Australian PM promotes AUKUS as platform for a total war economy
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this week outlined a actually chilling vision of basing the country’s whole economy on militarism and war.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with US President Joe Biden at Point Loma naval base, March 13, 2023, San Diego. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
He was speaking alongside US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the US naval base in San Diego to unveil information of the AUKUS strategy to provide Australia with nuclear-powered lengthy-variety submarines, which are created especially for attacking China from its coastal waters.
Albanese boasted that his Labor government was producing “the most significant single investment in Australia’s defence capability in our history,” predicted to expense an astronomical $368 billion more than 30 years.
This was dressed up as “deterrence” from “aggression” but it is a pivotal aspect of the escalating military encirclement of China by the US and its closest partners, accompanied by the provocative “Red Alert” declarations in the corporate media of the necessity to prepare for war with China inside 3 years.
Albanese equated the AUKUS pact to the establishment of a auto business in Australia by the US transnational corporations Common Motors and Ford in the wake of Globe War II. “The scale, complexity and financial significance of this investment is akin to the creation of the Australian automotive business in the post-Globe War II period,” he declared.
Albanese therefore likened the expansion of civilian business following the final planet war with the creating of an economy primarily based on destruction—the production of weaponry for the subsequent planet war, just about surely a nuclear one particular that would threaten the quite survival of humanity!
This would call for, the prime minister emphasised, a “whole-of-nation work.” That implies the establishment of a total war economy in which all else, such as social spending and the jobs, wages and circumstances of the operating class, have to be subordinated to the specifications of a vast military expansion.
Albanese proposed tying the future of young persons to the fortunes of the military and weapons suppliers, feeding off the eventual building of eight submarines in Australia. He spoke of “creating jobs and developing corporations, ideal about Australia” and “educating young Australians right now for the possibilities of tomorrow.”
In reality, comparatively handful of jobs are going to be developed by the AUKUS deal, and even inside an expanded military. These who are incorporated are going to be educated to generate and use weapons capable of killing millions. The vast majority of youth will be condemned to unemployment and poorly paid, insecure casual jobs.
To evaluate the auto business, which when straight or indirectly employed hundreds of thousands of workers, with AUKUS submarine production, touted to develop eight,500 jobs at its peak in the 2040s, is a reactionary fraud on each level.
In the very first location, an escalating US-led war is currently underway, against Russia in Ukraine, and this is a prelude to war against China, with US generals and media outlets warning of war by 2025. Below the AUKUS deal, US nuclear submarines will be currently primarily based in Western Australia by the finish of this year.
Secondly, the post-Globe War II launch of government-subsidised auto assembly production in Australia, very first by Common Motors from 1948 and then by Ford in the 1950s and 1960s, was predicated on the military victory of US imperialism in the planet war against German and Japanese imperialism.
Immediately after two such international conflagrations in the very first half of the 20th century, at the expense of tens of millions of lives, the United States prevailed. Washington established a military and financial hegemony more than most of the planet that paved the way for the international expansion of US industrial and economic giants.
On that basis, and with the help of the Stalinist bureaucracies in suppressing the revolutionary post-war struggles of the operating class, international capitalism was restabilised immediately after disastrous decades of war and depression. That laid the foundation for a quick period of boom, throughout which workers forced the ruling class to make specific concessions, such as well being, education and welfare applications.
Throughout this period, American organizations set up auto, whitegoods and other industries in other nations, such as Australia. By the late 1980s, even so, globalised production and the corporate exploitation of low-cost labour platforms had shattered the post-Globe War II model. In Australia that led to the ruthless closure of the auto assembly business, and several other manufacturing facilities, culminating in the shutdown of the final GM Holden assembly plant in Elizabeth, South Australia in 2017.
For decades, specifically given that the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996, Labor and the unions have enforced the dictates of the economic elite and globally-mobile transnational entities that scour the planet, hunting for the least expensive production charges and the highest price of return for ultra-wealthy shareholders.
Albanese, echoing Biden, held out the prospect of “good jobs, with fantastic wages.” In reality, the circumstances of workers, no matter if employed by the giant weapons makers or enlisted in the armed forces, will be brutal, dictated each by corporate profit-producing and the “sacrifices” demanded for the “war work,” as occurred in each planet wars.
Far from an era of effectively-paid jobs, what is becoming ready is sweatshop circumstances in industries of mass destruction.
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The Socialist Equality Celebration (SEP) is standing in the March 25 New South Wales state election to oppose this whole system of militarism and war. We are the only celebration undertaking so. As we clarify in our election statement, collectively with our sister parties about the planet we are creating an international anti-war movement of the operating class, directed against the supply of war, the capitalist profit technique itself.
We say: “Two planet wars are sufficient! Cease the warmongers! Tens of billions for education and healthcare, not for militarism and war!”
Albanese’s propaganda about a future jobs bonanza is a cynical work, operating hand in glove with the trade union bureaucrats, to overcome widespread opposition amongst workers and young persons to the prospect of a catastrophic nuclear war.
A “whole-of-nation” war economy needs political repression. It implies silencing the anti-war sentiment that has continued given that the horrors of the barbaric US-led interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, all primarily based on confirmed lies.
Against the war-mongering nationalism of Labor and the unions, workers and young persons have to have an international point of view, aimed at unifying their increasing struggles globally against the corporate oligarchies and governments that demand they fight and kill every other for the advantage of the wealthy elites.
Above all, what is essential is a socialist point of view, aimed at establishing workers’ governments to entirely reorganise society in the interests of social have to have, not private profit. Socialist measures, such as putting the enormous corporations beneath public ownership and workers’ handle, are the only way to establish standard democratic and social rights—including to decent, effectively-paid jobs and higher-high-quality totally free education and healthcare for all.
We urge all our readers to assistance our election campaign and, above all, to join the SEP to create the revolutionary celebration required to overturn capitalism and halt the plunge into Globe War III.
Speak to the SEP
Telephone: (02) 8218 3222
E-mail: sep@sep.org.au
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Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Celebration, Suite 906, 185 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000.
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