Rise of the working class
Source: Labor College lecture
First published: Labor College Review, November 1986
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
Oh yes I am a Labor man
And I believe in revolution
The quickest way to bring it on
Is talking constitution
Australian IWW song of World War I
A modern labour movement is a product of the development of capitalism, a consequence of the appearance of the modern working class and the separation of the masses of the people from the ownership of the means of production.
Australia was established in the capitalist era and developed within the capitalist system. The immediate reason for the establishment of Australia was the overcrowding of British jails, but from the 1820s on the demands of British textile manufacturers for Australian wool gave the impetus for capitalist development within Australia.
The discovery of gold in 1851 had a profound effect on Australian development. Firstly, it provided a market for British capital, secondly its initial effect was to make wage labour scarce as thousands flocked to the goldfields. Wages increased in real terms and although they declined when the number of gold strikes declined, they remained higher than they had been in the 1840s. High wages for labourers, plus the fact that the goldfields contained all social classes, where rank made little or no difference and a man could rise from rags to riches overnight, put an end to the aristocratic pretensions of the squatters.
The Eureka Stockade was not, as some romantics would have it, a proletarian revolt but men who sought gold as their way out of wage slavery. Some did acquire enough capital to become small capitalists, but the majority of course did not, and by the 1860s these provided a ready-made supply of wage labourers.
Yet the promise of easy capital lingered in one part of Australia well into the 1890s. This had an important effect on the outlook of the labourer, who developed an outlook more akin to the petty bourgeois than to working class consciousness.
The 1860s was a period of relative stagnation, with struggles between the city merchants immeasurably strengthened by the gold boom and the squatters over the latter’s land and political monopoly. The urban poor, greedy for land, supported their city masters in their attack on the squatters.
The selection acts of the 1860s were a direct outcome of this support, which aimed at the squatters’ monopoly of the land and promised the urban workers a self-sufficient farm of their own, a promise that was in the main not realised.
During the period 1860-90, often called the “long boom” brought a great influx of British capital into Australia in the pastoral and agricultural industry. Of much less importance were the investments in manufacturing, shops, mines, shipping and churches. The absence of large-scale manufacturing industry until a decade into the 20th century also kept the growing working class trapped within the mentality of the small proprietor.
Added to this was the early growth of political democracy. By 1860, the Australian colonies enjoyed the secret ballot, manhood suffrage (although not women) and short, regular parliaments, things that would not be achieved for many years in Britain. These were won by the urban middle classes in their fight against the squatter-dominated parliaments and required no development of class consciousness by the urban working class.
The gold rushes had produced an equalitarian outlook and a degree of social mobility not to be found anywhere in Europe, but it was not a socialist consciousness. Rather, it was accepted by the liberal middle class well into the 20th century.
Indeed, the first Labor government, in 1904, had a non-Labor attorney general despite the fact that William Morris Hughes had qualified as a barrister. The Labor Party did not consider it proper that anyone so inexperience should hold such an august position.
Such socialist ideas as existed were utopian, and popular books of the time includes Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, in which the hero awakes after a hundred-year sleep to find himself in a perfect society. This, of course, avoided all of the transitional problems. David Syme of The Age, described himself as a socialist, while William Lane defined socialism as being “mates”.
These socialist ideas were part of the largely pre-industrial environment in which they flourished. The enemy was not capitalism but bankers and land monopolists. The traditional enemy of the petty bourgeois, the small farmer and small businessmen, and for wager labourers, seeing the possibility of becoming a small proprietor they became the enemy for him as well.
It is very revealing to look at the 1894 platform of the Labor Party, which shows clearly that although labouring men from 1840-90 were often proletarian, their consciousness was petty bourgeois.
The rank and file opinion had been consulted on the policy to be adopted. The order of priority was determined by exhaustive ballot, and top of the list came “land value tax”, second was a mining on private property bill to ensure that the rush would never end, third and fourth were abolition of the upper house and local government both of which were dominated by landed interests, sixth came the call for a state bank to beat the money lenders and second last came the eight-hour day, the only working class reform, which was amended two years later to “where practicable in order to secure the farmer’s vote”.
An artisan opponent of the eight-hour day at a meeting asked: “Would any man in this room, who ever expects to be a master for himself consent to work for eight hours for 16 shillings if he could obtain 20 shillings for 10 hours.” The last point reflects both the relatively high wages of the labourer and the expectation of most labourers.
This petty bourgeois level of thinking dominated working class organisations, the earliest of which was formed during the late 1850s. Because of the relatively high wages the earliest struggles were for the eight-hour day and it was in the building industry that success first came.
This led to the formation of state trades and labour councils in the 1850s and in turn to the first intercolonial conference of unions in 1879. These early organisations were essentially craft unions. The 1870s brought the rise of “new unionism” — national mass unions comprising unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the miners, shearers and general rural worker and seamen.
They were outside the ambit of the trades councils based in the city. These were the most proletarian elements in industries where capitalist ownership was far more concentrated and capitalist exploitation was clearer than in the secondary industries where class distinctions were somewhat blurred. Even by 1891 only 25 per cent of occupied workers in NSW and Victoria were engaged in small-scale manufacturing. It was the new unions that supplied the great fighting force for the strikes of the 1890s. The city unions were craft unions — little more than benefit societies aimed at providing sustenance to ill or unemployed members.
