BY TRISHA REIMERS
Big Kev is excited — and he should be, because he's discovered that, just like sex, nationalism sells (in his case, sells cleaning products).
Big Kev is just another Aussie capitalist who's telling workers that they should keep their money "in our own backyard". And they're doing very well from their "buy Australian" pitch — Big Kev's backyard, for example, is very spacious, with a lovely pool which must have cost a fortune.
Dick Smith has made a name for himself with never-ending complaints about foreigners buying our "icons", like Vegemite and Sao biscuits, and has made a fortune of his own by selling dinky-di alternatives, like Aussiemite.
The pharmaceutical company Herron has jumped on the bandwagon also, urging Australians to buy its products over those of Panadol. Herron's edge isn't that its aspirin is more effective or better in any way — the only difference, its ads tell us, is that it's Australian-owned and Panadol is "foreign".
In the first instance, corporations deliberately mislead the Australian public when they claim that buying their "Australian made" or "Australian owned" products helps to support Australian standards of living.
"Australian owned" can refer to products produced in Third World sweatshops for a fraction of the price they're sold for in Australia. Loopholes for products that are "Australian made" also exist — sometimes all the parts are produced elsewhere in the world, and only the final assembly takes place in Australia.
Being produced in Australia doesn't provide any sort of guarantee against high levels of exploitation, either — take, for example, the "Australian made" clothing made in "Australian owned" sweatshops in Melbourne, Sydney and other cities.
This spate of blatant nationalism from Â鶹´«Ã½ of business is all the more striking because it feeds off, and into, the scaremongering of Pauline Hanson and her ilk, who imply that things are bad for ordinary people in Australia because too much profits are going overseas.
The argument is an old one, almost as old as capitalism and nationalism themselves. Everyone has to tighten their belt, and do their bit for the greater good — and in the end, everyone will benefit. Ordinary people are suffering, the argument goes, because Australian business isn't making enough money — if it was, wealth would "trickle down" from the rich to the poor, and everyone would be happy.
But if the "trickle-down effect" really exists, why are the rich getting richer and the poor poorer? Why is more of the world's wealth concentrated in fewer countries today than ever before?
"Buy Aussie" advertising, and the blanket media coverage such campaigns generally get, are close relatives of the racist and nationalist outbursts of Pauline Hanson.
Not only do they all seek to convince workers that they should sacrifice for the "national interest" but, when such sacrifice yields no positive results for workers, they all further seek to channel discontent about society's problems into solutions that are more about race and nationhood than solidarity and justice.
Both Hanson and this new wave of corporate nationalism work on popular fears about declining standards of living in Australia. And they provide easy solutions because they lay the blame for society's problems squarely at the feet of easily identifiable and vulnerable people: "foreigners".
Nationalism has long been a ploy used by the bosses — and a ploy which all too often right-wing Â鶹´«Ã½ of the labour movement have adapted to. "Make it here or jobs disappear", and similar slogans, have been used by many trade unions in an attempt to "protect" Australian workers' jobs from "foreign competition".
Nationalist ideas have persisted in the Australian union movement for more than a century, often in the form of overtly racist opposition to bosses' attempts to bring in migrant labour: against Chinese miners during the Gold Rush, in support of the White Australia Policy, even a shameful case last year when a union dobbed in to authorities workers they believed were illegal immigrants (who turned out to be Australian citizens of Asian descent).
Such sentiments have even surfaced in the worldwide anti-corporate movement. In contrast to the committed internationalism of most movement participants, conservative union officials have sought to present opposition to corporate globalisation as being synonymous with support for greater protectionist barriers in the rich countries.
There have been concerted attempts by left-wing unionists to overturn the dominance of these ideas, with some success. There has been a proud history of solidarity action by many Australian unions — in support of the Chinese workers' movement in the 1920s, backing the Indonesian independence struggle in the 1940s, running international campaigns against the global operations of big companies. At the S11 demonstrations in Melbourne, few union leaders were prepared to openly back protectionism and all stressed their support for internationalism.
But much more needs to be done to turn the tide on such ideas in the union movement.
Regardless of how it's sold to the public, nationalism is a dead end for the working class. Inevitably nationalism pits worker against worker, playing off one group of exploited people against another.
Capitalist Number One doesn't deserve our money any more than does Capitalist Number Two just because Number One happens to be Australian. The challenge is on, for trade unionists, for socialists, and for all people who desire an end to this corporate system, to openly denounce nationalism as the betrayal of other workers that it is, and to campaign for genuine global justice.