The Origins of the ALP: A Marxist Analysis
By Jim McIlroy
Resistance Books, 2004
58 pages, $5.95
Available from your local Activist Centre (see page 2) or email <info@resistancebooks.com>
REVIEW BY CHRIS ATKINSON
The further 2.4% swing to the Greens in the federal election indicates a rising recognition that Labor offers no real alternative to PM John Howard and the Coalition. Jim McIlroy's new pamphlet The Origins of the ALP: A Marxist Analysis is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the origins of Labor's headlong rush further to the right.
McIlroy traces the formation of the ALP in the early 1890s, after the great maritime and shearers' strikes, through to its consolidation as a reformist, parliamentarist party in the early 20th century. The ALP's formation reflected an advance in working-class consciousness. Its founders recognised that the bosses used the colonial parliaments as weapons against workers and that the labour movement needed its own political party to win governmental power to advance its interests against those of the capitalists.
The British settler states that united into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 shared the British empire's super-profits from the exploitation of its Asian colonies. These super-profits enabled the emerging independent Australian capitalist class to consolidate itself and foster a privileged and protected aristocracy of labour among the better-paid, skilled sections of the working class.
It was upon this conservative layer of workers and union officials that the ALP based itself. Placing defence of their own social privileges before the long-term interests of the working class, this labour bureaucracy shared the ideological outlook of the middle classes — the shopkeepers, professionals and farmers. These union bureaucrats sought to harmonise the interests of labour and capital, which meant supporting the capitalist status quo. The party's pro-capitalist character quickly became entrenched, and remains to this day.
VI Lenin's insightful and rather funny 1913 article In Australia appends McIlroy's essay. In it Lenin accurately characterises the ALP as "a liberal capitalist party". Lenin asks rhetorically what sort of a peculiar capitalist country is this in which the workers' representatives dominate parliament and yet capitalism is in no danger?
The pamphlet is an argument against the mistaken view, still held by many on the left, that the ALP is a workers' party, albeit with a pro-capitalist leadership. By basing the pamphlet on the historical development of the ALP, McIlroy undercuts the plethora of idealised accounts of Labor's formation that suggest the ALP was formed by some mythical spontaneous movement of rank-and-file workers. It joins Ray Markey's Making of the Labor Party in NSW in its compelling explanation of how the radical and socialist elements who helped form the party were defeated by an alliance of parliamentarians and union bureaucrats.
McIlroy points out that the ALP's accelerated rightward trajectory in the 1990s coincided with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the decline of the Communist Party. This has left a big vacuum to Labor's left and the Greens are its main electoral beneficiary. This vacuum, McIlroy concludes, makes the task of building a genuine working-class alternative — a socialist party — to eventually challenge the Labor Party for leadership of the Australian workers' movement more urgent than ever.
From Green Left Weekly, December 15, 2004.
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