Australia's First Socialists:
A critical review
Australia's First Socialists
Resistance Books, Sydney, 2003, $5.95
By Bob Gould
This little 55-page pamphlet is nicely designed and produced
by the
friendly radical book printer across the road from my shop, who prints
all the books for the DSP, and I imagine gives them a pretty reasonable
price. He has developed into a very tasteful book printer.
This pamphlet is part of the DSP's energetic publishing
program,
which I like because it makes many useful, if sometimes slightly
exotic, works available to the Australian radical public at sensible
prices. A socialist publisher bold enough to produce a comprehensive
collection of US Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon's writing as well as
the full text of Cannon's Struggle for a Proletarian Party for
an Australian audience, has to be applauded, even if you disagree a bit
with some of the political intention of the production, and even if you
discount the Doug Lorimer introductions for their sometimes mistaken
politics.
My information is that these books and pamphlets are produced
in
sensible print runs of between 800 and 1500. Taken as a whole, it's a
bold publishing venture and I try to keep a range of these books and
pamphlets available in my shop. It's a kind of agitational socialist
publishing that no one else does much any more, at least not in
Australia, and the fact that the DSP engages seriously in this kind of
socialist publishing softens my attitude to them a bit.
I try, as part of a personal project of keeping labour
movement and
socialist literature available in Australia, to keep a very wide range
of socialist material, labour history, Marxism, etc, often obtained as
publishers' remainders or secondhand, and the DSP's publishing activity
is a useful supplement to the range in my shop.
I'm also in the position that I know the author of the new
pamphlet,
Jim McIlroy, a bit, and I rather like him personally. I don't
particularly relish the political necessity of criticising his
scholarship and the political thrust of his pamphlet.
The content of pamphlet, like its predecessor, The Red
North, exemplifies many of the weaknesses of the DSP leadership's
approach to the history of the Australian workers movement.
Jim McIlroy is the only person in the DSP leadership who
writes on
Australian labour history these days, so he's the one I have to argue
with in this context.
McIlroy is extremely skimpy and selective in his use of
sources. He
only refers to a smallish number of books: ones that can be used to fit
the DSP's narrative about socialists and the Australian labour
movement, and he avoids a large number of others that complicate this
retrospective DSP leadership schema.
No Karl Marx "history is whole cloth" for the DSP leadership,
intellectually speaking.
As a consequence of this narrowness of sources, McIlroy does
not
even attempt to provide a bibliography at the end of the pamphlet, as
such a short bibliography would only underline the narrowness of his
research.
The pamphlet is ostensibly about the early socialists in
Australia,
but it's really a fairly thinly disguised polemic in favour of the idea
of socialists taking an ultraleft attitude to the mass labour movement,
particularly the Labor Party, and criticising those in the past who
didn't do this, which is why McIlroy leans heavily on the work of
Verity Burgmann, who has a similar standpoint.
There is no hint in Jim's pamphlet of past controversies about
approaches to Australian socialist and labour movement history,
particularly the well-known and important controversy between, on the
one hand the DSP's new ally, Humphrey McQueen, and on the other the
older generation of socialist and labour historians, Russell Ward, Ian
Turner and Robin Gollan.
It's peculiar that there's no reference to Humphrey McQueen's
rather important book, A New Britannia, which was at the centre
of this controversy, despite the fact that A New Britannia
obviously informs McIlroy's approach.
The beginnings and development of the Australian socialist
movement,
small country though Australia was, has been widely written about. In
the 1960s Henry Mayer wrote a book, published by F.W. Cheshire, the
title of which tells the early story: Marx, Engels and Australia.
The ethos of the early socialist movement is captured
extremely well in three relatively recent books: A New Australia
by Bruce Scates (Cambridge, 1997), The People's Party by Frank
Bongiorno (Melbourne University Press 1996) and John Curtin
by David Day (William Collins 2000). The book of letters from Curtin to
his wife is also of interest in this context, along with Lloyd Ross's
biography of Curtin.
There have been a number of memoirs or biographies of people
who
participated in the socialist movement that also flesh out the picture.
I Remember and The Great Bust by J.T. Lang, H.V.
