Revolutionaries and Reformists

Abstract

The production of labour history in Australia is still very much a going concern. Bede Nairn published his Civilizing Capitalism (for which there will be a sequel volume) in 1973; Gollan has now written a sequel to his Radical and Working Class Politics; Ian Turner will soon produce a sequel to his Industrial Labour and Politics; and the pages of Labour History continue to abound with shorter, more specific and empirical pieces of work written in a similar vein. Not all of those articles written for Labour History (perhaps increasingly less) are, strictly speaking, representative of 'traditional labour history'. On some levels this term has tendencies towards an amorphousness. Gollan and Nairn's works, with their politically and ideologically opposite intents, can both be included under the heading. But the phrase is useful in distinguishing a form of history in terms of theoretical presuppositon, methodology, subject, and sources. 'Traditional labour history', as used here, is defined by its positivism and empiricism, its frequent commit ment to progress, its leadership and institutional focus (unions and union leaders), and, as a concomitant to that, its exclusive use of sources which are the traditional tools of trade for the political, diplomatic and religious historians of the academic world. (Parliamentary debates, reports of special commissions, newspapers, accounts by leading figures, or records of central leadership bodies, such as the Labour Councils.) It has generally failed, as a consequence of its nature and predilections, to define class structures, and to show the relationship between industrial, political and ideological practice. Traditional labour history has been the alter ego of Aust. Hist. Prop.2 In Britain and Europe this form of historical endeavour has been subjected to a sustained critique for over a decade, by those historians advocating 'history from below', or a forced march beyond social history to the 'history of society'.3 E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), George Rud?'s The Crowd in History (1964), Angus Calder's The People's War. Britain 1939-45 (1969), and Stephan Thernstrom's Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (1964) have been seminal works in the development of history from below. They have all elaborated the social process and the flesh and blood involved in it, rather than the institution and the official statement. During the late sixties and early seventies sections of the New Left claimed this stream as a new 'democratic history', involving 'a love of mankind', 'commitment to man', and a 'structure of demo cratic values'.4 At the very least it 'filled out the picture', focusing not only on trade unions and Labor parliamentarians, but also on workers and common men and women who were not organised: the unskilled