Labour parties

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob's latest in the labour parties discussion seems to be having some
problems fitting through the eye of the needle. The first post (of the whole
thing) seems to have disappeared off the map, the second, broken in two
managed to get part 2 (the shorter) up. Here, hopefully, is a digestible
part 1 and part 1a.
Steve Painter

A review of the discussion on labour parties, and an investigation of the
sociology of labour parties and trade unions in English-speaking countries
with labour parties, from the standpoint of trying to arrive at the best
tactics required to build a class-struggle left wing
By Bob Gould
Part 1

Some preliminary remarks

Our genial sorcerer Louis Proyect's energetically organised and maintained
international discussion is serving a very useful purpose. After a couple of
months or so of familiarity with it, this old agitator is mightily
impressed.

I'm moved and excited to have the practical opportunity for an immediate
exchange, for example, with the comrade from Ireland, who conducts an
important theoretical discussion while engaged in very immediate day-to-day
political activities, dealing with the vicious assault of the British state
on the small Sinn Fein mass party, the major political expression of the
strivings of the 600,000 or so oppressed Catholics, right there in the belly
of the old beast, British imperialism, on the island where the great wave of
anti-imperialist revolution started in the 20th century, with the Easter
Rising in 1916.

We should never forget that, and the deliberate role of Marxists in that
first national uprising of the oppressed colonial masses. James Connolly's
deliberate participation and leadership in the Easter Rising and Lenin's
enthusiastic support for the Rising, established solidly one aspect of the
struggle of socialists and Marxists for the whole of the 20th century.

We should respond to the aggressive behaviour of our old imperialist enemy,
the British state, with what solidarity we can muster in our various labour
movements for the comrades in Northern Ireland who have been lifted, and
bear in mind also that these events in the six counties are by no means
unconnected with the preparations for war by the US, British and Australian
states against Iraq.

For any socialist worth two bob, the overriding immediate task is the
maximum possible mobilisation against the impending imperialist assault on
Iraq. This necessary mobilisation against the imperialist assault on Iraq
will be made, particularly in Australia, significantly more difficult by the
political atmosphere, generated by the bourgeoisie around the atrocity in
Bali.

Nevertheless, a massive 40,000-plus antiwar mobilisation took place in
Melbourne the same day as the Bali bombing, although its media impact was
partly obliterated by the Bali bombing. It's not absolutely clear yet what
impact the bombing will have on public opinion on the Iraq war, particularly
in the medium term, despite the obvious intention of Howard and important
sections of the Australian ruling class to use reaction to the Bali bombing
to generate support for the war drive.

Despite Bali, however, if we are a bit lucky politically, this imperialist
adventure may commence almost as unpopular in the community as the Vietnam
War was towards its end, which is a very big problem for imperialist
politics in Australia. The confused and awkward behaviour about the war of
both the Tory government and Labor leader Simon Crean, in different ways,
reflect this underlying reality.

THE PARALLEL DISCUSSIONS ON SOCIALIST REGROUPMENT AND STRATEGY TOWARDS MASS
LABOUR PARTIES

Since the DSP began energetically advertising its regroupment proposals in
Australia, on Marxmail, and I responded by arguing with them, on the
question of strategy towards the Labor Party-trade union continuum, we have
settled into a very serious strategic discussion, in which we have in some
respects got a little bit past point-scoring with each other.

In particular, Richard Fidler's recent contributions have drawn together and
summarised some of the developments that we have made in this discussion,
and I find Fidler's broad theoretical summary of a number of the issues very
persuasive and the useful material to which he has drawn our attention, by
Alistair Mitchell
(http://prome.snu.ac.kr/~skkim/data/article/files/revref.html for link) (and
another paper on the same Korean website by Jim Dye
http://prome.snu.ac.kr/~skkim/data/article/files/liverpool.html for link)
have created the conditions for a very serious discussion about the scope
and limits of revolutionary socialist activity in the workers' movement.

I opened up the question of Comintern strategy in the early 1920s, and the
dialectical, pedagogic nature of Lenin's approach to these strategic
questions, with the rather primitive intention of debunking the Doug Lorimer
"two-paragraphs-from-Lenin" school of intellectual confusion. Fidler's
serious overview of all the issues involved, drawing on the work of Alistair
Mitchell (and Jim Dye), who as Fidler points out he doesn't even know, is
now in my view the best short summary available to us. I defer to that
summary and indicate that I believe Fidler is correct in sounding a note of
warning about the over-optimism of the early Bolsheviks in relation to
short-term prospects of communist revolutionary success in displacing social
democracy in countries with mass labour parties.

