| By
Humphrey McQueen
Introduction
By Bob Gould
In Humphrey McQueen's very influential
book A New Britannia, one of the main themes is that there were
two different types of working class in late 19th and early 20th century
Australia: one petit-bourgeois and the other socialist. That view is
outlined in this essay, written while McQueen was preparing A New
Britannia. It is a view that McQueen later relinquished, after much
argument and debate.
Humphrey McQueen's revised and
considered, more or less final view after all the discussion, is
represented by the afterword to the 1986 (second) edition of A New
Britannia.
Laborism and Socialism
“It is not a matter of what this or
that proletarian, or even the entire proletariat, envisages as the
goal at any particular time. It is a question of what the proletariat
is and of what it will have to do historically, judged by the
conditions of its existence.”
Karl Marx
I
When the practice of the Labor Party in the eighty years of its
existence is considered it is truly amazing that anyone could suppose
that it has any more than the vaguest semantic associations with
socialism. Yet every socialist must confront the question of the Labor
Party. No matter what answer is forthcoming the Labor Party cannot be
ignored in any revolutionary socialist strategy. Part of the purpose of
this chapter is to show why the Labor Party is not and never has been a
socialist party, and why it can never become one.
The nature of the Labor Party cannot be
determined simply by recounting its actions, or by tracing the thread of
temporary majorities at Federal Conferences. Rather it will be necessary
to write of the rank-and-file and of the hopes and experiences of all
those who have in any way supported the Labor Party: “. . . the
history of a party, in other words, must be the history of a particular
social group. But this group is not isolated; it has friends, allies,
opponents and enemies. Only from the complex picture of social and State
life (often even with international ramifications) will emerge the
history of a certain party”. Attention must be directed to the nature
of the Australian working classes if anything is to be learnt of the
Labor Party.
Two problems connected with class arise
immediately: what is a working class and was there one in nineteenth
century Australia? Under capitalism a class is both a thing and an
experience. A working class is a thing in the sense that it is a factor
of production like iron or coal. But in terms of social action a working
class is a continuing experience of real, living men. The nature of this
experience is determined by the fact that because real, living men are
treated as things they try to alter their position. Since their
understanding will determine how they act it is to their consciousness
that attention must be directed. The critical criterion for class is not
ownership but consciousness.
If a working class is a thing, there was
a working class in Australia last century. But in terms of a continuing
experience there was not. This does not mean that Australia was a
classless society, but that the experiences necessary to create working
class consciousness did not exist. It certainly does not mean that
wage-earners lacked a continuing experience. On the contrary, it means
that their experience was such that they did not reject capitalism
because they did not perceive life as intolerable. Despite some bad
times, almost every aspect of life in Australia supported the belief
that while industrial capitalism should be avoided and adjusted, it
certainly did not warrant overthrowing. It will be necessary to find out
why they thought this by examining their experiences.
II
CONVICTS:
Some writers have pictured the convicts as “innocent and manly” and
imbued with an “egalitarian class solidarity”. As such the convicts
are presented as the originators of the mythical Australian. This is
nonsense. The convicts were professional criminals and believed in
nothing so much as individual enterprise. Even the three thousand social
rebels failed to contribute to our political tradition — they became
either well-to-do or policemen. If the convicts did not establish a
tradition of “mateship”, their acceptance of the acquisitive values
of capitalism and their not infrequent successes nonetheless set the
pattern for the free labourers who succeeded them. The link between the
convicts and the free labourers was not one of shared traditions, but of
a common confrontation with an economic and political system which was
in every way more flexible than the one in Britain which had caused
their transportation or migration.[1]
EMIGRANTS:
If the convicts were an unrepresentative sample of British society so
were the free emigrants. If they paid their own fares they needed both
capital and initiative; if they were assisted they needed at least
initiative. In the main they were the upward striving section, those who
were dissatisfied with their lot in Britain and thus sought independence
and comfort within the bounds of a newer and freer economy. This is
obviously true of the half-million who came for gold.
