PARTISAN!

The NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) was the most militant union in Australian labour history. Under disciplined rank-and-file leadership, they gained widespread popular support for their boycotts of socially and environmentally harmful construction projects, which would come to known as the ‘Green Bans’. Brunhilda Olding recounts the background behind the BLF’s rise and fall.

The current assault on the CFMEU by the Albanese government has drawn much attention to the legacy and political actions of the predecessor to the CFMEU, the Builders-Labourers Federation (BLF). While most understood today in popular memory as a union of corrupt thugs with Norm Gallagher being singled out in popular memory the BLF is perhaps one of the best examples of genuinely radical unionism in Australian history. The history of the fight inside the BLF, prior to its days as the radical union known and loved by most of the communist movement in Australia (with the exception of the League of Internationalist Communists) is as important as is understanding the political evolution and context behind the Green Bans and the Communist movement at the height of the BLF.

Indeed, in many ways the story of the Green Bans is the story of the Old and the New Left merging together. Taking forward the organisational and mass movement-based approaches of the old post-Marxist Leninist left with the more widespread focus on specific oppression of the emerging new left. But in others it is the last hurrah of the height of the Australian Communist movement. It is the last hurrah of a mass movement that was proportionally the biggest in the English-speaking world.

The Early days of the BLF

For a union that has such a radical memory the BLF in the 1940’s was a deeply conservative union more alike to the much-maligned SDA, or AWU of today than the militant radical and effective force it would later become renowned as. Indeed, compared to the Building Workers’ Industrial Union the BLF was a flat-out reactionary union, with little presence on the work site and a deeply conciliatory relationship to the Master Builders Association. Under the leadership of Fred Thomas, the union was a fundamentally conciliatory union with a rabid hatred for Communism and a total disengagement with either their members or broader social issues. During the post-war rise of militancy, the Communist Party grew in the minds of many anti-communists to the position of an existential threat. A position that was very much not warranted in either material or ideological terms. Yet that didn’t mean that the BLF under Thomas wouldn’t do all they could to fight against the Communist party. Including a 1945 NSW branch meeting passing a resolution explicitly outlining a total rejection of the CPA’s politics and outright stating that members who worked with the CPA or members in the CPA would be expelled.

It would take years of work by dedicated Communist party members already within the union to build up a genuine rank and file group. This campaign would face assaults from the union leadership who relied on physical offensives to break up the small communist forces in the union. The CPA intervention, unlike what a lot of other sects have relayed on, was based on a few members already in the union producing their own publication The Hoist. The extent of the CPA’s role in this endeavour was helping print it and enabling the education of their members leading this charge. Whilst the CPA was as they are now still wedded to the idea of a popular front government under the leadership of the ALP, this tactic of slow consciousness raising and consistent fighting is one that worked.

As the movement intervened into the union the struggle began to see more and more casualties. In South Australia the early 1950’s saw seven officials expelled for being affiliated with the Communist Party. Thomas would grow increasingly anti-communist to the point that when Doc Evatt announced his and the ALP’s opposition to the referendum that tried to ban the CPA Thomas would state to the media his desire for the BLF to rescind affiliation with the ALP. Now in an entirely unsurprising turn of events a rabid anti-communist as union leader didn’t particularly care for the members of his union which he hardly hid. Paul True noted several major examples of the extent that Thomas despised members of the union which he was elected to lead, including an immense distaste for workers who actually stood up for themselves and their rights, and the growing number of migrant workers.

This distaste for rank-and-file members created fertile ground for the Communist intervention, though at the start as with many of these projects it was mainly CPA members. But they kept working through the up and down waves that so determine union politics. Rather than simply treating it as a get rich quick scheme the CPA persevered and built connections. While the first inklings of the rank-and-file group were formed in the late 40’s the first time they ran for office was in 1958, revealing the focus on the strategy of patience and building up genuine support and influence within the union. While the Rank and File lost the blatantly stacked election, they didn’t betray their principles. Rather than try and call in the courts to force a recount the CPA influenced group held fast to the principle of class independence.

The counter-offensive that resulted was one that nearly threw the rank and file back to square zero. But they kept on fighting, and in many ways as Jack Mundey would later reflect the new Bodkin regime would be a blessing in disguise as the right of the union fractured, and the rank-and-file group gained three more years of experience organising, even as Sydney underwent a mass building boom. With buildings climbing towards the sky, for the rank-and-file organisers their work in some ways was only getting easier. This would culminate in a branch meeting which saw them force the union leadership back into their seats after an unconstitutional attempt to elect delegates to the federal council, which would kickstart the period of serious confrontation that would force the BLF as we know it today.

As the shambolic incompetence of the right-wing leadership was revealed in the courts it nearly seemed that the union would be deregistered nearly twenty years early. The fight for the BLF was being waged on two fronts: within the union, and in the courts. In a historical turn of irony, one of the lawyers involved in the case was none other than Ted Hill who would in three years go on to found the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), a group deeply tied with the history of the BLF.

By November 1961 the Communist-influenced block had been elected to the leadership of the union. It had taken over a decade of work, but the electoral result had seen them eke out a narrow victory. The next six years would see a series of major crises as the right-wing of the union movement tried to push them out and recapture the BLF, but the strong focus on building up rank-and-file groups would prove vital to keeping the new leadership in, and by 1967, the right had suffered a series of major defeats that they would never recover from while the BLF still existed.

While in some ways the history of the fight to win the BLF is a history of the CPA’s intervention into the union, it is also a history of the union movement during a period of mass economic growth, and when the political culture for communists within not just the union movement but Australian society was very different to what it is today. A period when to be a Communist wasn’t relegated to the fringes of society but a genuine mass movement.

