Blockade Australia – The Coming Storm and the Bourgeois Ark

By R.L

15/07/2022

As New South Wales is battered by yet another once-in-a-hundred-year downpour, the floodwaters from the rising Hawkesbury River are lapping at Windsor Police Station, marking the fourth time the area has flooded in 18 months. A few weeks ago, following an unprovoked military-style raid against peaceful climate activists, seven members of Blockade Australia (BA) were held prisoner in cages at this very police station for resisting the environmental crisis that capitalism has brought upon the planet’s ecosystems.

Fast forward a few weeks later, and the major Australian news outlets gleefully broadcast videos of commuters abusing a Blockade Australia activist. The activist, chained to their steering wheel, remains stoic as a furious man wails on the car windscreen, peppering it with his spit. The media framing is routine—exquisitely placed quotes from politicians and police commissioners emphasise the selfishness and ineffectiveness of Blockade’s tactics. Simultaneously, pictures of backed up traffic and police wagons stuffed with worn-out activists highlight the consequences of these ‘terrorist’s’ actions. 

Blockade Australia protesters participating in the group's "week of disruption" in the Sydney CBD.

The usual alarmism of the Murdoch press is expected— ‘Traffic Chaos’ or ‘Sydney Mayhem’ is feverishly plastered in nearly every headline across the right-wing media. However, the same alarmism can be found in their supposedly ‘leftist’ siblings, the so-called neutral media sources such as the Sydney Morning Herald, where a subtler approach is taken. Here, news writers mostly eschew the inflammatory headlines but instead make sure to repeatedly remind readers that the protest was unauthorised, while capping their articles off with authoritative denouncements of the movement by the likes of NSW Transport Minister David Elliott or Assistant Commissioner Paul Dunstan. ‘Perhaps their message could be said some other way?’ the articles question. ‘Surely, for a cause so concerning, a sensible message is better than, god forbid, disruption’.

Across both media ‘camps’, however, the message is clear. For the Australian media, and for the hands that stuff these puppets, (the capitalist powers that be), there is no alternative to the status quo. As the jaws of capitalism open to feed its insatiable appetite, these upholders of ‘decency’ and ‘democratic principle’ cannot fathom why one should not keep shovelling people into its mouth. While debates can be had about the efficacy of BA’s tactics and the vagueness of their systemic critique, one thing cannot be ignored—they have hit a nerve.  And this is made clear in the state’s oppressive response to BA, culminating in the mass raid of their camp earlier last month and the ongoing surveillance, arrest and zealous suppression of BA members, slapped with excessive bail conditions to top it all off. 

One might think by this fascistic response that the capitalist state and its armed defenders, the thugs in the NSW Police, are completely ignorant to the coming climate disasters, to which Australia and its delicate ecosystems are especially vulnerable. The truth, however, diverges distinctly from this narrative. The capitalist masters of Australia (the hedge fund managers, the oil barons, the media moguls, etc.) are more than aware of the gravity of the issue, and worry about what’s coming. They see the coming doom that they themselves birthed, and, like maggots fleeing from a rotted corpse stripped bare, are working to flee.

While they flood social media with messages mocking BA’s rightful fury towards climate inaction, the ruling class simultaneously prepares for the future that BA is fighting to prevent. Take Mr. Peter Thiel, world-renowned Paypal co-founder, who, while espousing criticisms of carbon restriction policies, bought himself a 477-acre former sheep station in rural New Zealand. His own little kingdom tucked safely away from those he leeches off. Another tech-princeling, Reid Hoffman, similarly buried himself, pouring so-called ‘apocalypse insurance’ into island hideaways and opulent underground bunker complexes. Countless other examples abound, but all are steeped in the same blatant disdain for the environmental and economic legacy left for future generations. 

These actions are, of course, flagrantly hypocritical, but the capitalists know this. This is the con; while perhaps half a century ago true-blooded climate change denialism reigned in the discourses peddled by bourgeois media outlets, their current favoured narratives serve a different function. From a laser-focus on maintaining ‘decency’ in politics to grand treatises on a coming utopian green (and thoroughly liberal) future, the owning class creates a smokescreen for itself. They craft this grand and enthralling play, acted out in the bowels of a sinking theatre. The scenes progress feverishly as the playwrights tear planks from set pieces for life rafts and unshackle their rabid enforcers before they leave. 

NSW Police arresting a Blockade Australia protester.

This is what we see in the events surrounding Blockade Australia. The enforcers of the status quo are emboldened as they provide cover for their retreating masters. Indoctrinated in the zealotry of liberal religion and its necessary blood-sacrifice, the police begin to unwind the mostly symbolic inhibitors placed upon them by past reforms in capitalist law. Now returns the time of the Pinkerton, the colonial enforcer, the strike-breaker. Now returns the time of the brown and the black shirt, as fascism casts off its disguise to unleash to its full extent. If Capital is a dying body, now begins its cytokine storm. 

This writer wishes that some future reader will scoff at the hyperbolism of these words but knows such an outcome is unlikely. For the working peoples of Australia and abroad, the choice is here. Marx’s long-predicted mutual ruin of contending classes creeps ever closer, and the window for effective action closes more rapidly each year. While BA fights a noble fight, it lacks direction. Class struggle through wide-reaching organisation is the solution. Not martyrdom, not restrained action, not limp aspersions against some amorphous ‘system’. The elite seek to be the only few who inherit the earth, burrowed in temples that testify to their own arrogance and egotistic individualism. They must not be allowed to flee the consequences of their actions. If they refuse to fix the issues they caused, they must be forced to reckon with them. We must turn our separated fingers into a fist and fan the first sparks of revolution into a roaring blaze by uniting and organising the working class. If they intend to build an Ark, we must burn it. 

To our BA comrades, this writer requests one thing: name the beast.