GOLD:
Gold had three important effects in the formation of the petit-bourgeois
consciousness of nineteenth century Australians. Firstly, it often
provided an amount of ready capital. Many labourers made a fresh start
with a small nugget. This did not stop in 1860: fresh strikes in New
Zealand, Queensland and Western Australia provided opportunities till
1900. But gold was not the only source of rapid riches; silver, copper
and precious stones were also important in sustaining “a rush that
never ended”. Secondly, the discovery of gold eased the process of
capital formation in Australia. The traditional source of capital —
the surplus value of workers — was partly circumvented in Australia at
this time because capital came from mineral finds; from the British
investments which these finds provoked; and from the natural increase in
flocks which these investments helped to finance. This meant that
employees were not called upon to sacrifice such a large share of the
wealth they produced. Higher wages were an inevitable consequence in a
society that faced a continual labour shortage. But the most important
effect was upon the outlook of the people. Gold mining, particularly in
its early days, strengthened the ethos of acquisitive competition and
resulted in the gross materialism that marked Australian society and
which so greatly offended Richard Mahony. By 1890, both Spence and Lane
were lamenting the passing of the “golden age” when every man had
been his own master. A stonemason, speaking in 1854, was more pertinent
when he pointed out that the love of gold had thoroughly individualised
the people and destroyed sociability.
Gold was at the base of high living
standards when times were good and it was there to sustain hopes when
they were bad. Its effect upon social consciousness was to hold out the
promise of escape from wage slavery, if it did not offer untold riches,
it certainly offered the prospect of sufficient capital to buy a shop,
establish a tradesman or purchase a farm.
LAND:
Most of those who came to Australia wanted to escape from urban
industrialisation far more than from a system of individual enterprise.
The desire for land was particularly strong amongst the Irish who
provided the model and initiative for the supremely radical Land
Conventions of 1857-59. Nineteenth century Australian politics were
dominated by questions of land ownership and use. From the earliest days
there were demands to “unlock the lands”. These became ferocious
after the gold rushes and culminated in the Free Selection Acts of the
1860s and 1870s.
The spread of Henry George's “Single
Tax” ideas is indicative of the acceptance of land as the source of
wealth. The Intercolonial Trades Union Congress meeting in Brisbane in
1888 unanimously agreed that a tax on land would be: “. . . a simple
yet sovereign remedy which will raise wages, increase and give
remunerative employment, abolish poverty, extirpate pauperism, lessen
crime, elevate moral tastes and intelligence, purify government and
carry civilisation to a yet nobler height”.
At the height of the Shearers' strike in
1891 about a hundred strikers formed a co-operative at Alice River where
they were financed by donations from Barcaldine. The Union Secretary
there wired Perth and Argentina to see if those Governments would be
willing to settle five thousand experienced bushworkers in co-operative
colonies. William Lane's settlement in Paraguay was the measure of this
demand, both in terms of the success he had in gaining recruits and in
its eventual failure.
Despite the emergence of a Labor Party,
the Queensland elections of 1893 were fought on the issue of Land Grant
Railways. When Sir Charles Lilley stepped down from the Bench to join
the fight he was given the wildly enthusiastic support of the Labor
Party. This highlights an important aspect of the struggle for land. At
every point in the campaign to establish a yeomanry, the people were not
only ideologically subordinate in as much as they were avoiding the
problems presented by capitalism by attempting escape into rural
harmony: they were also organisationally dominated by the middle class.
Part of the explanation for this is that the opposition to land reform
came from the squatter-dominated Legislative Councils against which the
predominantly middle class Legislative Assemblies were waging war for
reasons of their own.
DEMOCRACY:
Undoubtedly the most important fact about Australia is, as W.K. Hancock
observed, “that its entire history occurred after the French and
Industrial Revolutions”. This has meant that the issues which split
European society into irreconcilable classes were easily contained
within the existing framework of collaboration between labourer and
employer — the Eureka charade notwithstanding. Even the battle against
the squatters, though prolonged, was peaceable.
The fight to establish adult male
suffrage was largely fought and won by the small middle class in such a
way that the others were required to do very little except exist in
sufficiently large numbers. This purely quantitative dominance ensured
their enfranchisement by an advancing middle class which was thereby
unable to desert its allies, even if it had wanted to. The high point of
this collaboration was reached in 1889 during the campaign to support
the London dock strike. In Brisbane the relief committee contained
employers and the otherwise none-too-liberal Premier, Mcllwraith,
contributed fifty pounds, while the Lord Mayor organised the appeal. The
emergence of Labor Parties shortly afterwards did not entirely end this
relationship, particularly in Victoria and South Australia where Deakin
and Kingston continued to dominate movements for reform.
