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The timeless history of Jim McIlroy and the Democratic
Socialist Perspective
A review of The
Origins of the Australian Labor Party, by Jim McIlroy
By Bob Gould
The genial Jim McIlroy gives the obligatory historical lecture at DSP
Christmas/New Year gatherings. This pamphlet is the lecture he gave
last year. I don't like being too hard on McIlroy, as he's a pleasant
enough bloke, unlike some others in the DSP leadership, but his
historical lectures and pamphlets have become doggedly and predictably
routine. They contain only a certain amount of history and the real
point of these historical pamphlets is to reassert DSP dogma about the
Labor Party.
In this pamphlet, the DSP dogma comes at the end, in 24 points, most of
which don't depend at all on the limited amount of historical material
in the pamphlet.
This pamphlet works over essentially the same material as McIlroy's
previous Christmas lecture, Australia's First Socialists. Like all
current DSP history lectures, the whole history of the Australian
workers movement is reduced to a simple, timeless proposition about the
need to build the revolutionary party in all places and at all times.
In reality, the historical material is entirely secondary, and is
superfluous to the DSP's timeless theme about Laborism.
McIlroy and DSP Australian labour movement historiography have a lot in
common these days with Stuart McIntyre's right-wing Social Democratic
historiography. The McIlroy-DSP school share with McIntyre a total
neglect of all the instances of robust upsurges and centrism that from
time to time have reasserted or revived the Labor Party's influence
among the working class and the masses.
McIlroy's version is becoming farcical in this respect. This pamphlet's
narrative, like Australia's First Socialists, doesn't get much further
than 1914. Rather than reworking the same story about the very early
years, it would be interesting for the DSP and McIlroy to give some
account of the turbulent upheavals that took place subsequent to 1914.
McIlroy's first pamphlet, The Red North, ostensibly about the Communist
Party in north Queensland had the same defect, and my response to that
was to give comprehensive description and overview of the whole labour
movement in Queensland -- its very low lows and its reasonably high
highs, because the evolution of the labour movement in Queensland is a
useful experimental model for the country as a whole.
The reason the DSP historigraphy doesn't go further than the early
period is obvious. Rather than being the outright, simple tool of the
ruling class as the DSP's post-1984 schema would have it, the real
history of the labour movement contains the sharpest contradictions and
a number of major splits, in which the impulse from the base for a more
radical labour movement predominated.
McIlroy's historical approach is evolving into stark intellectual
dishonesty. This is particularly bizarre considering that there are
several narratives of the evolution of the Australian labour movement,
expressed at the mass political level in the ALP.
A useful and comprehensive summary account of these developments is
Peter Conrick's little booklet, a compilation of articles from the
early editions of Direct Action, which has long been out of print but
which is available on Ozleft and has attracted a steady stream of
visits, which suggests there is very considerable interest in labour
movement history that takes account of the movement's contradictions.
If McIlroy and the modern DSP were intellectually serious, but heavily
pressed for time, as they claim, perhaps they could use Conrick's
material about the subsequent period, rather than ignoring it (as
McIntyre largely does, in his Social Democratic way).
Despite Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher's reactionary statement in
1914 about supporting Britain's imperialist war "to the last man and
the last shilling", the whole labour movement, including the ALP,
revolted against conscription in 1916-17 and expelled the first
generation of reactionary Labor leaders that shifted to the right to
support conscription.
Those events don't fit very well with the DSP's ahistorical schema that
the mass political labour movement is some kind of conspiratorial
outfit acting at all times as the second party of capitalism.
In contradistinction to the DSP's simple-minded conspiracy view of the
Labor Party as a deliberate and conscious second party of capitalism,
the real historical narrative from 1915 on is quite different. It's a
story of a contradictory mass workers' organisation in constant crisis
because of the conflict between the ranks and the leadership, and for
other reasons.
Simple second parties of capitalism are unlikely to split over an issue
such as conscription.
The conscription split led directly to the adoption of the socialist
objective and to a general radicalisation of the labour movement
nationwide for the next 25 years.
There were many mistakes and political crises in the labour movement in
the depression of the 1930s, and certainly a revolutionary socialist
leadership was lacking. The Communist Party was saddled with the
crackpot Third Period schema, not unlike the DSP's current political
line, and the centrist populism of NSW Labor premier Jack Lang had a
lot of limitations.
