(From the Marxism list) From: Gary MacLennan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Hansonism - My take Now as everyone knows Hanson lost her seat in Federal Parliament and her party ended up with only one senate Seat. She had proclaimed she was going to get about six senators and 12 members in the lower house. However the major parties colluded in the distribution of preferences and her hopes turned out to be fantasies. So is Hansonism over? The ruling class after all do not need her. Significantly the Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fisher, the leader of the rural based National Party campaigned against her on the grounds that she was racist and thus 'anti-trade'. Hanson had been expected to wipe out the National Party but failed to take anything but a senate seat of them. So certainly I agree that she was taught a lesson. Nevertheless we need to be cautious. Her party is not two years old and although it ran a chaotic campaign that the press pursued mercilessly One Nation still managed to get 851,066 votes, in a country whose population is not quite 18 million. So out there we have enormous numbers of deeply discontented suffering people. They are by and large the rural petty bourgeoisie and lumpen proles. They dream of a return to the 50s when life was much better for them but they cannot see a way back other than by supporting their beloved "Pauline". Now my Marxist training was strictly classical and I would never argue that we should be impressed by quantity rather than quality. Thus I am not arguing that we should be spooked by the number of people who voted for Hanson. When I think of One Nation I recall Trotsky's remark about the Fascist movement. He said something like "the greater part of the fascist movement is but human dust." But I am suggesting that we should not fall into the glib celebration of the end of Hansonism. The material circumstances that created her are still there. Indeed they are likely to be aggravated by the coming recession. There have been an interesting number of articles by right wing journalists almost mourning the end of Hanson. They had helped make her great triumph in the Queensland election and when ordered to they helped defeat her in the federal arena. But journalists are by structure and so by nature petty bourgeois. They have to kiss the asses of the powerful, and even though they seem to go to it with enormous enthusiasm, beneath all that slobbering devotion is the true petty bourgeois' hatred and envy of the rich and the powerful. So there is a great deal of latent sympathy for Hanson in the media. Accordingly she will never be attacked with the same ferocity that a left wing movement would incur. So what will One Nation do now? There have been rumours of splits and rows. Within the Far Right everyone wants to be Fuhrer so such tensions are inevitable, but my best guess is that One Nation will not self destruct. It has been dealt a blow and put back in its place. The question is - Will the party learn its lesson? It dared to inconvenience the ruling class through its anti-Asianism and got a smack on the gob for its trouble. To get some idea of what might happen to the party we need to grasp that there are three closely inter-woven but distinct strands to One Nation's politics. There is firstly the rural based conservative's hatred of modernity and its beneficiaries who are generally encapsulated in the Political Correctness movement - gays, women, blacks. This merges with racist contempt for Aborigines, resentment of their "privileges" and full on loathing and fear of Asians and Asian migrants in particular. This in turn merges with the third strand of opposition to economic rationalism or neo-liberalism and the globalisation of Capital. Above all this has entailed the re-orientation of Australian capital from the old British Empire to the Asian region. In my opinion it was the third strand that gave Hanson her mass support but also earned it the wrath of the capitalist class. So this is the dilemma for One Nation, to the extent that it opposes the prerogatives of Capital it gets a mass base. But it does not want to be an anti-capitalist party. Hanson herself, like most of her party, is a Tory through and through. Her former adviser, Pasquerelli, has also argued that her electoral failures are due to the fact that she moved away from the main game - Aborigines and Asian migrants i.e. strand two. But if Hanson simply returns to beating the anti-Aborigine and Asian migrant drum then she will no longer represent the moment of opposition to the globalisation and restructuring of Australian capitalism. My opinion is that in these circumstances her party would go into sharp decline. The problem is that Hanson herself is simply too stupid to understand anything of this. She is though genuine Joan of Arc material. But this is Australia in the 20th century and instead of the fascinating Maid of Orleans plagued and driven by the angelic voices in her head, we have the fish and chip owner with the ugly whining tones - the genuine petty bourgeois from the bush with a mission to save her nation. Nevertheless she is also charismatic. I personally find that difficult to believe, but the truth is there. Hanson is enormously attractive to poorly educated and culturally deprived males in the 35-55 age bracket (what I refer to as the Viagra zone) and there are it seems enormous numbers of them. It is also well to recall amidst all this talk of Hanson being finished that there have been right wing movements with their leaders in Australia before and they all attempted to form right wing parties. But none of the filth could do what Hanson has done and put far right politics on the agenda on a national scale. So the strength of One Nation, Pauline Hanson, is also its weakness. It may however now acquire its Hitler - someone who knows what the ruling class want and will tailor the party's policies to suit that. This, as Christine Jackman points out in her interesting Brisbane Courier Mail article of Oct 13, could well be Hanson herself. It is true that for the present the ruling class do not need One Nation. Yet talk of systemic collapse is in the air. Everyone is spooked by the continuous outbreak of economic crises that are springing up on every side. The global triumphs of Capital have made it more vulnerable than ever. Moreover the dialectic lives and it cannot be long before we have a return of the repressed - a genuine anti-capitalist movement. And should the time indeed come when a Left emerges from a radicalised working class then One Nation will be revisited by the bourgeoisie and their media lackeys. regards Gary Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
