A Gaol of Ideas

The previous essay attempted to show how a magical substance acts as a proxy for power in modern societies. This essay considers how that substance has transformed the world.

About an hour south of Nambucca Heads, the Pacific shore curves eastward and then north to form a graceful sweep of aquamarine fringed by forest green. This tranquil haven is known as Trial Bay.

Today it’s a welcoming place. Mountains lapis blue with distance paint a backdrop. Kangaroos recline under shade trees fringing a white sand beach where holidaymakers play. But it wasn’t always so.

In 1816, the brig Trial bestowed her name when convicts who had hijacked vessel and crew in a desperate bid for freedom ran out of luck. Most who survived the shipwreck died trying to reach settlement.

In the fledgeling colony of New South Wales, recreation was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Beyond mere survival, colonial enterprise was split between the personal enrichment of squatters on stolen land and the corporal punishment of Britain’s underclass in exile, with labour for the former provided by the latter.

The eastern headland of Trial Bay unveils a panorama of epic natural grandeur. But “Englands green & pleasant Land”[1] it is not; in fact, nor was some of England by this stage, as “dark Satanic Mills” devoured fields and towns and the people cut adrift by the Enclosure Acts, some of whom survived on petty crime until they were arrested and transported to the colony. And had you been a 19^th Century colonial administrator, what was apparently most impressive about the Trial Bay site was its suitability for a gaol.

Ferocious storms had left wrecks scattered along the coast. Trial Bay might have offered a sought-after safe harbour were it not for its exposure to occasional northerly gales. To remedy this a breakwater was proposed. Labour would be supplied by prisoners to be housed in a nearby gaol.

By the time the gaol was finished it was obsolete. The partly constructed breakwater was no longer necessary thanks to advancements in shipping and alternative land routes made safe for settlers by the continuing annihilation of the country’s original inhabitants. But it has bequeathed to us a sheltered swimming spot of extraordinary calm, overlooked by the somewhat macabre edifice of the ruined gaol.

On the national holiday which brings to an informal close an extended period of summer recreation, Australians sunning by the quiet waters of Trial Bay seem quite carefree in their idyl. Or perhaps, like me, they find in the frowning ruins a trace of ghosts still haunting us.

Australia Day

The harsh reality of colonisation in Australia is hardly ambiguous[2]. The letters, diaries and journals of settlers, administrators and visiting observers are full of it. Official reports, court documents and contemporary newspapers recount it in sometimes horrifying detail. And it occupies its own stratum of the oral histories Aboriginal people entrust to their descendants.

The facts are plain. Australia was permanently inhabited long before the British Isles. Nevertheless, when the British arrived, they sought no agreement with local inhabitants; they simply disposed of the continent as they pleased.

What pleased the British to begin with was remote offshore detention for thousands of unwanted citizens. What quickly emerged, however, was the potential for colonial soil and convict labour to produce commodities needed elsewhere in the empire. A new class of settler entrepreneur seized the opportunity. When appropriation of Indigenous land for this purpose met with armed resistance from Indigenous people, the better-armed settlers began to exterminate them.

In light of these facts, history which avoids the so-called ‘black armband view’ takes some careful telling[3]. And that will be necessary to justify the date we presently use to celebrate Australia Day.

January 26^th is a date strangely detached from any proud national achievement but associated historically with the raising of the Union Jack at Warrane on Gadigal land by British Captain Arthur Phillip in 1788, and exactly fifty years later with the massacre by mounted police of Gamilaraay men, women and children at the site now known as Waterloo or Slaughterhouse Creek[4]. These events effectively parenthesise the disintegration of relations between settlers and Aboriginal people.

Many Australians would rather find another day for national celebrations, so it can include those deterred by genocidal associations. But for supporters, the mere facts are almost beside the point, subsumed by a grander narrative of ‘progress’.

