10.
Issues on the left
The Australian left generally welcomed the crisis of the seventies, in the firm expectation that its influence would grow.
Despite a certain ebbing of political radicalism after 1970, the left forces still maintained a considerable presence. The Victorian Socialist Left faction was a major force inside the ALP, the Communist Party had temporarily arrested its historic decline and the various groups further left were still gaining organisational strength. These currents should have been able to make sizeable advances after 1975, when so many people were questioning the society around them.
Although conventional industrial disputes had declined with the onset of recession, they were still higher than in, say, the Hawke era, while strikes over Whitlam’s dismissal and Medibank had showed workers were still capable of exceptional militancy. What’s more, socialist ideas had a considerable currency among active trade unionists. When Jeff Hyde, a Chrysler shop steward from Adelaide, visited the Latrobe Valley strikers he told the local paper quite unselfconsciously: “The working people ... could run this country far better than it is being run now.” On the face of it, conditions were favourable for the emergence of powerful new left wing currents in the working class.
The left had plausibly attributed the strength of capitalist ideas among most of the population to decades of postwar prosperity; the economic crisis, then, should have presaged a boom in socialist politics. Whitlam’s dismissal and Fraser’s rise posed the question of political power quite starkly, so that the far left did not seem far fetched when it argued that “we live in the era of socialist revolution.”
The economic slump did combine with the political events of 1975 to generate both a ferment of ideas, and an enthusiasm among large numbers of workers for a decisive confrontation with the employers and the political right. Yet after seven years of battles with Fraser, the main political beneficiaries were not the left but rather the political centre, the politicians who sought a new era of reconciliation between capital and labour.
The socialist movement, far from having grown, was in steep decline by 1982. The ALP Socialist Left had become just another factional machine, while the Communist Party had lost key union leaders such as John Halfpenny and Laurie Carmichael and was soon to discuss dissolution. Intellectuals, too, were in retreat. Academic Marxism, which had flowered briefly in the seventies, was giving way to “post-structuralism” with its hostility to systematic politics. Revolutionary Marxists had established only a small presence in the labour movement and could not hope to stem the rightward tide. So weakened was the socialist movement that when a sizeable minority of Labor supporters became disillusioned with the Hawke government in the mid-eighties, they turned not in the direction of socialism but to political currents lacking any substantial connection with the left or the working class -- to the Australian Democrats or various forms of “green” politics.
Earlier chapters have identified some reasons for this decline. Above all it flowed from the defeats suffered by organised labour and the social movements after 1975. Workers who had once been able to rely on localised industrial pressure to extract pay rises found themselves floundering in the face of generalised recession and battered by defeats. Rather than moving leftward under the impact of the crisis, their ideas drifted rightward as they lost confidence in their own strength, and were increasingly tempted to rely on bureaucratic manoeuvres and voting Labor rather than fighting the system. Movements which had once hoped to confront social and environmental problems through class struggle met a similar fate.
These setbacks, in turn, discouraged those intellectuals with an orientation to the working class or the social movements, while making it easier for academic Marxists to defect in the direction of the next intellectual fad. As for the small army of left and movement activists who had emerged from the Vietnam war era, by the end of the seventies they were showing signs of fatigue. Many had been intensely active for a decade or so, only to find that they were achieving less and less as time went on, in terms both of winning victories and of recruiting to the causes they championed.
Important as they were, however, such factors will not quite suffice as explanations for the drastic decline of the left over just seven years. On the one hand, the upheavals of 1975-78 represented a series of opportunities to reverse the pattern of defeat and decline -- but these were largely wasted. Prominent leaders of the industrial and political left bore, as we have seen, considerable responsibility for that. On the other hand, politics is not a simple reflex of social trends. Politically sophisticated people on the left were generally part of formal or informal organisations and networks, they carried on debates in specialised publications, and these structures insulated them somewhat from the pressures of the society around them. They should have managed more than a token resistance to the rightward tide. Some did, but the majority collapsed with remarkable speed into support for Labor Party policies designed to subordinate the needs of workers and oppressed people to the interests of capitalism.
This debacle was only possible because most of the left was itself infected from the start with reformism, the view that the system could be reformed from within. Its apparently radical ideas concealed considerable common ground with the dominant capitalist ideology, so it could slide without any great theoretical ruptures from a “left reformism” associated with considerable militancy to a “right reformism” which endorsed the pro-capitalist policies of the Hawke Government. There were some forces seriously committed to revolutionary socialism, and the critique in this chapter draws on their arguments, but mostly they remained marginal in practice throughout the Fraser era.
From women’s liberation to feminism
Politically, the early Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) owed much to the left. Its founders included members and ex-members of the Communist Party (for example Joyce Stevens and Zelda D’Aprano) as well as independents influenced by Marxist politics such as Anna Yeatman. The Maoists of the Worker-Student Alliance and the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party were influential in building the early WLM groups and their public actions. Initially, the movement as a whole saw itself as allied with the wider left in a struggle to fundamentally change society, as indicated by its very name, which carried echoes of Vietnam and Paris 1968.
