What is the purpose of Australia? Australia, like other nation-states, is the site of a political struggle over equality: the social, economic, and political equality of its citizens. The core of this struggle is about the nature of democracy and the role and function of the countryâs economy, in other words, the purpose of the Australian economy, how should it be organized and why, and for whose benefit?
Australiaâs neoliberal corporate security state is a hegemonic order backed by both mainstream political parties.1 Both have transferred considerable public power and wealth to corporations and wealthy private interests. Under their governance, political and economic inequality has considerably increased. Thomas Pikettyâs study on capital shows that in Australia and other western countries, an increasing share of economic growth has largely benefitted the upper classes (Piketty, 2014a, 2014b).2 In turn, the growing concentration of capital and wealth controlled by corporations and wealthy private interests directly and increasingly influences the nature of politics, contracting the political process and politicians to serve their interests. In other words, private wealth and power eventually captures and dominates the state apparatus and disempowers citizens. Systemic violence is built in growing political and economic inequality because it leads to the expansion and proliferation of conflict and violence in society and the militarization of social life.
Australiaâs political economy is an integral part of the American imperial project for a neoliberal free-trade global economy backed by military power. This world order system is flawed because it increases global economic and political inequality and leads to violent resistance and challenge to western hegemony. As a result, Australia is increasingly involved in military intervention overseas and in the use of violent means to confront political upheavals, rebellions, and situations which are viewed as threats to the national interest and to the American imperial project. Australiaâs role in the âwar on terrorâ furthers entrenches domestic violence and the militarization of Australian society.3
Democratization requires a clearly defined opposing hegemonic order, a counter-culture to the existing one, based on a political economy of social, economic, and political equality.4 The Australian Labor Party (ALP), which has traditionally been at the forefront of progressive social, economic, and political reforms in the past, no longer fills that role. With the 1983 election of the Hawke government, the ALP became another major spear-carrier for neoliberal capitalism in Australia. The outcome is a one-party state doing the bidding of corporations and wealthy private interests allied with a national security state engaged in the âwar on terrorâ and the military imposition of a US-led world order.5 This new form of authoritarianism requires the constant manipulation of morality to manufacture consent about the benefits of economic growth and the verity of the mantra that there is âno alternativeâ to the one-party state, and to legitimize a US-dominated neoliberal globalization.
Australiaâs neoliberal corporate security state represents the emergence of a post-democratic order, a reversal of democratization by a new form of authoritarianism to discipline bodies and minds to the demands of the dominant ideology of market relations, while the state neutralizes dissent and militarizes civil society with a new history of Australian wars for freedom and democracy. The central proposition of Australian new authoritarianism is captured by Colin Crouch when he writes that âpolitics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times, and that the one major consequence of this process is the growing impotence of egalitarian causesâ (Crouch, 2008:6). Australian political economy is not compatible with democracy because it is essentially a political project of class power to disempower âlabor relative to capital, adopting policy measure such as privatization in order to enable further capital accumulation and institutionalizing wealth, privilege and power within the upper-classes without ceaseâ(Harvey, 2013:5).
Democratic politics in Australia cannot survive without what Chantal Mouffe calls âthe agonistic struggleâ, a confrontation between adversaries, not a competition among private elites and between leaders of the ALP and the Liberal Coalition. The struggle must be between opposing hegemonic projects, says Mouffe, âwhich can never be reconciled rationally; one of them needs to be defeated. This is the real confrontation but one that is played out under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted by the adversariesâ (Mouffe, 2002:10). Democracy is work in progress; it exists as a vision of the common good and a better and more peaceful world. Democratization, Mouffe would argue, requires âconfrontation between democratic political positionsâ. An unwritten pact between the ALP and the Liberal Coalition has undermined democracy and constructed a broad macroeconomic consensus to ensure national stability. The outcome has been a major decline in the politics of the left and a rising shift of discontent towards right-wing populism and the passion for xenophobia and war. Mouffe warns that the absence of a democratic outlet, a radical and different hegemony, stops âthe construction of more democratic, more egalitarian institutionsâ and, instead, âlays the ground for forms of politics that articulate essentialist identitiesânationalist, religious or ethnicâand for increase confrontations over non-negotiable moral valuesâ (Mouffe, 2013:xiv; 2002:11).