Nevertheless, the Labor Party as a whole expelled Joseph Lyons, who
became the Conservative prime minister at the start of the Great
Depression, E.J. Hogan the Labor premier of Victoria, and Labor Premier
Lionel Hill in South Australia.
In the 1930s, the Australian ruling class obviously didn't view the
Labor Party, and particularly the Lang forces, as a stable second party
of capitalism. All the various wings and sub-factions of the ruling
class did all they could to destroy the Labor Party in the 1930s.
Later on, it's hard to see the move of Prime Minister Ben Chifley to
nationalise the banks just after the Second World War as an action
emanating from a stable second party of capitalism.
Again, it's hard to view the action of the Labor leader Herbert Vere
Evatt of expelling the Catholic Action (Grouper) extreme right of the
party, as that of a leader of a stable second party of capitalism.
Again, it's hard to see the actions of the Labor leader Arthur Calwell
in opposing Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, and lending his
ALP political leadership to the development of a popular antiwar
movement, as the work of the leader of a stable second party of
capitalism.
Even in the recent election campaign, it's hard to see Mark Latham's
industrial policies, and his pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq, as
emanating from a stable second party of capitalism.
As we speak, the Murdoch newspapers are engaged in a tremendous
agitation to get rid of Latham, because they're obviously convinced
that his populist, Bonapartist behaviour cuts across their interests.
Murdoch would certainly like to see Labor as a stable second party of
capitalism, but the behaviour of the Murdoch press indicates that they
don't believe that's what it is.
Jim McIlroy's pamphlet is intellectually quite dishonest, because he
only discusses the early years of the party, and then at the end he
attaches his 24 points about Laborism, including the proposition that
the old Trotskyists were wrong in their view that Labor was a mass
workers' party with a reactionary leadership.
McIlroy just baldly asserts these 24 points without any serious attempt
to locate them in the history of the Labor Party after about 1915, and
before the Hawke-Keating era of the 1980s and early 1990s.
McIlroy twists and distorts Lenin, parroting Doug Lorimer, trying to
make the facts fit the second party of capitalism schema. You can only
do this intellectually shoddy job if you ignore Left Wing Communism and
Trotsky's interventions, backed by Lenin, on the united front and
tactics at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern.
Clearly Lenin and Trotsky viewed the Social Democratic parties,
particularly the British and Australian labour parties, as
bureaucracies in the labour movement to be fought by the tactic of the
united front and other, and more direct tactics.
Several of the first four congresses of the Comintern spent quite a bit
of time and effort elaborating tactics towards the mass Social
Democratic parties for the small Communist forces.
While Lenin located the shift to the right of many Social Democratic
parties in Europe in the development of a labour aristocracy, he never
elaborated a schema making them "second parties of capitalism", in
which it was illegitimate for socialists to engage in activity.
Rather, Lenin and Trotsky elaborated the tactic of the united front,
and recommended that the Marxists in the small Communist parties in
English-speaking countries should campaign for affiliation to the
labour parties and try to sharpen the conflict within them between the
rank and file and the conservative leaderships.
The Communist parties in England and Australia engaged in fraction work
in the labour parties, clearly under the guidance of the Comintern.
The Trotskyists in English-speaking countries who developed the entry
tactic in labour parties from the 1930s to the 1950s were not doing
something un-Leninist, as McIlroy, Lorimer and the DSP would have it.
They were actually acting in the spirit of the tactics adopted at the
first four congresses of the Comintern.
The schema about the Labor Party being the totally entrenched second
party of capitalism is a unique Australian dogma invented by the DSP at
the initiative of Jim Percy and transmitted through his red professors
in 1985.
This switch to a new theoretical formulation was driven by a
conjunctural opportunity perceived by the late Jim Percy, in the growth
of the Nuclear Disarmament Party. This view suited the needs of the DSP
as a self-important independent sect, and that has led to this
formulation being frozen in aspic ever since.
It's also worth remembering that at roughly the same time the DSP
called for preferencing the Democrats over Labor on the grounds that
there was movement in the Democrats and they were perceived to be to
the left of Labor. In making that decision the DSP gave more weight to
the Democrats' overt public political positions, and to Jim Percy's
perception of the Democrats' trajectory of movement, than to the
working class trade union base of the Labor Party.