Evatt's biography of NSW Premier William Holman, Billy Hughes' memoir Crusts
and Crusades and Peter Coleman's book about Adela Pankhurst and Tom
Walsh, The Wayward Suffragette (MUP 1996).
Other relevant biographies and memoirs include: These
Things Shall Be, Edgar Ross's biography of his father, Bob Ross
(Mullavan Publishing, 1988); Dawn to Dusk, Reminiscence of a Rebel,
by Ernie Lane, William Lane's long-lived socialist brother, first
published in 1939 and reprinted by Shape (Brisbane, 1993), and Frank
Farrell's important biography, Harry Holland, Militant Socialist
(P.J. O'Farrell, ANU Press, 1964).
Two other useful books are Doherty's Corner, Colleen
Burke's
biography of the Victorian poet, Marie Pitt, a member of the Victorian
Socialist Party, and the chapter by Graeme Osborne on the Victorian
Socialist Party and racism in the book, Who Are Our Enemies?
As it happens, I have almost all these books either secondhand
or as publishers' remainders at reasonable prices in my bookshop.
What emerges clearly from this substantial literature is that
there
was from the 1880s onwards a diverse socialist movement in Australia,
quite large relative to the size of the country, and that it seriously
got going in the 1890s.
From its earliest inception, it was, as it could only be, a
complex
and many-stranded kind of movement. There were some Marxist and
syndicalist influences from early on, but there were also many other
influences and currents that can reasonably be described as socialist.
The most striking aspect was the mutual interaction between all the
currents and influences.
There were often sharp conflicts, but there was also a certain
all-inclusive socialist aspect to this movement, a bit like the
atmosphere that James P. Cannon describes with nostalgia in his
pamphlet on the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs in the United States.
McIlroy's summary, judgemental, retrospective criticism of the
early
socialists is ahistorical. How could these early socialists have
developed a more modern "Leninist" approach at this early stage? Rather
than this crude drawing of "lessons" it would have been more useful to
try to recapture the vitality and dynamism of this early movement,
warts and all, with all its contradictions. This is what the books by
Paul Bongiorno, Bruce Scates and David Day do, and what makes those
books useful and important.
They give some idea of the dynamic character of the early
Australian
socialist movement, bound though it was by the circumstances of the
time.
Lenin, Trotsky and James P. Cannon did not feel obliged to
continuously draw crude "lessons" about the defects of earlier
socialists. One has only to read Trotsky's political profiles of the
figures in the European socialist movement to see this.
McIlroy would be doing something more useful if he, say, used
his
time providing the book list at the back of Ernie Lane's "From Dawn to
Dusk", which provides a flavour of this early movement. (Ernie Lane's
book list has a surprising number of titles in common with James P.
Cannon's ideal socialist book list, which Cannon reels off in one of
his letters from prison.)
The whole spirit of Lenin and Trotsky was to build on the
past,
sharply demarcating the new Marxist currents from the defects of the
past, but not imagining that it was any use judging the activities of
past socialists from the standpoint of the present.
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all, at different times, made
the
general observation about history being a spiral, and that modern
socialists stood on the backs of previous ideological developments of
humankind and civilization, negating some parts and incorporating
others.
Lenin spent a large part of the years from 1913-1916 studying
philosophy: all the traditional philosophers, and especially Hegel,
although like Marx he "stood Hegel on his head", he spent a large part
of his time in a very careful study of Hegel, as a rather reverent
student of a very great teacher, as is shown by even a cursory study of
Volume 38 of Lenin's Collected Works, Lenin's Philosophical
Notebooks.
The great revolutionary Marxists of the modern period, Lenin
and
Trotsky, stood in an altogether more careful and knowledgeable
relationship to the development of the previous socialist movement than
the DSP leadership's ideological narrative suggests.
They didn't make an absurd ticks and crosses balance sheet, as
Jim McIlroy and the other DSP leaders seem to want to do.
Lenin and Trotsky drew broad political lessons from the
contradictions, weakenesses and inadequacies of previous attempts at
socialist organisation, but they nowhere said or implied that
socialists could have developed a modern socialist project outside
space and time.
