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BLF - DOCUMENTS - BLF NSW Defeat |
| BLF NSW Defeat
This
material was given to me by Harry Karslake, an organiser in the Victorian
Branch throughout the sixties and seventies. Harry was a member of the CPA. He
was Gallagher’s bitterest opponent, although he remained on the officers’
ticket. The passages in bold are the
ones Harry highlighted. The underlinings are in Taft’s original. Harry’s
copy has been sent to Melbourne University Archives to become part of the
collection he left there before his death late in 2011. In
evaluating the document, it should be noted that Taft was the most timid of the
CPA leadership group. So it is hardly surprising that any criticism he made
would have been scorned as gutlessness. Nonetheless, the points that he makes
are confirmed by the Branch and Federal minutes. See We Built This Country (Ginninderra Press, 2011). That book also
notes that Gallagher would repeat the NSW mistakes as he led the Federation to
de-registration and de-recognition.
The Builders’ Laborers in N.S.W.
demonstrated the exciting concept of workers taking up the issue of the social
consequence of the results of their labor. They moved beyond the traditional
confines of the trade union movement. They challenged capitalist values. They
showed that militant unions DID care about more than their wages and conditions,
that they WERE concerned with the broader problems of what happened to people,
in contrast to the accusation at present leveled against militant workers –
that they act without regard for broader interests of the great majority of the
people. The defeat of this leadership will, in
my view, tend to strength conservative trends in the trade union movement as it
will be claimed that it demonstrates that such advanced action is wrong and
inevitably leads to defeat. This is all the more so because of the Builders’
Laborers impact on the party, the trade unions, the student movement and among
young people. Our self-criticism should be concerned with learning the lessons,
not to pull back from advanced actions, but on the contrary to help us to go
forward more successfully. We should heed Lenin’s advice: “A
political party’s attitude towards its own mistakes is one of the most
important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it
fulfills in practice its obligations towards its class and the working
people. Frankly acknowledging a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it,
analyzing the conditions that have led up to it, and thrashing out the means of
its rectification – that is the hall mark of a serious party; that is how it
should perform its duties, and how it should educate and train its class,
and how it should class, (sic)
and then the masses.” Lenin,
Left-wing Communism, ch. 7. It
is argued that the defeat of the Builders’ Laborers was inevitable because of
the bold challenge that they made. I don’t believe this is correct. We need to
look deeper for the reasons for the defeat than the events of the more recent
period. These reasons stem from a faulty conception held by the party about the
relations between advanced actions and broad mass support. It seems to me that the defeat of the N.S.W. leadership may well have
been prevented if, over the years, their bold actions had been complemented
with the necessary attention to their mass base and trade union support.
This is the central question. Advanced and inspiring actions, which are
necessary and vital if the revolutionary movement is to advance, can only be
successful if they are supported by a
broad base in the mass movement. This base naturally will not go as far as the
advanced elements, but will provide the necessary soil for the advance elements
to operate in. Take the example of the draft
resisters. That small band of courageous young men had an enormous effect on
the anti-war movement, challenging both the authorities and the conscience of
many people. Yet they could not have done what they
did – made a fool of their pursuers, the Commonwealth Police, appear at
meetings and demonstrations – without the existence of a broad anti-war
movement at different levels and with diverse motivations. This movement, which
did not go nearly as far as the draft resisters, provided them with a base,
with support, with a platform, with strength in depth to ultimately win
through. This is the significant lesson to be
learned from the struggle of the Vietnamese. They engaged in the boldest action
of all. They challenged the enormous military power of the U.S. imperialism – a
challenge bolder than anything [that] is facing us today – yet at the same time
they paid a lot of attention to the development of a mass base of support for
their struggles among the most diverse sections and at different levels. They,
almost alone in the world, managed to secure active support from all the
socialist countries and of diverse forces in the United States, in Australia
and elsewhere. The message of their struggle to us is
that we must never counterpoise advanced actions to winning mass support. I
