In the history of statecraft, as bloody as it is long, elites have long had a number of strategies up their sleeves to quell dissent, neutralise protest and dissuade nonconformity with elite power and belief systems—such lending, for example, a notion of the sacred to class and social hierarchies (though personal boundaries and historical consciousness not so much). The first elite control strategy has simply been, in one form or another, to dispatch those getting in the way, though this tends to create further problems insofar as overt violence makes it clear who the oppressor is for survivors, witnesses, and historians, thereby necessitating more violence.
Another way, one popular amongst the Romans (as Thomas Jefferson and Norman Mailer both noted), was, upon sensing revolt from the peasantry, to stir up a war. Said peasants, who are proving troublesome and meddling at home, could be exported to fight for the empire, and thus be placed far out of danger (this strategy was used to great effect to neutralise the anti-corporate, anti-globalisation, ‘Battle in Seattle’ protests that occurred in the period immediately prior to 9/11). Again, and as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars demonstrated, this strategy can also have unforeseen and unwanted complications, even if it still remains a popular form of cancel culture.
A far more effective strategy over the long run is to neutralise protest and dissent by co-opting its leaders—or those who can be passed off as such. As we will see below, in more modern times, the highly-class conscious business community calls this strategy ‘endorsement without participation.’ Token representation can give subordinate classes and groups the illusion that they are part of, and represented by, the system that oppresses them, such that they will endorse it—without, of course, any real threat to elite power or privilege. Business continues as normal, in the exact same manner as before, but with lip service to change.
This far more cunning and effective approach has the benefit for elites of being able to tap into the support for the protest movement without conceding to its demands. It turns support for protest to support for the institutions being protested without altering anything about the latter (apart from its self-legitimating rhetoric), and allows elites to remain oppressors, seated at the apex of class and social hierarchies, while using the political legitimacy cleaned from co-option to conflate critics with the oppression being criticised. We examine a number of historical examples of this below.
The indigenous Voice to Parliament (VTP), the current federal government approach to indigenous affairs, is as instructive an example of this as any, and joins a long tradition in Australian politics of employing such strategies to forestall change (not dissimilar approaches can be seen in the excitement amongst elites for net zero greenwashing, where rolling an extractivist turd in sustainability glitter is understood to be the same thing as living ecological values). We might get some sense of the truth of this at the outset in asking ourselves how much of what is now being promised by proponents of the VTP was also the promise of the 1967 referendum. We might ask ourselves how much has changed.
These questions are not insignificant in light of more recent ALP achievements like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and the Northern Territory Intervention, a land grab based on panic-driven scapegoating. If the ALP legacy of racist paternalism, scapegoating, vilification and gaslighting of the historically dispossessed by a settler colonial, anglo-extractivist elite constitutes lived democratic values, perhaps this raises the question as to the veracity of the great claims made by proponents of this latest initiative. Alleges reconciliation.org.au,
A Voice to Parliament will give Indigenous communities a route to help inform policy and legal decisions that impact their lives. Giving people a say will lead to more effective results . . . Embedding a Voice in the Constitution would recognise the special place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia’s history, but importantly would also mean that it can’t be shut down by successive Governments.
It is unclear why they would if a Voice was non-binding; governments would hardly need to shut down a body they could just as easily ignore. Narratives of this kind fail to explain why a government of neoliberal technocrats that won’t even listen to its own experts on raising the cruelly inadequate Jobseeker allowance (in light of those on it being too traumatised by poverty to remain job-ready), will listen to anyone else about anything. They fail to explain why a Treaty would not do a better job of empowering indigenous people.
Nevertheless, the federal ALP and its courtiers and lickspittles appear to expect the Australian public to buy the idea that the ALP (or any government for that matter) is either willing or able to take indigenous issues seriously, despite a) the paternalistic, technocratic and racist legacy of every government that Australians have ever had, and b) the reduction of federal parliament to a wholly-owned corporate subsidiary through massive untraceable political donations and the influence of dark money generally. Factors such as this beg the question as to the extent to which Constitutional Recognition has more to do with whitewashing the Constitution to write out the fact that the violent origins of anglo-extractivism negates its own moral foundation, as does corporate capture.