Which in turn makes the remainder of the BLF’s history the story of the defeat of Australian Communism.

Green and Pink Bans

The discussion around the political context around the Green Bans must start with the history of the collapse of the original Communist Party of Australia at the beginning of the 1960’s. Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech would herald the beginning of a worldwide realignment in the Marxist-Leninist tradition as the fault lines between Beijing and Moscow grew greater and greater.

In Australia this would culminate in the formation of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) by Ted Hill and his allies in 1964. A strong supporter of the Chinese line, the CPA (ML) would draw many of the most militant unionists in Victoria to their (often hidden) banner. Most prominently amongst them would be none other than one Norm Gallagher. Meanwhile the rump CPA would continue their evolution towards Eurocommunism. A drift that would culminate in the 1971 split of the most adamant Marxist-Leninists into the Socialist Party of Australia (who today bear the lofty title of the CPA), the SPA would take with them the BWIU, and many of the smaller craft and trade unions.

The new Eurocommunist tradition that was left was in many ways the natural evolution of the Stalinist popular front. Yet in some ways the BLF would buck the trend and remain closer to a more militantly proletarian force.

Meredith Burgman argues that a major part of why the BLF took up the cause of Green Bans was due to the position that Labourers held in tearing down housing and building to raise offices during a mass housing shortage. This only extended the fundamental alienation that these workers had between their labour and the social needs of society. From this alienation and a prior history of refusing to tear down buildings where residents still lived would evolve into the Green Bans of memory today.

Fundamentally the Green bans reflected the CPA’s political turn into leftism, yet they also demonstrate the power of militant proletarian forces when they place their labour in the hands of social need rather than the anarchy of capitalist production. Whilst nowhere near what genuine socialisation of production would look like, it provides the seeds of a brief glimpse. A crucial example of this is the 1974 attempt to insert into the award that mandated that 60% of the work done in the building industry was to go into public buildings. Whilst nowhere near the social-based planning that a genuine socialised economy would operate under it provides a fascinating example of the strategies and demands used by the union beyond just the single small cases that are so famous.

The new tactics and strategies unleashed by the NSW BLF saw them famously building ties with Aboriginal Militants in Redfern, in the famous pink ban case the early Gay Liberation Movement, and of course with the Green bans the emerging environmental movement. Some might claim that this is a pioneering example of intersectionality, more accurately however, it is a representation of the fundamental nature of class struggle. Something that the BLF understood and organised around.

The capitalist counteroffensive

The first signs of the capitalist side of the offensive against the BLF in an entirely unsurprising turn came from the media. The notion of workers feeling that they had a right to determine how the city they lived in was built flew directly in the face of the capitalist media and the sensibilities of the bourgeois. Reading through Sydney newspapers of the early 1970’s paints a clear picture of capitalist disgust at the working class, and at the same a begrudging acknowledgment that these moves were popular. An acknowledgment born from fear.

Alongside this, the Master Builders Association began to agitate for the deregistration of the union. The primary role that the New South Wales branch played in the Green Bans created a split between the federal and state branches. With the MBA agitating for an assault on the broader union, the political differences between the increasingly Eurocommunist CPA and the Maoist CPA-ML provided yet more fuel to the growing internal crisis.

At the same time the New South Wales government and police forces began to launch attack after attack on the union. Including arresting union representatives on job sites. The rhetoric spouted out in parliament sounds like a lazy writer simply hit copy and paste from parliamentary debates today, or more accurately this is just the farce in which history repeats. Claims of ‘industrial anarchy’ were met with the same cry as today. The need for an industrial dictatorship to preserve investment and economic growth.

Jack Mundey put it best: ‘Because of our criticism of the Government and the way in which it has favoured so-called developers, because we have imposed environmental bans at the request of residents and other professional groups, we have caused the wrath of those powerful and vested financial interests, thus the attacks on this union.’

Whilst a theoretical explanation drawing on the rate of profit and so on is entirely possible, the simple explanation is that the NSW BLF was increasingly forming a counter-pole to the ideals of Labour peace that the Australian state has been built off. The greatest victory of Laborism in Australia was the formation of the Arbitration Courts a few years after Federation, no other victory has reinforced the power of the capitalist state quite like the first one.

With several different arenas of assault emerging the NSW BLF was increasingly on the back foot in a strategic sense. Now if it had been more than just the state section of one union (a state section that was engaged in a political brawl with the federal leadership) they would have had a chance. But the collapse of the CPA had shattered working class unity. Neither the SPA dominated unions, nor the CPA-ML controlled federal leadership would side with Mundey.

From 1973 the NSW BLF would be constantly on the back foot with internal assaults from above from Gallagher, and the government moving in on them, the NSW leadership was forced to dissolve their own branch in March 1975.

What road forward?

A lot of the left during the current offensive against the CFMEU has banged the drum of calling on the heritage of the BLF. A worthy comparison in some ways, but one turn of phrase keeps on turning up. ‘Red Union’ is a label with many implications. Implications that could correctly be applied to the BLF.

But not to the CFMEU. Whilst there are revolutionaries within the union, they have nowhere near the leadership that the CPA, and CPA-ML used to have. To call the CFMEU a red union is a total misunderstanding of both the political and economic roles that it plays in Australian society. The CFMEU is firmly wedded to the Laborist political system that the ALP once dominated. But as neoliberalism solidified its hold over the Australian state apparatus, the party began to take on an increasingly different role. The ALP is the party that can be trusted to take action against the unions and the working class by capital for the simple reason that it is the party to which the union leadership is firmly wedded to.

Any attempt to remerge the socialist and workers movements will require the active intervention of socialists into the workers movement. Luckily there is a very clear historical example of how Communists can effectively intervene into unions.