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The real road to serfdom

By Marko Beljac - posted Monday, 5 January 2015


The late 40s saw the entrenchment of a national security state whose main features consisted of an imperial presidency usurping greater political power, the development of political police forces such as the FBI and ASIO, a system of state support for high technology industry built upon the Pentagon, and large expeditionary military forces equipped to enforce world order.

Each of these facets of the national security state were, and are, highly functional for the rich.

An imperial presidency is useful for it is surely easier for corporations to wheel and deal with a more centralised system of executive power than legislators incrementally more accountable to electors.

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In Australia only the corporate elite can sway, say, the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet. To petition the ERC is akin to petitioning the Politburo.

The requirement to centralise state power in this fashion follows on from the insights of Aristotle made at the very dawn of systematic political thought; the interests of the rich come at the expense of democracy. Today corporate led neoliberal globalisation is accompanied by an attack on substantive democracy. The people continue to vote yet their preferences matter less.

The national political police, under the rubric of fraudulent McCarthyite and Menzian red scares, enforced ideological and political discipline ostensibly against communism but in reality against the broader left and popular countercultural movements that sought to further prise open the bounds of the possible within the advanced industrial states.

The Pentagon system of high technology subsidy was necessary because it was understood that an advanced society could not rely upon market forces to achieve the fundamental advances in science and technology needed to sustain economic growth.

Funnelling the subsidy through the Pentagon diminishes greatly the social democratic effects that come with greater state spending and entrenches hierarchies and inequalities of wealth and power.

The Western system of economic growth relies upon public subsidy for innovation and private exploitation of innovation by a small corporate class.

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Large scale military power is needed to enforce corporate interests in any system of world order based upon mercantile interests and principles, as Adam Smith well knew. So it is with our highly mercantile system of world order which is structured upon the interests of multinational corporations. Military force is used to promote not just sectional corporate interests, but the very stability of the system as a whole.

Notice that this system of mercantile world order, where states advance the interests of multinational corporations even if need by means of military firepower, hardly is a Smithian world of free trade and free markets.

Our neoliberals never have had a problem with this, and sing the praises of Western military interventionism at every turn.

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About the Author

Mark Beljac teaches at Swinburne University of Technology, is a board member of the New International Bookshop, and is involved with the Industrial Workers of the World, National Tertiary Education Union, National Union of Workers (community) and Friends of the Earth.

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