50 Years of struggle for Treaty
Indigenous Australians have been demanding a Treaty for self-determination, land rights and the recovery of their culture post-colonisation since at least 1972, when the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was erected on the lawns of the old Parliament House in Canberra. The Tent Embassy remains on the lawns of Parliament House to this day. After a solid half century of activism, the wishes of indigenous people are hardly unknown to anyone: a sign at the Embassy reads in large letters: TREATY.
This is appropriate and proper; on the one hand, indigenous Australians have never ceded sovereignty over the lands colonised by an imperial power looking to export troublesome classes surplus to the needs of capital accumulation (in time-honoured fashion). On the other, a Treaty is the only meaningful way for indigenous people to realise the human right of self-determination; perhaps one of the single most powerful facets is that a Treaty (unlike a Voice to Parliament) would not be controlled by the anglo-extractivist establishment.
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Few remain unaware at this point that the original inhabitants of the land have never ceded sovereignty, or that a treaty is necessary to recognise it, and enable self-determination in so doing. In addition, historical scholarship in recent decades has told us much about the violent history of European colonisation, from the frontier wars (including remarkable episodes like the Battle of One Tree Hill) to the attempted cultural genocide of the Stolen Generations. The history behind the deprivation of indigenous sovereignty is known, as is the necessary response.
Nevertheless, the Australian government has responded to these long-standing indigenous demands for the recognition of indigenous sovereignty through a Treaty with a campaign to mobilise popular support for constitutional recognition. The fact that this settler colonial constitution was the means by which indigenous sovereignty was destroyed in the first place somehow manages not to figure in this campaign, almost as though on purpose.
Following a well-trod strategy of trying to reduce complex issues to three-word slogans, the developments towards a national referendum for constitutional recognition, and an associated advisory body, has been popularised as a ‘Voice to Parliament.’ Despite the fact that the advisory body (the ‘Voice’) would lack binding powers or ability to legislate (giving it all the powers of a suggestion box), and the very questionable autonomy of the indigenous body associated with constitutional recognition, this process is alleged to be the best way to redress the historical wrongs perpetrated against the indigenous population of this country.
A paradox is evident then within the push towards constitutional recognition, insofar as it makes a nominal acknowledgement of the need of indigenous people for redress of harms done by European settler colonialism, while making zero recognition of grassroots demands for Treaty and land rights—demands that they have been making for many decades. If a Treaty and Land Rights have been the central demand of indigenous people for at least five decades, this begs the question then as to why both major parties are pushing for a Voice to Parliament. If indigenous activists have been using their voices since at least 1972 to demand a Treaty, why do we need to subject indigenous rights to committee to know what needs doing? One can be forgiven for wondering if constitutional recognition isn’t simply a foil for Treaty—a way to look like something is being done, without doing anything to alter the entrenched power structures responsible for the problem in the first place.
Co-option: endorsement without participation
These suspicions are not much allayed by business management literature on co-option—all the more so given the technocratic character of neoliberal governments. As the Harvard Business Review discusses in a 1979 article on the ways and means of inducing employees to conform to management decisions, manipulation, which ‘normally involves the very selective use of information and the conscious structuring of events,’ can be useful in mobilising support from subordinates within class hierarchies to the purposes of management. The latter, the Review laments, is often faced with the ‘inevitable’ problem that ‘people strongly resent forced change.’ Regrettably, however, ‘in situations where speed is essential and where the changes will not be popular, regardless of how they are introduced, coercion may be the manager’s only option.’
One common form of manipulation is co-optation. Co-opting an individual usually involves giving him or her a desirable role in the design or implementation of the change. Co-opting a group involves giving one of its leaders, or someone it respects, a key role in the design or implementation of a change. This is not a form of participation, however, because the initiators do not want the advice of the co-opted, merely his or her endorsement.