Accordingly, left wing men were generally seen as allies. They were active within Adelaide Women’s Liberation as late as 1971, reflecting the local movement’s view that “women’s liberation is human liberation”, that men and women were both oppressed by the capitalist state and that “women’s liberation was not a feminist movement narrowly confined to the struggle for equality with men in present society.” Similarly, early issues of movement papers like Mejane and Vashti carried the odd article by male contributors.
The early movement showed a strong interest in class politics. It held one of its first national conferences in August 1971 to coincide with an ACTU conference, its members were often concerned to establish links with working class women, and as late as March 1976 an International Women’s Day speaker could say:
We live in a male-dominated society which is also a capitalist society ... Governments are there to uphold capitalists’ position and to ensure that they make continuing profits. They don’t make exceptions for women ... they divide them off in classes as they do men. If women were in power and maintained capitalism they would still be divided from each other by classes.
From the early seventies, however, two factors had begun to push the movement away from these socialist and revolutionary influences. One was the growth of the movement itself. Young women poured into it, drawn largely from the universities and from professional and other skilled occupations. Most of these saw gender as a more important issue than class, making them a suitable audience for a growing radical feminist current. While socialism remained important for some time, the radical feminists increasingly set the agenda for movement debates with their argument that all women as a sex were involved in a power struggle with men, and should put aside issues of race and class:
As the Female Liberation Movement must cut across all (male imposed) class, race and national lines, any false identification of women with privileges that are really male (such as whiteness or class etc) will be fatal to our movement.
At the same time Whitlam’s government was widening the scope for welfare activity and for bureaucratic careers, and this was the second factor. Funding for health centres and similar projects expanded, particularly during 1975, International Women’s Year. Elizabeth Reid became Whitlam’s women’s adviser. While many activists remained critical of the welfare focus and also of Reid, the seeds of ambiguity had been sown. Moreover the new welfare network provided a certain material base for the activists and thus conferred an illusion of power; one could imagine that, contrary to the warnings of socialists, the oppressed might achieve their ends through the existing state machine.
The illusions were severely shaken by the Constitutional Crisis and Fraser’s rise to power, as capital and labour mobilised their forces for struggle so that the politics of class suddenly overshadowed everything else. The WLM feared that its key accomplishments were under threat, yet found itself relatively powerless to influence the outcome. While Fraser did not dismantle the welfare network, his attacks along with the economic recession did bring home to many of the activists that their health centres and other institutions represented dependency more than power. Rather than moving away from reformism, however, a discouraged and disoriented women’s movement responded by shifting decisively to the right, in an ideological démarche that took on two main forms.
Radical feminism continued to gain ground with its view that all women could and should be united against men and their supposed system of “patriarchy” on the basis of a “female culture”. Sometimes there was rhetoric about a feminist revolution, but this perspective was always left rather vague, and beneath even the most radical pretensions lay a logic of accommodation to existing society. As the International Socialists’ Janey Stone argued in 1974, the search for a female culture seemed so vital because it “amounts to the only thing that does cut across all class, race and national lines for women”. But she pointed out that to the extent that such a culture existed it was precisely the embodiment of traditional, sexist models of femininity:
As radical feminism has grown and developed it has retreated more and more into the female role ... Articles are written attacking thought and theory as “male”. Women “suddenly” develop an interest in crafts, particularly those not exactly traditionally regarded as unsuitable for females, eg weaving or crocheting.
Related to this was radical feminism’s obsession with the personal sphere. By insisting that “the personal is political” the early WLM had made important points about the political implications of everyday life, but by the mid-seventies the terms of the argument had changed. As Joyce Stevens and others pointed out, “sections within the movement developed a tendency to ignore what they as individual women did not experience ... condemning everything outside individual women’s personal concerns as ‘male power games’ or, at best, secondary to and derivative from this individualised ‘personal’.”
Such subjectivism had an appeal to people losing confidence in the labour movement, but it could not lead to any strategy for social change. By default the activists kept drifting into piecemeal reform projects. Meanwhile, despite Fraser’s cuts, there were still various explicitly reformist avenues within or associated with the state machine. Sara Dowse had succeeded Elizabeth Reid and she stayed on under Fraser, making the Women’s Affairs Branch inside the PM’s Department the nucleus of a network of women’s policy units throughout the public service. Inevitably, such work in the bureaucracy brought new conservatising pressures.
When the government moved to establish a National Women’s Advisory Council in 1978, feminists in the working party decided the Council should not be elected. Because they feared both “damaging conflict” among women and the organisational strength of the right, they decided “it was better for the government to make the appointments, and to rely on these relatively conservative women being radicalised by prolonged exposure to the issues during consultation processes”. This was a long way from the combative spirit of the early days.
These “femocrats” were joined by numerous other careerists. Lesley Lynch reported that the 1979 Women and Law Conference had revealed a “new breed of feminist legal women”, whose talents and energy were admirable but who displayed “an unhealthy respect for the overall legal system”. Another contingent were moving into business. In the decade ending in 1978 the number of females in administrative, executive and managerial positions had risen by 18 percent and in the latter year garment entrepreneur Vera Randall became the first Bulletin-Veuve Cliquot “business woman of the year”. Such trends helped explain why one founder of Sydney Women’s Liberation told Anne Summers: “We’ve become more conservative. It is as if we had to be very extreme to discover the possibilities. Now we’ve become more realistic.”