Dependence on radical liberals persisted
well into the twentieth century as evidenced in the highly significant
appointment of H.B. Higgins as Attorney-General in the first
Commonwealth Labor Government of 1904. Although Hughes had recently
qualified as a barrister, the Labor Party did not consider it proper
that anyone so inexperienced should hold such an august position. This
overwhelming deference to “The Law as the true embodiment of
everything that's excellent” has led some commentators to remark upon
the Labor Party's excessively legalistic approach, one writer claiming
that it has been more interested in constitutional than in social
reform.
SOCIALISM: Cordial
relations between employers and employees ensured that such socialism as
there was in nineteenth century Australia would have a distinctly
Utopian character. The most widely read “socialist” work was Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward in which the hero awakes after a
hundred year sleep to find himself in the perfect society. This personal
transformation significantly avoids the problems of the transitional
period and any unpleasantness involved therein. In the locally produced
novel, The Working Man's Paradise, by William Lane, the
protagonist, Geisner (Lane himself) explains the world to Ned, an
outback shearer. Geisner's attitude to class warfare is revealed when he
plays The Marseillaise on the piano. It does not invoke a call to
arms, but is a “softened, spiritualised, purified” rendering,
signifying the struggle in men's hearts.
“Socialist” ideas in Australia were
part of the largely pre-industrial environment in which they flourished.
The enemy was not capitalism, but bankers and land monopolists. American
populist notions were widespread and found fresh converts in a period of
bank crashes. David Syme, owner-editor of The Age, was not averse
to seeing himself described as a “socialist” and William Lane was
certainly correct when he wrote in The Worker on May Day in 1890:
“We are all socialists only some of us don't know it.”
What was this marvellous notion that
could penetrate men's minds without their being aware of it? For Lane it
was “mateship”: the desire for human solidarity, Asians excepted.
For almost everyone else it was governmental activity. The requirements
of a colonial economy demanded governmental intervention. Governor
Macquarie set the pattern with deficit financing to relieve unemployment
as early as 1813. During the “Long Boom” from 1861-1890, Australian
governments borrowed heavily on the London market in order to finance
developmental works; almost half the capital inflow going to public
sources. It was therefore no theoretical novelty when the Labor movement
demanded a program of public works to assist the unemployed, or when
they insisted that these works be carried out under a system of day
labour. Although they objected to State intervention in the strikes of
1890-94, they were even more insistent in their demand for compulsory
arbitration to make strikes unnecessary. Protection, Free Selection,
Factory Acts, Immigration Control, and a compulsory eight-hour day in
government contracts were but some of the items which made nonsense of
laissez-faire. As J.B. Condliffe put it when discussing a similar
situation in New Zealand: “The widening df State functions is due
primarily to colonial opportunism and freedom from theories. It has
little to do with Socialism. Reeves' phrase, 'colonial governmentalism',
is a truer description of New Zealand practice than 'State Socialism' or
Métin's 'socialisme sans doctrines'. It is 'étatisme' rather than
socialism.”
In 1904, J.C. Watson, first Labor Prime
Minister, defined socialism as state action, a view which has been
echoed ever since. (Every time Whitlam opens his mouth he promises some
new form of state action, on a national basis.) Governmental activity
remains acceptable because it contributes to national development and
falls under the protective mantle of the dominant component of all
radical ideology in Australia, namely, nationalism.
NATIONALISM:
When someone last century described himself as an Australian he was not
only saying something positive about what he was, but something negative
about what be was not. Specifically, and in diminishing order of
disapproval, the Australian was not an Asian; not a European, especially
not an Italian; and only finally, when at all, not British. This is why,
no matter how often it is repeated, there is still something strange
about saying “Australia is part of Asia”.
Australian nationalism is often presented
as if it were a mystical essence that had no other content than
reverence for “the land, boys, we live in”. Disputes between
Imperialists and Nationalists in Australia are thus reduced to
abstractions, despite occasional references to Australia's interests,
which, like as not, refer to nothing more specific than the right to
control one's own destiny. In a world which contains more than one great
power any minor power that either cuts itself off from, or is cast aside
by one power is likely to fall victim to, or be adopted by another. This
is precisely the situation that Australia has perennially confronted. In
a world of imperialism, complete independence from Britain has meant
either conquest (by France, Russia, Germany, China, Japan) or voluntary
tutelage (to the United States).