Happily, the Review adds, under certain circumstances this kind of ‘co-optation can be a relatively inexpensive and easy way to gain an individual’s or a group’s support (cheaper, for example, than negotiation and quicker than participation).’ These conclusions are echoed in academic research into tokenism, which notes that resistance to popular ferment from interested groups defending privilege from democracy, coupled with ‘the general slow pace of social change, have often resulted in situations where only a few members of these disadvantaged groups gain access to advantaged positions, while the vast majority of the group remain in a disadvantaged position.’ In a political context where an advisory body is, by definition, denied the powers of self-determination indigenous people have been demanding for over half a century, such outcomes are virtually guaranteed.
Speaking the quiet part out loud regarding the maintenance of elite power through ‘endorsement without participation,’ as the Harvard Business Review does, is also reflected in a much older history of social control associated with statecraft, as noted, and the class hierarchies states are necessary to protect and uphold—in the final instance, through the violence and coercion upon which they were originally constructed (in the context of European settler-colonial states especially). The fate of early Christians under the Roman Empire stands as a paradigm example—their persecution under Diocletian prefiguring their later co-optation.
In this instance, imperial persecution began as Roman elites began to sense a threat to their power from the movement lead by the Jewish rebel from Judea. Roman elites demonised Christians as enemies of society, reflexively conflating in their propaganda the interests of society as a whole with their own vested class interests. Thus dehumanised, it became permissible to feed Christians to the lions—thereby dealing with dissent by despatching the problem, as noted. In this sense, the Romans were savvy enough to combine oppression with spectacle and cruelty theatre, using persecution as an opportunity to divide and conquer the vassals and gird their power. This of course worked until the bloody persecution created enough support for early Christians, and enough resolve on their own part, that Roman elites found themselves with too much lion food.
At this point, Rome implemented its second—and ultimately far more successful—strategy of co-option. With Constantine leading the way in the 4th Century, the Roman elite adopted the dissident belief system, taking the opportunity to twist Christian theology beyond recognition to tar rebellion and dissent with Diabolic Conspiracism (as opposed to former associations of Lucifer’s machinations with the operations of imperial power, a perspective that survives in shards in the co-opted form). The colonised, co-opted and defanged version of Christianity enabled the endorsement of the Empire without the participation of the disenfranchised dissidents, who now found their original association of hierarchical power with the works of Lucifer a heresy punishable by death. Christians had won recognition and endorsement at the expense of empowerment; in this sense, they were arguably far worse off.
With God by the side of imperial power, external as well as domestic opposition could be tarred as rebellion not just against the fait accomplis of Roman conquest, but against the principle of Divine Right—one that medieval monarchs throughout Europe would claim for many centuries hence as a means of gaslighting criticism and opposition. As early converts to the new imperial orthodoxy breathlessly exclaimed, ‘there is no crime for those who have Christ’—a mentality readily apparent in the mentality that the Crusades were God’s Will (‘Deus Velt’), and that European colonialism was a ‘civilising mission’ legitimated by the need of Roman Catholics to protect Christendom from heathens and savage susceptible to Satan-inspired defiance, rebellion and heterodox thought. In both cases, what Mikhail Bakunin once described in terms of a ‘transcendent morality’ provided a performative space for conquerors and colonisers alike to recast their violence as benevolent paternalism.
Usefully, and as author of the US Constitution James Madison noted, co-option also facilitated the ‘standing maxim’ amongst Roman elites to ‘excite a war whenever a revolt was apprehended,’ a truism of realpolitik reflected in Norman Mailer’s observation about the efficacy of the Vietnam War as a useful way for US elites to export a generation that was proving troublesome at home (as noted). The plebs could participate as expendable cannon fodder in defence of a democracy of the propertied few, who habitually conflate individual freedom and their own class privilege. They could be sent off fight and die in far-off lands, their nominal freedoms enjoyed only in fact by an occupation power that was and always remains the primary beneficiaries of imperialist warfare.
