A Penal State of Mind
Australian nationalism promotes the claim of a nation-state united under the Australian flag, but thanks in particular to racism and xenophobia, we remain deeply divided. What is the meaning of racism in a society that prides itself on being situated in modernity when it comes to our technical expertise? The dynamics of ‘Othering,’ demonising and victim-blaming belong with the medieval period and the Witch Hunts, not in a society cognizant of the Enlightenment
In a nation that adheres at the rhetorical level to Enlightenment values in respect for individual rights (well, sometimes), the prevalence of premodern attitudes—and better yet, the dominance of premodern attitudes—in Australia, begs the question as to what it is about Australia that makes racism so virulent.
The H-word
At the outset, part of the answer might be that it has always been. A country that was founded on the principle that the original inhabitants were sub- or ‘unhumans’—as was reflected in the legal doctrine of Terra Nullius, the founding doctrine of white settler colonialism—is a country founded on deeply-embedded racism, one that was bound to reproduce virulent racism down the track.
This fact is reflected in the legacy of the Frontier Wars and massacres such as those carried out at Myall Creek, the anti-Chinese riots in Clunes and elsewhere that followed the suppression of the Eureka Stockade in 1854, as healthy impulses to protest soured into toxic xenophobia and scapegoating.
A particularly noxious example, even by Australian standards, the White Australia Policy was initiated and supported by the ALP and the mainstream Australian union movement to their everlasting infamy, and opposed solely by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), promptly smashed for also opposing WWI.
In more recent decades the rise of Pauline Hanson, our sadistic and surely criminal victimisation of refugees, race riots in Cronulla and bashings of Indian students represent just a few examples of many. The culture that sustains these remain deeply embedded in Australian culture and history.
It does not seem at first glance an issue of whether racism is getting worse so much as we tend to develop a better grasp of how bad it has always been. Racism has always been virulent because it has always been of high value historically for elites.
The uses of racism
Racism historically has served in the first instance as a way of blaming the victim for the crimes against humanity committed as Europeans spread out across the world, laying the economic basis for global capitalism in what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation,’ or the appropriation of ‘first capital’ for use in kickstarting the capitalist production cycle—typically through systematic, institutional violence.
In the second, racism has served as what US historian Frank Van Nuys calls the ‘great national safety valve,’ a reflection of the historical correlation between the rise in earnest of racism and xenophobia and the closing of the western frontier. With the resulting loss of economic opportunity, Van Nuys argued, the United States was deprived of its traditional mechanism for dampening down class conflict.
As a remedy for this crisis, US elites developed the mythology of the ‘racial frontier,’ the colour line deep within the national unconscious separating ‘whiteness’ from ‘Otherness’—’Others’ against whom a racially purist notion of American national identity could be constructed.
Instrumental in orchestrating ‘the new structure of class rule’ associated with the rise of corporate power towards the end of the nineteenth century, they were not slow to associate corporate paternalism with the logic of the ‘great national safety valve.’ Racism, Van Nuys argued, was a natural corollary of the exclusivity inherent to class privilege.
On a similar note, ‘the material benefits of racial exclusion function, in the labour context, to stifle class tensions among whites,’ wrote legal historian Cheryl Harris in the Harvard Law Review. As long as a regime of racial privilege could be established and kept in place, white workers could be encouraged to believe ‘that they had more in common with the bourgeoisie than with fellow workers.’
Even when ‘the white working class did not collect increased pay as a part of white privilege, there were real advantages not paid in direct income: whiteness still yielded what Du Bois termed a “public and psychological wage” vital to white workers.’
Racial privileging of this kind, Harris noted, provided a tried and true approach for those who sought to render scapegoats by associating ‘opponent’ with ‘foreign’ a stick to the carrot of whiteness. As a form of ‘divide and conquer,’ this trick was classic example of the proverbial oldest one in the book.
As a footnote, and considering the way that the predatory gaze of the elite treats workers, women, the flora and fauna and even the planet itself the same way, we might even speak of the ‘wages of privilege’ as such, a fact that only accentuates the usefulness of racism in being combined with other forms of discrimination to bolster the status quo and divide subjects amongst themselves..
Wages of privilege
Observations of this kind have a marked relevance for a society such as Australia, which has always prided itself on being egalitarian, the ‘lucky country,’ even if the egalitarianism concerned derives from confusing being criticised with being attacked and cutting down ‘tall poppies’ who tell us things we don’t want to hear— one of boorishness and mediocrity borne of arrogance and anti-intellectualism.