This has made for an ambiguous
anti-British feeling. Australians wanted the Empire to be strong so that
it could protect them, but they did not always trust Britain to put our
interests first. By 1910, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance had placed the
Naval Defence of Australia in the hands of the Japanese fleet. This
enabled Britain to keep its fleet intact in the Atlantic but it
terrified Australians. The threat from the north has made Australian
nationalism essentially racist and militaristic. Racist because it is
the slit-eyed little bastards who are planning to rape our wives and eat
our children; militaristic because only a civilian militia can keep them
out.[2]
RACISM: The
full import of racism in the development of Australia can be gauged only
by seeing it as part of a total ideological landscape. Firstly, it was
the dominant aspect of our much-vaunted nationalism, the anti-British
and anti-imperialist phases of which have been over-stressed, while its
militaristic connotations have been largely ignored. Secondly, the
appeal of racism was assisted by the almost total absence of Marxian
socialism, which would have directed attention towards class and away
from racial grievances. Even when internationalism gained some ground
with groups like the Victorian Socialist Party, it did not extend beyond
a call for European Workers of the World, Unite!
The historical roots of Australian racism
are to be found in the days of the gold rushes and in attempts to use
coloured labourers to undermine living standards.[3]
Labor Party apologists today pretend that White Aus-tralia had a pure
and simple economic motivation. This will not bear analysis. For as
Watson told the House of Representatives in 1901: “The question is
whether we would desire that our sisters or our brothers should be
married into any of these races to which we object.”
As Japan became a powerful industrial
nation so it became the source of anxiety. Fear of Japan was undoubtedly
one of the major reasons for the decision to introduce conscription in
1916-17, just as it was one of the reasons for its defeat. This second
feature is exemplified in the career of J.H. Catts, MHR for Cooke, who
left his office as Director of Voluntary Recruiting for NSW to become
secretary of the “Vote No Conscription” campaign. Hughes arrested
him seven times under the War Precautions Act because “he dared to
tell the truth concerning the war aims of Japan”.
MILITARISM:
It is difficult to sustain a belief in Australia's anti-British,
anti-militarist attitudes in the face of the response to the First World
War. Sixty-four per cent of enlistments in the AIF were labourers and
tradesmen who responded to Fisher's pledge of the last man and the last
shilling. Henry Lawson had voiced this aspect of nationalism in his poem
The Star of Australasia:
”From grander clouds in our peaceful
skies than ever were there before, I tell you the Star of the South
shall rise in the lurid clouds of war. It ever must be while blood is
warm and sons of men increase; For ever the nations rose in storm, to
rot in a deadly peace.”
Labor's antimilitarism was opposed to
elitist cliques, but was strongly in favour of civilian armies in which
everyone participated. This longing found realisation at Gallipoli
“when Australia became a nation”.[4]
WAGES:
Nothing is more illustrative of the petit-bourgeois nature of the
nineteenth century labouring classes in Australia than the arguments
surrounding the eight-hour day. A typical resolution at an eight-hours
meeting was “that the enervating effects of the climate, the advanced
state of civilisation, the progress of the arts and sciences, and the
demand for intellectual gratification and improvement, call for an
abridgement of the hours of labour”. The opposition argument was
neatly put by an artisan who asked: “Would any man in this room, who
ever expects to be a master for himself, consent to work for eight hours
for 16s, if he could obtain 20s for ten hours?” The last point is
indicative of the high wages prevalent: what worker today could
sacrifice twenty per cent of his earnings?
The chronic labour shortage meant that
wages in Australia were appreciably higher than those obtaining in
Britain. Brian Fitzpatrick estimated that real wages in Australia
increased by one hundred per cent in the fifty years after 1840. In
1890, the young radical critic, Francis Adams, summed up the position of
the urban tradesman thus: “The old rates of good wages made him years
ago a petty suburban proprietor. He bought his sixteen or thirty-two
perch allotment within reach by bus or tram or train of his work, and
went to the building societies to put him up a wooden cottage ... and he
paid off the pretty heavy building bill (with running interest) by
monthly instalments, which he refused to call 'rent'. There he lived
with his wife and children in the profuse Australian style. ...
Generally he owned a small, iron-framed, time-payment piano, on which
his daughters, returning well-shod and too well-clothed, from the local
public school ... discoursed popular airs with a powerful manual
execution.”
This is sufficient evidence of the
experiences and ideas of the labouring men in Australia from 1840 to
1890 to conclude that although their position was often proletarian,
their consciousness was petit-bourgeois through and through. This
outlook dominated their organisations, firstly in the trade unions and
later in the Labor Party.
