'Pace Setter or Quiet Backwater?': German Literature on Australia's Labour Movement and Social Policies 1890-1914

Abstract

'What sort of peculiar capitalist country is this', asked the Russian emigr?e and professional revolutionary Nikolai Lenin in the June 1913 issue of Pravda, 'in which the workers' representatives predominate in the Upper House and, till recently, did so in the Lower House as well, and yet the capitalist system is in no danger?'.1 According to Lenin the answer was simple. The Australian Labor Party was not a socialist party at all but was rather a 'liberal-bourgeois party', while the 'so-called Liberals' in Australia were 'really conservative'. In Lenin's view this was brought about by the fact that most Australian workers were emigrants from Britain where the 'liberal-labour policy held almost un divided sway' leading to a Labor Party which was the 'unalloyed repre sentative of the non-socialist trade unions'.2 The leaders of the Aus tralian Labor Party were trade union officials, 'everywhere the most moderate and capital serving element' and in Australia 'altogether peaceable, purely liberal'. Lenin could thus assure the Pravda reader (at the Putilov factory in St. Petersburg or the Morozov works in Moscow) that conditions in Australia bore no reason for concern. He concluded that those in Europe and in Russia who tried to teach the people that class struggle was unnecessary by citing the example of Australia only deceived themselves. 'The rule is: a socialist workers' party in a capitalist country. The exception is: a liberal Labor party which arises only for a short time by virtue of specific conditions . . .'3 'In Australia' was not the most thorough analysis of the Australian Labour movement which was written before the Great War. Lenin was unlikely to concentrate in great depth on a country which was as yet not even an 'Independent capitalist state',4 particularly as he had just taken up residence in the Polish city of Cracow to be nearer to the Bolshevist movement in Russia and to continue with renewed vigour his attacks upon the Mensheviks and other heretics of Marxist thought among the European socialists. But although Lenin's article was short, and somewhat superficial, it did show that Australia was definitely creating interest in Europe. By 1913 the literature on Australia as the 'workers paradise' and 'the country of social miracles', had reached such proportions that even the extreme left of the European Marxist move ment felt compelled to answer widely made claims that social and political development in Australia was providing another nail in the coffin of Karl Marx. By far the greatest part of this literature on Aus