Simon Blow, Online
A spectre is haunting the Australian left, the spectre of a history that never occurred. Among many Australian leftists, there exists a romanticised vision of the old union movement: a radical force that resisted the managers of capitalism and the dispossession on which Australian capitalism was built. But this view of history exists largely in their own minds.
A stark example of this tradition is found within the Australian Communist Party’s the Militant Monthly (Kinda Like That – The Modern Union Movement: A Circus Lion). ACP’s Dan Kelly, in an attempt to “unite the abstract with the relatable” uses an extended and painful metaphor reserved for the high school classroom. The unions were, in some not so distant past a “powerful beast” that was “feared by those who were its rightful prey”, the capitalists, politicians and thugs of settler-colonialism.
This view is entirely ignorant of the real record of the Australian workers movement, a record steeped in ethno-nationalism, racial exclusion and class collaboration. While i do not claim to be an authority of the exact origins of this myth-making, one influence is obvious: the nationalist laborism of Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend. Ward’s egalitarian bushman has been traded in for a caged circus lion, but the function is the same. To romanticise an otherwise problematic past.
Kelly claims that colonialism was haunted by the union movement. Unfortunately for this story, history tells a different tale. The Australian unions, even before the formation of the Labor Party were staunch defenders of the White Australia Policy, a policy that much like the racism of Australian nationalism grew out of the sectional interests of the workers movement at the time. Both the ALP and its political opponents were united on one issue, Australia must remain white. In economistic terms, this meant restricting pacific and Asian labour from Australia’s labour market, keeping the wages of white workers high, and in social, race-patriotic terms of believing that Australia was the only bastion of European “civilisation” in the pacific.
Far from being a threat to capital, the labour movement was instrumental in shaping the distinct trajectory of Australian capitalism. Through the genocide and dispossesion of the indigenous people, an outpost of British capitalism was established, unencumbered by the fetters of prior social orders. The labour movement, propelled by a chronic labour shortage and the prosperity of the gold rush, quickly developed a highly sectional, petit-bourgeois character. By the time industrial manufacturing came to dominate production, the labour movement had become dominated by Laborism, a political current committed to nationalism, state-loyalism and gradual reformism.
The early history of the Australian workers’ and democratic movement was notably passive by international standards. Australia in the 19th and early 20th century saw no great political strife. The greatest political disturbance of the era, the Eureka Stockade, was a minor skirmish in global terms. Had it occurred in Paris instead of Ballarat, it would have been forgotten the following week. This passivity was reflected in its complete aversion to the strike. Unions were “united to relieve, not combined to injure.” When strikes did occur, they were broken with easy by volunteer labour, a problem compounded by unions’ disdain for the unemployed, who were treated as a threat rather than as allies. The legacy of the strikes would be found within internal ALP propaganda to remind workers the fallibility of the strike.
The radicalism of the early Australian union movement can be summed up in the closing section of the NSW labor party 1897 manifesto
”If you want a free country for free men and women, with justice for all and work for all VOTE STRAIGHT for the Labor Ten and A WHITE AUSTRALIA, NO UPPER HOUSE, ADULT SUFFRAGE, THE REFERENDUM.”
It is important to state that the “golden ages” of union militantly in Australia were the exception to the rule. The upsurge of militant unionism in the 60s and 70s with the Builders Labourers Federations green bans, pink bans and anti-war strikes is remembered so fondly because it was so atypical. Even in these moments the union leadership acted to contain militancy and preferred state-arbitration, a system established in the early 20th century with union rank and file support. A system designed to replace class conflict with state-managed “industrial harmony”. Though in practice this meant binding the unions to the state.
Kelly’s lament for the chained lion treats the decline of union militancy as a tragic fall from grace. In reality, the bureaucratic corporatism of today’s union leadership is not a betrayal of a once radical tradition, it is the logical outcome of laborism. The partnership with the Hawke government during the price and incomes accord was not the beginning of the movement’s co-option into assistant-managers for capitalism. It was the latest expression of its long standing strategy of state-loyalism.
The most pressing issue for the workers movement is not that unions have forgotten their history, or that the current crisis is one of leadership. The crisis that marks our era is one of organisation. From their inception, the unions have birthed and ever since been bound to Laborism, shaped by sectionalism, nationalism and state-localism. The union movement was a lion with powerful jaws and razor sharp claws, but its prey was immigrant labour, not capitalism. This is no degeneration but the logical outcome of their historical role. Breaking this grip relies on more than nostalgia, it demands the creation of a political organisation, armed with a programme for workers power, that can unite struggles across the movement and confront the capitalist state and the union bureaucracy, this organisation is the communist party. Without the party the unions will remain what they always have been.
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