They had thoroughly assimilated Marx's general idea that
humanity
makes its own history, not in circumstances of its own choosing, but in
the circumstances with which we are presented by previous historical
developments. One has only to read Engels' book The Peasant Wars in
Germany to absorb this general point.
At one point, McIlroy says, about the IWW: "Let's imagine the
Wobblies did survive in World War I and re-emerge into the open later.
The Communist Party was in formation at that time, and came to play the
key role in Australian radical politics for the next 50 years, but
inherited a whole number of weaknesses. They weren't as sharp as the
IWW on racism, on the Labor Party, even on war. How many more workers
would have been educated about what socialism really is, and could
become, if there were some good debates between the IWW and the CP,
hopefully leading to unification and the formation of a much stronger
revolutionary organization?"
Leaving aside the point, which I'll deal with later, that a
lot of
the things McIlroy says here aren't quite accurate, this methodology is
completely un-Marxist. It deserves to be described as the DSP
leadership science fiction, alternative worlds school of "Marxist
historiography".
The "science fiction alternative worlds" approach is a
hopelessly
metaphysical way to educate socialists. Its worst feature is that it
accentuates a mad bootstrap-lifting kind of idealism in politics: the
notion that anything can be achieved by willpower and that a sober
appraisals of material circumstances and possibilities is not central
to developing a perspective.
There is in labour movement politics and history a kind of
parallel
Social Democratic science fiction alternative worlds approach. At a
labour history gathering several years ago, Graham Freudenberg
developed at considerable length the thesis that the great Labor split
in 1916 over conscription was a kind of accidental aberration, and that
the split with the Groupers in 1956 was also an accidental aberration.
He expanded on his view that the radicalizations of the labour movement
from the 1920s to the 1940s and from the 1950s to the 1970s would not
have taken place if it hadn't been for these accidental, aberrant,
splits.
Freudenberg's right-wing Social Democratic alternative
universe and
the DSP leadership's alternative universe are mirror images of each
other, and both alternative universes have little to do with Marxism.
The effect of Jim McIlroy's limited selection of sources
James P. Cannon, in his correspondence with Theodore Draper,
reprinted in "The First Ten Years of American Communism", said, in a
very well-known comment:
"Iris Kipnis' book The American Socialist Movement
1897-1912, published in 1952, gives some interesting information about
the evolution of the Socialist Party up to 1912. I assume you are
familiar with it ... "From what I have read I am inclined to be a bit
suspicious of Kipnis' objectivity. There are some telltale expressions
in the Stalinist lingo which should put one on guard. His book is
overstuffed with references. They may all be accurate, but as you know,
a history can be slanted by a selectivity of sources, as well as
outright falsification.
"In skimming through the book for the first time I was torn
between
my own unconcealed partisanship for the left wing, and my concern for
the whole truth in historical writing."
Jim McIlroy's central interest throughout this pamphlet is
clearly
the Labor Party question, but he gives no serious, amplified discussion
of the contradictions and complexities in the evolution of this issue
among early socialists.
A very large number of active socialists tried to influence
the mass
Labor Party from very early on. Sometimes they became disillusioned,
broke away and tried other tactics. One very determined breakaway was
led by Harry Holland, which persisted for a number of years running
electoral candidates against the Laborites in anger at betrayals by
Labor parliamentarians.
These breakaways didn't succeed electorally, and many of those
who
tried the independent socialist electoral tactic drifted back into the
Labor Party, often still in an oppositional and socialist way. Harry
Holland, the sharpest critic of official Laborism at the turn of the
20th century, as leader of the Socialist Labour Party, subsequently
moved to New Zealand and became one of the founders of the NZ Labour
Party, and its first parliamentary leader, while at the same time
defending the Russian Revolution.
The movements backwards and forwards about socialist tactics
towards
the Labor Party were quite complex, and usually driven by events and
circumstances, rather than purely theoretical considerations.
Even a brief mention of the literature, such as the one above,
underlines the limited nature of Jim McIlroy's account of the
Australian socialist movement. He's only really interested in what he
perceives to be the need to break with and expose Laborism, but the
actual texture of the movement raised these questions in a much more
complex way than McIlroy describes.
