Wikileaks and the exposure of imperialism

Vanguard September 2013 p. 11
Jim H.

As Julian Assange continues to be holed up in a London embassy fighting attempts to have him finally extradited to the United States, he and his many supporters continue their work to expose the activities of imperialism against the peoples of the world.

WikiLeaks may not consciously be in the business of targeting the imperialist powers and their key servants. Even so, WikiLeaks’ actions serve this role anyway. And this is a very good thing.

The damning evidence concerning the utter subservience of leading Labor politicians and figures reporting to the US Embassy in Canberra, and the relationships between their  counterparts in the Liberal and National Parties and the US imperialists, helped to expose the real nature of parliamentary politics in Australia and confirmed what many Australians already suspected about our so-called politicians.

It brought to light the high level of dishonesty and the anti-people nature of the practice of misnamed capitalist democracy. In reality it is no more than a fig leaf to cover the essential dictatorship of a few that is the underlying reality: the Australian people do not have political power in their hands.

Further than this, WikiLeaks has shown the extent to which Australian sovereignty and independence has been sacrificed to American control.

For these reasons the ongoing activities of this group deserve serious support.

The WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance has been set up to continue the exposure work.

The WikiLeaks Party was officially registered on July 6 and this will field candidates for the Senate in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia.

At the time of writing, the Wikileaks Party was going through the usual internal disruptions that parliamentary elections seem to trigger over the allocation of preferences.

This participation in the electoral process will not bring about any major change. The staged political system will remain.  This does not mean that there is not a good side to it. There is. It is that there is an opportunity to use the electoral process as a platform to expose the politicians and political institutions of the system; assist Australia’s working people to deepen their understanding and prepare them to take on the urgent task of working out an alternative. WikiLeaks can be part of this.

At the same time, the longer term need to organise the fighting capacity of the Australian people on the ground, under working class leadership, remains the most important task by far.

This takes us past any immediate election process and focusses instead on the real politics that is outside parliament, where power largely resides in the networks embracing the big, mainly multinational corporations (including the capitalist media), and the leading circles in the military and diplomatic spheres.