In pursuing this shibboleth the DSP leadership has taken up with great
gusto Lenin's half-developed and never entirely clarified views on the
aristocracy of labour in advanced capitalist countries. McIlroy and the
DSP use this conception of Lenin in a most peculiar way.
At one point in their analysis, they imply (or Peter Boyle implies, to
be more specific) that the whole of the working class in the advanced
capitalist countries form part of the labour aristocracy because of the
imperialist role of the advanced capitalist countries in relation to
the Third World.
A bit of sleight of hand is then used to associate the origins of Labor
with this view of the whole working class as the aristocracy of labour
in Australia.
The working out of this sleight of hand becomes a bit complicated, and
almost incoherent, for the DSP. Of late the DSP has latched on to some
early formulations of Humphrey McQueen, which imply that there was some
kind of large socialist trade union and working class movement in
contradistinction to the Laborist trade union and working class
movement in the early years.
This is a kind of myth of the golden past and any careful reading of
the historical works of Ian Turner, Paul Bongiorno and others actually
demonstrate the way all of the strands of the early labour movement
were intertwined. The distinctions between the various working class
and trade union movements were never as clear as McQueen's early
formulation suggested. In fact McQueen later dropped this version of
his early work, only to have it taken up in recent times by the DSP,
which is a kind of intellectual curiosity.
The DSP currently tries to give some intellectual reinforcement to its
strange view of Laborism by making extensive rhetorical use of the
aristocracy of labour idea as the source of Laborism.
The difficulty with that is obvious. The trade union militant current
to which the DSP points as a kind of wave of the future for the working
class movement, located mainly in Victoria, is made up largely of trade
unions that, according to the DSP schema, are located in the
aristocracy of labour. Even worse, the militant unions in Victoria are
all solidly entrenched in the Labor Party.
One of the paradoxes from the point of view of the DSP is that the
unions that have fought hard in defence of Craig Johnson, for instance,
are blue collar unions that are affiliated to the Labor Party and well
entrenched in it. The unions in Victoria that don't take up the call to
defend Craig Johnson include the teachers, public servants, etc, which
are traditionally not so deeply involved in Labor Party politics.
That's a rather brutal paradox for the DSP.
All four prominent trade union leaders who spoke at the recent rally in
defence of Craig Johnson: Michele O'Neil of the textile union, Martin
Kingham of the CFMEU, Steve Dargavel of Workers First in the AMWU and
Kevin Bracken of the maritime union are all prominent figures in the
Victorian Labor Party left.
The paradox of the DSP's settled and persistent sectarianism towards
Labor, which his given a kind of intellectual gloss by McIlroy's 24
points, is how similar it is to the Third Period of Australian
Stalinism, which actually happened twice, between 1928 and 1933 and
between 1948 and 1951.
The CPA recovered from the Third Period disease rather rapidly in
historical terms, although it committed many other bizarre political
errors dictated by the politics of high Stalinism at other times.
Nevertheless, for most of its political life, the CPA tried to come to
terms with, and find strategic hinges into the obvious fact of
Australian working class political life: the grip of Laborism on the
masses.
The early Australian Trotskyists, driven in part by the realism
dictated by their small numbers, tried to elaborate tactics to give
themselves an audience in the labour movement and the working class.
The DSP's 20-year Third Period strategy since 1984 is some kind of
record in the Australian left, and a very negative one. In the time
since it adopted its new formulation and the belligerent anti-Labor
hostility and rhetoric that flows from it, a number of the DSP's
organisational rivals, such as the CPA and the SLL, have disappeared. A
new mass centrist party, the Greens, that gets 7-10 per cent of the
vote to the left of Labor has emerged in this period, Laborism's
hegemony over the working class and the Labor-trade union continuum is
still intact, but the DSP is now weaker than it was in 1984, when it
first adopted this intellectual novelty and the sectarian tactics that
flow from it.
The big strategic task facing Marxists (who are a tiny group) is still
the one that has confronted them for many years: how to elaborate
tactics that will get socialists an audience in society at large. To
get such an audience, one of the major questions is how to combine
political independence with a strategic orientation towards the
supporters and adherents of the Labor-trade union continuum and the
small mass party to the left of Labor, the Greens.
A belligerent, sectarian Third Period posture presenting, in the short
term, the tiny forces of the Marxists as some global alternative force
to Labor and the Greens is a strategic absurdity in current conditions.
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