Considering the cost of the submarine program it would be reasonable enough to inquire into their purpose. The build program extends a long way into the future with the first second-hand subs to be bought in the 2030s, and the final three to be finished sometime in the 2060s. There will also be billions of dollars spent upgrading port facilities. All going well, by the end of the project, we’ll have between 11 and 13 boats. Over the next 30 years the program is expected to cost the Australian taxpayer 368 billion dollars with the building process expected to create 20,000 new jobs in Australia.
In addition to any subconscious Freudian motivations the submarines are supposed to function as a countermeasure to the emergence of China as the dominant super-power in the region. It should be recognised that the very possession of these submarines, justified in these terms, deepens a commitment to military involvement as a response to Chinese or American aggression. Given the social, political and economic volatility in both countries it can hardly be described as a move toward domestic security.
The dangers of international tensions aside, Australia’s submarine program reminds me of chapter III: War is Peace from Emmanual Goldstein’s, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, in Orwell’s 1984.
According to the fictional Goldstein the problem faced by the ruling party in the mid twentieth century was “how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.”
One thing that can be safely said about submarines is that consumers do not buy them. The heaviest industry and most advanced technology will be employed in their construction, and 20,000 people put to the grindstone, but in all that nothing will be produced to improve anybody’s day-to-day existence. This according to Goldstein is the point:
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the product of the machine without raising the standard of living.
Assuming the program stays on budget these submarines will cost every Australian $460 per year for the next 30 years. That’s nearly $2000 a year for a family of four over the life of the program. Aside from being a tribute to America’s military industrial complex, it is difficult not to see submarine building as a deliberate diversion of purchasing power from the distribution of material abundance at home. Goldstein continues:
Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
Perpetuation of the myth of scarcity is a priority of the ruling elite. The abundance made unavoidable by industrial techniques must not be made available to relieve the sense of insecurity and dearth that is the constant worry of the masses.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
There is a consistent purpose that links such contrivances as submarines, monetary policy and wind turbines. That is, they are all designed to funnel the money and initiative of the community into the coffers of a privileged minority. This is the pattern, we must learn to see it.