McIlroy, Verity Burgmann and the IWW
The largest part of McIlroy's pamphlet — about half of it — is
a bit
of a panegyric to the IWW, based on Verity Burgmann's useful, but
rather dry, book, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The IWW in
Australia
(Cambridge University Press, 1995). McIlroy neglects to recognise or
even mention Ian Turner's lively and extremely important book about the
IWW, Sydney's Burning which, based on a great deal of original
research, presented the IWW warts, contradictions, and all.
Verity Burgmann's approach is almost uncritical support for
all
aspects of the IWW's boisterous and courageous anarcho-syndicalism. She
doesn't provide much flavour of the contradictions and complexities
facing militant trade unionists influenced by anarcho-syndicalism in
their trade union activities.
Two articles available on Ozleft, by Peter Sheldon, (Job
Control for Workers Health, the 1908 Sydney Rockchoppers' Strike
and In
division is strength: unionism among Sydney labourers, 189O-191O)
supplement, and to some extent contradict, Burgmann's overview.
McIlroy slides over the fact that some of the framed-up IWW
prisoners probably did engage in arson. The evidence in the case for
this is soberly considered in Turner's very careful book, particularly
the second paperback edition, and Turner concludes that the main IWW
leaders were innocent of the charges and that even those who were
possibly "guilty" were loaded up by the police, who had little real
evidence and whose main intention was to frame the IWW leaders, which
they did fairly thoroughly and to the best of their ability, although
the frame-up was difficult, as such projects usually are.
McIlroy also ignores Frank Cain's useful book about the
suppression of the IWW by the bourgeois state, The Wobblies at War:
A History of the IWW and the Great War in Australia (Spectrum
Publications, 1993).
Again, McIlroy doesn't even mention the existence of the book,
A Short History of the Australian Labour Movement,
by E.W. Campbell (Current Books, 1943), which was the Communist Party
take on the history of the Australian workers movement, including a
detailed appraisal of the IWW.
McIlroy's approach to the IWW is hyped up, and he even says
the IWW
attitude to the Laborites was more correct than that of other
socialists and later the CPA, and he creates a sort of fantasy about
how, if the IWW hadn't collapsed, it could have argued with the new CPA
from the left. (In the extract I quoted earlier, McIlroy relies very
heavily on Burgmann's version for this view, but E.W. Campbell's
account of the events is, in my view, much more accurate.) What a
curious piece of retrospective metaphysics is this little pen picture.
In fact, the IWW did persist a bit and did argue with the CP, without
much effect.
The Socialist Labour Party in South Australia, which also had
a
syndicalist view, continued all through the 1920s, until its main
personalities, including Gil Roper, folded it up and joined the CPA.
Jim McIlroy's account of the mass upsurge against conscription
in
World War I is slightly dishonest. He pictures the conflict over
conscription almost as one between Laborism and the IWW, which is
extremely ahistorical. The conflict over conscription, as everybody
knows, culminated in a convulsive split in 1916 in the official labour
movement.
Conscription was defeated not primarily by the IWW, which was
the extreme left wing of a very large popular movement.
The IWW's energising role was extremely important, but so was
the
visceral hostility of Irish-Australian Catholics to conscription, which
was sharpened by the brutal suppression of the 1916 Easter Rising in
Ireland and the execution of its leaders. This event propelled
Archbishop Daniel Mannix into the anti-conscription battle in a big
way. What tipped the scales against conscription was the split in the
Labor Party and the presence of the big battalions of the unions and
the labour movement in the anti-conscription camp.
Conscription might not have been defeated without the
agitational
role of the IWW, but its defeat was clearly impossible without the
mobilisation of the mass official labour movement and the expulsion of
the right-wing led by Hughes, Holman and others from the Labor Party.
Jim McIlroy's version of the anti-conscription struggle is
cockeyed
and eccentric. He chops off the evidence at both ends to turn a
struggle that was the classic example of a decisive split in the
official labour movement, with the expulsion of the right wing, into a
struggle in which the left of the movement, the IWW, was the only
decisive element. Very strange history.