A thing that strikes me is how much, different national experiences affect
this discussion. Fidler obviously has a long experience in intervening as a
revolutionary in the labour movement in Canada. My experience here in
Australia is based on almost 50 years of activity, including long periods of
extremely intense activity. I have also been influenced by following the
work of Trotskyists in Britain over that time, through the journals of the
lively interventions of different groups. I received Healy's Newsletter from
its first issue in the 1950s, I subscribed to Tony Cliff's Labour Worker for
a very long time, and I used to get Pat Jordan's The Week.

British Trotskyists of a number of traditions have a rich history of work in
the British labour movement, and the detailed discussion of those
interventions by Mitchell and Dye is extremely useful in this context. The
older historical material about the early work of the Communist Party by
Brian Pearce and Hugo Dewar also seems to me to be very important in this
discussion.

It is obviously difficult for comrades in the US to initially get a fix on
all the issues in this kind of discussion, because the US has never had a
mass labour party. In my patch, the ALP is the oldest in the
English-speaking world, having started in 1890, and there is an enormous
literature in Australia about the variety of experiences in the workers'
movement, and the interaction between groups of socialists and communists
and the broader labour movement. It's actually the largest literature of its
sort in the English-speaking world.

It seemed useful to me in the early stages of this discussion to offer a
reading list of Lenin's works and books about Lenin to establish the context
in which Lenin and Trotsky approached the questions of strategy and tactics
in the workers' movement in 1921. As a small aside, I'd like to throw in a
comment about Tony Cliff's biography of Lenin made by Ted Crawford (The
Tragedy of the International Socialists http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext
Articles from New Interventions) in an article on the International
Socialists. Crawford says: "His later behaviour has been summed up by John
Sullivan, unkindly if accurately, thus: "Cliff's biography of Lenin is
written in the peculiar style of a biography of John the Baptist by Jesus
Christ'."

Inevitably, this strategic discussion has been informed by the longer
discussion on Marxmail about the other important strategic question - the
nature of Marxist organisation, Leninism, Cannonism, Zinovievism, etc. I
have found the discussion on those questions of great importance. It's
useful to discover that there are other people in the world who've come to
similar conclusions, on the basis of their own political activity and
reading, and these exchanges are also very significant. Although for some on
the list, their interest is primarily scholastic or academic (also
legitimate activities), for many others, like myself, these questions of
rearming ourselves intellectually, in new conditions, are of burning
importance to future perspectives for practical activity.

On the sociology of mass labour parties, and the associated question of
trade unionism in English-speaking countries -- both in their historical
development and in their current state -- I inevitably have to polemicise
with Ben Courtice, and to a lesser extent Phil Ferguson.

The slightly over-enthusiastic, "right-on" kind of dialogue a week or two
back, but sporadically ongoing, between Phil Ferguson and Ben Courtice on
matters of sociology, is instructive. Phil Ferguson views things from a
standpoint that I described as principled sectarianism, Ben Courtice is an
enthusiastic, energetic activist of his party, the DSP. He belts out
extravagant sociological characterisations about yuppies, labour
aristocracies, etc, etc, in dialogue with Ferguson. (I don't much like
having a go at Ben, despite the fact that I think a lot of his sociology is
wrong, because in my experience there's another side to him that I greatly
respect. He seems to me to have a burning personal interest in Marxist
theory. Over a period of seven or eight years, whenever he comes to Sydney
he does a systematic trawl through the accumulated Marxist literature in my
shop and his interests are obviously very wide. He avoids much verbal
encounter with the heretic Gould, but his inquiring mind is stronger than
the narrow sectarianism characteristic of a number of the inhabitants of the
far left groups. He's the kind of bloke who would literally go into the
gates of hell to find a significant book about the Marxist and socialist
movement that he doesn't have, and there's always hope for someone like
that. Courtice's inquiring approach is in fairly sharp contrast with the
other attitude, characteristic, in my view, of many members of Marxist
groups in Australia - they remain insulated in the texts and literature of
their own tendency, and are not interested seriously in much else. In my
view that state of mind is a great obstacle to political development.
Happily, Ben Courtice is not like that at all.)