It was the same in electoral politics, which appeared more important as the social movements declined, particularly after a swing to Labor in the 1980 elections. A 1981 seminar brought together female leaders of all the major parties ranging from Labor’s Joan Child to National Party president Shirley McKerrow, at which “ideological differences disappeared”. The story was little different out on the hustings. Take the 1980 ALP candidate for Dundas, a feminist, whose research found the electorate to be rather conservative -- so she felt obliged to present a respectable image that “would not in itself be a challenge to the lifestyle of the majority of voters in the electorate”:
Our major pamphlet featured a picture of a smiling mum in a neat skirt and jumper surrounded by three smiling children ... I acquired various items of dress to fit this image [and] became very conscious that I had created a monster and was even buying her clothes.
What good was a feminism that feared to challenge conservative lifestyles? To be sure, there were still plenty of activists wearing jeans and raising hell. But the difference in principle between militancy and moderation, let alone reform and revolution, was eroding steadily. Susan Eade noted that as early as 1976 one Canberra discussion group had decided “the old distinction between reform and revolution is obsolete and irrelevant”, and dismissed the “socialist revolution propagated by the male left as pie in the sky”. In the wake of the Constitutional Crisis the Canberra feminists had arrived at an “anarchist-reformist concept of the revolution”.
This was a fair description for the politics of much of the movement nationally -- with the added proviso that the anarchism lay mostly in the style, while reformism increasingly dominated the practical politics. Over the next couple of years most people stopped referring to liberation, and the WLM ceased holding general meetings in the capital cities around 1978.
Meanwhile socialist ideas steadily lost ground. The majority of women identifying as socialist, including many in and around the Communist Party, had made a fatal concession quite early, by trying to reconcile conflicting ideologies with an arbitrary amalgam -- calling themselves socialist-feminists, or in the case of the more theoretically inclined, marxist-feminists. The implication was that socialism was fundamentally flawed but could be fixed with a feminist admixture. In reality socialism and feminism were pointing in different directions.
The resulting ambiguities plagued the socialist-feminist journal Scarlet Woman. This publication contained valuable partial critiques of radical and reformist feminism, and the editorial collective saw race and class as important issues. But Scarlet Woman’s backers were as incapable as the radical feminists of arriving at a strategy for social change. Even attempts to establish an on-going organisation foundered in the face of basic disagreements, which wasn’t surprising given their theory was essentially a cut-and-paste affair. After years of chewing over the concept, “capitalist-patriarchy, socialist-feminism’s almost mystical beast” remained largely undefined. At the 1980 Women and Labour Conference, Pat Gowland’s attempt to provide an answer got no further than the lame conclusion: “A tentative application of a Marxist-feminist theoretical framework is possible.” So how could you work out a strategy for fighting the beast? No wonder the Scarlet Woman editors had to concede that “we have obviously felt more confident about our feminism than our socialism”.
And in fact “hyphenated” feminism was in deep decline by the early eighties. “As time goes on,” lamented Ann Curthoys, “one after another of former marxist-feminists has announced her conviction that the two theories cannot be integrated or made compatible, and that if a choice has therefore to be made it has to be for feminism.”
This choice was being made despite glaring weaknesses in feminist theory and practice. Talk of sisterhood, for example, looked rather facile given the frequent and often bitter conflicts among feminists (Scarlet Woman reported “vitriolic attacks” and sectarian battles over “the one true line”), and there were even sharper conflicts once you looked outside the movement’s own ranks. Not only were there right wing women’s groups, but the right wing forces could invade feminist territory and hi-jack feminist formulations. In 1980 a group of conservative women physically occupied the Alice Springs Women’s Centre, complaining that the Centre ignored “the very separate needs of white women”; the occupiers also mouthed “platitudes about Aboriginal autonomy”. It was not much longer before some anti-abortionists began to use the term feminism.
The hope of uniting all women was not merely utopian, it could lead to reactionary conclusions. When the Australian Social Welfare Union tried to get award coverage of NSW women’s services in 1982, they were attacked by some in the movement for compromising feminist “autonomy”. Union structures were hierarchical, said the critics, and “therefore patriarchal”. But perhaps the most outrageous and revealing episode occurred in the aftermath of a 1981 “Womyn, Patriarchy and the Future Forum”, where black participants warned the audience that racism lurked just beneath the surface in the movement. This raised a few hackles, and one Pam Stein replied as follows:
Certainly as a radical feminist I am trying to destroy black cultures -- if they keep trying to uphold the cultures of patriarchy ... I am racist to the extent that I believe there are two races -- women and men, and I hate the men who are destroying our race ... [women] should be analysing this and eliminating our murderers.
The statement was as ignorant as it was insensitive. Misled by a patriarchy theory which saw all men as oppressors, Stein thought Aboriginal women should see their men in this role, but that was nonsense. There was evidence that Aboriginal society had been free of sexism before white colonisation, and there was little doubt that sexism in modern black communities was caused by the pressures of the white society around them. Despite these pressures, the status of Aboriginal women was probably better than that of their menfolk. As Meredith Burgmann pointed out, “black women are better educated, more likely to be employed and in marginally higher status of employment than are black men”.
