilitary alliance we can genuinely see the failings of Australian democracy. Joy.
With a sense of foresight and uncertainty,
Aidan.
Dear friends,
Another day in hell. In the last fortnight we have seen: the ALP eject an elected member over their relatively limp anti-genocide stance [1], the rapid increase in cost of education visas [2], the taxation of higher degrees by research [3], and many policy and party platform transformations to reconfigure the once upon a time centrist party as the firmly right wing player.
Where does the fascism start? If we momentarily set aside the deliberately genocidal and narcissistic behaviour of the Australian Government and its ALP rulers, we have just as recently borne witness to the systematic decimation of higher education – in the long run. Education in this country is government controlled. Allegedly public schools and universities are run for the public interest. In reality this has always been the hegemony’s interest. While higher education, in particular, has been seen as a relative bastion of liberal thought, over the past 30 years in Australia, there has been an acceleration towards corporatised, privatised, and conservative thought and decision making.
Importantly, the “liberal thought” of higher education in Australia has always been a centrist, socially and economically conservative, and static status quo. This enabled higher education institutions to avoid neoliberalism longer than other institutions, not because they were special, but because in this country they were already functioning under managerialist, cost-saving, and conservative models. This was brought by the ALP in decades past, unlike how neoliberalism arrived in the rest of the world [4]. The intensification of crack-downs on research funding for the arts, humanities, social sciences, and, frankly, anything the conservative Minister for Education doesn’t like was a hallmark of the Liberal-National coalition. While this intervention was allegedly reversed relatively early in the ALP’s most recent term in government, these two most recent developments only show a re-commitment to the rapid deskilling of the working class due to ripple affects.
As recently as last week the NTEU, the union for higher education, and CAPA, the peak body for postgraduate students, called for raising the wage of research students to the minimum wage. Currently, Australian postgraduate research students are paid approximately $30,000 per year – tax free. This approximately $14 per hour wage is supposed to enable transformative science, radical thought, new frontiers in social transformation, and to up-skill workers for the next generation of higher education - as well as covering the cost of living. Instead, the government has decided to tax this stipend, in addition to preventing more than 7.5 hours of work per week (or 30% of the stipend, whichever comes first).
Australian higher education has long been wholly dependent on international students to sustain itself. Importantly, while this is financially irresponsible, this is the status quo in higher education. For domestic students to be educated, the university sector requires international student enrolments, this is because of the exorbitant fees. In another regressive decision from the past week, the ALP has also announced the almost doubling of the international study visa cost. This deters international students from Australian institutions, and even those who are currently enrolled may reconsider returning for study in 2025.
Atop funding cuts, massive indexation on study debt for domestic students, previous policy which continues to influence study flows towards “professions”, and other tax disincentives for institutions, donors, and so on, the financial situation of most universities is now dire. After a massive downturn during COVID-19 lockdowns, the sector has been incredibly slow to recover. With these latest developments amounting to punching down by government on higher education and students simultaneously.
Okay – this brings us to fascism.
There has been a clear repositioning of the ALP from the so called centre-left party, connected integrally to unions, to occupying the centre-right, and now the right – and, as illustrated above, completely disconnected from the worker. We have seen the Liberal-National Coalition progress further to the extreme right, and their ‘retreat’ or continued loss of popularity with the majority populous. Now, drawing on their tactics, the ALP seeks to reposition itself as the party for the capitalists – millenials, boomers, never mind, this is distinctively class warfare. From a prime minister with a massive housing portfolio, who could expect pro-renter housing policy? From a foreign minister with an ongoing relationship with Israel, who could expect anti-genocidal policy? The bourgeois hegemony of the ALP now rivals the Howard era in contemptibility.
Recent propaganda from the ALP’s MPs and candidates indicates copying the LNP’s homework directly. Investment in churches, increased funding in private schools, reducing tax (for the 1%), individualist claims in individualist times. Inwardly, past the propaganda, is a continued and deeply economically conservative party whose financial interests lie with property developers, investors, corporate CEOs, and other plutocrats. Socially, the ALP stands on the side of genocide, so I do not believe I need to say more about their positionality.