"At this point, to get a basic sociological construct of Australia, I quote
myself, from my piece, "The People's Choice", about electoral politics in
NSW: 'The two most useful census documents for this inquiry are "Australian
Social Trends 1999" and the "Social Atlas" for each capital city, and I will
use the 1996 "Sydney Social Atlas" as my working example. On page 83 of
"Social Trends 1999" you get the ABS classification of qualifications, which
divides post school qualifications into the following five: "bachelor degree
and above", "undergraduate diploma", "associate diploma", "skilled
vocational qualification", "basic vocational qualification". For purposes of
describing people who have a university degree or equivalent, it seems
sensible to group the first two together as representing a university
degree. In the first census where degrees were tabulated, 1966, 1.5% of the
population over 15 years had degrees. In 1976, 3% had degrees. By 1996,
Katharine Betts gives the figure of 10.2%, but she seems to be wrong, as the
Bureau gives the figure of 12.8%. In addition, the Bureau give a figure of
8.8% for people with undergraduate diplomas and associate diplomas together.
For simplicity's sake, we may assume half the 8.8% for each category, which
means that in 1996, according to the Bureau, approximately 17.2% of the
adult population had a university degree. By 1998, according to the Bureau,
the figure had become 14.5% plus 7.9%, which takes the number with a
university degree up to 18.4% of the adult population, a very high figure
indeed.

"Another framework useful in relation to the educational qualifications of
the population, are the figures for the raw number of tertiary students. In
1912, when the Australian population was 4.5 million, there were a tiny
3,672 tertiary students. In 1938, when the population was approximately 6.5
million, students were still a tiny 12,126. In 1966, when the population was
11.7 million, the number of students had risen to 91,272. Thirty years
later, when the population had increased about 50%, to about 18 million, the
number of tertiary students had soared seven fold to 634,094.

"In the Census Bureau's documentation there is a very detailed breakdown of
"People with post-school qualifications, by type of qualification" by both
age and sex. They reveal a very sharp increase in the number of women with
university qualifications, who now number about the same as men, and who are
concentrated in such areas as teaching, the health industry, social work and
also, to some degree, in commerce and business. The number of female primary
teachers went up between 1988 and 1998 from 71.7% to 77.5%. The number of
female secondary teachers went up from 48.3% to 53.5%, and the number of
women teaching in higher education went up from 27.3% to 35.1%.

"In 1996 227,000 people had bachelor degrees or higher in business and
administration. 35.7% of them were women. 213,600 had university degrees in
health. 66.2% of them were women. 357,800 had university degrees in the
delightful ABS classification called "Society and Culture", defined as
"Economics, law, behaviour, welfare, languages, religion and philosophy,
librarianship, visual and performing arts, geography, communication,
recreation and leisure, and policing". 54.8% of them were women. In
engineering, however, with 120,100 only 8.4% were women.

"The great numerical explosion of people with university degrees was a
product of the Whitlam period educational reforms.

"The extremely useful "Australian Social Trends 1999" book has a detailed
breakdown of the age composition of people with university degrees. Part of
this table is reproduced here.

"The extraordinary increase in both men and women with degrees in the age
group 25 to 54 clearly illustrates the magnitude of the explosion of
tertiary education from about 1974 onwards. This forcefully underlines the
very important point that this was the period when women soared from being a
very small portion of the people with university degrees to rough numerical
equality with men. It is fascinating to note the rage of conservative
misogynists like Michael Thompson against the Whitlam period of free
education. Possibly the rough equality in educational achievement gained by
women in this period is one of the features that infuriates them.

"What emerges most strikingly from these statistics, is the enormous growth
in the proportion of the whole adult population with university degrees. The
very size and diversity of this group makes an absurdity of the conservative
rhetoric that they comprise, as a whole, an elite "new class". It is
important to bring to bear other available statistical information to get a
picture of what is really the Australian class formation at the moment and
how this vastly increased group of university graduates fit into it. This is
where an investigation of the information contained in the "Social Atlas"
comes in, particularly if you superimpose on this information, the fairly
elementary and obvious information provided by the statistics of electoral
behaviour in federal and state elections. The "Social Atlas" tells you that
people with degrees are heavily concentrated in Sydney on the North Shore,
most of the Eastern suburbs, and in a belt in the inner Western suburbs.
There are smaller concentrations in the Sutherland shire, the Georges River
area, and the Blue Mountains. If you go, however, to the useful separate
category that was provided in the 1991 "Social Atlas", called "Managers and
Administrators", you find that this coincides almost exactly with the map of
"high income earners". Both these maps, however, coincide only in part with
the map of people with university qualifications. Most of the people in the
southern part of the Eastern suburbs and in the Inner Western suburbs, with
university degrees, are thus neither "managers or administrators" or "high
income earners" as defined by the ABS. I submit that, quite obviously, these
graduates are by and large the ones working in teaching, health, social
work, etc. Coincidentally, the divide in political voting behaviour is on
almost exactly the same geographical lines amongst graduates as the apparent
geographical divide between "high income earners" and "managers and
administrators" and the rest of the population. The southern Eastern suburbs
and the Inner West vote overwhelmingly Labor or Green etc. The North Shore,
Wentworth, the Georges River area, etc, all vote solidly Liberal. Any
serious investigation of all these statistical tools shows that a real
economic, political, and class division exists within the ranks of
university graduates, not between graduates and the rest of the population.