Aboriginal men who had to cope with racist violence, illness and malnutrition hardly qualified as oppressors by any standard, and their women understandably resented attempts by comparatively affluent white feminists to paint them as such. Thus the existing women’s movement had little allure for the many women prominent in the black movement, who repeatedly declared, as Pat O’Shane did in 1976, that “racism is the greatest problem facing them in this society”.
To their credit, numerous feminists rushed to dissociate themselves from Stein’s diatribe. Jocelyn Clarke responded with a statement that “I have no common ground with some of the other women who call themselves radical feminists.” Well said, but where did that leave the female culture and a united women’s struggle?
Though the dangers and contradictions of reformist and radical feminism were becoming obvious, that did not reduce their influence. Occasional wistful pleas for a return to some concept of liberation fell on deaf ears, and by the early eighties feminism was no longer necessarily left wing. Its academic representatives often displayed what Anna Yeatman called “the usual sort of academic snobbery towards those ... whose ideals and values are embedded in practice.” In addition to the political factors discussed above, this had a social basis which Ann Curthoys explained in an insightful passage:
As I grew older, and gained greater job security and a higher level of pay, I saw my feminist friends around me experiencing the same process. We ... had become established. We became public servants, journalists, teachers, academics, librarians, social workers and so on. We published magazines, saw the correct films, attended the correct meetings, and had consciousness-raised ourselves to think correct thoughts ... The women I’m speaking of were, then, in terms of the society they lived in, highly privileged people ... Yet how did this group, these friends of mine, see themselves? They saw themselves as oppressed, as victims, as underdogs.
To be sure, as Curthoys herself noted, teachers or librarians were still part of the working class. Oppression was a tangible reality for many of them. Yet the fact remained that numerous feminist leaders and trend-setters had gained a foothold in the capitalist system. As they did so, their theories shifted ground in subtle fashion, slipping into categories which that system could accommodate.
Nationalism: a road to the right
Nationalism is a traditional feature of Australian labour politics, usually in close alignment with reformism. The connection is logical, since both nationalism and reformism look to the existing nation state and seek to strengthen it. However in the late sixties and early seventies the Maoists of the Communist Party of Australia -- Marxist-Leninist (CPA-ML) sought to construct something resembling a revolutionary nationalism.
During a genuinely revolutionary phase in the 1920s Australian Communists had opposed patriotism, dismissing references to the “spirit of Eureka” as a “meaningless bleat”. Later on Stalin’s “people’s front” policies of the mid-thirties, designed to lure western social democrats and sections of the western bourgeoisie into alliances with the USSR, had committed the Communist Parties to various forms of nationalism. At the same time Stalin steered them towards parliamentary strategies. Still, they could resist fully embracing the patriotic-reformist logic because they had a reference point outside their own society: their first loyalty was to a foreign ruling class in the USSR (or later, China). In the postwar decades demands for “national independence” were vehicles for challenging American influence, and gained a new (though ultimately spurious) revolutionary colouration because of the examples of Vietnam and China.
Trading on the ultra-revolutionary image of the Chinese cultural revolution, the Maoists were able to serve up a potent cocktail combining national chauvinism (blaming everything on “the Yanks” or on Japan) with revolutionary slogans. They traded on a certain disquiet in both the bourgeoisie and the labour movement about the surge of foreign investment since the late sixties, and on this basis were able to recruit a layer of radical students whom they organised into the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA). WSA saw the main enemy as US imperialism but, as its name implied, still retained an orientation to class struggle.
By 1975, however, the nationalist politics were beginning to predominate. At the height of the Constitutional Crisis the Maoists tried to take the big Melbourne demonstration to the US consulate, claiming that American machinations lay behind John Kerr’s actions. Over the next few years they threw themselves into building an Australian Independence Movement (AIM), campaigning for Blinky Bill to replace Mickey Mouse as King of Melbourne’s Moomba festival and arranging for Matilda the boxing kangaroo to knock out Uncle Sam on May Day platforms. Their Independent Australian magazine promoted Australian businesses in an attempt to woo a supposedly “patriotic” section of the bourgeoisie, alongside cultural discussions attempting to revive a narrow version of the “Australian legend”. For a time the Maoists won considerable sympathy for this venture, partly because opportunist elements in the wider labour movement were also promoting nationalism in order to derail the class struggle.
Yet it was an awkward enterprise. The AIM had to promote Banjo Paterson despite his racism, and somehow blur the fact that traditional Australian nationalism had been closely linked to genocide against Aborigines as well as the “yellow peril” syndrome. In an otherwise useful book about early black resistance to colonisation, Fergus Robinson and Barry York even hypothesised that convicts and Aborigines (the “first Australian patriots”) could have made common cause against British colonialism -- though they had no evidence worth mentioning. Plus the AIM had to draw obscure distinctions between supposedly progressive Aussie rock music and the “imperialist” variety coming out of the USA -- never mind that they were largely indistinguishable or that the latter stemmed from the culture of America’s black people. The whole argument was also very narrow, because the bush ballads or celebrations of Australia’s invention of the stump-jump plough meant little to the growing section of the working class born overseas, while increasing numbers of women rejected the sexist strand in traditional Australian culture.