UNIONS: The
motto of the unions speaks volumes for their role. While the wording
varied from “Defence not Defiance” to “United to relieve, not
combined to injure” the meaning remained clear. The typical unionist
was a pillar of the community, truly a marble angel. The decision to
build a Trades Hall in Melbourne was largely initiated because delegates
objected to meeting in hotels. This connection between radical politics
and prohibition continued well into the 1920s.
Even the coalminers did not defy their
taskmasters; instead they gave their superintendent an embossed address
valued at twelve pounds when he retired; proprietors and managers were
always invited to the annual picnic. Two of the main objects of the
Lambing Flat Miners Protective League are most informative in this
regard. One was the promulgation of the word of God. The other was “to
use their utmost energies to preserve order and to protect property, and
the rights of every individual, and to seize, secure and hand over to
the government authorities any thief, robber or ruffian who violates the
laws of the country”.
Craft Unions were often nothing more than
benefit societies aimed at providing sustenance to ill or unemployed
members. Even with the growth of the “new unionism” in the 1880s
which took in semi-skilled workers the overall strength of unionism was
slight. At the commencement of the 1890 strikes there were more domestic
servants than unionists in New South Wales. Nor had attitudes changed
greatly: in 1893 the Melbourne Trades Hall Council refused to interest
itself in the unemployed who were not members of affiliated Trade
Unions. After the strikes, and in the face of a continuing economic
crisis, unionism almost died away. It did not revive until well into the
twentieth century when it was artificially stimulated by the Harvester
Judgement handed down by the newly formed Arbitration Court. [5]
ARBITRATION:
Unionists wanted nothing better than to talk to their employers; and
when the employers refused to talk, the Unions wanted the Government to
make them. It was the Conservative and Free Trade forces in Australia
who opposed Arbitration. In 1889, well before any of the strikes,
William Lane was working for an Arbitration system that would be policed
jointly by the unions and the employers.
Compulsory Arbitration was eventually
granted by Deakin in return for Labor support of his Protective Tariff.
Higgins' first award, which meant a thirty per cent wage increase in
some cases, confirmed the belief in the benefits which Arbitration would
bring. The “New Protection”, as the scheme of Tariff rebates for the
employers who abided by Arbitration was called, was typical of Labor
thinking in as much as it was based on a belief in the common interests
of Labour and Capital, and in the neutral role of the state. White
Australia was a more obvious form of protection that the Unions had
fought hard to achieve.
What is common to the Unions, Arbitration
and White Australia is their essentially defensive nature. This is
equally true of the Labor Parties, the greatest of all the creations of
the nineteenth century workers.
LABOR PARTY:
The Labor Parties that emerged after 1890 were in every way the
logical extension of the petit-bourgeois mentality and organisations
which preceded them. There was no turning point. There was merely
consolidation; confirmation of all that had gone before. The Labor
Parties did not represent a break with militant socialism for no such
thing had existed. Radicalism was widespread as it invariably is amongst
a petit-bourgeoisie on the make.[6]
Labor's parliamentary candidates
reflected this. There were those who stood as they had done at every
election and merely changed the wording on their banners to Labor; there
were radical farmers, editors and journalists by the score; there were
trade union officials of the old school. All were solidly moderate in
outlook and practice. The tale of the first Tommy Ryan (Queensland MLA
for Barcoo) needs some revising. He did not resign from Parliament
because “the whisky was too hard, the seats too soft, and the call of
the billabongs too strong” but because he refused to pay his debts in
Brisbane.
Labor's fighting platform was another
measure of this carry-over. Every item of the 1894 NSW platform, the
first for which rank-and-file opinion was consulted, brings to light
some aspects of the petit-bourgeois culture sketched above. The order of
priority was determined by exhaustive ballot so that at the top of the
list came a “land value tax”, a triumph for Henry George and the
land myth; second was a mining on private property bill, to ensure that
the rush would never end; third and fourth were “abolition of the
Upper House” and “local government”, both sound liberal measures,
the former recalling the battle against squatterdom; sixth came a state
bank to beat the money-lenders and satisfy agrarian populism; finally,
limping in a sad second last, came the only specifically working class
reform, the eight-hour day; two years later this was amended by the
addition of the words “where practicable” in order to secure the
farmers' votes.
