LETTER: The Greens – Imperialism’s Left Wing

Maya Kaufmann, Online

We are told by Andrew Greene at the ABC:

For the first time in the party’s history, the Australian Greens have unveiled a formally costed policy to fund new military programs for locally made “defensive” weapons, while also pledging to slash billions of dollars in spending on American technology.

This plan, which is pitched as an alternative to the AUKUS pact between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, would seek to establish an independent Australian arms industry and adopt a policy of pure self-defence. As David Shoebridge, the Greens spokesman on the matter, says, the first step to a peaceful foreign policy is to end Australia’s “dependence on the United States” for arms.

While the Communists would agree with the need to break the AUKUS Pact, this announcement by the Greens is no cause for celebration. In fact, given the longstanding opposition of the Greens party to the US Alliance, this move should be understood as a clarification of their position – not as a party of anti-imperialism, but rather as imperialism’s left wing.

Let us begin with the most obvious problem. The Greens are not in government, and are unlikely to be in government in the future. What this policy signals is a willingness to “play ball” with Labor Party defence policy, albeit on a limited basis. If the ALP was to propose an increase in military spending, as part of a generalised arms build up, it seems likely that the Greens would at least partly vote in favour. This does not bode well. The most pressing issue facing the international working class is the growing threat of a war between the United States and China. By embracing the language of “national defence” – which any war with China would be framed in – the Greens do not position themselves as potential opponents of this war.

There is also a deeper problem. Support for an “independent Australia” policy is not anti-imperialist in practice. Rather, it seeks to facilitate an independent Australian imperialism, liberated from its sub-imperial status under the American nuclear umbrella. Australia already plays a distinct imperialist role: in the South Pacific, in Papua New Guinea, in Indonesia. Australian capital is engaged in the systematic exploitation of the global periphery, and maintains a vested interest in the uneven exchange that characterises world trade. An independent Australia would simply be an imperialist Australia. In this context, any defence of “national interests”, any call of national defence, including those offered on a “left” basis are implicit defences of imperialism and imperialist interests.

This is why it is vital that communists reject the slogans of “national defence”. The working class and the capitalist class do not share a common political program, including on the question of national defence. We must oppose the standing army, and its associated industries, as tools of ruling class power. Against the capitalist armed services, we pose the minimum slogan of the communist movement: the arming of the working class and a popular militia. On this question, even the socialist movement falls short, with Socialist Alliance and Victorian Socialists offering only a reduction of defence spending – not the abolition of the standing army.

This is of course not to say that we are pacifists. Far from it! Nor are we opposed to war! We put no stock in the prattling of the social pacifists who talk of “international arbitration”, the “United Nations” or “a Rules Based International Order” – they are just another one of imperialism’s many Mandarins. If there is a war on the horizon – and it is likely to be a World War – let the working class not fight for “national defence” or “the Western Alliance” or “free trade”. Let it instead fight the social war, the war between classes, the global war for international proletarian revolution. That is the war we should be preparing for. It is a war we are determined to win.

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