The Roots of Parliamentary Socialism in Australia, 1850-1920

Abstract

The Australian Labor Party was formed in 1891 as the political wing of a working class mobilisation that sought to curtail business power in the interests of working people. In 1905 it weakly acknowledged the socialist component of its vision. In 1910 the Australian Labor Party formed the first working class majority government in the world. In 1921 an angry trade union movement forced a thoroughgoing socialist objective on the party in response to the failure of national and state Labor governments to advance or even protect working class interests. In this narrative of events may be discerned two views of parliamentary socialism in Australia. In the first the stress is on the term 'parliamentary'. The parliamentarism of the party blocks the socialism of the working class militants. Parliamentary socialism in fact is no more than labourism, a pragmatic response to the immediate needs of wage-earners. There can be no progress to socialism by working through capitalist institutions. But supposing we try a different reading of this narrative. Now the stress is on the term 'socialism', and on the ruling class resistance that it elicited. The problem for the labour movement is to find a way to unite its parliamentary and industrial wings so that a socialist agenda can be pursued in both parliament and community organisations. A Labor government can and does protect workers and consumers at the expense of employers; workers organised around extending democracy at work and in the community strengthen the parliamentary party's determination to stick to its socialist agenda in the state. Parliamentary socialism is the legislative arm of the movement to democratise society. Institutions are not intrinsically capitalist or socialist, but sites for political struggle. These two readings indicate that the history of parliamentary socialism has to be a theorised history. In fact there has only been one such history of parliamentary socialism in Australia, V. Gordon Childe's How Labour Governs, which appeared in 1923. This paper does not try to extend Childe's form of class analysis into the present; rather it is concerned to extend it back into the late nineteenth century, to provide an enlarged discussion of the roots of parliamentary socialism. It has two other concerns, also inspired by Childe. Both of them carry the theory of parliamentary socialism beyond the models used in the contrasting readings described above.1 The first of these concerns may be expressed in the proposition that parliamentary socialism is an option not only for the working class but also for small rural and urban producers, for shopkeepers, self-employed artisans and professionals. 'From its foundation', as Childe said, 'the Labour Party has had to look for allies outside the working class and the few middle class protagonists of proletarian revolt/ (74). He explained how the bonds of democratic and nationalist sentiment as well as economic interest attracted the petty bourgeoisie to the party. Various state agencies and enterprises were set up by Labor to help the small producers escape the grip of the monopolists while supposedly carrying the whole society towards socialism. We should take a broader view than Childe, and say that parliamentary socialism in Australia was a matter of inter-class accommodations steered by the relations between political forces in the state, accommodations whose origins predated the Labor party.