The alternative to the existing neoliberal hegemonic order in Australia is a radical democracy, which exists largely in the activities of non-violent progressive movements. Social movements have played a major role, ending the âwhite-onlyâ Australia policy, constructing greater equality between people, and âchallenging those who abuse powerâ (Burgmann, 2003:43). Verity Burgmannâs study on late-twentieth-century social movements in Australia identifies the Aboriginal, the womenâs, the green, and the anti-corporate globalization movements, and she writes that they âsharply highlight the connection between corporate capitalism, racism, patriarchy and environmental degradationâ (ibid.). Early twenty-first-century progressive non-violent social movements in Australia activate for the empowerment of citizens, justice and human rights, and struggle against social injustice and the causes of violence in Australia and in the world. Each incorporates and projects the meaning of the common good in its understanding and vision of democracy and a more peaceful world, and mobilizes passions towards democratic ends.6 Democratization in Australia depends on the advances of these movements and their potential for convergence to succeed in challenging and displacing the existing orthodoxy and political economy of violence.
Violence is about human suffering built in the political economy of advanced capitalist societies like Australia. The World Health Organization defines violence as âthe intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivationâ (WHO, 2002:4). In his pioneer studies on conflict, John Burton provides the political economy context of violence when he defines structural violence as âdamaging deprivations caused by the nature of social institutions and policiesâŠand avoidable, perhaps a deliberate violence against the person or communityâ (Burton, 1997:32). Violence is structured in the economic, cultural, and political systems of the nation-state and the world order. At the core of any major structure is power. Power is about control, domination, and exploitation, and is constructed as relations of force because power involves coercion and repression (Foucault, 2004; Heilbroner, 1986). Unequal access âto resources, to political power, to education, to health care, or to legal standing, are major forms of structural violenceâ (Winter & Leighton, 2001).
The link between capitalism and violence is the extent to which capitalism creates inequality, poverty, unemployment, and alienation. Miliband argues that capitalism is inherently violent because it is âa system of domination and exploitation; and the fact that it is unable to make rational and humane use of the immense productive resources it has itself brought into beingâ (Miliband, 1991:209). The power of the state is fundamental to capitalism and the embedding of society in market relations. Foucaultâs analysis of the construction of the modern European nation-state reflects the imposition of a âtight grid of disciplinary coercions that actually guarantees the cohesion of the social bodyâ (Foucault, 2004:37). Power, Foucault reminds us, âis essentially that which repressesâ, and political power âis perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of forceâ (ibid.: 16). However, where there is power, and therefore repression, there is always resistance. Relations of force cause suffering, and where there is suffering, there is disobedience and the desire and demand for change. Power and resistance confront each other everywhere, and the struggle is everywhere.
Norwayâs peace activist Johan Galtung argues that violence should be understood âas avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possibleâ (Galtung, 1996:197). Galtung has argued that violence is âthe cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what isâŠand shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chancesâ (Galtung, 1969:168,171). Systemic violence is implied in the level of incarceration of any country, for example. The number of prisoners per 100,000 in 2013 was 60 for Sweden and 143 for Australia (ICPS, 2014). In the case of Australia, systemic violence is the difference between reality and the potential for non-violence. The potential is presented as what is possible for Australia when compared with other advanced capitalist societies, such as the Scandinavian countries, where levels of incarceration are considerably lower (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010:148).7
What this means is that, unlike Australia, Sweden has made considerable progress in addressing the causes of violence, particularly relating to crime, because it is more egalitarian and, therefore, more democratic than Australia. This is reflected in the rankings of the Global Gender Gap Report, where Sweden ranks fourth after Iceland, Finland, and Norway, while Australia ranks 24th after Bulgaria and Slovenia (WEF, 2014). When people play a meaningful role in the decision-making process about the social purpose of the economy and how to live in terms of the quality of life for all, and share more equally i...