The hoped-for alliance with “patriotic capital”, which was supposed to compensate for this, proved elusive. It was hard to identify any significant bourgeois figures interested in forming a block with the Maoists, though at one time they had hopes for financial high-flyer Gordon Barton. More typically the Independent Australian devoted its attention to sections of small business such as small wineries or the Independent Publishers’ Association. Even these were not easy to woo, and the AIM began to drop any mention of socialism or left politics in a desperate attempt to maintain credibility with them.
Thus the Maoists along with their umbrella organisation were already on a reformist course, when the whole attempt to construct a revolutionary nationalism collapsed abruptly because the reference point outside Australia changed. In the course of the seventies Beijing tilted decisively toward the west, Mao and his successors began seeking allies amongst the western bourgeoisie, and Maoist parties like the CPA-ML came under pressure to accommodate to their own national ruling class. China’s new nemesis was the Russians, and since the new Australian leader Malcolm Fraser was stridently anti-Soviet, he became a potential ally. As the implications of this turn worked their way through CPA-ML theory, the Maoists had to make some bizarre adjustments. Even their assessment of the Constitutional Crisis had to change.
The main culprit remained US imperialism, but the reasons ascribed to Washington for dumping Whitlam subtly shifted. Originally the Maoists had cited Whitlam’s inability to control the unions and his economic nationalism. His softer line on the USSR was mentioned in passing. By 1978, in an effort to rationalise what had become an absolutely obsessive anti-Soviet line, the CPA-ML was insisting that “superpower contention” had been the main factor -- Whitlam had been dumped because he was too pro-Soviet.
Since the anti-Soviet Fraser had replaced Whitlam, this line of argument opened the door for the Maoists to align themselves with the new government, and indirectly they did so. In November 1977 they slammed the ALP for its “even-handed” attitude to the two superpowers, since “in circumstances where Soviet social-imperialism is advancing ... that unavoidably means assisting Soviet social-imperialism. Hence this Labor Party attitude menaces the independence of Australia.” To be sure, the conservatives were also lackeys of imperialism. “But where is the greater danger?” This question needn’t be answered explicitly, since they had insisted two months earlier that the Soviets were “the greatest menace to Australia”. By the late seventies the Maoists and their AIM were panic-mongering about the machinations of the Moscow Narodny Bank.
In addition to isolating them from pro-Soviet sections of the left, these formulations outraged others who knew that Fraser’s anti-Soviet rhetoric underpinned Australia’s own imperialism abroad and anti-communist attacks on the labour movement at home. Foolish attempts to link women’s liberation to “Australian independence” didn’t help. The crudity of the arguments, the downplaying of socialism and the accommodation to Fraser (plus ructions over internal Chinese politics) provoked the more left wing elements of the Australian Independence Movement to break away, and the CPA-ML lost most of its sixties recruits. The growing isolation of the Maoists left the field free for more overtly reformist forms of labour movement nationalism.
One curious case was their sometime academic fellow traveller Humphrey McQueen. McQueen’s first book had ripped into Australian nationalism but he had drifted steadily rightward over the years, and by the early eighties he was firmly on a nationalist and reformist course. His book Gone Tomorrow was a milestone in this evolution. Gone Tomorrow explored many issues with some flair, nonetheless returning repeatedly to the evils of foreign capital. McQueen looked to the more enterprising domestic capitalists to pose an alternative, launching at one point into a celebration of Rod Carnegie’s efforts to Australianise CRA, the local subsidiary of Rio Tinto Zinc, then moving along to this astonishing passage about one of our most bilious local reactionaries:
Despite Lang Hancock’s reactionary attitudes, Australia’s working people would have been much better served if he, and not foreign investors, had owned the Pilbara since his profits could be recycled through Australia thereby creating jobs; and even if he invested all of his mining profits in Asian factories which then took jobs away from Australians, our balance of payments could benefit from these repatriated profits ...
Having embraced Australian capital, why be shy? Australian imperialism was more charming still!
McQueen was too sophisticated to imagine that “economic independence” alone could solve the country’s problems. “After getting the benefits for Australia there remains the question of how to distribute them to Australians ... Welfare spending and employment are two of the obvious ways of achieving this goal.” But with these provisos, he was content that “economic nationalism is a practical program for rescuing the welfare of Australia’s working people ... “ Socialism might be desirable as an added extra, but McQueen had clearly lost faith in it. “Bitter disappointment arose when racism, sexism and other inequalities survived the establishment of socialism in Russia or China,” so consequently “reform is more likely to be attempted than is revolution.” Unlike the CPA-ML, McQueen could see faults in Mao’s China, but the fact only hastened his reformist evolution.
