Letter

On Australian Imperialism and Labor Reformism

13 July 2009

Dear Comrades,

I appreciated your recent article “Recession Australia: Unemployment, Racism, Militarism” (ASp No. 205, Winter 2009), particularly the prominence given to China, as well as the polemic against protectionism. On two points I think it could have been better.

First, the article declares that the Laborite trade-union bureaucracy “is historically based on a thin layer of privileged workers who are bought off by crumbs obtained from the profits from Australian imperialist exploitation abroad.” I believe that this statement is not right. The Australian bourgeoisie has never lacked the appetite or ruthlessness for such imperialist rapacity; but for most of its history it has lacked the opportunity. I don’t think that the Australian capitalists significantly expanded their direct investment in and exploitation of other countries until relatively late in the twentieth century. Yet there was a trade-union bureaucracy, and reformist labor party, long before.

Instead, the Australian labor aristocracy, and the union bureaucracy based on it, developed on the basis of campaigning successfully to drive out and keep out non-white workers, and for protectionist barriers and state subsidies to foster industrial development by the Australian bourgeoisie in Australia. Thus, “White Australia” and protectionism were, and remain, two of the three essential underpinnings of Australian labor reformism and the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The third leg was integration into the capitalist state and subordination of the workers to it. Together these compose the virulent Laborite expression of Australian nationalism which has always crippled the Australian workers, tying them to their class enemies and setting them against their working-class comrades of other nations and ethnicities.

For its first four decades or so, Australia was a settler-colonial outpost. Later, the ruling class accumulated wealth from the export of agricultural products and minerals, overwhelmingly back to England. In this way, they received indirectly the benefit of participating in the British Empire’s colonial loot and dominant imperialist position.

As a small European enclave scattered thinly across a whole continent in the midst of Asia, capitalist Australia required the protection of the Royal Navy. Britain was more important to Australia than vice versa; hence the continual anxiety of the colonials. For this reason, the Australian capitalists loyally supplied cannon fodder for the Empire’s wars, from the Sudan to the Boer War in South Africa to World War I, often despite popular discontent at home. At no time did Australian capital have anything like the capacity to compete with the big powers (England, France, Germany, the U.S., the Dutch, and later Japan) in the division of the spoils in Asia and the Pacific. Hence its perennial role as a (very) junior partner of the big Anglo-Saxon plunderers.

To be sure, in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century the Colonial Sugar Refining company (now CSR Limited) monopolized Fijian sugar production using indentured workers from South Asia, and Australia got its very own colony, Papua New Guinea, as a result of World War I. However, I don’t think the Fijian operation came to much compared to Australia’s own extractive and agricultural industries. And Papua New Guinea did not develop prospects for major profits until the 1960s or so, when mining opened up. Before then, Australia put in little infrastructure and ran a grotesquely racist, paternalistic colonial regime. (It might have been worth mentioning Papua New Guinea, a now formally “independent” classic neo-colony—where the head of state is still the queen of England!—as one of the victims of Australian jackal imperialism.)

Australian manufacturing developed significantly to supply the home market when British imports were hit by World War I, bringing into being a modern urban proletariat. After World War II the ruling class for the most part did not export capital to super-exploit labor elsewhere. Faced with a labor shortage, it imported millions of immigrants recruited from anywhere not black or Asian, with a preference for the whitest—first the British Isles and northern Europe, then southern Europe, the Balkans and finally Turkey and the Near East. (If I remember rightly, in the early 70s they got so desperate as to start recruiting in the Philippines, until the economic crisis of 1974 drove unemployment up to the scandalous level of two percent.)

While the ALP formally dropped its “White Australia” clause (in the late 1960s, if I recall correctly), and Australia has since admitted significant numbers of Asians (beginning as a favor for U.S. imperialism with the Vietnamese “boat people” after the imperialists lost and the Vietnamese Revolution won), the underlying conditions of Australian capitalism remain, and Labor chauvinism remains along with them. Today “White Australia” takes the form of anti-immigrant bigotry and brutal repression of asylum-seekers, by Liberal and Labor governments alike.

Secondly, I thought the Soviet Union got too short shrift. The article’s description of the rise of the U.S.-Australian imperialist alliance gives the Soviet Union only a passing mention. It is important to point out, as the article does, the Australian rulers’ “fear of the spectre of social revolutions in Asia, particularly after the victory of Mao’s Red Army in China in 1949.” But the fundamental target of the Cold War, and the alliance, was not China but the Soviet Union.

The existence and power of the Soviet Union was a precondition for the creation of the People’s Republic of China, a deformed workers state qualitatively similar to the product of the degeneration of the October Revolution. The Stalinist-ruled USSR provided not only a model for the Maoist CCP, but also a critical measure of military protection. It was the Soviet bomb that ultimately prevented the U.S. from implementing MacArthur’s plans for nuking China during the Korean War.

When the decline of British imperialism suddenly confronted Australia’s rulers with the need for a new protector, the Australian bourgeoisie had to embrace the strategic concerns of their new sponsor as they had the Empire’s. And the Australian bourgeoisie went in boots and all. Menzies’ Cold War witchhunt largely failed to purge the labor movement of reds. But the ALP suffered a split by an anti-Communist operation.