Nothing in the subsequent behaviour of
the Labor Party gives the slightest indication that it has changed. It
remains as firmly trapped under capitalism as ever. The only changes
have been to appearances, for example, the much modified
“Socialisation Objective” of 1921. All attempts to move
“Socialisation” from the realm of a long-term Objective into the
Fighting Platform have been strenuously rejected. Thirty or so “state
enterprises” ranging from butcher shops to brick works, were not
attempts at “socialism by stealth”. They were never intended to
replace capitalism, but were an extension of the belief in “state
action”. They usually arose to meet an emergency and most often merely
supplied other Government departments and did not sell to the public.
One public enterprise refused to employ all union labor even under a
Labor Government. Conservatives have been at a loss to understand the
gulf between Labor's stated aims and its practices and attribute it to
Machiavellianism.
W.G. Spence understood matters far better
when he praised the first Labor Premier of South Australia, claiming
that “the rich anti-Socialists soon discovered that the Socialist
Premier ... could be trusted with big business affairs”. Chifley's
attempt to nationalise banking came after every other method of
regulation had been tried; it was seen as a special case and in no sense
was part of an overall socialist offensive. Nowadays, every Federal
policy speech is prefaced by a promise not to attempt socialisation. If
Section 92 of the Federal Constitution did not exist, the ALP would have
had to invent it.[7]
More alarming still is the rich tradition
of strike-breaking by Labor Governments. The fable that the Labor Party
was created because the workers saw the futility of striking has been
interpreted by many Labor politicians to mean that their job is not to
make strikes superfluous but to smash them. In 1911, the NSW Labor
Government proposed that ordinary strikers would “not be liable to
imprisonment, but to a fine only. We believe this is a more effective
deterrent, provided that the fine is enforceable as the first lien on
any wages that may be earned after its imposition”. Two years later,
the Labor Premier of NSW called for volunteer labour to replace striking
gas-workers. More spectacular was the decision by the Labor Premier of
Queensland to dismiss the entire staff of the railways and re-employ
only those who could be trusted. Not surprisingly the daily papers
acclaimed him as “their Commander-in-Chief”. When the Tory
Government in Queensland attempted to break the 1965 Mt Isa strike with
amendments to the Arbitration Act they copied them directly from
legislation which had been brought down by a Labor Government in 1948.[8]
The Labor Party is not a working class
party. Nor is it a two-class party, for no such thing is possible. In
ideas and practice it is firmly committed to the maintenance of
capitalism, though it is not averse to making some running repairs. The
nature of the Labor Party cannot be avoided by placing the blame on
individuals, or upon the over-populated community of “Labor rats”.
The case against Labor does not rest on the iniquities of particular
Labor leaders but on the social nature of Laborism as the historical
manifestation of an integrated, subordinate work force. The Labor Party
cannot produce socialism because it is part of a class which is
fundamentally committed to capitalism. Socialism requires a new and
different class for its creation. It needs a working class with a
proletarian, not a petit-bourgeois, consciousness. Such a consciousness
can come only from a new set of experiences.
III
If the preceding analysis was all
that could be said about the working classes in Australia the prospects
for socialism would not only be bleak, but non-existent. Socialism
remains a real alternative for Australia because there is a working
class with a proletarian consciousness, though not a socialist one.
After 1890 an increasing section of the work force felt that they were
no longer an accepted part of society, that there was no place for them,
no hope for them as long as capitalism endured. The combined effects of
economic stagnation, political repression and industrialisation began to
produce a working class that sought its salvation outside capitalism.
Although real wages did not fall
continuously from 1890 to 1940 the overall picture was one of stagnating
living standards and diminished prospects. No longer could union demands
be met readily so that bitter, protracted strikes became common,
particularly for coal-miners and railway workers. The strikes of 1890 to
1894 pale into insignificance when compared to the 1912 general strike
in Brisbane or the NSW general strike of 1917. To lament the passing of
militancy with the nineteenth century is to slander the militancy of the
twentieth by underestimating its persistence and intensity in the face
of vicious repression and continuing defeats.[9]
“in the height of his manly prime,
Brookfield died for the people.”
The rise of the New Guard during the
depression was the final proof that the politically open society of the
nineteenth century was gone forever. More devastating in its psychic
effects than either of these was the spread of large-scale industry,
which put an end to all hopes of self-proprietorship or rural escapades.
This new experience and consciousness
brought forth organisations radically different from the Trade Unions
and the Labor Party. Just as the petit-bourgeois experience has
persisted long after the somewhat arbitrary dividing line of 1890, so
too did the proletarian experience have its roots before that date. The
pockets of poverty that sour affluence today were no less prevalent in
the affluence of nineteenth century Australia. The Active Service
Brigade that was formed from the Sydney unemployed in 1890 was the
precursor of the new militancy which came into full play with the IWW,
the demand for “One Big Union” and the Communist Party.
The IWW performed two invaluable services
for the emerging proletariat in Australia. The first was to bring it to
self-confidence. Wobbly propaganda, by both word and deed, stressed
class conflict, while their courage and daring destroyed the remnants of
the subservience which had marked relations between master and man.
The second service was to commence the
long haul in the battle against racism. Both these tasks were taken up
and consolidated by the Communist Party after 1922. Further strength was
drawn from the increasing acquaintance with Marxism as a distinctive
world view. Previously Marx had been lumped with Jesus Christ and Sidney
Webb as socialist thinkers. Marx's unique position became clear only
when there was a class that was forced by their experiences to recognise
the validity of his notion of class struggle. Important as these changes
were they did not produce a new mass party, as happened in France and
Italy. This failure is related to the earlier period of prosperity.
Although a proletariat had been formed this process took place in a
society where “the eight-hour day was the rule, modern machines were
installed and where these were worked principally by men, not primarily
by women, and by children scarcely at all”, and where the proletariat
was enfranchised free of cost and with some defence organisations in
position. This meant that the more brutal aspects of the emergence of
industrial capitalism were softened; for some they were hardly felt at
all.
The war for position on the ideological
front was equally indecisive. Despite the valuable work against racism
conducted by the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat in the 1920s,
internationalism was mutilated by the forties into little more than
friendship with the Soviet Union. In general the Communist Party was
little more than the culmination of militant unionism and its
relationship to Marxism as a philosophy, as distinct from a political
program, was slight. This was partly due to the abysmal level of
bourgeois intellectualism in Australia. Meeting no serious challengers,
Marxism in Australia rarely rose above the surrounding morass of
scientistic positivism.
Not surprisingly the proletariat has not
established itself as an independent political force. The explanation
for this failure is not to be found solely in the strategic weaknesses
mentioned above. There were equally important reasons of a purely
immediate character.
The first occasion when a proletarian
party seemed possible was in 1916 when the working class had suffered a
great deal at the hands of the Labor Party. If conscription, or more
accurately, Ireland, had not intervened, the split in the Labor Movement
would have been on class lines, probably in conjunction with the 1917
strike. As it turned out the cleavage was blurred by the presence of
Irish-Catholics in an uneasy alliance with the proletariat against the
Labor Conscriptionists. Moreover, the proletariat had been weakened by
the ritual suicide of the IWW early in 1916. A further split, centring
on support for the war was developing along class lines in 1918, while
in Broken Hill an independent Labor MLA was elected. The next two
opportunities were in reality one and the same. The militant unions had
suffered severe defeat in 1927-29 and thus entered the depression, and
the period of disillusionment with the Labor Government, in a defensive
mood. It took almost ten years for the depression to produce a new
political force in NSW around the Hughes-Evans Labor Party, which was
destroyed by its anti-war stand just as the phoney war ended. Equally
important was the hold Jack Lang had over many workers. Lang had won
this support in the period of his first government (1925-27) when he
reinstated the strikers of 1917 and initiated some welfare measures. His
dismissal by Game was precisely what he needed to maintain his position
as a martyr for the working class. Moreover, depressions are not the
seed-beds of revolution that they are supposed to be because the workers
who are most affected are those who are unemployed and thus out of the
factories and difficult to organise.
Since the Second World War the
petit-bourgeoisie and the proletariat have both had their previous
experiences confirmed, materially and ideologically. After magnificent
fights in the late forties and early fifties against wage-freezes and
political repression, the proletariat has spent over a decade recovering
its strength for the battle against the penal clauses, which erupted
with the arrest of Clarrie O'Shea, Victorian Tramways Union Secretary,
for refusal to pay $12,000 fines imposed for “illegal” strikes. It
is impossible to overestimate the importance of the fight against
Arbitration and against the kind of unionism that it fosters. The strike
that followed O'Shea's arrest was the most extensive in Australian
history. When victory is achieved it will represent a decisive break
with the tradition of fighting the boss on his terms and within his
system. It may be that the break-up of Arbitration will coincide with
the appearance of a genuinely working class party. That such a party
would not necessarily be revolutionary socialist would not detract from
the importance to be attached to the political emancipation of the
Australian working class. The problems that would arise for this new
party would present many opportunities for further advance.