According to that reading, what happened during colonisation, if not always entirely admirable, was nevertheless inevitable in a modernising world and ultimately for the best. Phillip’s flag supposedly proclaimed the natural ascendency of a superior ‘civilisation’. It announced not merely a new human presence but a new pattern of occupation. For those who equate human wellbeing with material wealth, that pattern was self-evidently better because it enriched many people from many places. It was, however, incompatible with hunter-gatherer subsistence, and this exacted a cost in Aboriginal lives.

The documents of the time contain similar rationalisations. In any case, as adherents are quick to point out, it happened, and we can’t go back and change it. And this argument suits the many small-time ‘squatters’ whose current plans for personal enrichment depend on rents and capital gains on residential portions of never-ceded Aboriginal land. As genocide recedes from collective memory, the plunder it facilitated proceeds apace.

But this Australia isn’t the only one with a claim to national character. From the start of European settlement there has been another Australia inclined to challenge the bloody-mindedness of the squatters. It brought from home a growing awareness that many Britons were paying a terrible cost for the involuntary transformation of their own country.

The conditions of disruption and widespread deprivation that sent free settlers abroad in search of opportunity also furnished their convict workforce, many of whom also became squatters after time served. The penal colony at Sydney Cove was the latest link in a chain of traumatic displacement that soon stretched from rural England all the way to the lands of the Gamilaraay, via Britain’s crowded slums, gaols, and prison hulks. In hindsight, it could be argued that trauma was Britian’s biggest export.

At home, the emerging consciousness of systemic factors in contemporary social maladies informed the great parliamentary debates of the Nineteenth Century and shaped the class conflict theories of Karl Marx. In the antipodean colonies it appeared in print decrying the depravities of the frontier. It peopled the barricades and picket lines of the long struggle for a fair go. And it’s still evident in the voices rising in protest at today’s iniquities, which are no more difficult to uncover than the brutal facts of colonisation.

By the second half of the Twentieth Century, the rival credos of state-sponsored private enterprise on the one hand and legislated social justice on the other were embodied in Australia’s two major political parties. And inspiration for both can be traced to some big events which shortly preceded the planting of Phillip’s flag.

The Expanding Frontier

The 1770s provided some big lessons for Britain in colonial administration. The first big lesson was that speculators are trouble. An outbreak of reckless gambling with British East India Company stock and derivatives caused parts of the European banking system to unravel, requiring the Bank of England to intervene, just as Britain was recovering from the portentous and expensive Seven Years War[5].

The second big lesson was that angry colonists are even more trouble. Parliament’s Tea Act, which attempted to restore general solvency by creating a trading monopoly for the offloading of East India Company surplus in the American Colonies, increasing colonial tax revenues in the process, laid another stone on the path of grievance to the American Revolution.

American Independence had major repercussions. For a start, Britain needed a new destination for the transportation of unwanted people. Terra Australis, recently claimed by Captain James Cook, was a strategic choice[6]. But American punishment of British heavy-handedness may also have made Parliament timorous. Whether it was this, or ‘the tyranny of distance’, arriving squatters and profiteers enjoyed lax oversight of trade and official indifference to the murder and dispossession of Aboriginal people[7].

But the ‘other’ Australia benefited too. American independence originally brought ‘government by the people’ only in a very limited sense. Women, ‘blacks’ and workers weren’t included. One group of propertied white men had overthrown another. Nevertheless, change had been set in motion. Rebels had defeated an imperial military force, defying the permanence of the hereditary aristocratic order. And once the idea of ‘unalienable rights’ had escaped, it spread like an invasive weed.

At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was ‘legal’ and widely practiced around the world, including in the Americas. Forced labour was instrumental in the expansion of Britain’s antipodean colonies. But within a century, chattel slavery had been outlawed in the British Empire and the United States and transportation had been abolished.

Similarly, in the Eighteenth Century few Europeans questioned the legitimacy of conquest, disguised as it was in the vestments of Christian salvation; conquered ‘natives’ were fortunate to be ‘saved’. Organised killing of Indigenous people outlasted slavery and transportation well into the modern era[8]. But by then women and other marginalised groups had begun to claim the rights and privileges previously reserved for white heterosexual males. Carnage and degradation on the margins of what had become widespread prosperity were intolerable. In 1967 a large majority of Australians voted to improve conditions for Aboriginal people.