The typical unionist was a pillar of the community. The decision to build the Melbourne Trades Hall was taken largely because delegates objected to meeting in hotels. It is worth quoting the main objectives of the Lambing Flat Miners’ Protection League: One was the promulgation of the word of God. Another was to use the utmost energy to preserve order and to protect property and the rights of every individual and “to seize, secure and hand over to the government authorities any thief, robber or ruffian who violates the law of the country".
Humphrey McQueen has added to this by showing that the racism of the times was shared in full by the working class and its unions. In the 1850s, coloured labour was seen as a threat to living standards. This was not merely an economic consideration, but a full blown racism against non-Europeans, as a look at Henry Lawson’ will show, or as Labor Party leader J.C. Watson said in 1901: “The question is whether we would desire that our sisters or our brothers would be married into any of these races to which we object.”
Despite much of its character the boom of the 1870s and the 1880s enabled the rapid extension of unionism and the securing of wage and condition concessions. When the economic bubble burst, the unions were determined to consolidate their gains won and the employers were less willing to make concessions, responding by forming various employer organisations.
The strike wave from 1891 to 1894 exhausted and defeated the unions. Bad economic conditions, the extensive use of “free”, ie scab, labour, and the extensive use of the police, law courts and the state by the employers against the unions resulted in defeat for the union movement.
This, and the hostility of the capitalist press to the labour movement, raised class consciousness, although by no means was there a revolutionary situation. In 1890, there were still more domestic servants than unionists.
Thus, although a considerable class consciousness was needed to establish the Labor Party, the general objective was social reform, not socialism. The idea of separate political organisation did not originate in the defeat of the unions in the 1890s but the trade unions began more earnestly to organise the new Labor parties. It was committees of the trades halls that established the political leagues. These leagues from the first represented both the trade unions and the Labor leagues in their conferences.
Minorities in the Labor Party, such as the Victorian Socialist Party, sought to have the ALP adopt a socialist objective, but until 1921 all that was achieved was a commitment to “the collective ownership of monopolies” in the federal platform of 1905.
ALP policy in these early days included support for arbitration, not a strategy based on the class struggle; White Australia and gradual acceptance of the link with Imperial Britain. This last policy is interesting because loyalty to the British Crown increased after the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-05, when Japan won a surprising victory, and the fear of Asians caused Labor men to swing to the protection of the British Navy. During the 1890s radical journals such as The Bulletin were aggressively republican, but by 1914 Labor Prime Minister Fisher, was pledging support to the Empire "to the last man and the last shilling".
The Labor Party, as it emerged in the 1890s and after federation (1900), was liberal labour rather than a socialist labour party.
In policy Labor differed from the liberals largely in the enthusiasm with which it sought to complete the framework of capitalist democracy, and secondly by acceptance of state amelioration of conditions as a philosophy, and not as the liberals regarded it, merely as an expedient.
The reasons for this are as follows:
(1) Australia’s capitalist economy was still in its early development and was still in many ways particularly economically a colonial country.
(2) Although monopoly control developed in wool, cattle and mining (and it was these that had the mass unions and the first demands for nationalisation), generally, manufacturing industries at least to 1914 was small-scale (in 1908 the average factory employed only 19.8 employees). Even these factories were light industry, there was no steel industry till 1914.
These factories influenced the structure and outlook of the Australian labour movement. The small factory unit made for limited class consciousness, that is, workers did not really think of themselves first and foremost as workers.
The generally high wages (particularly since 1851) were based more on a sharing out among the workers (particularly the skilled workers), of part of the profits from sale of scarce raw materials overseas.
Under these conditions, working-class organisation in the cities was essentially craft unionism (mainly skilled workers) and union leaders and Labor MPs were drawn from the upper crust of the skilled labourers, often called the labour aristocracy. This layer, now enshrined as a union bureaucracy, acts as a buffer between the bourgeois and the working class.
They fitted into state and commonwealth parliaments, they shared the same basic acceptance of society as the non-Labor MPs. The direct responsibility of Australian governments for many economic activities such as railways, posts and telegraphs and roads, produced an acceptance of state enterprises as a possible alternative to private capitalist enterprise in many fields. This attitude was strengthened by the development in the states of social services and pensions. Reforming zeal (rather than fundamental change) was stimulated as concessions were rung from the capitalist class in quick succession. These included:
Abolition of voting anomalies.
Universal suffrage (not merely for men).
Health acts, mining acts and eight-hour day legislation.
From 1907 on, there was increasing criticism from the industrial wing of the Labor MPs and a gradual growth of disenchantment with the moderate line of the ALP leadership. This was due to an increasing drift to monopolisation of industry, increasing exploitation of labour and a fall in real wages.
Thus we see that the ALP was not born a socialist party and it never aspired to abolish private ownership of the factories, the land and the financial institutions.
In words of striking relevance to today, Lenin in 1920 wrote of the British Labour Party:
Of course the bulk of the members of the Labour Party are workers: however whether a party is really a political party of the workers or not depends not only on whether it consists of workers, but also upon who leads it, upon the content of its activities, and of its political tactics. Only the latter determines whether we have before us really a political party of the proletariat. From this point of view, the only correct one, the Labor Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because although it consists of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst reactionaries at that, who act fully in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns. (V.I. Lenin: Speech on affiliation to the Labor Party, August 6, 1920)