With this divestment from even a ‘liberal’ centrist educational system, which I will at this juncture point out continues in its hegemonic control by the government from preschool through graduate education, we are now seeing the ALP stamp their mark as the anti-intellectual part of the country. A populist movement not seen in left-wing (populist) politics in the anglosphere. Indeed, the right gut and disfigure education the world over, and when it talks like a duck, acts like a duck, and makes regressive policy decisions like a duck, it’s probably a duck – sorry, fascist. With higher education being on the chopping block it is a matter of time before the future of this country becomes increasingly narrow and devastatingly less class-conscious. The latter was already fading away beyond belief, particularly given the dire state of a corrupt, narcissistic, profiteering, yet underfunded and radically unequal, higher education system. The future does not look bright.
We need an education system that fosters class consciousness. We need a curriculum, from preschool to higher education, that enables positive social transformation. We need more equality, acceptance, and communal spirit to push back the ravages of unchecked neoliberal capitalism. Instead, we are seeing an increasingly desperate focus by governments and political figures on the de-skilling and anti-intellectualising of the populous and constant undermining of those in vague positions to be able to create a better future together. Such is the rise of global fascism.
We can but hope for a French-style left-jerk in the next election, but the Murdoch press are so hellbent on authoritarianism that they still back the LNP in the face of a “nuclear overlord”. The Greens as the last remaining centre-left party in Australia are in dire straits. The rhetoric that the Greens are the ‘radical left’ is so ingrained in the populous by the ALP, LNP, and Murdoch monopoly, that the average citizen still thinks the ALP represents a centrist position. This is patently untrue – fascism is here, and it wears red (again).
In solidarity,
Aidan
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/06/fatima-payman-quits-labor-party-palestine-voters-base ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/07/international-student-cap-visa-fees-increase-albanese-government ↩︎
https://www.campusreview.com.au/2024/07/taxing-part-time-postgrad-study-strange-punitive-measure/ ↩︎
Humphrys, E. (2019). How Labour built neoliberalism: Australia’s accord, the labour movement and the neoliberal project. Brill. ↩︎
Dear friends,
I have been thinking about negative distraction since our last idea. Essentially stemming from the notion of capital’s necessary divisive nature for its own reproduction, negative distraction – I’m calling it – is another in the many tentacled squid of class divisive praxes instilled by the ruling class. Previously we talked about division across the class line, vis. proles vs capitalists or civil vs ruling, and how intersections create vertices of additional exploitation and expropriation. Negative distraction, in a sense, is a political theatre of this boundary.
Let’s take the right’s use of identity as an example here. For political society, in particular, drawing from our comrade Gramsci [1], identity is a performance to an ends. For example, we might consider Bob Katter in Australian politics a performed identity of “country” – an eccentric with radical ideas, conservative ideas, but radical and introduced in the performative nature of political society: “But I ain't spending any time on it because in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland” [2]. This performative identity lends itself to a political message, a particular cause, and a rather transparent configuration of politics in society.
Naturally there are a great number of these performances which are more nuanced than a political “cowboy”. Regardless, however, of what we perceive in these performances, they are winning votes and enabling those performers a platform to influence legislature and direction in civil society. Without degrading into level upon level of nuance, if we understand that capital controls political decision making, the performative nature of politics enables a theatre to perplex, rile up, or otherwise befuddle civil society. None of these performances are harmless, and they are nearly universal in the political arena. There are next to no “straight shooters” in the political sphere – simply because the hegemony of “politics” is to perform.
Pop down the stack a few layers and we can see this theatre affect the micro. Here’s where microaggressions are born an expansion from their original use in race relations [3], the class divide now leverages these aggressions to enable negative distraction. Rather than focus on a critique of, for example, Dutton’s nuclear policy, the capital-media hegemony in Australia turns individuals against one another by amplifying divisive narratives over nuclear use, waste, storage, regulation and so on. Here the proletariat is drawn against lines of political theatre: “are you pro nuclear?” For those passionate on issues on any area of the political spectrum, this creates a negative distraction: “of course I’m pro nuclear, it is the only way to produce a stable base load of power” (fallacy upon fallacy). Rather than critique political society we are directed to absorb ruling class rhetoric as identity.
