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Technocratic
Laborism: Introduction
Arena,
25, 1971, pp. 53-56.
No one could pretend
that even the most skilful propaganda or the most scholarly tomes will
cause the ALP to lose its mass electoral base. Only the dialectics of
class struggle can achieve that outcome. But detailed analyses of the
ALP are nonetheless an essential ingredient. At this early stage they
can provide the final straw for individual militants. IN the heat of
future battles, these militants, and their understanding of the nature
of the ALP, will be available to wider audiences for tactics and
propaganda. Until quite recently the revolutionary left in Australia had
been poorly served in the material available for dealing with the ALP.
There was Gordon Childe’s brilliant fragment How Labour Governs (1923). But that was all. After that, there were
a variety of Communist party pamphlets but these were slight in terms of
the material they contained and the theoretical apparatus they employed.
Works of substance of socialist academics gave the ALP critical support
and invariably pictured it as the achievement of a radical working class
in the nineteenth century. It was with this legacy that the miniscule
revolutionary left fought and lost the 1966 elections as hewers of wood
for the ALP.
Something had gone
wrong: if the Australian working-class was what Gollan and others had
said it was there should have been overwhelming support for Calwell’s
anti-imperialist and anti-conscription policies. But there wasn’t. In
this mood (though unable to articulate it), a group of young
revolutionaries in Melbourne planned a week-end conference on “Which
party for socialists?” The movement away for the ALP could not repeat
the experience of the 1930s, if only because the disillusionment of the
1960s was not with the ALP so much as with the entire tradition of which
it (and its Trotskyite and CPA defenders) were part: it was not a
rejection of the ALP because another Labor government had failed to live
up to expectations, but because the ALP’s universe was no longer
habitable.
The task of examining
the ALP historically fell to me. There were two models from which to
choose: either an Australian equivalent of Ralph Milliband’s Parliamentary
Socialism, or Antonio Gramsci’s demand in The
Modern Prince that the history of a party must be the history of a
society from a monographic point of view. The choice had to be Gramsci
since it was necessary to start at the beginning if the ALP was to be
understood. Fortunately, the conference did not take place, because at
the time for which it had been scheduled, March 1968, I was still
thrashing around with the convicts.
Out of this proposed
conference paper emerged A New
Britannia in which I attempted to show that the ALP is umbilically
linked to capitalism, that its misdeeds are not contingent, not the
result of wicked individuals, and that it is irrevocably incapable of
achieving socialism. A New Britannia did not become the title until a few weeks before
completing the manuscript; until then, the title (and the filing-cabinet
drawer) were labeled “Laborism”. A
New Britannia ends around 1920, rigorously excluding the proletariat
emerging from the nineteenth century on. Even if A
New Britannia is seen as satisfactory for the 19th
century, it leaves a vast amount to be done on the ALP; my chapter
“Power without Glory” in the forthcoming Australian
Capitalism, edited by John Playford and Doug Kirsner, is no more
than a sketch of the Party from 1920 to 1960.
Moreover, by
concentrating on the past I had failed to absorb fully the important
changes being attempted inside the ALP. As Kelvin Rowley commented when
reviewing my essay “Laborism and Socialism”, from Richard Gordon’s
edited collection, The Australian
New Left:
… one could say
that the critique of Laborism has come just at the moment it is
rendered redundant … the last five years have been the last gasp of
the old Laborism in the ALP. It is currently being isolated and purged
by the ascendant forces … the victors have been the Whitlamites,
representing the new petit-bourgeois mentality of what Galbraith
called the “technostructure”. (Farrago, 16 October 1970)
John Playford had
already provided a solid basis for furthering this investigation with
his 1969 monograph Neo-capitalism
in Australia. As Rowley, McFarlane and I were all working on
chapters for the Playford-Kirsner volume. we arranged discussions which
altered the shape of our contributions and spawned my paper to the
anti-war conference on “The ALP’s strategy for counter-revolution in
Asia”, [an expanded version of which appeared as “Living off Asia”
in Arena, 26, 1971]. From
these background studies, and with the appearance of some new pieces on
“technocratic laborism”, discussion quickly turned to extending the
survey to areas such as industrial, social and educational policies.
Because Dunstan was the only “labor technocrat” in office, it was
agreed that a study of his administration take priority. The result is
John Lonie’s researches in this issue as the first essay under the
general heading “technocratic laborism”.
