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Title: Peace, Land & Bread: Civilisation & the Welfare State Author: Dole Army Ex-Worker Collective Language: en Topics: Australia, anti-civ, post-left, welfare, unions, anti-militarism, Soviet Union, history
When the sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick wrote his rambling manifesto
called The Exegesis, he was pretty damn convinced that we were still
living in the remnants of the Roman Empire. Easy to dismiss as the
writings of a madman, but as dole bludgers fucked up from our poverty we
find ourselves in the good company of many a nutcase, so why would we
judge? Let’s give the man a little credit, and see whether he’s right.
Rome, like all empires such as the global one we live in today, was
built on a long history of war, colonisation and slave labour to expand
its borders. It didn’t spring up over night, but over heaps of
generations of men dying for the glory of Rome. Now, if you take two
seconds to think about it, that sounds like a shit deal for the average
plebeian huh? The capital ran the show, and all the people connected to
it as the centre of power, but there were way more Romans out there than
Roman generals and politicians, so how’d the empire survive for as long
as it did?
Well, it was with the introduction of the dole of course. Same shit that
went down here & the rest of the Allied countries during & after WW2,
when the working class was furious after the great depression and war,
and the American New World Order was crushing revolutionaries with
schemes like Operation Gladio so they can use Europe as the one big
military base we now call NATO. When faced with revolution from a mob of
pissed off dispossesed worker slaves, it’s more cost effective to throw
scraps down to the people and claim it’s your good will and generousity
as capitalists who’ve pulled yourselves up by the bootstraps than to
throw more and more cops or soldiers at them. Welfare has been the
backbone of Empire as long as it’s existed, always being brought in to
shut us civilians up when we get rowdy, and over the years eroded when
the ruling class no longer fears dissent.
In Rome they did this with grain, rather than money. With grain you
could get all the carbs you need to survive day to day and toil for the
upper eschalons of society. A man fed grain every day doesn’t starve.
Sound familiar? Centrelink gives people money these days (if you can
access it, and if they don’t fuck you around), but it’s barely enough to
eat and also have somewhere to sleep. Like the Roman plebeians, we’re
disposable, our bodies and lives don’t matter to the people ruling the
roost, but we’re looked down on for our suffering, told if we just tried
harder like a good citizen we’d achieve great things. Didn’t like it?
You can join the military (or today, the cops), and for your service the
state will give you lots of nice benefits and a new social status to
seperate the veterans like you from the plebs like them who never killed
for the glory of the Empire.
Now you might be thinking to yourself “But that was world war 2! There
was a war on! The Reds took over Russia! Australia’s always been a place
for Australians, not for commies! It’s the modern age, not ancient
history!”. Well sure alright, let’s dial the clock back then and see how
this continent was “civilised”. The first few attempts at genocide was
with hard convict labour, as we’re all taught in school. Back in the UK,
industrialisation took a country of rural peasants and enclosed them
into the most horrific factories you can imagine (yknow, like the ones
in the 3^(rd) world where all the shit we buy from local corporations is
made, outside of our minimum wage laws). This, understandably, left a
lot of people very pissed off that they’re poor as shit and can’t feed a
family, driving many people to crime. Off to the colonies! Redeem your
soul with hard work! And so people were shipped out here, serving their
sentence just like a soldier their military term, and paid off with a
kind of dole the british workers had never seen before: land.
