What's Wrong With Being A Consumerist?
Nothing.... mostly.
In a late capitalist world, we are all consumers. We live in a sea of branding and advertising and selling points and marketing hype. We are presented with the inevitability of making transactions to obtain things, and about the only control we have, is over which thing do we choose to buy. Tragically, if you can't afford what you want to buy, you are bored to either buy the cheaper thing and find satisfaction somehow, or save up for the real deal.
If these decisions dominate your grocery shopping, then that's part of the ordinary existence in late capitalism. Do you want Coke or Pepsi? Do you want Arafour mandarins or Imperial mandarins? These are the kinds of questions that the shopping experience pushes towards you. They go through the gamut of products put to you through capitalism, right up to the house you may choose to inhabit and the suburb in which it sits. We all make choices based on what we can afford against what we want to have.
What then is the problem with treating political parties like consumer products? It's because you're supposed to exercise a lot more control - and therefore thought, - as you participate in democracy. That is to say, the seeming market like atmosphere of election campaigns is actually misleading bullshit. You are supposed to think about a brand spectrum of ideas and apply some critical thinking in trying to see what is worth your single vote - because believe you me, you get to vote far fewer times in your life than you imagine when you turn 18.
Electioneers will come at you like a marketing campaign to feed you notions about what their candidate is going to do for you and society. They will play up to your prejudices and unconscious desire to punish 'the other'. They will flatter your vanity and appeal to your sense of justice; and this is all well and good, but your vote should not be cast because of branding or single issue hype. There's a lot more to the transaction than the leaflet they give you as you walk towards the booth.
I don't mind if somebody is all out for Gucci or Chanel or whatever brand. It doesn't matter how one defines one's identity for that matter. Truth be told, nobody cares. However in politics, your vote matters and it amounts to something. What you're transacting isn't just money. That's why I think voters should at least think about where exactly they stand in late capitalism, and that that means, and how that is working out for you and your loved ones.
Grubbiness of Democracy Is A Feature, Not A Bug
I can't believe I have to spell this out in this time of history. It's like people have forgotten whole chunks of history. All the big issues take a long time to resolve. That's the nature of things.
From time to time we find the party we voted for, does not do the obvious thing and support our favourite cause. God only knows it only took all of the 1980s and part of the 1990s before the ALP to admit that Global Warming was a problems and needed to be tackled. Then the Coalition won government and it wasn't until 2006 or so that the Liberal Party led by John Howard grudgingly admitted that Climate Change was real. To get there, they had to change Global Warming to Climate Change because Global Warming would scare too many people. (Arguably, people needed to be scared a fuckload more but that's another story). And even then there were electoral gyrations that let Tony Abbott win office for the Coalition and he went on to carry on like there was no such thing by dismantling policies to do with Global Warming.
The list of Australian Prime Ministers who lost their jobs in the turmoil surrounding the 'culture wars' around climate policy then are John Howard, Kevin Rudd (twice) Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and finally Scott Morrison. Peter Dutton is doing his best to bring back the culture wars in a bid to win the next election but he forgets, that is exactly how his party lost the last election. The simple point is not over by the looks of things. The fossil fuel industry will keep donating big bucks to the Coalition in a bid to stave off the X-day when fossil fuels will cease to be the main source of our energy. It's difficult and complex and awful and generally grubby exactly because so many interests intersect on the fossil fuels alone.
It's not even clear we are able to curb our emissions enough according to the stipulations of the international agreements. And this after a lifetime of following this subject has made me despair for humanity - but it has not made me despair about democracy.
And that's just Global Warming.
Same Sex Marriage in Australia had its own Odyssey. From the first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras march of 1978 to when it was finally legislated in 2017. It didn't take 10 years - it took close to 40 years. It took a lot longer than the participants in that struggle would have wanted to but it got done and in a way that the majority of Australians could accept.
All this is to say if anybody thinks the ALP should suddenly adopt a hyper-partisan pro-Palestinian view, they don't understand our democracy very well. You're going to have to negotiate a lot harder and longer than simply threatening to vote for an independent. If it were as easy as that, our country would be a very different by place by now. The first step of politics is to accept the reality you have as it comes to you. And it's not a bad place to start at all.
We Just Want Peace, Part 1001
Going back to 1975 when the Vietnam War ended, we've had a lot of war since. I won't go into the list. I started but then got sick of it. I'm just sick of war, so making a list of all the ones I've seen on the news seemed like a perverse act of masochism.
And I have been lucky. With all this fighting going around the globe, I have not lost family to war since 1945. I certainly have not lost any friends to war. I have not had to learn how to use weapons, or had to undergo basic training. The day the Chinese invade Australia, I'd probably be useless in defending the place. In all honesty, I do not want to participate in any war, I do not want to experience killing anybody and sure as hell don't want to get hit in battle.
Part of it is that as the years wear on, one is left with overwhelming sense of fruitlessness of all these conflicts. What was the point of occupying Afghanistan for so long? Or Iraq? What good did it do to anybody? What good is it for Serbia to want to maintain control over lands with people that don't want to have anything to do with them? What good is it for Russia to be sending troops into Crimea for some imagined historical grievance or reckoning or whatever the hell Vladimir Putin is imagining? And what is the point of surging out to kill 1020 people and taking hostages if it means you have to wear the full weight of a modern, well-equipped military?
Part of it is the bleak feeling that Global Warming is going to wipe out whole swathes of habitable zones for humanity. Is killing one another the best way to deal with this ever-enlarging, ever-present looming problem? In the late 20th Century in the early 21st Century, it has become increasingly clear that the party that wants to engage in warfare will pay a steep cost. Thus, one wonders can we at least learn some less ons for all this and not push for territorial claims or mineral mining rights or fishing rights? Can't we just trade for things we don't have?
Anyway, for a blog that spend s a lot of time talking about wars in distant lands, I just want to say it would be much better if there were no wars anywhere, near or far.
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