The scourge of Labor nationalism
By Iggy Kim
One key reason that the Hanson and Howard show has hit high ratings is its deep connection to the history of capitalist Australia. Hanson's rhetoric invokes an ideology and tradition that form the very roots of this country.
Many people still think that, somehow, racism in Australian history wasn't as evil as slavery in the US or apartheid in South Africa. They think that, despite all that has happened, Australians have always stood for a "fair go" and that any problems were due only to ignorance, misunderstanding, cultural insensitivity at worst — it wasn't real racism. And anyway, we have to focus on the positive achievements of our national past.
This is clearly false: Australian capitalist society has a racist past as vicious as any other, a past that the Howards and Hansons are trying to legitimise in order to perpetuate it in new ways.
The wealth of the Australian investing class is founded on the blood of thousands of Aboriginal people and their stolen lands; on the blood and sweat of Pacific Island slaves chained on the sugar plantations of Queensland; on the super-exploitation of Aboriginal pastoral workers paid in flour and tea; on the violent mass evictions of Chinese miners from the goldfields.
Colonisation, slavery, segregation, lynching and pogroms form the birthmarks of the BHPs, the CRAs, the Elders IXLs and the CSRs which continue to rule this country.
Whose racism?
That's why not all white Australians are fundamentally responsible for racial exploitation — the root of racist ideology — because one needs money and power to colonise and enslave other people. As the ruling class was subjugating peoples of colour, it also enslaved British and Irish convicts and, after World War II, conscripted masses of non-English speaking European workers at wages and conditions far below those of Anglo-Celtic workers.
If all whites are blamed for racial exploitation, then this can only make racism seem natural and legitimise the myth that people have always hated each other for being different.
That is, the mystery remains as to where racism comes from and whose interests it serves. It is how the rulers of this country escape responsibility for racial exploitation — by saying that unless none of us are guilty, then all of us are.
But it's because not all whites are guilty of racial exploitation that those who are guilty have to sell it to the rest of the white population with vicious lies about Aboriginal privilege and Asian criminality. Of course, anyone buying those lies does perpetuate racism as a whole.
Tragically, that's what has happened in Australian history. For a long time, ordinary white people swallowed the racist bait because they were relatively more privileged than migrants and Aboriginal people and saw their interests in denying others this privilege.
This explains why the labour movement has historically been, above all, nationalist, dominated by the nationalist Labor Party: it has seen its main enemy, not in Australian bosses, but in evil foreign — i.e., Asian — investors and workers of other countries, especially the coloured workers of Asia.
Remember that the Labor party was founded on the white Australia policy. It brought the policy into federal law, one of the first laws passed after federation. The first plank of the federal ALP's platform in 1905 was the "maintenance of a white Australia".
The federal election manifesto of the Victorian Labor Party in 1910 stated: "When a majority of the people of the principal nations, such as the USA, Germany and Great Britain, are converted to the Labor Gospel, war as we know it will cease. The only use for armies and navies then will be to police the world and keep the small and less civilised nations in order."
Economic strategy
Such ultra-nationalism underlies Laborite economic strategy. In both the unions and parliament, Laborites have traditionally sought salvation in strong Australian industry.
They've protected and subsidised the likes of BHP and CRA, powerful multinationals that continue to accumulate wealth through the ongoing dispossession of Aboriginal people. This dispossession — given a conciliatory gloss by Labor's native title legislation — is set to intensify if Howard overturns the Wik decision and implements widespread uranium mining.
The flip side to nationalist protectionism is the current argument from the bosses that Australia must cut jobs, wages and social spending to become "internationally competitive".
The Laborites have accepted this wholeheartedly, adding a pro-worker-sounding spin that restructuring is the only way to save "traditional Australian living standards" from degenerating into those of a seedy Asian sweatshop.
But as these standards deteriorate anyway under successive economic rationalist regimes, protectionist Laborites retreat further into nationalism, calling for more measures to protect and bolster up "our" big business, to curb Japanese investment, to restrict (Asian) immigration.
Where such a retreat naturally leads can be seen in the evolution of Graeme Campbell, ex-Labor MHR and founder of the ultra-nationalist Australia First party. His expulsion from the ALP in 1995 had more to do with his public death wish on Paul Keating than with his racist views — he'd been an outspokenly racist Labor politician for many years and a federal MP since 1980.
By contrast, Campbell's more trendy Laborite colleagues use the pretext of globalisation to argue for helping "our" bosses become more competitive in international markets because, otherwise, overseas workers will take our jobs.
This is just a fancy way of singing the same old tune, that Asians are going to take Australian jobs. It's the 1990s version of the yellow peril. Whether it's protectionism or economic rationalism, the same line is drawn — Australian workers and bosses on one side, and everyone else on the other. Only the language is different.
Super-profits
Traditional Australian living standards have historically been maintained by the super-profits that Australian multinationals drain from surrounding Third World countries, even while the white Australia Laborites drummed up the myth that this country is threatened by the yellow peril.
We need only look at what they've done to the people and environment of Ok Tedi, Kalimantan and Bougainville. These big Australians rove all around the world extracting super-profits.
This goes back many years: the Women's Weekly was set up with the super-profits from the Fijian Emperor gold mine, stolen when Fiji was a British colony by Frank Packer, Kerry Packer's father, in cahoots with the one-time Labor federal treasurer and Queensland premier, "Red Ted" Theodore.