Other comrades have
promised material on industrial policy; TPNG; education; incomes policy;
and the NZ Labor Party, which has been forced further down the road of
open class collaboration because of the chronic economic crises there.
In future issues, it is hoped to publish trailers, notes, documents and
reviews as well as full-length articles.
This long explanatory
background has been presented so that readers and future contributors
can appreciate more fully the implications of what might otherwise
appear unconnected writings. As an exercise in protracted intellectual
warfare by a wide-ranging ménage, the project on “technocratic laborism” might point the
way to appropriate means of fostering socialist scholarship in
Australia. By publishing material piecemeal, rather than in a special
issue, it is hoped to offer opportunities to correct errors, and to
redirect emphases. Of course, the material will be largely useless if it
cannot penetrate beyond Arena
subscribers, so, unless otherwise stated, all the items on
“technocratic laborism” will be available for reprinting without
permission. The material could be useful for discussion groups – even
in ALP branches. We are anxious to receive reports of speeches or
actions by Whitlam and his retinue which might otherwise pass us by;
country meetings are relevant here. Just as the coming battles against
Whitlam as prime minister must have a mass character, so much their
ideological preparations.
Already it is clear
that the federal Labor government will be met by a revolutionary left
which will be better prepared – ideologically and organisationally –
to deal with the dynamics of labor-in-office than at any previous
period. This is no local phenomenon, but is indicative of the world
situation; that is, the phase of US imperialism’s defeat and
destruction. Previous labor governments have largely maintained or
regained their mass electoral support because the imperialist power(s)
to which Australia was tied was able to play both time and space. But
time and space are what British and US imperialism do not have. We are
witnessing
… the march of this
retreatin
g world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Strategies to deal with
particular contradictions such as an ALP split which look to previous
splits for guidance are doomed unless they recognise that the principal
contradiction now centers on the rout of US imperialism, less than 30
years after its world conquest.
The effect of this rout
on Australia in the 1970s will be anything but a mechanical reflection
of US imperialism’s crisis. Alternatives for Australia include an
accelerated decline comparable to that of New Zealand vis-à-vis Great Britain; a switch to the patronage of Japan which
is unlikely to feel obligated to maintain our high domestic living
conditions; become an imperialist power in our own right. Each of these
will doubtless occur to a certain extent in different sectors of the
economy, but for the present, Australia is deriving benefits from
imperialism’s forced retreat.
Blainey points out that
there is not so much a mining boom as an exploration boom. Minerals are
very difficult to find here and once found are costly to develop but
they have one over-riding virtue – they are in a politically stable
country. Even Allende’s pseudo-victory in Chile led to the suspension
of Japanese iron-ore negotiations and their transfer to Australia. (Financial
Review, 28 September 1970) Constant supply of raw materials is
essential to maintain markets; disruption for even a few months could
lead to a competitor’s penetration. As less and less of the world
remains quiescent, the attractiveness of Australia as a place for
mineral investments will increase.
While minerals have
helped counter-balance declining primary-product income, they produce
tensions of their own: they generate a boom economy from which
inflationary pressures lead to working-class demands for the maintenance
of real-wage levels; they by-pass the old producers and leave small
farmers, for instance, faced with insoluble problems; they intensify the
imbalance of public squalor and private affluence. Ultimately, and not
so far in the future, they will demand the presence of Australian
conscripts in New Guinea and Fiji. That Whitlam fully recognizes this
last point is evident by his rush to grant self-government to the former
so that he can prop up an “independent” administration there. These
are not answers but areas for investigation and action.
In form, the project on
“technocratic laborism” will be like Arena’s
continuing work on education and the intellectually-trained.
In content, however, it will present an immediate denial of the Arena
thesis since, at this time, but perhaps only for the present phase, the
intellectually-trained are providing Whitlam with his constituency and
are not even a secondary motor of revolution. This link may break when
Whitlam-in-office has exhausted the potential for his rhetoric. The
conjuncture of Arena’s
intellectually-trained thesis and the new project on technocratic
laborism can be resolved only dialectically. It will not be a matter of
choosing one or the other, but of tracing uneven developments. Not the
least of the virtues of this confrontation will be the need for the
keener theoretical tools offered by Mao’s On
Contradiction.
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