Meanwhile, three tasks present
themselves. Firstly, there is the need to establish the ideological
supremacy of Marxism in every area of activity and thought. Secondly,
the fear of Asia must be combated by building movements for practical
solidarity with revolutionaries there. Thirdly, the Arbitration system
and its related unionism must be replaced by responsive job
organisations which engage every worker in a day-by-day struggle against
capitalism. None of these things will be easy, but they are necessary
and possible.
Those who look at the Labor Party and the
ACTU and despair of the working class are mistaken. What they see in
those organisations is not a working class but a peculiarly Australian
petit-bourgeoisie; they do not see workers who have lost the will to
overthrow capitalism but a petit-bourgeoisie who never had it. The
working class has not declined in militancy since 1890 because it did
not exist then. Its militancy has extended throughout its life as it
continues to demonstrate. The attack on Arbitration will not lead
immediately to socialism. Nor can the proletariat achieve socialism
unaided. It will have to lead an alliance of the type constructed in
Russia, China and Vietnam (though the role of peasants will be minimal).
Those who discount the leading role of the proletariat misjudge the
future just as surely as they misread the past.
1.
For further details see my article Convicts and Rebels, Labour
History, Number 15. The present essay is a synopsis of a larger work
on the development of the Australian working classes, which I am
preparing. Schematically stated as it is here, the argument is
aggressively imperialistic. It is hoped that the addition of
corroborative detail will not make it less so. Most of the footnotes
which follow indicate where such details can be found.
2. S.
Encel, Defence and the World Outlook, Australian Outlook,
Volume 17, Number 2; D.C. Gordon, The Dominion Partnership in
Imperial Defense, 1870-1914 (Baltimore, 1965); W. Ross Livingston, Nationalism
in the Commonwealth of Australia, Pacific Historical Review,
Volume 11, Number 2; Neville K. Meaney, A Proposition of the Highest
International Importance, also: Alfred Deakin's Pacific Agreement
Proposal and its Significance for Australian Imperial Relations, Journal
of Commonwealth Political Studies, Volume V; Meaney, Australia's
Foreign Policy: History and Myth, Australian Outlook, Volume
25, Number 2; I.H. Nash, Australia and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance,
Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume IX, Number 2;
E.L. Piesse, Japan and Australia, Foreign Affairs, Volume
IV, Number 3; Hugo Wolfsohn's The Evolution of Australia in World
Affairs, Australian Outlook, Volume 7, Number I, is
remarkable for its wilful refusal to acknowledge even the existence of
Japan.
3. Humphrey
McQueen. A Race Apart, Arena, No. 19.
4. S.
Encel, Equality and Authority (Melbourne, 1970); K.S. Inglis. The
Anzac Tradition, Meanjin, Volume XXIV, Number 1; and Geoffrey
Serle's doggedly romantic response in the following issue.
5. Robin
Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales (Melbourne, 1963); J.
Hagan, Printers and Politics (Canberra, 1966); N.B. Nairn, The
Role of the Trades and Labour Council in New South Wales 1871-1891,
Jean E. O'Connor's and June Phillipp's discussion of 1890-A Turning
Point in Labour History are all in Historical Studies, Selected
Articles, Second Series (Melbourne, 1968).
6. See
Terry Irving's contribution to the present volume for the distinction
between "radicalism" and "socialism". Also R.N.
Rosencrance, The Radical Tradition in Australia: An Interpretation, Review
of Politics, Volume 22. Number 1.
7. D.J.
Murphy, The Establishment of State Enterprises in Queensland,
1915-1918, Labour History, Number 14; R.S. Parker, Public
Enterprise in New South Wales, Australian Journal of Politics and
History, Volume IV, Number 2; J.R. Robertson, The Foundations of
State Socialism in Western Australia: 1911-1916, Historical
Studies, Volume 10, Number 89; W.J. Waters, Labor, Socialism and
World War II, Labour History, Number 16.
8. Humphrey
McQueen, Labor versus the Unions, Arena, No. 20.
9.
M. Dixson, The Timber Strike of 1929, Historical Studies,
Volume 10, Number 40; A.A. Morrison, Militant Labour in Queensland,
1912-1927, Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and
Proceedings, Volume 38, Part V.
First published in The Australian New
Left: Critical Essays and Strategy, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1970
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