The art of enforcing Capital's regimes

Vanguard June 2014 p. 5
Nick G

Artists participating in the Sydney Biennale stacked on a blue recently when it was announced that Transfield Holdings subsidiary, Transfield Services, had won a $1.2 billion contract to manage the Manus Island concentration camp.

Reflecting community outrage over the policy of offshore detention and the murder of Reza Barati, the artists have forced the Biennale board to reject sponsorship from Transfield Holdings.

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, an executive director at Transfield Holdings, had to resign as chair of the festival.

A bit of Transfield history

Transfield was the creation, in Sydney, of two ex-officers of Mussolini’s fascist army, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis and Carlo Salteri.

Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen quotes Franco Belgiorno-Nettis as saying “The choice of friends, selection of enemies is part of management today.  We camouflage this with a veneer of civilisation”.

Arts sponsorship is one such veneer.

Far from the bloody workplaces where a boss’s deadline all too often becomes the workers’ line of dead, black tie events are held where companies like Transfield use the arts as PR. 

For them, the arts are the camouflage with which they keep concealed their true role as exploiters of labour, despoilers of the environment, and in Transfield’s case, enforcers of government policy.

Writing of the founding days of the company, McQueen records that “Transfield kept its labourers isolated in camps as an anti-strike device.  If they did stop, Transfield closed the camps and refused to readmit their spokesmen.  In May 1962, forty builders labourers on the Vales Point power station struck against having to pay for their board and keep.  Conditions in the Transfield camps were more like the military than a village, the site managers behaving like NCOs.  To break up a stop-work meeting, one foreman threw some labourers into the back of a truck before threatening to drive over the rest.”

McQueen says that exploiting cheap labour rather than investing in capital equipment allowed Transfield to kill off competition.  It also ran the risk of killing off workers, but they are cheaper to replace than heavy equipment.

“Transfield sent men up 200m television towers without safety equipment,” wrote McQueen.  “Its supervisors claimed that protective gear added to the danger by limiting mobility.”

“We didn’t have the cranes,” he quotes a Transfield linesman. “So my mate and me had to carry a channel 10 feet by 4 feet, up 15 feet, position it, which is usually the crane’s job, and then put it together.  On the ground, two men would never do such a thing, but we did it high in the air.  Of course it was dangerous.”

Transfield proud of its legacy

No wonder new Transfield Service’s new chair, Diane Smith-Gander was able to claim of Transfield’s suitability for the Manus Island job that the company “has a 60-year legacy of doing this sort of work in remote locations and difficult conditions.”

Quoted in a puff piece for the Financial Review’s BOSS magazine (yes, that’s its name!) Smith-Gander said “…we have experience in this sort of work”.

Replete with portraits of herself channeling Annie Lennox with a mouth full of lemons. Smith-Gander claims working class ancestry and compassion for the “tens of millions of displaced persons in the world”.

 

But she is also depicted as arbitrary and authoritarian, as someone “quite happy to issue instructions to all and sundry”.

Profits used to paint over reality

The corporate empire that is Transfield has arisen from the theft from its labourers of value created by them after their labour power has covered their wages. 

Maybe they worked three or four hours a day to produce the value that Transfield converts into the price of their labour power, but the remaining four, five or six hours of each day they worked for no pay, creating the value that Transfield redeems as profit realised through payment for completion of a project.

Then those unpaid hours of profit are used by the corporation to sponsor art and to engage in other activities far removed from the actual site of profit creation in order to prettify their operations, to conceal the pressures placed on their employees, to cover over the injuries, the maiming and the deaths that occur in the normal course of their operations.

We honour the Biennale artists who have refused this company’s sponsorship.

And we give the final words to McQueen:

“The next challenge is for all of us to shout NO whenever corporations attempt to patronise art, education, health or sport with the proceeds of their crimes.

“The finest and noblest art forms will be our envisaging the kind of society that we can build as our collective efforts enrich individual creativities.

“Placing the highest moral and aesthetic value on social labour opens pathways to a time when corporate blood money will no longer be a distraction because ‘human being’ and ‘artist’ will again be synonymous.”