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Issue No. 148 | 16 August 2002 |
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Peak Performance
Interview: Labor Law Unions: Critical Conditions Bad Boss: Shifting The Load History: Peeking Out Safety: Flying High Corporate: Salaries High, Performance Low International: War on the US Wharves Review: And the Signs Said... Poetry: Tony Don't Preach Satire: Latham Dumps Rodney Rude as Speech Writer
Politics The Soapbox The Locker Room Bosswatch Human Rights
 Miranda's Not Fair on OutworkersAnother Capitalist Party?Justice For All?Kill the Photos!Right Wing Lackies
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History Peeking Out
The state seeks to survive by making sure that "its primary enemy - its own people - remain "quiescent and obedient and passive". (Noam Chomsky) Those that object to the "keep the rabble in line" principle (Chomksy again) can expect to be hounded by the various apparatus of the state. In Australia two historians have looked closely into the means by which the state achieves its hold. Bob James takes the long- term historical view, and is probably more of a mind to agree with Chomsky than Frank Cain, the other observer of state survelliance systems. James in his study the active anarchism of the late 19th century looks at the "surveillance and civil control by the military, police, and the newspapers". The way in which the state acted to keep oppositional or "anti-systemic" voices in line was a method that developed from the changing character of societies in Europe and the Antipodes in the 19th century. The industrial revolution and the new ways of organizing by the working people required a different response from the state. That intelligence gathering and spying long pre dated this is not in doubt, but this era brought with it a revamping of military and para-military forces and the state consolidated itself with increasing centralization, thus more bureaucracy and a need to gather and control information. Nowadays we see much of this information gathering passed of as necessary for the social security and welfare systems, but as the furor over the Australia Card proposed under the Hawke government showed, people are rightly suspicious of the states information collection role. As James says, monitoring the movements and activities of people was so important it had to be disguised. In Britain this went so far as to deny the existence of spying agencies. British research shows the extent of surveillance by police and military authorities of meetings of Irish republicans, socialists and anarchists. E.P Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" and many of his other writings draw on police and court records that show how the evidence is presented by agents placed in these "threatening organisations." The part of the detective developed in police forces (who themselves evolved from the military as the arm to control the local populace) as a symbol of the crucial role information gathering came to have in monitoring and ultimately destabilising oppositions. Some pro-state forces applauded the role Charles Dickens gave to detectives in his novels. This helped turn the populations suspicions of such activities to admiration. As James writes, "Detectives in sixty years or so had become a major exemplar of the archetypal British (white, male) hero. Their success in preventing Fenians, anarchists and labour agitators shooting royalty, burning down the Bank of England or blowing up the Houses of Parliament, that is, all that was ever best, was largely responsible for their exalted image. The fact that no attempt was ever made by anarchists to do these things was considered irrelevant when denunciations were being handed out." Interestingly, this also occurred at a time when Queen Victoria was rescuing the British Royal Family from obscurity and tradition was being "reinvented" to exalt "all that was good." In Australia Governor Phillip arrived with military and domestic surveillance as the chief point of the whole white settlement. Army officers who acted as his controlling agents (members of the Rum Corp initially) were given extraordinary powers from the outset. In 1839 the police force was separated from the colonial magistrates and were then organised along the lines of the London Metropolitan force. James noted that there was a distinct detective section of the Victorian police force by 1865 and there is reference in the records to "secret agents". The failure of this domestic spying and the need by the state to beef it up was brought to notice by the attempt on the Duke of Edinburgh's life on his visit to Sydney in 1869. The Fenian conspiracy was used by Henry Parkes to boost his political career, however. Parkes claimed at the time that he knew beforehand of the plot and his newspaper coverage ad fanning of the outcry lead to the passing of the Treason Felony Act. The Truth newspaper, 23 years later, pointed out the lack of evidence of any plot and concluded that Parkes was either an accessory or a liar. What it did show was the need for the state to believe, or at least the need for the state to have people believe, that such acts were always imminent, and the need for the state to convince the public that they were imminent, so that they could justify repressive legislation. The state also could rely on newspaper reporters to ferret out plans, factions and other internal difficulties that oppositional forces faced. The state around the world responded in punitive fashion to the Haymarket events in Chicago, and standard media dutifully followed the line on what was acceptable behaviour. Getting the alternative point of view out required anti-systemic forces to print their own media with