In a more sinister and capably deployed version of this practice, Queer rights are frequently weaponised as an intersectional negative distraction. We know that queer humans, across the board, are deeply discriminated against by the vast majority of “other” humans, and the weaponisation of queer rights (i.e. where these rights are not perceived as human rights) leads to wanton destruction of human life (literally). From bisexual erasure, through anti-trans activism, -human rights- are regularly undermined for political theatre. In this instance, as opposed to nuclear power by example, is a violent and destructive negative distraction at great cost to life.
A recent “controversy” (i.e. a right wing politician attacking a celebrity queer ally) is a perfect example of a negative distraction [4]. Taking a brief meta-look at this issue, as par for the course celebrities deride political decision-makers on a broad range of issues. From housing to aid programs, arts funding to disaster recovery, and so on. This occurs on both sides of issues and aids the political theatre at large, bringing celebrity attention to political theatre as an extension of the capital-media hegemony – literally dramatising politics for attention, distraction, division and reality TV. Here we see the emergence of terms such as ‘optics’ rearing their head in common parlance, an incorrectly deployed and severed theoretical word which, at least to me, screams “right winger”. Rather than address a unitary and common thread of discussion which advances human liberation, the political theatre (both self professed left and right wing parties) engages with, yet again, identity politics.
When this makes its way to the daily lives of civil society, the results are disastrous. Major political issues do not receive appropriate public scrutiny, the authenticity and genuine nature of human need and rights are ignored, and the machinery of capital is enabled to continue exploiting and extracting civil society year after year. As discussed previously, we no longer have time for negative distractions. We are on the brink of ecological collapse; societal collapse; and a rapid swing into fascist authoritarianism – the radical resurgence of which we are seeing in the south of the United States, across Europe with the recent election, and increasingly globally decaying “democracy” all in the name of “line goes up” capitalism.
Importantly I’d like to be clear that identity politics are very real and very destructive. The deployment and use of hate speech, microaggressions, and other forms of (lateral) violence have genuine impacts on human life. This is why the practice is so successful in aiding negative distraction. Rather than focus on issues of merit, such as assuring human rights to queer people, focussing on undoing the mass damage of corporate environmental destruction, enabling better funding of medical and social services, and so on the deployment of negative distraction to feed the political theatre drives hate, division, and distraction. A stereotypical Marxist may be criticised, here, for disregarding identity, matters of race, gender, disability and so on – but I believe this is often deployed as a further tool of negative distraction. Rather the left needs to find a way to unite intersectional causes under a banner of capitalist destruction. Not waiting for the revolution, but creating an intersectional future which -does- address the interstices as part of the revolutionary activity – otherwise we are doomed to perpetual failures of political/economic/governance systems which reproduce exploitation.
We can do better than being -distracted- by negative distraction. To my left-wing friends, this doesn’t mean it does not hurt, nor that things aren’t terrible, but if we can find just one ounce of energy left after successive attacks, it is a rallying cry to disavow political theatre and arm ourselves with meaningful analytical critique. Of course, the opening sentence of this paragraph is more a call to the right to look past the amplification of radical emotive issues and look to humanity, comradery, and collaboration. Though finding ways to engage in this kind of movement from right to left seems almost too far-gone as we witness fascist takeover. After all, if you’re standing with a fascist, you’re probably a fascist.
Cheery thoughts for a gloomy day on Kaurna country.
Your comrade,
Aidan
Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1985). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (8. pr). International Publ. ↩︎
Sue, D. W., & Spanierman, L. (2020). Microaggressions in Everyday Life. John Wiley & Sons. ↩︎
https://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/david-tennant-called-rich-lefty-185201001.html ↩︎