The rivalry of the two Australias was generative. One harvested the country’s riches, the other helped to spread them. It was from the outset, however, a very uneven relationship. Power remained concentrated among landowners, bankers, and business interests. It’s fanciful to imagine the many rose up and wrested equity from the few. Most people didn’t rise up at all. Rebels and reformers were exceptional.

Repression probably could have defeated egalitarianism. There was, however, one instrument which proved mightier than the sword. It was the cash register. A better quality of life for ordinary people was simply expedient for the heyday of capitalism.

The Imperial Economy

A date which links Australian nationhood to lofty ideals is hard to find. We have no Independence Day, no Bastille Day. We never threw off an oppressor. From the Aboriginal perspective, modern Australia is the oppressor. Even federation was essentially a triumph of bureaucracy. Obligatory fanfare settles for some British naval officers hoisting a flag.

The truth is modern Australia proceeded from plunder. And if we’re honest with ourselves, plunder remains essential to the national ethos. Apart from the continuing rancour over who gets to be here at all, and how much collateral damage is justifiable in pursuit of personal enrichment, and despite the earnest goodwill of many people, our public policy deliberations retain only trace quantities of vision and principle in what are now mostly quarrels over booty. It’s no one’s ‘fault’ we’re like this; guilt and shame aren’t helpful; but nor is denial; and there is a reason for it.

The European settlement of Australia took place within a wave of conquest which spread outward from its source in Europe. Its antecedents stretch back to Alexander III of Macedon and most likely beyond to incursions of warrior cultures from the Asian steppes thousands of years earlier. Undoubtedly, advances in shipping, navigation, cartography, and weaponry contributed to its globalisation. But two other factors were especially instrumental.

Jem Bendell reminds us that, contrary to contemporary orthodoxy, the growth economy is primarily purposed not to improving human life in general but to servicing an expansionist monetary system[9]. For many centuries, rulers, merchants, and fortune hunters have been financing their exploits with borrowed money. Since the principal must be returned with interest which accumulates over time, the problem for all of them has been to secure a source of increase. Stealing from others has long been the popular choice, by taking their lands or exploiting their labour and frequently both. The cumulative effect, moderated from time to time by taxation and redistribution, has been the concentration of wealth in the hands of creditors.

Ancient Middle Eastern rulers, recognising the manifold dangers of debt peonage under a small creditor class, regularly used executive power to erase debilitating debts. This pattern changed in ancient Athens and Rome.

According to Michael Hudson, the legacy of western classical antiquity is not democracy, as is sometimes claimed, but oligarchy, secured by a legal system which awards primacy to creditors and permanence to debts[10]. Such oligarchies operate globally today, often under cover of putative democracies, including celebrated examples like the United States, using compounding debt to accumulate wealth and political power. The derivatives which provide the chips in the great gambling house known as the ‘global financial system’, including those which crashed it in 2008, are largely comprised of debt and debt-like obligations. And unlike even autocratic rulers of old, the oligarchs who sit astride this gigantic fabrication have no regard for the long-term viability of states.

So successful have they been at promoting usury that most people today accept it as a kind of natural law, something like gravity, and perhaps even more persuasive, since it’s the main reason ‘the economy’ has exploded beyond Earth’s capacity to support it.

The second major factor in the European wave of conquest was another Roman invention, resurrected in the Middle Ages. It was a kind of anthropomorphic automaton, like the golem of Jewish folklore, powerful but unpredictable. This dangerous creature had many heads, each of which could potentially observe, calculate, communicate, and coordinate, and many arms, each of which might hold tools or weapons of many kinds. It fed on the resources in its environment. And it had a single purpose, which was to enrich its owners. We christened this monster ‘the corporation’.

Philip Stern asserts[11] that Britain’s imperial expansion was driven by such entities. From Ireland to the Americas, Africa, and Australia, the evidence suggests it was corporations rather than the state which planned and executed the subjugation of lands and peoples for commercial purposes, often enjoying monopoly conditions imposed by royal charter, as well as the legal personhood afforded by incorporation, using funds invested by wealthy citizens.

The Nineteenth Century became an experiment in ‘creative destruction’ as corporations in service to investors turned the world into a giant laboratory. And their efforts were redoubled with enabling legislation and a potent new energy source.

The Grand Experiment

Let’s turn back the clock a few centuries. Throughout this unmodernised world, both in Europe and elsewhere, most people subsist on some combination of hunting and gathering with small scale farming and cottage industries using muscle power. Some are living a traditional way of life on lands occupied only by themselves. Others are the descendants of subject peoples tolerating some form of imposed rule.

What will happen if we restrict their access to land, by turning it into ‘private property’, through Enclosure Acts at home, and land grants to settlers in the colonies? Without the areas they have depended on for centuries to hunt, fish, forage and grow food, local inhabitants are at risk of perishing. In the colonies they may be forced into servitude as farmhands, stock handlers, domestics, trackers and even, like Australia’s native police, as militia used to exterminate other tribes. In imperial homelands, they will likely drift into settlements to seek a livelihood, or find it abroad as sailors, soldiers, and colonial functionaries. We have, in effect, created a transglobal population of hirelings.

What then if we lift restrictions on incorporation and simplify it? And what if we also establish a new legal principle of ‘limited liability’ which holds that the obligations of a company are separate and distinct from those of its owners? We’ve now made it much easier to set up a company, attract shareholder funds, and employ some hirelings for exploratory ventures with reduced personal risk.

Finally, how might these opportunities be expanded by a new and highly portable source of energy? Harnessing steam produced from coal, our mines and mills can be bigger and located away from other energy sources such as wind and water. Steam power can also be used to work agricultural land and, once we apply it to conveyances running on rails, or on water, to haul large quantities of materials and people across great distances.

These were the conditions appearing in Britain and its colonies around the turn of the Nineteenth Century. The combination would prove formidable. But it was incendiary. And the first result of the experiment was to blow up the laboratory.

The victors who wrote our history refurbished this upheaval as an unquestionable boon for humankind. In fact, the First Industrial Revolution destroyed communities across England and spread fresh misery abroad. And it was only over time and through great suffering and struggle that the benefits of new technologies reached much further than a relative handful of people making serious money from them.

Ordinary people made the best of changed circumstances. Some venturers sought profit from commodities extracted from foreign lands. And some sought it from the pool of cheap labour at home which could be employed in mines and mills. Some displaced peasants accepted these gruelling conditions as their lot. Others found an alternative livelihood in petty theft or prostitution. And, once the establishment had tired of hanging them or housing them in rotting hulks, many were transported to the colonies where they provided a slave workforce to accelerate extraction.

This system of personal enrichment from ‘investor returns’ became the template for the modern world. Commodities extracted from stolen land using slave labour were conveyed to mechanised factories where they were transformed into marketable products by landless peasants. So developed a master-servant relationship between humans and nature, between capital and labour, and between countries divided into what would eventually become ‘global north’ and ‘global south’.

But like all complex experiments, this one produced some unexpected results and emergent properties.

The Turning Point

Not quite a century after independence, Americans again fought a war on their soil. And again it was indicative of far-reaching changes.

In retrospect, the outcome of the Civil War was inevitable[12]. The southern confederacy was exhausted by the richer, more populous, better equipped northern union. But its agrarian economy was becoming obsolete in any case. Had the modernising world retained its appetite for human slavery, many of its victims, like many other workers, would still have been replaced over the next century by a new and better slave workforce of fossil-fuelled machines.

Corporations like to lay claim to innovation, competition, perseverance, and hard work. These sound like attributes they should aspire to. And they often characterise the small and beautiful enterprises Schumacher championed[13] and Adam Smith used as examples[14]. But the ‘hired guns’ who run bigger businesses will choose easier, safer options if they’re available. While they can be quick to capitalise on the productive innovations of technologists, their own innovations are often designed precisely to escape the difficulties of competition, perseverance, and hard work.

The technological and methodological innovations commonly referred to as the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ enabled the modern world to take shape. For dislocated people surviving in squalor they could have meant deliverance. Unfortunately, as Mordecai Kurz explains[15], winners of technology races are uniquely positioned to consolidate market power and extract monopoly profits. In the US in the Nineteenth Century they formed into large conglomerates, each running a sector of the economy like a fiefdom, and replicating many of the features of feudalism, including the hoarding of wealth amidst persistent poverty which inspired the epithet ‘Gilded Age’.

The same pattern arose in Britain and Australia, as factory owners joined commodity producers in capturing the wealth of industry, while their workers barely survived in miserable towns and filthy slums close to mines and factories[16].

But whereas feudal lords amass rents from land, and monopolists syphon them off from proprietary technology, true capitalists must turn a profit by contributing something. Slaves, landless peasants, and impoverished factory workers are useful in this exercise only until their cheap labour can be replaced by even cheaper machines. What true capitalists need most is someone to buy their products.

As resources and energy became more abundant, it was apparent to some entrepreneurs that the conversion of the material world into money might be best facilitated if its human instruments were not only producers but also consumers. Henry Ford would later observe that the radical efficiency of his assembly lines helped him overtake his rivals because it made his cars affordable for his workers. And this leant weight to other changes taking place.

The Evolving Social Contract

Among the unfortunates consigned to penal servitude in the Australian colonies there had been some thousands of political prisoners – the Luddites, early trade unionists and Irish republicans who threatened the establishment’s lucrative arrangements. By placing them together in remote penal servitude, Britain’s rulers had inadvertently created conditions ideal for organised resistance to develop into large scale industrial action and ultimately into political representation[17].

At the same time, people equipped with literacy, numeracy, or other skills required for mechanisation and trade, were earning enough to become an expanding market for its products. And they had also become an audience for its critics, such as Charles Dickens, whose name would eventually be an adjective for the grim conditions in England. The idea began to take hold that someone should intervene to improve the lives of the less fortunate. Charitable work became a pastime for the virtuous. Sooner or later governments were destined to get involved.

At the periphery of empire, primary production was king. Clearing, building, mining, herding, and shearing remained laborious activities. While Australia’s full potential was yet untapped, this gave workers leverage.

The great Australian strikes of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries would eventually win for workers an eight-hour day, a basic wage and annual leave[18]. And as suffrage and union membership increased, strength in numbers would gradually yield an enviable standard of living for many people. But even these gains depended on a degree of common cause with capitalists.

When turn-of-the-century US Presidents Roosevelt and Taft enforced the antitrust laws intended to promote competition, it wasn’t primarily ordinary Americans they were protecting from monopolists, but other businesses. Similarly, when FDR’s Depression Era New Deal placed restraints on speculative banking and invested public funds in programs for workers and tenant farmers, it was the viability of American capitalism itself which was at stake.

People queuing at soup kitchens aren’t making anyone rich. These governments were attempting to save capitalism from its own excesses.

To assess the long-term results of unrestrained power and wealth concentration, the place to look, according to Chrystia Freeland, is Venice[19]. One reason it fascinates is that it’s barely changed in four centuries, since it ceased to be the preeminent Mediterranean trading state and became instead a monument to the lassitude of its oligarchs. If it wasn’t for tourism, it might have subsided into its lagoon long ago.

Security and prosperity depend on money in circulation rather than in tax havens. This is obvious even to neoliberals, who invented ‘trickle-down’ in a half-baked attempt to dress avarice up as probity. Rulers of old knew that as soon as you need to fend off revolt or fight a war, monopoly power isn’t sufficient. To prevail you need large numbers of citizens with a stake in the system; and that means a share of its rewards.

This is a lesson capitalism never seems to learn. Naked self-interest is built into its source code. And bull markets in particular appear to induce collective memory loss. The modern world is the product of capitalism running rampant and public institutions running after it with legislative mops, buckets and first aid.

