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Parliament and the Law

The regular functioning of the system relies on its legal and parliamentary institutions. On the street, the law is kept by the police force. The police protect property above all else, especially the private property of the rich. The police remind everyone of what can happen to them if they step out of line, sometimes by just driving around neighbourhoods, other times by beating people up or breaking up strikes and marches. Right behind the police is the judiciary. It decides who has broken the law and what the law means. Judges are not elected and are totally unaccountable. They are there to protect the system. They can make sure that robbing a bank is heavily penalised, while robbing the country gets a small fine (or an Order of Australia). At the head of the capitalist legal system is parliament. Parliament, it’s claimed, is a "representative" body. But who is really represented? We get to vote for one or another politician, most of them consciously for the system. Real alternative candidates seldom get enough financial or media support to have a chance to be elected. The capitalist system of representation makes it impossible for the electorate to exercise any control over its supposed representatives. Politicians claim to represent the tenant as much as the landlord, the worker as much as the boss, the unemployed as much as the employer. Since the interests of these groups are not the same, the politician has a speech for every occasion. But in practice, whether Liberal or Labor, they don’t step on capitalist toes. Sometimes they argue against war, but never against the military budget. They’re always full of sympathy for the unemployed, but not enough so to stop sackings. At most, parliament discusses the issues facing the ruling class: what services to slash, what types of repression to use against unions. It doesn’t exist to discuss whether this or that social system might work better for most people. If this ever does gets raised in parliament, the ruling class always has a back-up. The Australian constitution, for example, doesn’t allow parliament to nationalise private companies. When legal means seem insufficient to protect the system, the ruling class invents new rules. In 1975, the Australian ruling class wasn’t taking any chances. Key sections of the army were placed on alert at the time of the governor general’s dismissal of the Whitlam government.

The System of Thought Manipulation

The most important guarantee of capitalism is the whole structure of thought control. Capitalism trains people not to think. The education system teaches you to obey authority and keep to the rules, and the media make sure that you never forget it. What you are taught at school is enough knowledge to be an efficient worker, how to count and how to read, and some science for industrial technicians and researchers. It’s not considered necessary that you understand how society works, except to know the chain of command. If you go to the "right" school, you might be taught how to "move up in the world", or at least be sold the illusion. The education system is much less about education than about indoctrinating you in the values of capitalism: competition and obedience. Memorisation of facts and the ability to cite "experts" is usually rewarded more than critical analysis. We aren’t taught how to develop informed opinions. Opinions are made for us. That’s the role of the media. The mass media are owned and controlled by the rich. In Australia, a few rich men control most of the newspapers and television and radio stations. All the editors and program controllers are appointed by the company boards. The editors appoint their own deputies and heads of departments. All the camera angles are from the side of the rich. You rarely see a US soldier killing a civilian. When US soldiers die, it’s called a killing. When the poor residents of a Third World city are shot or bombed, it’s "collateral damage". The mass media isolate and separate people. The TV "viewer" is connected to the rest of the world only if they watch reality programs or crappy sitcoms, Desperate Housewives, or whatever the latest fad is. Information technology that could link people, that could help cultures interact and learn from each other, which could encourage creativity, is used instead to numb people.