Giving the Green Light to Imperialism
Why the left must criticise the Greens’ promises of military spending
The Greens’ commitment of $4bn to Australian weapons industries for home-made missiles and drones as a “beginning” to their national war budget policy constitutes the drawing of a clear line that left wing people, and especially revolutionaries, must oppose.
A party that accepts the logic of capitalism and purports to know how to manage it in a more humane, more ecologically friendly, more just, less nasty way, has no choice but to accept the logic of war and imperialism. It doesn’t matter that there are ‘progressives’ or people that call themselves socialists or anti-imperialist in the Greens. It doesn’t matter that the Greens talk big on housing policy or have thrown their support behind the Palestine movement and community campaigns. Ultimately, managing, reforming, accepting the logic of capitalism means protecting the interests of the capitalist class, whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of workers, whether in Australia, China, the US, Indonesia, Taiwan, Tonga or Palestine.
The Greens accept that the defence of the interests of Australian capital requires the maintenance and defence of the capitalist mode of production and the profit motive. Australia’s military ultimately exists to uphold and defend the interests of the Australian bourgeoisie, whether through AUKUS, through home-made weapons or through a continuation (or more likely a large increase) of US military presence on the Australian continent. At present Australia’s ‘national’ (i.e. bourgois) interest is dependent upon an alliance with US Imperialism and on projection of Australian military power in the Asia pacific, including in the South China Sea.
Despite rhetoric about Australia’s military being essential for the defence of national security, history makes clear what this means. Between 2001 and 2020, 40,000 ADF personnel were deployed in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, a war that killed over 200,000 people. The ADF was deployed in the US-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 - a war that claimed the lives of half-a-million. 60,000 Australian soldiers served in America’s war on Vietnam, which claimed 1.5 Million lives. In the last year, Australian ‘defence’, ‘economic interests’ and ‘national security’ have been used to justify the bombing of Yemen, the feeding of intelligence to US and Israeli military operations in their genocide of Palestinians, and “combined operations” in the South China Sea.
And as well as following major imperialist nations like The US and Britain into aggressive interventions, Australia is an imperialist force in its own right, projecting military power across the Asia-Pacific region. Between 1975 and 1999, Australia backed up Indonesia’s occupation and control of Timore Leste, extracting billions in natural resources in the decades following, under the guise of ‘peacekeeping’. Between 1988 and 1998, they were instrumental in suppressing the struggle for national liberation of Bougainville, an autonomous territory of Papua New Guinea fighting for independence. In 2006 Australian troops were sent to crush pro-democracy protests in Tonga. And successive Australian governments have long backed Indonesia's military occupation of West Papua, a nation struggling for independence a stone’s throw from our northern coasts.
But Australian workers’ interests do not lie in militarisation or in backing one inter-imperialist force over another. We have no interest in being the ‘tip of the spear’ in the US’s confrontation with China, as put starkly by former US Defence Secretary Richard Spencer. We have no interest in the ruling class pouring billions into maintaining military dominance, or in being sent to die as cannon fodder for Australian “sovereignty”. Australian workers have an interest in better health, education, housing, stronger, more radical and political unions and an immediate end to the production and consumption of fossil fuels. We share an interest with workers, the poor and oppressed struggling for political rights and independence throughout the Asia-Pacific and, indeed, throughout the entire world. And most importantly, Australian workers have an interest - and a capacity - in fighting against the Australian ruling class.
A truly left wing party is a party of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. With the US ratcheting up pressure and maneuvering for war with China, and inter-imperialist rivalries in Russia and Europe intensifying and complexifying, a denunciation of AUKUS needs to be a denunciation of Australia’s role as an imperialist power, and an assertion that the Australia’s working class and oppressed have no interest in siding militarily with USA and no interest in the continued projection of power into Southeast Asia.
Melbourne protests Australia’s involvement in the Iraq War, 2003
We need a party that can clearly break from and criticise the Greens when they slide to the right. We need a party that can organise and lead people in popular movements and workplaces to oppose war. We need a party with clear, revolutionary socialist politics that can campaign for reforms that improve workers’ lives, but that ultimately exists for the immediate task of laying the basis for a party of revolutionary workers that can confront Australia’s war-mongering ruling class and fight for international workers’ power.
As the Greens slide to the right and become apologists for Australian imperialism - as they are already apologists for capitalism - we need a socialist party that can lead a fight to confront the capitalist class as a whole. This means not only presenting an alternative at the ballot box; it means being crystal clear on imperialism and militarisation: socialists oppose it. We are for workers’ power, we are for revolution, and we are for international class war, because that is the only fight that can do away with the capitalist system, which lies at root of the imperialism that the Greens can never break from so long as they are waiting in line to reform, manage and uphold Australian capitalism.