"The "Social Atlas" provides a wealth of useful information. There are maps
of the distribution of migrants of different backgrounds, and these maps are
very informative. Most non English speaking migrants are concentrated in the
Eastern suburbs, the Inner Western suburbs, and the middle Western suburbs.
The pattern of people with trade qualifications is the obverse of the
pattern of people with university degrees. Many people with trade
qualifications are concentrated in the southern part of the Eastern suburbs
and the further Western suburbs, but quite a few are also concentrated in
the Sutherland shire and areas like Hornsby and the northern beaches. An
overview of all the statistical information available gives a breakdown of
the class structure of the Sydney population on broadly the following lines.

"At the very top of Australian society there is a powerful ruling class,
which interlocks with a power elite, if you prefer that form of words. This
group is very small. It, however, exercises direct ideological influence and
hegemony over a broader group who show up in the statistics as "managers and
administrators" and "high income earners", and these two maps in the "Social
Atlas" are almost completely coincidental. For statistical purposes, it is
useful to group the core power elite and/or ruling class and the
aforementioned two groups, together, as statistical Group One.

"Statistical Group Two are very distinctly represented in the "Social Atlas"
by the section of the map of university graduates, who are excluded from the
map of "high income earners" and "managers and administrators". These lower
paid university graduates comprise university staff, teachers, health
workers, many public servants, minor bureaucrats in welfare organisations,
and other such people. They are concentrated heavily in the Inner Western
suburbs and the southern part of the Eastern suburbs. A very large number of
these people are upwardly mobile people of Irish Catholic or older European
migrant background, and include many people who don't state a religious
belief in the census. They are overwhelmingly Labor voters, though some vote
for the Greens and the Democrats, in addition to the minority who vote
Liberal.

"Statistical Group Three are the most diverse group. They are scattered all
over Sydney, except in the areas of very high incomes on the North Shore,
and in the northern Eastern suburbs. They include such people as clerical
workers, proprietors and workers in small retail businesses, bank workers,
computer workers, call centre workers and finance industry workers. They
also include many self employed tradesmen. They range from low incomes to
quite high incomes and are of very diverse ethnicity, Anglo, Irish Catholic,
European migrant and even including self employed recent migrants. A
significant part of this group vote Labor, but some also vote Liberal, and
the biggest number of swinging voters is concentrated in this group. The
ruling class attempt to exercise ideological hegemony over this group,
particularly through television and the tabloid press, and a lot of the
current reactionary populism of the right is an attempt to influence this
group electorally.

"Statistical Group Four include the blue collar section of the working class
and the unemployed. Though manufacturing industry has declined somewhat, the
blue collar section of the working class is still a very decisive section of
the population. This group is now composed overwhelmingly of recent NESB
migrants. This section of society is concentrated in the middle Western
suburbs, which are also the areas of recent migrant concentration and
relatively high unemployment. This group overwhelmingly vote Labor in
elections.

"Even a cursory overview of the correlation between the information provided
in the census publications and electoral results confirms the general thrust
of the above break-up and analysis. This four level description of
Australian society is realistic and useful for a variety of purposes.

"In my view, the dominant class division in Australian society is between
the ruling class, with enormous economic and political power, who exercise
very great ideological influence and hegemony over the "high income earner"
and "managers and administrators" statistical group one, and the rest of the
population. This four level division of Australian society holds for all the
major capital cities and for the Illawarra, Newcastle, Whyalla, Launceston
and Geelong, with the qualification that the smaller capitals and the
provincial towns have a much lower NESB component in Statistical Group Four,
the blue collar section of the working class. Rural and provincial Australia
contains some elements of this division, but a concrete analysis of rural
and provincial Australia has to incorporate a number of other factors, and I
will deal with rural and provincial Australia in another chapter of this
book."

This is the very solid framework in which I approach the sociology of the
mass Labor Party and the Greens, and the associated question of the trade
unions in Australia. In current Australian conditions, incessant babble
about the "aristocracy of labour" is of no use at all. It's theoretically
unsound anyway, as Fidler has pointed out, and as the Cliff tendency
internationally has always held, Lenin overstated the phenomenon of the
"aristocracy of labour".

See part 1a.


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