Land! My own little slice of genocide paradise! The dream of every
convict! But once they got that land, they had to work for the benefit
of the Crown, and all the rich bastards it sent down here to plunder the
continent for as much wealth & power as they could. There were plenty of
people who thought this whole thing was full of shit and decided to get
their revenge and fair payback, and today we call them words like
“bushranger”. As the 1800’s came to a close, around the same time Ned
Kelly was being sent to Melbourne Gaol, the labour movement had really
taken off from all those former convict families and gold rush
immigrants who knew they were getting the short end of the stick. Of
course they were racist bastards, wouldn’t let a blackfella or chinaman
join their unions at all, but they formed a group we know today as the
Labor party, and really not much has changed. As crime picked up, and
bandits roamed the countryside, the government sent in the troops,
aiming for the stick rather than the carrot this time round. By World
War One, the angry workers were enough of a force that they ended the
draft with a general strike, and the only people sent off to war were
the conservative pricks doing it for King & Country. By the end of the
war, the workers stormed heaven in Russia, fought off the allied armies
from the war sent to Siberia to crush the revolution & aid the Whites,
and in a desperate bid to save themselves formed a new government (huge
mistake comrades, never trust a beauracrat).
This period of history is called the Red Scare, and it never really
ended. By the time the great depression hit, people were starving all
over, and our own communist party was growing. Revolution was in the air
worldwide, and people were pissed. Then a war happened, conviniently
framed as “liberating” europe & asia, but just like the first war, it
was a scam to throw the bodies of working people at the front lines so
they can’t make trouble at home. The Pilbarra strike showed the country
that aboriginal men dispossesed of their lands weren’t gonna take shit
from this country, and the unions around the country surged once more.
This was the backdrop for the dole being “given” to us, and just like
every other time in history, it only ever came through when nobody
trusted the army or cops to have a chance at a pension and a power trip
for upward mobility, and when the bosses and politicians felt the mob
outside their door.
From WW2 till 1975, there wasn’t medicare, and the unemployed still had
a tough run. This post-war confidence gained by the working class was
called the “new left”, when the generation after the war realised how
fucked the world was and started getting radical. It was enough to make
the labor party do stuff sometimes, back then they still relied on
working class people’s good will to get votes. The Unemployment Benefit
introduced in 1945 was taken away if you participated in a strike, and
it came with all sorts of exceptions. Angry workers had to fight to get
women and aborignal people eligible, and by the 70’s the working class
movement was feisty enough that they got medicare forced through, and
since then shit’s only gotten worse as the factories have closed for
cheaper labour overseas, the unions broken by the Accords, and
casualised bullshit service industries took over the country. By the
1990’s, the melbourne tram strike was crushed, the soviet union
collapsed as the US Empire privatised their economy for a few oligarchs
to rule, and labour parties worldwide declared themselves the good
friends of small business tyrants and landlords.
In the United States, the heart of Empire, they’ve taken shit a step
further, closer to the Roman model than anywhere else. You don’t get
money from the government, you get “food stamps” that you can only
redeem for certain things, same as the disgusting rort that the Indue
card is. If you join their armies and serve a term, you get a pension
and healthcare you can only get if you’re in a rare “good” union over
there. You get a free uni degree too! And if you don’t serve in the
front lines, maybe you can serve your free nation at an arms
manufacturer like Raytheon instead, or through the feds or cops, and
pull yourself up by your bootstraps there. The only reason why it’s not
that bad here yet is cos American soldiers are stationed and trained in
military bases all around this country, the CIA keeps a listening
station at Pine Gap, they get their uranium from us, and American
companies can rip us off and run off with the profit. In exchange, we’re
allowed to run around relatively unchecked, so long as we don’t make too
much of a fuss or they’ll collude with the Crown and governor general to
dismiss parliament like they did with the Whitlam-led ALP in 1975. This
frees up the local military for annoying ads on social media promising
us a degree if we sign away our souls, and to be a haven for the few
racist freaks who signed up to go to the middle east and kill brown
people.
Every time an empire rises from a colonised land they grabbed for power,
it rounds up the majority of people, makes them work for a living to
build the temples and markets and roads, to make the weapons and armour
for their soldiers, and to build palaces for the people winning from the
rort. From Rome to China, from the caliphates to the holy empires with
all their wars and inquisitions, and from the guild cities of the
medieval world to the brutal colonial kingdoms that rose from them, in
any time or place, Empire has the same rules: Keep the poor bastards
begging for the hand that feeds them, and use force to keep them in line
if they don’t.