LOUIS PROYECT'S COMPARISON OF AUSTRALIA, CANADA AND ARGENTINA.

["Gould's Book Arcade" <ggouldsb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

LOUIS   PROYECT'S  COMPARISON  OF  AUSTRALIA,  CANADA  AND  ARGENTINA.

Louis, in his sometimes overly oracular way, says, in relation to my
question about Australia and Argentina being a bit similar, makes this
sweeping comment: "This is a common perception, but quite erroneous."

He goes on to tell us, at some length, using as his authority, Jeremy
Adelman, that Argentina and Canada are quite different, and at length
recounts Adelman's analysis which locates the difference between Canada and
Argentina in the fact that there was relatively free access to land in
Canada, and that the Canadian state and banks made it easier for
homesteaders.

He then draws a sharp difference with Argentina, where he says, correctly,
that capital, largely British capital, ignored the small settlers and
devoted most development money to big ranchers. By inference, he and Adelman
suggest that this produced greater class conflict, which is true, though I
am no expert on Argentina or Canada. He then airily says Australia was
similar to Canada, and he then infers that for that reason, Australia and
Canada are both in the "global North" and Argentina is in the "global South"
. Quite how easier access to land by homesteaders is the decisive difference
between the "global North" and the "global South", he doesn't make clear.

The other problem with his summary judgement on the matter is that he
obviously doesn't know a lot about Australia. In relation to access to land,
Australia, which was also a colonial settler state, like both Canada and
Argentina, developed by British capital, was and is much closer to the
Argentinian example than to the Canadian example, as Louis and Adelman
outline the Canadian example.

There is a substantial literature, both socialist, political and economic,
about the economic development of Australia and the land question, and the
impact that this had on political developments. Labor historians Brian
Fitzpatrick, Connell and Irving, Andrew Wells, Buckley and Wheelwright and
Australia's foremost economic historian and statistician, Noel Butlin,
amongst others, have written substantial books on this question.

>From the date of settlement in the major colonies, the land was dished out
with the support of British banks, to major capitalists who became what is
called "squatters" and even to consortiums set up by the banks. The
overwhelming amount of bank finance went to big capitalists in Australia,
just like Argentina. For long periods there was a chronic shortage of
labour, which was a stimulus to trade union organisation in most colonies.
The smaller people, the working class in the developing cities and the
landless labourers, raised a substantial agitation for access to land with
only middling success. Eventually liberal bourgeois politicians in NSW and
Victoria, particularly Sir John Robertson in NSW, brought in laws for free
selection, allowing small farmers a limited amount of right to select land
within big squatting spreads. (My Irish grandfather and a number of my
country relatives, were free selectors.)

Free selection, however, was very largely unsuccessful in breaking the grip
of the big squatters and the British banks on the land, and Australian rural
development was primarily dominated by big capital and squatting interests.
The resulting class tensions between the small farmers, the urban working
class and the big squatters and the ruling class, was one of the primary
forces which gave impetus to the formation of the Labor Party in the 1890s,
the direct trigger for which were the mass strikes of 1891 and 1893-4 of
rural and urban workers against the squatting interests. From its
commencement the Labor Party in Australia was a kind of coalition between
scrubby small farmer free selectors and the urban proletariat. The
Australian classic novels of rural life "On Our Selection" etc by Steele
Rudd captures something of the harsh life of free selectors.

Inter alia, when I was in the orbit of the SLL/ WRP in the 1970s, I attended
several WRP schools at their premises in Derbyshire, along with quite a few
other Australians. Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter and Mike Banda, when they
were an ideological and leadership team, had a pedagogic method in which
they would take up some simple theme and often associate it with a book on
the subject, and drum it into people. Those who went through the orbit of
that formation will remember schools at which Healy used Christopher Hill's
excellent book on Cromwell "God's Englishman", as a simple battering ram to
buttress a rather primitive idea that the revolutionary party should
resemble Cromwell's "New Model Army".

At one such school that I attended, the subject was Australia, and Healy,
Slaughter and Banda put the Australians through the hoops, trying to get
them to locate the difference between Australia and the United States, on
the one hand, and the United States and Canada on the other, as to why the
Labor Party had developed so quickly in Australia in contrast to North
America. Most of the Aussies failed this ferocious test of understanding and
it eventually emerged that the right answer was the fact that easy access to
land on the frontier in North America acted as a release of class tensions,
and did not produce the build up of the class tension, that led to the
formation of the Labor Party. (The aim of this rather cruel pedagogic
exercise was obviously twofold. One aspect was to sharpen up the critical
faculty of the cadres. The other aspect was to reinforce the extreme claims
of Healy, Banda and Slaughter, to political leadership of the group, based
on their almost occult understanding of these questions.) Nevertheless,
despite the pedagogic crudity of this political lesson, there is no serious
doubt that basically Healy was right on the matter. It is pretty clear that
in relation to access to land, the question that Louis locates as the
critical question vis a vis "global South" or "global North", Australia has
more in common with Argentina, than it has with Canada or the United States.

In my view, in locating countries as "global North" or "global South" the
land question is not necessarily the vital question. Current socioeconomic
relationships, both within the economies of countries, and between the
economies of countries and the wider capitalist world, are also obviously
pretty important, and I would still be interested in a more measured
response about Argentina, Singapore, South Korea, etc.

Bob Gould, October 2003


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