‘Social cohesion’: a weapon to defend the status quo

The term “social cohesion” has had a workout in Australia over the past year. Always a handy staple for those wanting to cast a blanket of conformity over society, the term has particularly been used to attack those protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its war on Lebanon.

In late July, the Albanese government appointed Labor MP Peter Khalil as the country’s first special envoy for social cohesion. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that friction in the community over Israel’s war on Gaza was causing a “great deal of concern about disharmony” across Australia.

The use of social cohesion as a weapon to reproach pro-Palestine demonstrations came to something of a climax as Israel invaded Lebanon in late September and with the approach of the first anniversary of its murderous onslaught on Gaza.

On 30 September, Sky News reported breathlessly the claims of shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan that “social cohesion is failing in our country” and demanded punitive action when Hezbollah flags and portraits of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared at the weekly Palestine rallies in Melbourne and Sydney.

A week later, NSW Premier Chris Minns tried to ban pro-Palestine protests, to the acclamation of Peter Dutton. Echoing these sentiments, Albanese proclaimed 7 October was “not a time for demonstrations to occur ... It’s a time to try to make sure that social cohesion in Australia is valued”.

What is the “social cohesion” that Australia’s political leaders seek to protect against protest?

Like every attempt to paper over the massive divisions built into Australian capitalism, it begins from the assumption that unity is something both possible and desirable. Further, if social cohesion is natural, then unity can have been disrupted only by troublemakers—the infamous “outside agitator” thesis beloved by every boss who ever faced a strike and every government that inspired rebellion.

So social cohesion is based on a demand for compliance and demonisation of those who challenge it. In the Cold War 1950s, it was “reds under the bed”; now it’s Arabs and Muslims who are the supposed danger.

Peter Dutton spelt it out on 19 April: “Central to Australia’s social cohesion is a social contract. Whatever our background, our faith, or our cultural traditions, we do not allow the problems, the tensions, or the animosity of other parts of the world to manifest in our communities or on our streets ... there are people in our country today who do not subscribe to our democratic values”.

That demand for compliance is backed by a political and legal infrastructure designed to undermine and criminalise protests of all kinds, including strikes. Sometimes it’s been the crushing weight of a media barrage of the dominant ideas, sometimes it’s been threats from university administrations against even using words like “from the river to the sea” or “genocide”, and sometimes it’s a battery of laws against protesting or striking.

It is “cohesion” only in the sense of those who run society demanding compliance with their rules. As Bernard Keane pointed out in Crikey on 15 August: “Labor tries to make a virtue of supporting ‘social cohesion’, even while demonising pro-Palestinian protesters, cutting immigration, refusing entry to Gazans, and denouncing political organisation by Muslim voters”. All the concern and blame are placed on supporters of Palestine. Where are the headlines calling for supporters of Israel to stop backing genocide because such ideas undermine social cohesion?

The ALP is the manager of an imposed consensus—from maintaining Australia’s imperialist alliances to centring profitability in the economy—about which it actively works to discourage debate, let alone protest.

There’s nothing naturally cohering in a class-divided society. At the core of capitalism are irreconcilable competing class interests. Social cohesion is a myth—at our expense. Often the so-called cohesion can be maintained only by exclusion, such as that of Indigenous people, or the ban on marriage equality before 2017. Refugees remain condemned to be permanent outsiders. The attack on the CFMEU coheres the union movement even further around tame cat passivity in the face of the cost-of-living crisis.

In other words, calls for social cohesion always mean just going along with the status quo. On the other hand, the high points of struggle, such as the successful working-class fight against conscription in World War I or the smashing of the anti-union penal powers in 1969, have involved breaking with the notion of social cohesion and exposing the real divisions in society through mass struggle.

So social cohesion is deserving only of the utmost hostility. Socialists don’t want social cohesion; we want to make the class war visible. As the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in 1857:

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”