This approach may make the cadres of small socialist groups
feel
good when reading about those events in McIlroy's pamphlet, but the
real lesson that they won't find here is that great things are actually
achieved when the radical vanguard, in this case the IWW, interacts
with and energises the broader mass labour movement, as it did over
conscription. Socialist groups don't amount to much unless they have
influence in broader proletarian mass movements.
One aspect of the struggle to defend the framed-up IWW
prisoners
that flows from Jim's eccentric emphasis on the IWW alone, is his
neglect of the labour-movement-wide agitation for their release. Most
people in the workers movement were aware that some fringe elements of
the IWW were probably involved in incendiarism, but it was equally
clear that the IWW leaders had been framed up by the bourgeois state,
and it's to the undying credit of a very broad section of the official
labour movement that they rallied energetically in support of the
release of the IWW prisoners.
Viewed in a balanced way, historically, the release of the IWW
prisoners was a tribute to a labour-movement-wide campaign for their
release, which included the trade union ranks, many trade union
leaders, many of the ranks of the Labor Party and quite a few Labor
politicians.
The two people who figured most in the campaign for the
release of
the prisoners were Ernie Judd, the leader of the Socialist Labour
Party, a factional opponent of the IWW, and Henry Boote, the
well-entrenched Laborite socialist and editor of the Australian Workers
Union weekly newspaper, The Worker. These two men were the
heart and soul of the agitation for the release of the IWW prisoners.
They conducted the release campaign for more than four years,
and
were extraordinarily energetic and ingenious in exposing the frame-up.
This is all described at length in Sydney's Burning.
Jim McIlroy doesn't even mention the dramatic events
associated with
the agitation for the Ewing Royal Commission required to release the
IWW prisoners, which eventually resulted in their release. This is
obviously because describing these events undermines the broad nature
of the agitation in the labour movement.
In a hotly contested election in 1920, under a system of
proportional representation the NSW parliament was evenly split between
the Conservatives and Labor, and the balance of power was held by an
independent socialist from Broken Hill, Percy Brookfield, who set as
the price of his support for the Labor government that Storey, the
Labor premier, had to find a Royal Commissioner who would release the
prisoners.
There was no appropriate pro-Labor judge available in NSW, as
Jack Lang describes, in his memoir, I Remember. A pro-Labor
judge, Justice Ewing, was available in Tasmania, but the conservative
Tasmanian government wouldn't release him.
However, during the post-World-War-I economic crisis there was
a
nationwide shortage of cement. Storey made a deal with the Tasmanian
Tories to supply several shiploads of NSW cement for Justice Ewing. The
Royal Commission was held, and the prisoners were released.
Gil Roper, the one-time Socialist Labour Party leader in South
Australia, subsequently a CPA leader, later a Trotskyist and later a
Labor Party representative on Sydney City Council, wrote a
well-researched small biography of Percy Brookfield, the courageous
socialist from Broken Hill, who played the critical role in these
events. The book is Labor's Titan, which I also have in my shop
(along with Sydney's Burning).
Brookfield was killed in the prime of life while trying to
talk down
a madman with a gun at Silverton railway station in South Australia in
1921.
I have, in addition to my political objections to the DSP
leadership's ahistorical approach to the IWW, a kind of aesthetic and
literary objection. The struggle of the IWW is one of the most
interesting and colourful high points of the class struggle in
Australia. It took place, however, in a certain historical context.
I've actually written two 500-word film pitches about those
events
and the anti-conscription struggle, which I put into a film pitching
competition a couple of years ago. Removing from this story of the
Australian class struggle the contradictions that don't focus on the
DSP obsession with exposing Laborism, deprives it of lot of its punch.
The foundation of the Communist Party
McIlroy's handling of the foundation of the Communist Party is
entirely written from the point of view of trying to use history to
justify the DSP leadership's current electoral focus on exposing
Laborism.
It avoids the question that the strategic approach of the
early
Australian Communists to Laborism was produced by both domestic and
overseas influences.