Therefore, for the Laborites to argue that workers need to help Australian industry become more internationally competitive is to make Australian workers the storm troopers of Australian bosses' imperial ambitions.
Of course, this is nothing new for the Laborites: on top of Red Ted's adventures, Gough Whitlam supported Australia's invasion of Vietnam until he saw the potential loss of votes, and he actively facilitated the invasion of East Timor. Bob Hawke sent Australian warships to the Gulf War.
In an exploiting country like Australia, nationalism inevitably has racist and chauvinist implications, because Australia is part of that exclusive club of white countries exploiting a vast number of non-white countries.
Nationalism for Australia, unlike East Timor or Bougainville, is basically about preserving this dominant, exploitative position in the world using ethnicity, national culture and racial categories as an ideological justification. Nationalism is used to sell this exploitation to those of us whose interests are not profit-driven and imperialist.
Pretend underdog
We're taught from a very early age that all Australians share the same interests, that we're in it together. Today this is made more effective by the progressive-sounding language in which nationalism is couched, by conservatives and Laborites alike.
One peculiar feature of Australian nationalism is its inferiority complex: by feigning fears of becoming a "banana republic", the "poor cousin of Asia", etc, Australian corporate bosses are more easily able to sell their imperial exploits to progressive people.
Instead of old-fashioned white supremacism, they tell us "our" interests depend on Asia, that we have to "tolerate cultural difference — like a bad odour — as long as it delivers trade and tourism dollars.
By making Australia seem like an underdog, the bosses are also able to justify supporting regional dictators, arguing that not only should we understand different cultural approaches to democracy, but that we have to because those Asians are bigger than "us", and "our" fate is caught up with theirs.
These more cosmopolitan imperialists use the internationalist-sounding language of "globalisation", "international competitiveness", "entering Asian markets", but in the end, it's just a more polite way of maintaining Australia's imperial position. The only difference between the Laborites of the Campbell and Keating schools is essentially a tactical one, albeit one that the anti-racism movement can use to form united fronts against the most grotesque forms of racism.
All of us who have no stake in the profits of the BHPs and CRAs have to fight for true internationalism, for the independent interests of all working people, both here and overseas, especially workers in countries exploited by Australia, because our interests are independent of the bosses'.
Despite all these years of tightening our belts for the sake of international competitiveness, what have we gained? We are losing more and more because, ultimately, bosses care as little about Australian workers as they do about Asian workers.
But the Laborites still speak the language of nationalism and have done little to assist struggling workers in the Asia-Pacific region. In fact, the ACTU of Martin Ferguson did the complete opposite in Indonesia a couple of years ago — it actively tried to assist Suharto's puppet union, the SPSI, while genuine worker activists were being jailed and tortured for organising strikes.
Racial nationalism has held back the social and moral advancement of the majority of white working people in this country.
Workers under the leadership of the Labor nationalists have shamefully taken strike action against, and physically attacked, other workers because they were of a different colour; they were misled into the nationalist Prices and Incomes Accord, which shifted billions from workers to the bosses; and now, the Hanson and Howard show is trying to take up where the Laborites have left off, claiming to speak for the battlers and represent equality for all Australians.
Internationalism
But there are battlers all over the world, not just in Australia. Fighting exclusively for Australian battlers leads to racist nationalism. That's why we have to replace the disguised nationalism of multiculturalism with the fight for international solidarity and racial equality.
Multiculturalism was used by the Whitlam government, with the ruling class's support, to contain and neutralise the internationalism that came to be prevalent in the late '60s radicalisation. Reconciliation has served the same purpose in relation to the perspectives of racial equality.
Today, we who are genuine about fighting racism must popularise, once again, the ideals of international solidarity and racial equality.
Despite the domination of the Laborites in this country's working-class history, there are heroic precedents of real internationalism and anti-racism.
The foundations for the internationalist and anti-racist radicalisation in the late '60s were laid even earlier by Communist Party workers.
Despite all the problems that beset that party, including a degeneration into nationalism later on, it was the Communist workers in the 1930s who alone fought alongside Italian and Slav miners in the Kalgoorlie goldfields and alongside Italian militants in the Queensland sugar plantations who had fled Mussolini. It was Communist organisers who stood with Aboriginal pastoral workers in the 1940s to fight for equal wages.
In all these struggles, not only did they fight the bosses; they also clashed head-on with local Labor politicians and Laborites in the Australian Workers Union who incited and organised Anglo workers to physically attack their fellow workers.
And yet, as one of the Kalgoorlie Communists, Jack Coleman, related many years later, the Italians were better unionists than those rotten Laborites. Jack and his comrade, Jock Findlay, armed only with a pamphlet arguing for internationalism and the local Communist newspaper, were so successful that Jock was eventually elected secretary of the local AWU.
This is the tradition we can look to in fighting racism — a tradition of working-class internationalism and racial equality. As the Communists demonstrated, this can happen only if the organised labour movement, and working people as a whole, make a decisive and complete break from the misleadership of the nationalist Laborites.
Racism can be fought effectively only when working people organise a political voice that consistently champions the independent interests of all workers, a political voice that is our very own, under our democratic control, committed to a strategy of empowering working people of all colours in direct mass action to defend and extend our interests.
Ultimately, racism can be eradicated only when these interests are practically realised in a democratic, worker-run society based on solidarity, not competition, between nations and between workers.