The Century of Transformation

To appreciate more fully the results, try this exercise. Close your eyes and imagine, if you can, what you might expect to see around you if you opened them again in 1850. In many parts of the world, very little would be the same, and this is especially true in Australia.

In 1850 you would probably be looking at Australian landscape as it appeared under Aboriginal custodianship. Whichever part of the country you are in, you would be surrounded by an extraordinary richness and diversity of unique plant and animal life and very little else. Even in one of the relatively few places which had been settled by Europeans, you would notice a complete absence of the accoutrements of modern life. You would draw water from a stream or well, light a fire to keep warm, and travel on foot or horseback.

When you open your eyes today, nearly everything you see is recent. Even if the building you’re in is early colonial, which is uncommon in Australia, it’s now covered in fossil carbon compounds, furnished with objects and appliances fashioned from plastics, advanced metal alloys and rare elements, connected to municipal systems supplying energy and water, while others remove sewage and refuse, and embedded in global supply chains, motorised transportation systems and electronic networks which can deliver you to almost anywhere on Earth, and almost anything on Earth to you, including food, provisions, equipment, entertainment, and social interaction, while the forest, savannah or wetland that was once where you sit, the organisms which lived in it, and the people who cared for it for thousands of generations, are gone.

Most of us alive today were born into this transfigured world. It may never have occurred to us to ask if it’s unequivocally better than what came before. It isn’t immediately obvious that some of the poverty this system supposedly ‘lifted millions out of’ was first created by it, as it tore apart ancestral ways of living; those of our own ancestors, and those of other conquered peoples. We may not notice that the champions of the happiness indices and the ‘blue zones’ where longevity is greatest have moderated its intrusions. We may know little of its contemporary links to loneliness, suicide, addiction, and degenerative illness. And we are possibly unaware that while it made much of our predilections for comfort and convenience, whether or not they serve our best interests, all of it occurred in pursuit of ‘growth’ which now exceeds planetary capacity, and in service to debts which can never be repaid.

This system’s tragic weakness is that it never arrives at a destination. What it creates survives only until it must be destroyed to create something else. It has no concept of ‘enough’. And so, at the end of the century of transformation, after immense bloodshed and suffering from the world wars and economic collapses which came with it, instead of pausing to enjoy its hard-won rewards, we kept the pedal of production and consumption pressed firmly to the metal.

An Alternative History of Australian Settlement

More than once I’ve heard a businessperson suggest that our problems would be solved if we dismantled our governments altogether, reconfigured Australia as a corporation, issued every citizen with a share, and then elected a board to run it. Perhaps Tony Abbott was listening, which is why he kicked off his Prime Ministership by declaring the country “open for business”. One MP even proudly proclaimed his government had “made a profit”, by which he meant returned the budget to surplus, although it wasn’t true in any case.

This apparent ignorance of the difference between business, government and life in general may be partly due to the fact that Australia and the modern corporation developed in unison, with the latter more often in charge.

If we are to believe the messaging in our corporate-dominated politics and media, most Australians live in a place called ‘the economy’. The continental landmass of Australia seems to be attached to it as a kind of warehouse. We extract commodities from the warehouse on behalf of investors. And for our reward we are licensed to obtain things from it for ourselves such as ‘property’ and a ‘lifestyle’. This paradigm, which directs our public discourse, preserves the mindset and methodology of settler colonialism which arrived with Phillip’s flag.

While the people of the Gumbaynggirr nation are the ancient custodians of the lands and waters around me here in Nambucca, settler descendants like me are more accurately natives of capitalism. I enjoy the scent of the sea on the wind, the gentle roar of surf when it blows from the east, and the fertile valley view below my window. But I admit I am more familiar with the shelves in the local supermarket than the plants and animals of the area, its original inhabitants, or indeed the culture of my own ancestors, from whom I am separated by hemispheres and centuries and the intervening proliferation of industrial consumer society.

By the time Britain came to these shores to build prisons, the advent of mechanisation using cheap, abundant carbon energy was making the peasantry superfluous. Converting us into prisoners to facilitate colonial exploitation prolonged our usefulness for a time. But what finally made our increase desirable again to the rich and powerful was the vast profit potential of coupling mechanised extraction with increased consumption. Peasants were rehabilitated as consumers.