The overseas influence was the direct tutelage of the
Communist
International to persuade the early Communists to adopt a united front
towards Laborism and to campaign for affiliation to the Labor Party.
The domestic context was a very considerable shift to the left in the
official labour movement as part of the general shift to the left in
society after the Russian Revolution, which was expressed at quite a
high point politically in the federal Labor Party conferences' adoption
of the Socialist Objective.
The impact of the split over conscription, the revolutionary
events
in Ireland, and the Russian Revolution, had all combined to push the
Australian labour movement, including its official parliamentary and
trade union expressions, dramatically to the left.
The NSW leftists and socialists had a negative experience to
draw
on. In 1920, after losing by one vote at an ALP conference, the left
walked out of the Labor Party in NSW with the support of the Labour
Council and the left unions, and set up a Socialist Labor Party. This
party did very badly in the subsequent state elections. It only managed
to elect one MP, Percy Brookfield from Broken Hill, and that was
because of Brookfield's enormous local popularity in a rather parochial
community that had recently experienced a number of bitter industrial
struggles, in which Brookfield had taken the lead.
The left in the NSW labour movement was fairly quick to draw
firm
conclusions from the unsuccessful results of this premature split, and
they were therefore in a favourable frame of mind to accept the
prodding from the Comintern to adopt a united front strategy towards
Laborism. This strategy wasn't some sort of aberration. It had both
international and domestic origins.
Revolutionary politics involves, in large part, the question
of
perspectives. It's vitally important to be able to discern ebbs from
flows to elaborate perspectives. Even a cursory reading of the
interventions of Lenin and Trotsky at several Comintern congresses
underlines this.
When forcefully arguing for the united front policy in the
labour
movement in a number of countries, Lenin and Trotsky stressed that the
revolutionary flood tide associated with the Russian Revolution had
already begun to ebb by the early 1920s and this dictated the
importance of a united front strategy.
The early Australian communists were pretty sensibly taking
note of
this in the early 1920s and the IWW's syndicalist hostility to Laborism
was clearly a bit out of space and time in the early 1920s.
This underlines how metaphysical McIlroy's "science fiction
alternative reality" about the IWW is in the way he applies it to the
early 1920s. The decisive removal of the right wing from the labour
movement in the conscription split laid the basis for a radical mood in
the movement, which persisted into the 1920s and 1930s, but this was
undermined by the relative economic stability of the early and mid
1920s.
(I've just read the extraordinary perspectives document
adopted by
the DSP at its recent congress, the core of which is a fantastic
misreading of the current political environment in Australia, and I can
see from this strange perspectives document how the political climate
in the DSP at the moment easily leads Jim McIlroy to neglect the ebb of
the 1920s in his analysis. After all, the 1920s is a long time ago, so
talking extravagantly about that time is a good deal easier than
putting forward a fantasised view of current reality.)
To sum up, McIlroy can only sustain his sectarian lessons from
the
early history of the socialist movement in Australia by a very
selective reading of the history.
To try to correct this selective reading, and to illuminate
this discussion we're incluing as appendixes two extracts from Sydney's
Burning, by Ian Turner, and the second edition introduction to Industrial
Labour and Politics, which covers the dispute over historical
method between Turner, Gollan and Ward on the one hand and McQueen on
the other.
A third appendix is some relevant extracts from E.W.
Campbell's History
of the Australian Labour Movement,
relating to Communists and the Labor Party in the 1920s. E.W. Campbell
was a working-class autodidact who drank a bit, but who became the
CPA's main labour historian after the departure of J.N. Rawling in 1940.
Campbell was a convinced Stalinist, but a pretty good labour
historian despite that. He later wrote a book that was a best-seller in
Australia in the 1950s and 1960s: The Sixty Families Who Own
Australia.
Eric Fry interviewed Tom Barker
about these events in 1965, and the transcript is available at on the Australian IWW website
For the DSP leadership's benefit, it's worth noting that in
1965, when
Fry interviewed Tom Barker, the former editor of Direct
Action the struggle for whose freedom sparked the upheaval in 1916,
Barker was by
then a British Labour Party councillor in a London borough. Such are
the complex twists and turns in the workers movement.
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