In the mainstream of the labour movement, nationalism had seldom taken on quite so left a face as that initially presented by the Maoists. Its historic role was to divert attention from the class struggle against the Australian bourgeoisie and to facilitate class collaboration in the supposed national interest. As an ideology it suited perfectly the needs of the trade union bureaucracy, the ALP machine and Labor MPs, who liked to employ the rhetoric of struggle (against foreigners) while containing industrial militancy and social protest at home. In the Fraser era, union and ALP leaders used nationalist rhetoric to divert working class anger after the Constitutional Crisis, then gradually to lock their rank and file supporters into reformist projects whose culmination was the ALP/ACTU Accord.
Soon after Whitlam’s fall, the unions began searching for alternative economic perspectives to counterpose to Fraser’s monetarism. Their first resort was traditional Keynesian policies. Tom Uren lectured groups of workers about the “multiplier effect”, and the first major union document -- the Metal Workers’ “People’s Budget” of 1976 -- relied on calls for public spending and public works. But amidst the ruins of the big-spending Whitlam Government this wasn’t credible. A system in crisis lacked the resources to make such concessions, therefore the traditional reformist projects could not deliver the goods. Something else was needed to restore enthusiasm. The AMWU leaders found it in a particularly paranoid version of economic nationalism.
The union’s 1977 publication Australia Uprooted was a mass-distribution pamphlet. The main appeal of its crude and uncertain economic arguments lay in dire warnings that foreign-owned multinationals were out to destroy Australian industry by turning the country into a “vast quarry”, while Fraser was doing these foreigners’ bidding by cutting wages. Although further pamphlets were needed to flesh out the arguments and add a veneer of sophistication, the immediate political problem had been solved: the AMWU had an excuse not to fight the Australian bourgeoisie. Instead it argued metal workers must unite with that bourgeoisie to defend domestic manufacturing from the multinationals’ infernal plans.
The conspiracy theories had little basis in reality, for although Fraser did look primarily to resource development to drive the economy, he did not intend to destroy the rest of industry. According to Industries Assistance Commission measurements, average rates of protection for manufacturing, which had been 27 percent in 1975, were still 23 percent in 1980 and rose again to 25 percent in 1983. At the very time the AMWU was launching Australia Uprooted, the government was introducing new protectionist policies for manufacturing industry. But simplistic as they were, these theories had a considerable appeal to workers losing confidence in their ability to fight the class struggle. And a range of left intellectuals stormed onto the new bandwagon.
Ted Wheelwright and Greg Crough elaborated critiques of foreign ownership of capital, the short-lived “resources boom” gave the arguments about de-industrialisation and becoming a giant quarry a superficial plausibility, and a complex argument about currency values (the “Gregory Thesis”) gave them some theoretical sustenance. Metal Workers’ researcher Ted Wiltshire argued for a “total package which includes a commitment to Australia having a viable manufacturing industry” including nationalisation and controls on private finance, plus restructuring of manufacturing industry through state intervention. By the late seventies a large slab of the left intelligentsia was at work on “alternative economic strategies”.
Many of these writers were, like some of the feminist opinion-makers discussed above, worn-out or disillusioned radicals now entering comparatively privileged careers, which helped explain an intellectual accommodation to capitalism. But to be fair, their enthusiasm for alternative strategies also derived from an understandable desire to put forward something positive. With its endless array of negative slogans (stop this! ban that!) the left did sometimes remind you of Groucho Marx singing “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”. The challenge was to find alternatives that really challenged the status quo. This the left intelligentsia largely failed to do -- nor could they do so on a nationalist basis.
Australian nationalism has always had a reactionary dynamic. In the colonial era it was closely linked to racism, and its supposed hostility to British imperialism usually amounted to complaints that Britain was betraying the white race in Asia, while in the twentieth century it has become an ideological support for Australia’s own imperialism. The goal of making this country economically competitive fitted naturally together with the attempts by both conservative and Labor governments to intensify the exploitation of labour. All of the alternative strategies, therefore, tended to collapse into the logic of capitalism despite their authors’ best intentions.
They also had another fundamental weaknesses, in that they all sought to some degree to shut out the pressures of the world economy through investment guidelines, tariffs or other forms of state control. But isolating Australia from the international economic division of labour would have immense costs, as Marxists like Rick Kuhn pointed out:
Multinationals’ investments have extended the scope of Australian industry and employment in the past. If the country is to survive without infusions of overseas capital while industry and employment are maintained, then the social rate of savings would have to be increased. That is, the amount available for workers to consume will have to be cut. This would especially be the case as capital equipment produced by protected local industries would be more expensive.
Moreover calls for greater economic isolation would have to be sold to a sizeable section of Australian business, and overseas interests would have to sit idly by and allow themselves to be frozen out. None of that was at all likely, but then these proposals were never likely to be acted on anyway. The fading of the “resources boom” allowed the argument to shift to new ground. Having built a consensus about the need to strengthen manufacturing, the ALP and union lefts could turn their attention to the details of that project. It was, after all, in the “national interest”. Later on under Hawke the emphasis was on national competitiveness, but the underlying logic was the same. Here too, the politics of nationalism meshed neatly with the economics of reformism.