Defenders of the ‘public and psychological wage’ paid to white workers tend in this way to reject being acquainted with unwanted facts regarding the historical origins of settler colonialism as snooty liberal PC fascism and elitism. This does not stop white workers however from supporting actual fascists who promote racist ideologies, or corporate elites, especially in the banking and mining industries, who are their primary material beneficiaries.
To the extent that the ‘racial frontier’ informs Australian politics, we can also assume that authoritarianism does as well. If virulent racism can be understood an expression of authoritarian or even fascist modes of thinking designed to protect class privilege from democracy and justice, however, this creates difficulties for the alleged anti-authoritarian tendencies of the Australian character.
From our convict origins, to the friction between working-class ANZAC diggers and the arrogant imperial brass who them to die without purpose or gain at Gallipoli, and the rise of the larrikin as a cultural reappropriation of an elitist British slur, Australians are understood to be anti-authoritarian.
This fact begs the crucial question as to whether anti-authoritarianism was of necessity the default position of convicts simply because of their oppression by the British penal system.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychologist who lived through the Nazi era, argued that, in addition to seducing German workers with simple answers to complex issues based on the logic of scapegoating, Nazism relied on co-dependency-driven capture-bonding more commonly associated with abusive interpersonal relationships, narcissistic personality types and organised religion.
Through co-dependent capture-bonding with a wages-of-privilege sugar coating, Reich argued, the Nazis able to tempt ordinary Germans into the service of reactionary and authoritarian political forces, despite a patent conflict with their own material interests as workers.
As the bait, the white supremacism of the ‘racial frontier’ was a line that, once crossed, brought German workers under a totalitarian psychological dynamic that encouraged them to regress to infantile states of leader-worship and total dependence on the Fuhrer, relieving them of adult responsibility for having to make their own decisions and be responsible for the consequences in return for total obedience.
In concluding his study of these dynamics, Reich observed that such dynamics, far from being limited to German society, were visible anywhere hierarchies existed, as they were designed to foster obedience, social control between leaders and led, and the will to command as well as the desire to obey.
Penal institutionalisation
To the extent that similarly autocracies dominated the social landscape in New South Wales during the early years of European settlement, under the British penal system, the function of Terra Nullius-style white supremacist ideology appears to have been to encourage similar forms of authoritarian capture-bonding and co-dependency between convicts and the British Empire.
If anti-authoritarianism was not of necessity the default position of convicts due simply their oppression by the British penal system, it seems reasonable to assume that they were equally prone to institutionalisation within the New South Wales penal system, as long-term prisoners are in any prison.
Given the token privileging of working class whites within the racial system of Australian settler colonialism, it seems reasonable to argue further that a great many of the were bought off with the wages of whiteness. The virulence with which racism as tended to mark Australian society throughout our history, as noted, seems to bear this point out.
If the penal colony of New South Wales was not totalitarian in the sense that Germany was under the National Socialists—not least because National Socialism could claim a measure of popular support—neither, as Reich pointed out, was authoritarian capture-bonding and co-dependence foreign either. It is in the nature of prisons to encourage institutionalisation; the cultural legacy of the early period of Australian society was not simply legislated away in 1901 when the colonies were brought under Federation.
On the contrary, imposing a nation-state though the passing of legislation did nothing to dispel widespread social acculturation in Australian society to authoritarian attitudes and mentalities. Within the context of the Australian penal system, this authoritarian acculturation encouraged class collaboration on the basis of whiteness as a matter of course. It accounts for much of the lack of intelligence and emotional regression that seems to characterise most public discourse in this country.
The penal colony within
Has Australia ever quite stopped being a penal colony? It does not seem so. The continuing virulence of racism in particular is reflected in other forms of privilege-driven hate, not least of which being anti-women misogyny evidenced in an epidemic of domestic violence and a spate of sexual assaults and murders.
Such horrors continue to reflect the social culture of a prison in terms of authoritarian capture bonding and subject dependence on authority. Reflected historically through susceptibility from working class whites to appeals by white elites to whiteness, said elites and their subsidiaries in politics and the media feed such capture bonding yet with a habitual reflexivity—if not in our policies towards indigenous people and refugees, then in their willingness to shriek that the sky is falling because a new immigrant group displays the exact same human frailties as the rest of us
If very little willingness to acknowledge these as aspects of the national character as they appear today, then there is even less so to account for them historically. Such would mean an end to racism as a sop to the white convict classes and their descendants from the table of class privilege, as a method of ensuring loyalty.
Racism in that respect remains the ‘national safety valve,’ as a way of naming and denouncing aspects of the status quo that must not be named due to the fact that the privileged few continue to benefit from them. It also serves to demonstrate the extent to which Australians retain a penal state of mind; the bars remain, but have simply been internalised.