think essentially that here lies the root of our problems in the Builders’
Laborers. It is not that we were too
bold or too advanced, it is rather that we, the Party, tended to ignore the
need for mass support. On occasions we even made a virtue out of our isolation
in the official trade union movement. It is not a matter of watering down
our policies or that we should seek unity on the basis of the lowest common
denominator. To win mass support does not mean that at all. But we must at all
times be conscious of the need to win mas support. The mistakes that have been
made can only be explained by a lack of concern for mass support, otherwise
there would have been an effective struggle to warn, overcome and correct
mistakes in time. Nor it is sufficient to say that we were defeated by a combination
of the economic downturn, the alliances between the Builders’ Laborers, by
Hawke’s negative attitude, Gallagher and the S.P.A. After all, we had been
saying these things for a long time. We predicted that the economy would
decline, we know that the ruling class was out to destroy the N.S.W. Builders’
Laborers, we knew what Gallagher’s position was, and we have ben critical of
the S.P.A. leadership for years. But nobody predicted that the Builders’
Laborers would be defeated, let alone that this was inevitable – otherwise
surely a responsible leadership would have been prepared for it. Take such things as the strict observance of Union rules, including those rules that our
comrades did not like and did not think were good rules. It would have been a
matter of course to observe rules scrupulously if you expect to be hit with
them, and to attempt to change them in the proper manner. The same goes for administration, for proper accounting and the use of Union
property. It is elementary that such things should have been watched. We should
not have supplied Gallagher with ammunition to malign and misrepresent the
N.S.W. leaders to the workers. If some comrades knew or expected, as they are
saying now, that the NSW Builders’ Laborers leadership would be defeated, they
acted utterly irresponsibly. Other things also contributed to the
situation where it became possible to defeat the N.S.W. leadership. There was a trend to non-organisation and
anarchist concepts. In his interview in the Australian Left
Review in December 1973, Jack Mundey said “… I find, talking to anarchists and others,
that there’s more respect among the left, the genuine left revolutionaries, for
the Communist Party of Australia than ever before”. In the same interview he
said: “The conservatives in the Building Trades Group are saying that
one-outism is no good; Ducker is saying the same thing”. He dismisses as beyond
debate the proposition that “if you take action it affects the plumbers,
therefore you shouldn’t take unilateral action”. If matters little how it
affects other workers, it seems. He was quite wrong. These ideas did permeate the
Party. They were not fought by the leadership and were certainly reflected
among the Builders’ Laborers. There was also a bad reaction to criticism of
aspects of these matters by the Party leadership. Critics were treated as
hostile elements and their criticism, even when it solely designed to secure
the very fine work that the B.L.F. was doing, was regarded as really expressing
opposition to whole concept of advanced action. In January,
1973, some leading comrades expressed the view that the Builders’ Laborers were
not doing sufficient to impact the rest of the trade union movement and had a
go-it alone attitude. They saw dangers in the isolation of the Builders’
Laborers in the trade union movement. But
unfortunately this was treated as hostile criticism and misrepresented as
opposition to what the Builders’ Laborers were doing. There as in fact quite a deal of
deliberate isolation from the official trade union movement under the impact of
a false ethos which had spread in the Party: that the official trade union
movement did not matter very much and that they were nearly all conservatives,
anyway, and a tendency to counterpoise the rank and file movement to the trade
union officials. I myself had raised this criticism on the Executive over three
years ago. There was also the way in which the
limited tenure of office was handled. After making a great deal of this and
publicizing Comrade Mundey’s return to work widely, Comrade Mundey did not in fact return to work. This discredited the
campaign and actually weakened the very necessary struggle against those
conservative elements in the trade union movement bureaucracy who remain in
positions long after they should have be replaced. Now the task before us is to learn
from the lessons of the B.L.’s to continue their work in the new conditions.
That requires a frank facing of the new realities, free from negative and
carping criticism, but also free from any attempt to brush it under the carpet. This is vital for the continuation and
development of their positive work in the trade union movement. |
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See also: Labour History |