Militancy uprooted
The alternative strategists, whatever their intentions, simply contributed to diverting or dampening the class struggle. Some key union leaders seized on their ideas with enthusiasm, precisely because they offered a particularly subtle attack on the industrial militancy of the Australian working class -- which would not be easy to subvert, partly because unionists who had been hammered by Fraser would be reluctant to forgive and forget. An additional factor was the union leaders’ own earlier statements. While even the best of them had always operated within an essentially reformist framework, the days of giddy militancy around 1968-75 had seen some pretty radical posturing. John Halfpenny, for example, had declared as late as 1976 that “the interests of workers and management correspond only by accident” because class conflict was “inherent in the capitalist system”.
So the first attempts to reconcile workers to the capitalist system had to assume the most left wing possible guise. Laurie Carmichael made a fair fist of this in 1977 when Australia Uprooted appeared: he argued that its economic proposals were actually vehicles for a transition to socialism. After all, they called for some nationalisation of industry associated with “an extension of worker control”! In addition Carmichael spoke vaguely about mass struggles to back up the policy proposals. While he and other left officials did little to mobilise workers, the rhetoric of struggle helped provide a left camouflage for a shift to the right.
Further camouflage was soon required. Lest workers take seriously the talk about socialism and mass struggle, the ideologues of the official labour movement moved quickly to replace both concepts with pale imitations, something which became easier as the seventies wore on, because workers were losing confidence in their own ability to win gains. The reform projects of the early Whitlam years had had a certain substance to them -- if the capitalist system had kept growing, reforms within it might well have continued to improve the lives of the working class. By contrast the new proposals were intellectual fairy floss. The economy was not going to return to the growth levels of the postwar decades, and if a growing number of militants nevertheless put their faith in the new arguments, it was because they saw few alternatives.
First came a sustained attack on basic industrial militancy. Railways union research officer Roger Jowett told a conference organised by the Trans~National Co-operative in 1978 that strikes over wages lacked the ability to “mobilise, unite and educate workers”. After all, wages had not even been mentioned at the last ACTU Congress. Rather workers must take the offensive with alternative economic plans and engage in the “progressive conquest of power.”
That might appear to take the struggle away from the dismal lowlands of “economism” towards revolutionary heights, but in reality the conquest of power was increasingly understood to mean a social contract with the next Labor government. And this was the second part of the exercise. Ex-Communist Winton Higgins extolled the Swedish model in which a powerful trade union federation together with social democratic governments was supposedly achieving a transition to post-capitalist society. For most of the following decade Sweden was a lodestar for sections of the labour movement, until an emerging Swedish crisis in the late eighties put paid to the illusions.
There was talk of “revolutionary reforms” -- but of course, these dare not be too revolutionary. No-nonsense union officials like Bruce Hartnett understood that “a socialist strategy for Australia must include ... firstly, an alternative economic program which is realistic, credible and achievable.” This was to be implemented under capitalism and aim to achieve full employment and rising living standards.
Hartnett later moved along to a management job at ICI, and we are still waiting for the full employment. It was actually the alternative economic strategies which lacked realism; in particular they ignored the need to dismantle the power structures of the system and replace them with new and very different ones. In retrospect it is clear that the whole alternative-strategy literature was a vast fantasy land. Although some of the reforms were worth fighting for, others were essentially technocratic, and in any case the measures proposed could by themselves no more abolish capitalism than Sweden’s social-democrats were genuinely committed to introducing socialism. Far from leading to a “conquest of power”, the various plans for industry merely provided insights for politicians and bureaucrats, while demoralising or co-opting militant workers.
In the early eighties, writers closer to the ALP centre seized on some of the insights to help rehabilitate Laborism intellectually. One vehicle was a series of Labor Essays edited by Gareth Evans, two volumes of which focused on policy. Written amidst a temporary revival of industrial militancy during the “resources boom” (see next chapter), the 1981 edition still presented a fairly left wing face, paying lip service to socialism and seeking to forge links with the rightward moving alternative strategists.
Economist Barry Hughes offered sophisticated arguments against wages militancy. Increasingly, he argued, wage gains were being wiped out by inflation. Moreover the wage-price spiral of the seventies had allowed affluent professionals to get ahead at workers’ expense. On the other hand, if a government incomes policy achieved falling inflation while fully indexing wages, workers could gradually make gains because “current money wage increases, reflecting past higher inflation, will be more than enough to keep up with present price rises.” The argument was incredibly neat, as long as you trusted Labor to maintain full wage indexation.
Bruce Hartnett advanced a complementary argument: while acknowledging in passing that wages were important, he warned that without a wider focus, wage claims could merely reinforce the existing social order. “The wage claim maintains the momentum in the system, keeping it running and distracting both unions and their members from the underlying issues relating to the concentration of power and decision-making in a few hands.” Better, he said, for unions to undertake challenges to that concentration of power, as the BLF had done with its Green Bans. This was a fair point and sounded rather daring. Alas, he then launched into a proposal to use union super funds to prop up manufacturing industry, making it obvious that his real aim was “interventions” in bureaucratic forums designed to cement new alliances between capital and labour.