Our rebellious forebears wanted freedom for us. But for the rich, that was a terrifying prospect. What they welcomed for us was a more sophisticated form of captivity. While a few stone gaols were kept for felons, a radical new kind of gaol was introduced for the general population. And we helped to build it. The brilliance of its design was that, without even the merest infraction for justification, we would allow ourselves to be locked up in it.

‘The economy’ is this new, state-of-the-art gaol. For wages, basic services, and a chance to own property, a whole population can be persuaded to devote our lives to the exploitation of Earth’s resources, multiplying ‘investor returns’, feeding the gaping maw of global banking, and turning a blind eye to harms and injustices.

Like the power that hides behind the seemingly impartial instrument of money, this gaol is invisible because it is primarily one of ideas. Captivity has been reimagined as wish fulfilment. Walls and manacles have been replaced by mortgages and appliances; deprivations and punishments by novelties and distractions; and wardens by credit cards; while carbon slaves perform the dirty work.

So seductive is this cosseted confinement, so pervasive its self-promotion, and its inmates so convinced of its desirability, that we won’t oppose it even if it abandons us, even if it robs our children of a future. We have learned instead to fear freedom, a place few of us have been, an alien land of rumours and misgivings on the 'other' side of the perimeter.

But like its Trial Bay precursor, this project has reached a natural conclusion. There simply isn’t enough 'new' Earth to satisfy ‘investor returns’. So now the monster must devour its children.

The many-tentacled, multi-headed corporate golem sifts the prison population, harvesting the equity it once conceded. As our earning potential is reassigned to machines and workers overseas, privileges for good behaviour are also withdrawn; even our usefulness as consumers wanes and must be supplemented by fresh aspirants from elsewhere.

For those whose imaginary numbers run out altogether, there is no ticket of leave, only destitution, displacement, and premature death. And unless we reorganise, this may embroil many more of us than we dare contemplate. So in the essays to come we should see if we can pick the locks and find the exit.

[1] Blake, W. (1804), Preface to Milton: A Poem in Two Books:
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these[c] dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

[2] Allam, L. (2022), “Australia’s history of massacres should be no surprise, but many have to be dragged to the truth”, The Guardian, Mar 17.

[3] Catt, P. (2015), “'Black armband view of history' necessary for healing”, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 31.

[4] Edmonds, P. (2014), “A breastplate reveals the story of an Australian frontier massacre”, The Conversation, Oct 28.

[5] Anderson, F. (2001), Crucible of War, US, Vintage.

[6] Blainey, G. (1966), The Tyranny of Distance, AU, Sun Books.

[7] Marr, D. (2023), Killing for Country, AU, Black Inc.

[8] Allam, L. (2022), “Attempted Aboriginal massacres took place as recently as 1981, historian says”, The Guardian, Mar 16.

[9] Bendell, J. (2023), Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse, UK, Schumacher Institute.

[10] Hudson, M., (2023), The Collapse of Antiquity, US, Islet.

[11] Stern, Philip J., (2023), Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism, US, Belknap Press.

[12] Schulman, M. (2024), Economics and the Civil War, History Central.

[13] Schumacher, E. (1973), small is beautiful, US, Harper Collins.

[14] Smith, A. (1776), The Wealth of Nations, W. Strahan and T. Cadell, London.

[15] Kurz, M. (2024), “How Capitalism Became a Threat to Democracy”, Project Syndicate, Mar 15.

[16] Simpson, M. (2018), “Industrial Revolution in Australia – impact on manufacturing in the 1800s”, powerhouse.com.au, Aug 29.

[17] Moore, T., and Davis, M. (2022), Conviction Politics: How Convicts Shaped Australian Democracy and the Labour Movement, Centre for Professional Learning, Jun 7.

[18] http://www.atua.org.au/timeline.html.

[19] Freeland, C. (2014), Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, CAN, Anchor.