BY JONATHAN STRAUSS
Rise Like Lions: The Hijacking of Australian History
By Steve Davis
Ginninderra Press, 2000
138pp., $19.80 (plus $3.30 postage)
Order from PO Box 53, Charnwood ACT, 2516.
The cover of Steve Davis' Rise Like Lions: the Hijacking of Australian History features praise for it from radical journalist John Pilger and historian Humphrey McQueen, both of whom provided Davis with encouragement and material. They endorse the author's call for activism against government deregulation and free-market ideology.
"From the first day of the convict settlement of Australia in 1788, there developed between the governing and the governed a feeling of mutual obligation in the true sense of the term", argues Davis. This "mutualism", forced on the colonists by their circumstances, developed into a unique form of social contract, the "Australian system". Economic deregulation and privatisation in the 1980s and 1990s have destroyed this system.
According to Davis, this social arrangement nurtured Australian economic development and "also provides the key to understanding many of those features that make us proud of ourselves as individuals and as a nation". Yet, "the Australian System is virtually unknown among the general public"; right-wing journalists and commentators give an inaccurate and trivialising account of the social contract, while "historians and academics in general have overlooked its significance".
Davis' sharp criticisms of left-wing historians — for being so concerned that social contract's modest benefits for workers impeded the development of a socialist society that they presented "history as they wished it to be, not as it was" — ignores more contemporary historical research.
Davis fails to acknowledge that Australia's settler-colonial society was founded on the expropriation of Australia's indigenous people and quickly developed social structures that systematically discriminated against Aboriginal people and non-European immigrants. These were significant sources of the "common wealth" distributed among "white" Australian employers and workers.
Even in relation to Davis' particular subject, labour history, he makes no reference to works such as Raymond Markey's The Making of the Labour Party in New South Wales, 1880-1900 (UNSW Press, 1988). That book showed how the Labor party developed in the late 19th century as an instrument of the "national settlement" achieved in the first years of the 20th century. Markey's research contradicts what Davis accepts from the old left historians about the class consciousness of rural workers at that time.
Davis' dating of the "Australian System" back to initial European settlement, however, suggests it was necessary and intrinsic to Australia. This glosses over his acceptance of its capitalist character and of its division "between the governing and the governed".
For example, Davis writes: "British settlement of Australia established a society consisting of a unique mixture of socialism and private enterprise initiative. On the one hand we had the authoritarian socialism of the penal system, and on the other the officer class and free settlers acting as independent economic units but dependent on the penal system for support and survival. This balance, this two-pronged arrangement, was to survive and thrive in modified forms almost to the present."
That is, capitalism in Australia arose on the basis of the forced labour of convicts (similarly, in the English colonies in North America it developed on the basis of indentured labour and slavery). This hardly constitutes a balance between capitalism and "socialism", though the state in Australia did serve the development of the "independent economic units" with the resources it had at its disposal.
Davis also writes: "As the young colonies were developing a sense of national identity and national purpose, it is only natural that a negative view of the penal system slowly took hold." The rejection of penal labour was only a "natural" result of the growth of Australian nationalism, however, because the latter was a product of the consolidation of Australian capitalism. Davis ignores this link because he uses nationalism as part of his defence of the "Australian System".
Amazingly, Davis refers to Karl Marx's Capital while arguing "labour ... regarded as a commodity ... is [a] sick and distorted view ... a denial of the right of all people to share in the wealth generated by economic advances, but it is a carry-over that our forebears were able to shake off as they forged a new society in a new land". The premise of Marx's analysis of capitalism, however, is that the capacity to labour is, not "regarded as", a commodity.
The argument that labour should not be regarded as a commodity, however, is the basis on which Davis promotes a politics of government economic intervention, in the form of local community development and ownership of enterprises, as opposed to "economic orthodoxy". The ALP is the political instrument for this.
Davis says past government acceptance that "society is a unit", the health of which "depends on the health of all its members", resulting in its intervention to secure social stability rather than to pursue class war. A mass belief developed that "the wealth of the nation should be used for the good of all", and this constituted "a loose form of socialism". In Australia, this outlook produced, according to Davis, "the most progressive nation on earth as far as political reform and economic justice was concerned".
The labour movement's commitment to this outlook is the basis of the "Australian System", Davis argues. "The ALP, as the foremost working-class political institution, developed this 'peculiarly Australian' attitude of working-class respect for stability of government because, historically, this had produced the best outcomes."
Even the experience of the 1980s ALP-ACTU Accord, which Davis calls "a free-market policy in its own right", leaves his faith in the ALP untouched. The Accord was "a mechanism for responsible wage determination and positive economic and social outcomes. As such it clearly demonstrates the fact that the ALP has never broken faith with the ideal of the common good; it has always attempted to govern for all ... The basic commitments of the ALP seem to have altered little: it is the Liberals and Nationals who have been transformed by market sovereignty."
Therefore, Davis writes, the ALP "is the battleground": progressive organisations raise issues, but they are won or lost in the forums of the ALP.
What Davis, however, upholds as the commitments of the ALP — nationalism, "evolution [as the] hallmark of the Australian System", and a search for social stability through facilitating working class aspirations — represents a commitment to capitalism from workers based on a system of concessions to workers such as improvements in living standards and political and social rights. This political perspective, while capable of developing militant demands and actions, is not revolutionary.
Davis' politics rely on continuing divisions among workers. In the past, Australian workers, along with other workers in rich countries, have been pitted against those of the poor countries. The heightened drive for profits by capitalists in recent decades has increasingly concentrated the "benefits" of imperialist capitalism among smaller groups of workers.
This makes Davis' call for "a new and comprehensive Australian System" a misleading utopia. It attempts to revive an approach to labour movement politics that is no longer capable of systematically securing even incremental improvements.
The crisis of capitalism is the precondition for successfully advocating among broad layers of workers a revolutionary overturn of the existing social order as the best response to its oppression. As Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, "The Mask of Anarchy", quoted by Davis, states, the workers must "rise like lions ... shake your chains to the earth like dew, ye are many — they are few".