smaller print runs and the associated distribution problems. The mainstream press in Australia contrasted Happy Australia to the disturbances caused by those terrible anarchists in the US and Europe. The impact this had on oppositional forces could be summed up by a letter published under the heading "Land for the People" James quotes from the Shearers Record of April 1888: Sir: In reference to the above heading I hurry up to state that I am not an Anarchist, Communist or Nihilist, as some of your readers may imagine to be the case." As we still see today this struggle over definitions was a life draining force from the active opposition and one that the state forces used to the full to ensure obedience, along with the more overt tactics of prosecuting, gaoling and spying on the people. During the First World War in Australia the forces of the state used the circumstances of international crisis to crush internal dissent. The best-known example was the gaoling of the IWW 12 in Sydney for supposedly plotting to burn down Sydney. Ian Turner goes into marvelous detail of this in "Sydney's Burning" Frank Cain also looks at the IWW in detail in his history of the movement during WWI. This book followed on from Cain's earlier doctoral work on the origins of political surveillance. Billy Hughes was the Prime Minister in 1916 who banned the IWW for its treasonable activities and he was also responsible for the banning of the CPA in 1940. The IWW was so successful that its leaders were deported in 1917. These bans tell us a lot about the changing fortunes of radical groups too. The IWW and the general anarcho-syndicalist currents were leading radical forces until the first war with the CPA becoming the leading bogey group after that. The IWW was also perhaps a threat to the established, "acceptable" face of unions and labour, as it didn't have much time for Parliamentary socialists and reformers. That established labour didn't do much for the plight of the persecuted IWW figures is in no doubt, but despite all the propaganda and war hysteria, many "ordinary" people did. The difference in the philosophy of the radical movements was great, but forces of the state tended to be pretty broad brush in their approach to "threats". The access recently provided to special branch files developed by the NSW Police force shows how this sort of stuff could develop a life of its own, and how parts of the security apparatus could act with impunity against anyone it designated as a "threat." Hughes acted against the IWW, anti-conscriptionists and again against the Irish, whipping up public animosity with the help of the enforcers in the military, the police and the press. ASIO developed from the sorts of security systems that expanded under Hughes. The lineage of the IWW to later peace and environmental movements can be seen in the concerns the Wobblies had with the internationalisation of capital and in the sort of direct action tactics that are used today by the disparate groups labeled the "anti-globalisation" movement. Again the argument over definitions is used to derail the debate. As George Monbiot says, "Globalisation means whatever you want it to, so "social justice" or "internationalist" movement" are a tighter fit" and make it more difficulty for the establishment to divide using words. It won't of course, stop them using other tactics of surveillance and observation, which will be more of the spying noted above, and other more technologically based tactics, using cameras and other electronic gadgetry. Workers face these increasingly with cameras in the workplace, often justified as looking after the security of staff whereas they are really used because management likes to harass staff, or keyboard monitoring and monitoring of work don in call centers where management claim to monitor to ensure the development of training and assistance to staff, but are actually aiming to increase the amount of work done. The Wobblies creed of working slower shines like a beacon in the electronic monitoring age and in the 24/7 society being foisted upon us. That the state uses notions of external threat (such as "terrorism") to justify the increased bureaucratisation and authoritarianism at all levels comes as no surprise to those who always look at the forces of the state with a jaundiced eye. Much of Bob James' important work is at http://www.takver.com/history/indexbj.htm Here you can purchase the book I refer to "Anarchism and State Violence in Sydney and Melbourne 1886-1896: an argument about Australian labour history. (1986) For the anarchist tradition living long in Australia make sure you go to http://www.takver.com/index.htm because Takver's site exemplifies the oppositional stance so disliked by those who survey. For a first hand account of the actions of the state against the IWW see the interview with one of the leaders, Tom Barker at www.iww.org.au/history/tombarker This site is the site of the current IWW and has good links to the international organization that is the basis of the ethos of the Wobblies. For more on the Wobblies see Verity Burgmann Revolutionary Industrial Unionism - The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge UP, 1995); Frank Cain.The Wobblies at War: a history of the IWW and the Great War in Australia (Melbourne: Spectrum, 1993) For the trial of the 12 see Ian Turner. Sydney's Burning. (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1967). See also Cain's The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1983) The Noam Chomsky Archive is on ZNET at http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm George Monbiot articles are at http://www.monbiot.com. This quote is from "Black Shirts Green Trousers"
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