Aussie leftie stuff

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In relation to people like Lang, it should be no surprise that he was an
anti-semite.  Left labourism in Australia is full of racism.  After all,
the top plank in the program of the Australian Labor Party, when it was
first formed, was not the usual social-democratic tokenism of
'nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange' but
support for the White Australia policy.  A good deal of Laborite
'militancy' was directed at keeping the Chinese out.  The same in NZ.
Indeed an interesting argument was made by one of the contributors to 'Who
are our enemies?' ( alate 1970s collection of papers by leftie
labour/social historians) that the ALP was not formed as any kind of
workers party, but was very much a middle class party right from the start,
albeit one which managed to attract large sections of the working class
through the labour movement being hegmonised by nationalism and racism
(especially stuff like White Australia).

In the NZ Labour Party, the racists also won out.  Indeed even syndicalist
militants like Harry Holland, the first leader of the LP here, criticised
Tory anti-Chinese immigration controls for not going far enough.  At the
same time, Holland welcomed the Russian Revolution and identified with
Bolshevism, as did a number of other Labour leading lights.

This is one reason why I'm always wary about identifiying with 'indigenous
socialist traditions' in the imperialist countries and seeing the influence
of the Bolsheviks in predominantly negative terms.  The Bolsheviks actually
had a good deal to teach labour militants in countries like NZ, Australia,
Canada and the USA - not least on the issue of racism.

Philip Ferguson