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 facts of the AUKUS strategy to provide Australia with nuclear-powered extended-variety submarines, which are developed particularly for attacking China from its coastal waters.

Albanese boasted that his Labor government was generating “the greatest single investment in Australia’s defence capability in our history,” predicted to price an astronomical $368 billion more than 30 years.

This was dressed up as “deterrence” from “aggression” but it is a pivotal element 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 automobile market in Australia by the US transnational corporations Basic 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 market in the post-Globe War II period,” he declared.

Albanese as a result likened the expansion of civilian market following the final globe war with the developing of an economy primarily based on destruction—the production of weaponry for the subsequent globe war, practically definitely a nuclear 1 that would threaten the extremely survival of humanity!

This would need, the prime minister emphasised, a “whole-of-nation work.” That implies the establishment of a total war economy in which all else, which includes social spending and the jobs, wages and circumstances of the operating class, will have to be subordinated to the needs of a vast military expansion.

Albanese proposed tying the future of young folks to the fortunes of the military and weapons companies, feeding off the eventual building of eight submarines in Australia. He spoke of “creating jobs and increasing corporations, correct about Australia” and “educating young Australians nowadays for the possibilities of tomorrow.”

In reality, comparatively couple of jobs are going to be designed by the AUKUS deal, and even inside an expanded military. These who are incorporated are going to be educated to make and use weapons capable of killing millions. The vast majority of youth will be condemned to unemployment and poorly paid, insecure casual jobs.

To examine the auto market, which as soon as straight or indirectly employed hundreds of thousands of workers, with AUKUS submarine production, touted to produce eight,500 jobs at its peak in the 2040s, is a reactionary fraud on just about every level.

In the very first spot, 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 automobile assembly production in Australia, very first by Basic Motors from 1948 and then by Ford in the 1950s and 1960s, was predicated on the military victory of US imperialism in the globe war against German and Japanese imperialism.

Right after two such international conflagrations in the very first half of the 20th century, at the price of tens of millions of lives, the United States prevailed. Washington established a military and financial hegemony more than most of the globe 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, in the course of which workers forced the ruling class to make particular concessions, such as wellness, education and welfare applications.

Through this period, American businesses set up auto, whitegoods and other industries in other nations, which includes Australia. By the late 1980s, on the other hand, 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 market, and several other manufacturing facilities, culminating in the shutdown of the final GM Holden assembly plant in Elizabeth, South Australia in 2017.

For decades, particularly 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 globe, seeking 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 great wages.” In reality, the circumstances of workers, no matter whether employed by the giant weapons makers or enlisted in the armed forces, will be brutal, dictated each by corporate profit-generating and the “sacrifices” demanded for the “war work,” as occurred in each globe wars.

Far from an era of nicely-paid jobs, what is getting ready is sweatshop circumstances in industries of mass destruction.

Donate to the WSWS 25 Year Fund

Watch David North’s remarks commemorating 25 years of the Globe Socialist Internet Web site and donate nowadays.

The Socialist Equality Celebration (SEP) is standing in the March 25 New South Wales state election to oppose this whole plan of militarism and war. We are the only celebration carrying out so. As we clarify in our election statement, with each other with our sister parties about the globe we are developing an international anti-war movement of the operating class, directed against the supply of war, the capitalist profit program itself.

We say: “Two globe wars are sufficient! Quit 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 folks to the prospect of a catastrophic nuclear war.

A “whole-of-nation” war economy demands 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 established lies.

Against the war-mongering nationalism of Labor and the unions, workers and young folks will need an international point of view, aimed at unifying their increasing struggles globally against the corporate oligarchies and governments that demand they fight and kill each and every other for the advantage of the wealthy elites.

Above all, what is needed is a socialist point of view, aimed at establishing workers’ governments to fully reorganise society in the interests of social will need, not private profit. Socialist measures, which includes putting the enormous corporations beneath public ownership and workers’ handle, are the only way to establish standard democratic and social rights—including to decent, nicely-paid jobs and higher-excellent no cost education and healthcare for all.

We urge all our readers to help 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
Facebook: SocialistEqualityPartyAustralia
Twitter: @SEP_Australia
Instagram: socialistequalityparty_au
TikTok: @sep_australia

Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Celebration, Suite 906, 185 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000.