In the same volume, moreover, Chris Hurford essayed a frontal attack on socialism:
The likelihood that Australia’s institutions could be developed to replace the present mechanisms of the private sector within any foreseeable period is remote indeed. No political strategy for such radical change, which bears any concrete relationship to Australian reality, presently exists. Accordingly, we must turn to a strategy which can germinate within the confines of the existing and prospective attitudes of Australian people.
The socialist references had only been intended to lure the gullible. Labor wanted ideas for administering the system, not for challenging it, and while some insights could be extracted from the alternative strategies, they must be set firmly in a capitalist framework. In any case, by 1983 the party had lost interest in cultivating those to its left, because industrial militancy had collapsed with the return of recession in 1982 and most of the intellectual and trade union left had thoroughly compromised itself. The 1983 edition of Labor Essays was full of shadow ministers and conventional social democratic proposals. Ralph Willis wanted more expansionary macro-economic settings, Barry Jones wanted better industry planning ... and socialism did not rate a mention.
The intellectual eclipse of the left ran parallel to its political decline inside the ALP. There was a sizeable left factional apparatus, but its underlying strength had been sapped by years of failure both in politics and in industry. Hampered by the vacillations of key union officials, the left had failed to stop the Newport power station, failed to stop uranium mining, failed to save Medibank, lost the Latrobe Valley strike. The unions did win a series of battles between 1978 and 1981, as we’ll see in chapter eleven, but these were not fought on a very political basis. The final settlements with their no-strike deals renewed the trend towards class collaboration -- which in turn helped weaken working class organisation at the grassroots.
When a Communist Party industrial publication complained in 1982 that “shop floor organisation has not expanded”, this was a euphemism for disastrous decline: actually there were “few if any effective self-acting shop committees”. But without organised strength at the base, the left could not hope to shape politics at the top. This was already becoming apparent by 1980, when the National Times announced that “the lions of the left are gone”:
The days when Jim Cairns was its prophet, Lionel Murphy its brains and Tom Uren its organiser are history. For the first time in decades the left in recent years cannot deliver to one of its own any of the four leadership posts inside the parliamentary party.
The left could no more determine policy than it could control key positions, a fact which the 1982 ALP national conference mercilessly exposed. The conference dumped the party’s previous blanket opposition to uranium mining, refused to take a serious pro-choice stand on abortion, and ran away from endorsing a capital gains tax. And while the left at least made some effort to hold the line on uranium, it was hugely embarrassed when one of its key leaders, Bob Hogg, made the running for the pro-uranium forces. By this stage it was only an isolated minority within the ALP left, and some small groups outside the party, who still thought seriously in terms of challenging the capitalist system.
With the left in decay, the politicians at the top could flaunt their right wing views as they moved toward power. Hayden traded on his reputation as the budget-slashing treasurer of 1975 while Hawke boasted that he would take a hard line against the unions, and in case the bourgeoisie was still a bit uneasy, Labor had a new star every boss could love: Paul Keating. “Labor’s OK, look at Keating,” said one business leader. Another, Hugh Morgan of Western Mining, announced he “would be pleased to have someone like Keating as our minister,” while his fellow mining magnate Sid Londish thought he was “the type of person we really need in power”.
Once Labor had politically neutralised the forces on its left and built bridges to the right, all that remained was to articulate a new strategy for Australian capitalism. The ALP leadership had been debating this since February 1979, when Bob Hawke told the party’s economics committee that “a comprehensive, equitable incomes policy” should become Labor policy.
At the party’s Adelaide conference in July of that year, Hayden negotiated with the left to steer through a more leftish sounding call for an incomes policy to “achieve a more equitable distribution of our national wealth and income, with the commitment to supporting the maintenance of real wages.” This was a factional rebuff to Hawke, but the incomes policy concept was becoming entrenched. Besides, Hayden was not serious about maintaining, let alone improving living standards, and his refusal to commit a Labor government to full wage indexation brought ructions with the ACTU from time to time.
As the prospect of a Labor government drew near, the leaders of the industrial and political wings flirted repeatedly with each other. Hayden raised the social contract issue at the 1981 ACTU Congress around the same time as the Metal Workers began talking about their “social wage” campaign. In February 1982, Hayden explicitly hailed the latter as a significant step toward his own plans for a prices-and-incomes deal; in July, Labor’s federal conference endorsed the concept in principle; then later in the year prominent ALP politicians appeared at union meetings pushing the “social wage” concept. In September the ACTU and party leaders released a discussion paper containing the gist of what eventually became the Prices and Incomes Accord.
These results were not surprising, given the close links between the ALP politicians, the trade union officialdom and other closely related groupings remote from the working class rank and file. The July 1982 conference brought together approximately 150 delegates and proxies, of whom 65 were MPs, 34 were union officials, 13 were party officials, and 10 were practicing lawyers (many no doubt MPs-in-waiting). Individuals in this milieu might take a consistent left wing stand but as a social whole it was grafted into the existing social order, making it a vehicle for capitalist ideas. Hawke’s 1983 election win was this bureaucratic layer’s hour of triumph.
At first, of course, the Hawke ascendancy also seemed to be a victory for the working class itself; a fact owing much to the upheavals which gripped industry at the start of the 1980s.