A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic
By Bruce Scates
Cambridge University Press, 1997
261 pp., $29.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/15793
Have you been lashed into a coma by the debate over the Constitutional Convention and whether a rich Australian or rich English parasite should be head of state? If so, then a reviving taste of a much more exciting republican debate is available in Bruce Scates' book on the socialist and other oppositional movements in Australia during the 1890s.
Scates, from the University of NSW, surveys "the great political and cultural imagination" of the 1890s. Then, amidst severe economic depression and big strikes, a colourful parade of "visionary, inspired and infectiously enthusiastic individuals" — socialists, anarchists, feminists and single-taxers — sought to interpret and change the world.
Scates rescues from obscurity the "single-taxers", followers of Henry George who had a "faddish obsession with land reform" as the miracle solution to "unite capitalist, labourer and self-employed against the parasitical landlord" and usher in a fair society.
A significant part of the early Labor Party, and never socialist, the Georgists were eventually overtaken by movements with more comprehensive ideals and more appeal to the working class. The Georgists ended their days in "the exile of single issue politics" becoming, like George himself, bitter opponents of "tyrannous trade unions" and socialism.
For all that, these "respectable radicals" had a better record on women's rights and race issues than much of the labour movement of those years. From their fear of what the cheap labour of women and migrants would do to their members' wage levels, the trade unions were prone to scapegoat rather than organise these sectors.
Scates notes, however, that colonial racism and sexism were contested from within the labour movement. The anarchist Chummy Fleming called anti-Chinese racism "the brightest red herring ever drawn across the trail of the labour movement". Despite his fondness for "racial purity", influential labour journalist William Lane nevertheless saw colonial occupation as "sheer robbery" of the Aboriginal people — a stand on indigenous issues rare for its time. Such principled stands, however, were confined to the fringes of the labour movement.
On the feminist movement, Scates extensively describes women's agitation for their rights on issues of marriage, family and sexuality, as well as political and economic matters.
Scates argues that the "masculinist" tag, applied by some current feminist scholarship to the radical movements of those (and later) years, "impoverishes history".
He cites many examples of men's support for equal rights for women, including the Georgists, William Lane and especially the socialists who had an intense interest in "the woman question", whilst noting their flaws. Lane, for example, held marriage, motherhood and the family sacred. Scates' critique of the "comforting orthodoxies of marxist theory" on women's oppression, however, is less convincing, giving much analytical ground to the theory of patriarchy.
The lure of communal experiments is another of the "movements" explored by Scates. Apart from Lane's famous but ill-fated attempt to "build socialism by example" in Paraguay, he writes about the thousands of unemployed who left the cities to settle in the country on cooperative schemes set up by anarchists and other idealists and utopians.
Those schemes which did not perish as unsustainable islands in the competitive sea were soon captured and subverted by "church, charity and philanthropist", becoming rural work houses, isolating and containing the unemployed.
The unemployed, when mobilised, are shown to be not "passive victims of the Depression", but a lively social force, their protests developing from "well-mannered deputations to government" to large demonstrations full of vigour and radical demands.
Scates leaves no manifestation of radicalism untouched. A frenzy for reading, for example, fired many radicalising workers in their quest for knowledge and political solutions. The occasional "loneliness of the radical orator" is contrasted with the profusion of the radical press which announced its purpose and spirit in titles such as "Voice, Hammer, Pioneer, Democrat, Roughshod, Revolt".
Internationalism warmed the heart and lit the consciousness of the radicals, and the songs, symbols and rituals of the radical movements "provided sensory affirmation to ideals that otherwise seemed lofty or remote".
The 1890s are usually renowned for the formation of the Labor Party and Scates examines how the socialist hopes that many workers had for that party were strangled at birth. Devastated by defeats in the big industrial battles, trade unionists looked to a political solution — the taking of state power through the ballot box.
The ALP proved defective from the start. It was plagued by the diseases of electoralism (the need to moderate policy so as to win elections), the blurring of class vision by ideas of community and nation (which meant keeping the capitalist class on side) and the gap that opened up between the privileged party leaders and the rank and file.
The late 19th century socialist movement reflected the political and ideological weaknesses rather than the strengths of the labour movement. For trade unionist and socialist alike, "socialism" often amounted to little more than state intervention in the economy and industrial relations. They were also attached to such snake-oil policies as tariff protection and White Australia. These beliefs led them to bank their hopes in an all-class, nationalist and racist Labor Party and it is no surprise that their political investments were used against them.
The socialists eventually split from the ALP. Economic recovery, however, kept the extra-parliamentary socialists isolated which reinforced their political immaturity. Frustrated by the lack of revolutionary consciousness in the working class, the socialists blamed the workers' backwardness and sought to overcome it with lectures. Nevertheless, they had started to clear the way for a more viable Marxist movement the following century.
The socialists are not the main focus of Scates' book, however. Scates does not believe that Marxism, then or now, has a monopoly claim on socialism. He argues that alternative socialist traditions had equal legitimacy and should not be dismissed as statist, moralistic, utopian or populist.
By celebrating the diversity of movements and ideologies, Scates has performed a valuable historical task. But a comparative assessment of the socialist and other movements shows why the socialists proved to be the winners in the long run and why the anarchists, Georgists and communalists all fell by the wayside.
A rewarding, if not always relaxing read (Scates' style of thick description produces a density of prose that earns a track rating of "heavy"), his book is nevertheless like cheese to the chalk of the current "republican" discussion. That dreary debate about dusty constitutionalism is a universe away from Scates' 1890s cast of passionate radicals who argued about, and struggled for, the total transformation of society.