I picked this up a little while back at Trades Hall Council's annual Little Red Book Sale. Given the parlous state of unionism in Australia and its attendant image problem, you could be forgiven for thinking that naming your fundraising activities after a compendium of meaningless slogans that people had to carry at all times if they wanted to avoid being shot might be a tad counterintuitive... but oh well. Australia's Way Forward is the 1964 platform of the Communist Party of Australia (price: three shillings!) as ratified by the 20th National Congress of the CPA in Sydney. From the introduction, Australia Today:
New Guinea, Papua, other Pacific islands and countries of South-East Asia."Australia's monopoly capitalist owners make their profit not only from investment at home. They increasingly draw profit also from the resources and labor of the peoples of
In this way, Australia has become an imperialist power, side by side with the United States, British, Japanese and other powers exploiting this region.
The class of owners of the Australian economy is dominated by about 60 very rich Australian families and various overseas interests with whom they are frequently allied.
These families are divided into several groups, the most powerful being that centred on the Broken Hill Pty. Ltd. steel giant, with headquarters in Melbourne.
The monopoly families, headed by the Darlings, Baillieus, Knoxes, Fairfaxes and their close associates, tied by mutual investments, intermarriage and their exclusive social circles, are the real ruling class of Australia."
Some of this warrants further comment. Papua New Guinea was a colony of Australia inherited from Germany at the end of World War I, granted independence under the Whitlam Government in 1975. Much to the chagrin of many of PNG's indigenous communities, the country's economy is still overwhelmingly dependent on foreign investment in mining, which has diversified from an Australian monopoly in the decades following independence. BHP's copper mine on the Ok Tedi river caused major environmental damage, and the 50,000 odd villagers living downstream from the river have had to contend with a water supply contaminated with copper and mining byproducts, which as you'd expect, killed most of the fish and impacted the wider ecosystem. While the community which lived in the vicinity of the Ok Tedi mine was consulted about its development, none of the people living downstream from the mine were included in the discussions.
After merging with rival mining giant Billiton in 2001, Broken Hill Pty. realised that Ok Tedi was more trouble than it was worth, and sold off a controlling stake in the mine to a development fund for the PNG economy. In 2007, a class action was launched against BHP Billiton on behalf of villagers living by the Ok Tedi river. The lawsuit is seeking US$4bn in damages; a 1990s lawsuit on behalf of a different tribe was settled by BHP for US$28m.
BHP Billiton has since divested itself of its steel and shipping operations to focus on mining, and why not? An old maxim of Australia's political classes, "What's Good for BHP is what's good for Australia", is reflected in the title of Alan Trengrove's 1975 history of the company. Obviously, not something you say aloud in Wollongong, Newcastle or any other place where the price of this corporate restructuring was thousands of job losses, chronic unemployment, and the economic devastation of the local community - and where the result of such an egregious faux pas is more often a karate kick to the teeth than a raised eyebrow and a chorus of Well I Nevers.
The Fairfaxes refers to the dynastic Fairfax media empire, nowadays publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, amongst others. It's easy to forget how stultifyingly conservative these broadsheets were back in the 1960s, as opposed to the heady mix of social liberalism and inner-urban circle-jerkism that we know them for today. (Case in point on the latter: The Sunday Age has a new reader-submitted section on the back page: "You Know You're in Melbourne When..."; a typical submission: "Your son's under 12 soccer team is sponsored by a coffee chain". Yes, we're cultural. Christ, we get it already.) After Warwick Fairfax tried to buy out the rest of his family back in 1987, the company collapsed, and the only tie to the company's familial origins is its name.
Baillieus refers to the Melbourne family of Liberal Party politicans and businessmen. The Baillieu dynasty was founded by William, a former Victorian Government minister and board member of Carlton Breweries, the Herald and Weekly Times (now part of the Murdoch stable), and Dunlop. The Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne is named for him and his philanthropy. Ted Baillieu is Victoria's incumbent opposition leader, and his life reads like the CV of your typical member of the landed gentry: brought up in the Vile Bodies wonderland of Toorak, educated at Melbourne Grammar and Melbourne University, an architect by profession before being parachuted into the safe seat of Hawthorn. Still, it's hard to give credence to the idea of an oppressive, scheming family in thrall to the boss class when Ted's sister is an anti-development campaigner on the Mornington Peninsula.
The second half of Australia's Way Forward deals with the CPA's agrarian program. Apart from this being the most urbanised country in the world, the utter futility of a bunch of commos pandering to Australia's deeply conservative rural bloc would surely not have been lost on the party's headkickers. The breakdown in diplomacy between the Soviet Union and Communist China led to wider ructions in communist parties across the world, with Australia being no exception. A few months after the publication of Australia's Way Forward, a breakaway group from the CPA formed a rival pro-Maoist party, ironically named the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), which had it's strongest base in the militant Builders Labourers Federation and the student population of my esteemed institution, Monash University - for most of the sixties and seventies considered the most radical university in the country (my, how times have changed...). Including a 40 page treatise about what the Glorious Revolution means for the farmers is an obvious last-ditch sop to those members on the verge of defecting to the CPA-ML.
Apart from little peculiarities - for instance, dropping the u in 'labour' in the tradition of semantic progressivism - the most striking thing about the booklet is how little has changed in the discourse of radical activists in the forty-five years hence. Swap a few of the names, update with reference to a few more (Filthy Imperialist) wars, and any extract of the book is the sort of thing you'd expect to hear coming out of the megaphone of, say, the campus-based Socialist Alternative or the youth wing of the DSP, Resistance.
It's a long-held truism of contemporary radical authors and academics that progressive voices have lost the means to be effectively heard as an opposition to the prevailing global order. Clive Hamilton's Quarterly Essay What's Left? is the seminal Antipodean version of this complaint. Yet after years and years of agonising, here we sit, still, where the first principles of any socialistically-inclined activist either involve pretending that the Wall never came down (and in case you were in any doubt, here), or bemoaning the fact that the word "bourgeois" can nowadays only be deployed with an appropriate ironic smirk, without understanding this and working within it.
Honestly. If someone who's spent the formative years in this decade suddenly gains a perspective on the world that leaves them deeply upset with the state of things - and deeply unsatisfied with any of the available means of redress - there's not much to be found from the distant days of Charles Dickens factories and the British East India company. And even if they want some kind of historical perspective, if they want to divine the sum total of grand insights that Marx shat out over the typewriter and cigars unflinchingly provided to him by his factory-owning industrialist BFF over a fair chunk of the nineteenth century, well. It's thesis number eleven, bitches.