Old wine, new bottles
In the millennia since the Crusades, not much has changed. A ruling class culture of performative make-believe, rooted in the transcendent morality of the greater good and imposed on the world as a fait accompli of imperial conquest, establishes raging moral double standards for political action depending on who benefits. Such was the logic of European colonialism and the entitlement of the British predators who rationalise continental land left and wars of extermination against the indigenous population on the grounds that it was they, and not the colonial usurpers, who were the savages from whom the rest of the world needed defending.
Through the narratives of the alleged ‘civilising mission,’ indigenous peoples the world over were invited to endorse European colonial rule through submission, while being denied participation through the Orientalist representations of the Other that dehumanised them, rendering enslavement and near-extermination genocides like the American Holocaust noble acts rather than major crimes against humanity.
In a not-dissimilar vein, the terrorist conspiracism of the War on Terror problematised the terrorist violence of Wahabbist fundamentalists, while turning a blind eye to the state terrorism that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile on September 11, 1973 in a CIA-sponsored coup—George W. Caesar quipping that the United States was engaged in a new Crusade before quickly being told to shut his stupid ass up before anyone thought too much about what he had just said by his PR specialists.
This terrorist conspiracism was arguably notable for its weaponization of democratic norms in the service of imperialist aggression. As a means of stomping on the anti-globalisation protests of the 1990s and shutting down criticism of US foreign policy as it prepared to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003, its paradoxical logic of ‘if you think for yourself, the terrorists win’ was impossible to miss. The world was invited to endorse democracy without participating in it—the victims of the War of Terror not least of all.
Thanks to the panic-driven scapegoating driving terrorist conspiracism, it was also equally impossible to call out, as the ideological uniformity of the corporate mass media fell into lockstep behind the imperialist drive and independent thought was associated with lack of patriotic loyalty until, some years later, lack of success in prosecuting the war finally became the undoing of its core rationales (though the dismantling of liberal democracy continued apace).
While the co-option of the forms of democracy to mask the lived values of extractivist imperialism meant that the war had the right branding, the fact that military aggression rendered the alleged defenders of democracy everything they claimed to oppose precluded the participation of the disenfranchised mass who were dragged along through the unusually conspicuous manufacture of consent.
Not dissimilar processes are evident in the ideological narratives of green technocracy; as in the case of decades of indigenous agitation for a Treaty and land rights being responded to with an official campaign to mobilise support for constitutional recognition, so too (by now) decades of agitation for degrowth and ecological sustainability are met with official campaigns to mobilise support for net-zero offsetting and biodiversity markets.
Once again, entrenched power and privilege strives to defang popular ferment by adopting their concerns in the abstract to gain its endorsement, while proposing solutions that ensure no real threat to its interests by positing itself at the centre of alleged solutions. The fact that the offsets required to mitigate all of the pollution the globally-hegemonic endless-growth economy produces will require additional planets, and the fact that biodiversity markets are plagued by rampant speculation and corruption, such that many offsets are relegated to ‘junk’ status, goes no small way to demonstrating how hard elites need to work to ensure nothing changes—if not the extent of the actual threat that popular ferment presents to them in fact.
All of these historical examples point to the apparently habitual tendency amongst elites to try to manage, rather than respond to, popular ferment. The fact that this tendency stretches at least as far back as the Roman Empire raises serious questions about the role of co-option in protecting elites from the consequences of their own rule—if not the degree of continuity in politics from antiquity to what passes for progress in the present day. Elites have long known how to rescue themselves from popular ferment by adopting the forms of their enemies, while retaining the substance of hierarchical domination and exploitation of one by another.
The white history of constitutional recognition
Despite the racial characteristics of an anglo-extractivist Constitution built on the back of colonisation, dispossession, crimes against humanity, and ideologically-driven DARVO abuse and gaslighting to supress history, proponents of the Voice to Parliament go out of their way to feed the pretence that Constitutional Recognition and indigenous self-determination and sovereignty are more or less the same thing.
Whoops hey unfinished as well how about that
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