Daily Times

Contrary to cricket, a game of glorious uncertainties, capitalist democracy is a display of inglorious calamities inflicted by the indoctrinated majority on its body politics, a wound that can prove lethal to the future of coming generations. The logic of a free choice -the choice of choosing between black and white -has often been questioned. The possibility of choosing something from waste is no freedom; on the contrary, one’s decision to reject the given choices for a real alternative – that can pacify the existence, making life worth living for humanity -defines the real freedom.

People have become victims of the manipulative democracy devoid of consent; they consider themselves choosers or electors, with a false consciousness of being powerful without having any control over politics. Access to political and intellectual freedom, being the antithesis of the system, is denied to people. The former is held back by separating the masses from the means of production while the latter is manipulated through the logic of the system and partially by the mass media through indoctrination.

After a shocking and entirely unexpected defeat of the Australian Labor Party, the world-renowned economist, Yanis Varoufakis tweeted, “As an Australian citizen…I suggest that all of us citizens of Oz [Australia] should hang our heads in collective shame for having elected a climate-change-denying, xenophobic gvt [government] that only Trump can be proud of. And to condemn the ALP [Australian Labor Party] for a decade of appeasement and treachery”. The essence of his analysis rests in the last sentence that alludes to the betrayal of the alternative.

After Whitlam, Labor became a shadow of its past and acted merely as a tool of big capital. After Hawke’s demise, the hegemonic capitalist media is all praise forhim, who in his tenure as prime minister revived Medicare and Superannuation. Yet he simultaneously changed the whole texture of the economy by privatizing key state industries including Qantas, Commonwealth Bank, Optus, and the CSL Limited, (Kelly P, .1992) a biotechnological company based on research and manufacturing of products to treat and prevent serious human conditions. It was Labor under Hawke, which deregulated the financial sector and floated the Australian dollar; the betrayal of the party continued, which refused to identify itself with the Australian working class.

In an antagonist society, the superhuman power of propaganda – mutilating human thought, presenting the chalice of poison as the panacea for all ailments – invariably plays an important role. The overproduction of capitalistic waste attracts people to consume what they do not need. Yet for the mutilation of thought, mass media alone is neither responsible nor enough; the contradiction is inherent in the technological rationality of capitalism, which turns human beings into receptacles. Those who control media control and even create minds. Akin to commodities, they fill them with predetermined notions.

The process of self-preservation, making survival the only objective of life, consumes the self. Those emphasizing the individuality are scared to be left alone; no one wants to be away from the crowd

More recently, the atmosphere of permanent threat has forced the people to seek security at the cost of liberty. Capitalism is stoking up the infantile and repressed fears of humankind presenting them as real horrors, which in reality are nonexistent. Fear of enemy is one, which creates the caveman mentality of treating everyone with different skin color and different thought with suspicion; animosity towards refugees, Muslims, and Marxists is the continuation of the same phenomenon.

The process of self-preservation, making survival the only objective of life, consumes the self. Those emphasizing the individuality are scared to be left alone; no one wants to be away from the crowd. Hence, in reality, everyone is more or less a Nazi who wants to participate with enthusiasm while remaining isolated or even fed up with the social process. No one thinks because thinking makes his/her subjective position in the objective process of production difficult. Instead of thinking, it is convenient to follow the commandments even when it comes to choosing the rulers or the executioners, who are the same.

During the French revolution, despite Robespierre’s opposition, when one of the Jacobins Jacques Pierre Brissot decided to go to war with Austria, the queen Marie Antoinette said: “the imbeciles do not perceive that they are furthering our planes” (Wright…Documents, p123). The “climate-change-denying, xenophobic” government after winning the elections must have smiled slyly on the dumb objective spirit of the electorate and in relief would have repeated what Antoinette stated two hundred years ago. However, deception has limping feet; it can hardly take the deceiver very far -it took Antoinette to the guillotine.

The crisis of capitalism has rocked the boat of nearly all political parties of the world. In the last two decades, both the Australian Labor Party and the Liberals had celebrated their respective ‘night of the long knives’. In its in-house fight, Labor stabbed two of its prime ministers; Liberals went a step ahead and installed three in the last six years. This is a feeble attempt on the part of each major party to masquerade the economic crisis inundating the Aussie shores. Besides the economy, climate change is a real threat. However, the debate about climate change is superfluous if there is no intention to get rid of the system which, in the process of its realization, has destroyed the climate. Labor, despite raising the slogans of reversing the steps taken against climate change, is hand in glove with the Liberals on Adani’s Carmichael coalmine project, which is inimical to climate and the Great Barrier Reef.

Ever since the liquidation of the Soviet Union, the left-wing parties are struggling to recover the lost ground yielded to the reactionary forces. Anemic they are, they lack the appeal to the younger generation and are unprepared to concede their sublime positions to the younger lot. Dominated by leaders with one-dimensional thoughts, they refuse to transcend the Russian revolution. Hindered by the myopic views, wrangling over the personalities that eclipsed in the middle of the previous century, they are stuck in the grave of the past.

In the absence of the revolutionary situation, the class struggle is moving ahead in an economistic contest. Reforms, not revolution, is the apparent objective, the subjective factor; the Communist party that fought for social justice and human rights(including aboriginal rights) and survived the most coercive era of Gordon Menzies has committed hara-kiri. Its three factions pitted against each other are singing its swan song.

Due to high productivity, a large majority, the victim of capitalism, is unable to discover the reason for its exploitation. To the people, stupefied work, alienated labor and apolitical thought is the natural way of life. The first generation migrant community escaping from the overtly coercive regimes in their former countries compares the technological exploitation of capitalism as redemption. Work is no disgrace and is paid reasonably well; it masquerades the class conflict and the rapacity of the system.If a cleaner and the president of a corporation drive the same automobile, it does not do away the class difference. It only proves that the necessity to maintain the exploitative system is shared by either class.

In the coming days, people of Australia are going to face the wrath of brutal capitalism. They alone can become the rock of resistance against the capitalistic might; all the messiahs in the guise of leaders have turned out to be mere mercenaries.Hopeful we are, because “Without hope, theidea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable” (Adorno).

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history