Later, when Queens Counsel Gough Whitlam became ALP prime minister, he sought to modernize Menzies-era troglodyte Australian capitalism, including more “independent” moves to engage in Asia. This meant openings toward China, which not accidentally coincided with the Nixon-Mao counterrevolutionary anti-Soviet alliance. But Washington and the CIA were not appreciative, blinded by the ALP’s opposition to the war in Vietnam (after all, this was just the Australian version of the growing desire by key sections of the U.S. rulers to cut their losses there), and no doubt did what they could to facilitate Whitlam’s ouster. Later Labor governments under Bob Hawke, the labor lawyer who ran the Australian Council of Trade Unions during Whitlam’s tenure, and then Paul Keating, made clear that the ALP’s administration of capitalism was thoroughly compatible with stout service in Washington’s drive to crush the Soviet Union, as well as in U.S. imperialism’s subsequent “new world order.”

I’m not arguing that the article had to have a whole section on the Russian question, which is dealt with in the NATO article elsewhere in the issue. But it deserves a little more attention than it got. In particular, it is odd to speak of the critical U.S. imperialist military bases in Australia without mentioning that their principal target was the Soviet Union. Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North-West Cape were key to the U.S.’ nuclear targeting of the USSR, and key parts of the military buildup that undermined the USSR and hastened its collapse.

Our point about China is only strengthened by noting that, with the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR, the U.S. imperialist juggernaut turned toward China (a stark condemnation of the Beijing Stalinists and their treacherous alliance with U.S. imperialism). The nuclear missile subs were re-deployed from the Atlantic to the Pacific (under Democrat Clinton), the MIRVed missile warheads were re-targeted, and so too, we may be sure, were the Pentagon’s Australian bases.

Lastly, in this connection, I thought it would be very useful to put forward explicitly the Russian Revolution as a model for the Australian proletariat, rather than mentioning it only in reference to its counterrevolutionary overthrow. The Russian Revolution brought out the best in the Australian working class. It brought genuine internationalism to the Australian labor movement, finding a base most naturally among the maritime unions, the Wharfies and Seamen, and continuing to find occasional expression, even if deformed, following the Communist Party of Australia’s Stalinization and descent into class collaboration. The capitalists, the ALP misleaders and “White Australia” offer only depression, war and ruin. The Australian working class has a decent future only as part of communist Asia.

Comradely,

Dave Reynolds

ASp replies: We thank Dave for his incisive letter and for pointing out the incorrect assertion regarding the historical basis of the Australian Laborite trade-union bureaucracy contained in our article. For more on the origins of the ALP and Labor reformism, as well as a revolutionary internationalist perspective to sweep away the jackal Australian imperialists through workers revolution, we refer readers to For a Workers Republic of Australia, Part of a Socialist Asia! (1998), program of the Spartacist League of Australia. We also concur with his sharp points on the critical import of the Soviet Union and the “Russian Question” more generally. This is particularly so in this post-Soviet period where more politically advanced workers generally do not identify with the liberating goals of communism.

Dave is dead right in stating that “White Australia” and protectionism along with integration into the capitalist state, and the subordination of the workers to it, is “the virulent Laborite expression of Australian nationalism which has always crippled the Australian workers, tying them to their class enemies.” Today’s servile Laborite trade-union bureaucracy repeatedly acts to divert workers’ struggles into reliance on the capitalist state and its parliament. In 2006/2007 they channelled workers’ anger at the Liberal/National Coalition government’s reactionary union-busting WorkChoices legislation away from classstruggle and into a nationalist campaign that pushed reliance on the courts, especially defence of arbitration, and above all the election of a Labor government in the 2007 federal elections (in the process pouring millions of dollars of workers’ union dues into the Labor Party’s election campaign). Once elected the ALP began carrying out attacks against working people and the oppressed on behalf of the ruling class as it said it would.

Today, ACTU tops such as Jeff Lawrence enthusiastically support Rudd/Gillard’s anti-union legislation, which goes under the Orwellian title of the “Fair Work Act.” This legislation strengthens arbitration and maintains a ban on all but the narrowest strike actions. In February, responding to legal action by the ALP government’s witchhunting Australian Building and Construction Commission, the federal court imposed fines in excess of $1.3 million against unions for picketing at the West Gate Bridge construction site in Melbourne last year. Far from mobilising for the necessary class-struggle fight to defend the unions against the bosses’ attacks, many union tops have found energy and purpose in backing Rudd’s nationalist and racist “war on terror” state repression. From right-wing AWU honcho Paul Howes to the so-called “left” construction and maritime union tops, the Labor-loyal union misleaders push protectionist poison and feed into racist anti-immigrant hysteria under the guise of defending “local jobs” or supporting the Labor government’s reactionary “border security” measures (see “Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!” ASp No. 207, Summer 2009/10).

The ALP is what Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin termed a bourgeois workers party, thoroughly bourgeois in its program and outlook while based on the trade unions. In order for the working class to become not just a class in itself but a class for itself, conscious of its historic role in sweeping away capitalism, it is necessary to shatter the chains of Laborism. An internationalist revolutionary workers party will be built through a political struggle to break the working-class base of the ALP from the nationalism and loyalty to the capitalist state purveyed by its leadership. This will centrally be through a fight to replace the hidebound Laborite union misleaders with a class-struggle revolutionary leadership.

We look to the experience of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party which led the Russian Revolution of 1917. Mobilising the working class in political independence from all wings of the capitalist exploiters, a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party will stand as a tribune of the people. Against this deeply male chauvinist society, it will champion the fight for women’s emancipation and stand in unremitting defence of Aboriginal peoples whose deep oppression goes to the very foundation of White Australia capitalism. A Leninist-Trotskyist party will fight to unite the struggles of the Australian working class with those of its class brothers and sisters throughout the region. This is integral to the fight of the multiracial working class to overturn virulently racist Australian capitalism. For a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia!