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Vanguard to Laggard in a Revolutionary Age: Australian Labour, Democracy, Revolution and Reform

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Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

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Abstract

‘What sort of peculiar capitalist country is this’, Vladimir Lenin asked in 1913, ‘in which the workers’ representatives predominated in the Upper house and till recently did so in the Lower House as well, and yet the capitalist system is in no danger?’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    V. I. Lenin, ‘In Australia’, available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/13.htm.

  2. 2.

    Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics. The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, Second Edition, 1979), p. 3.

  3. 3.

    Simon Ville, ‘The Economy’, in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (eds.), The Cambridge History of Australia [henceforth CHA] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), vol. 2, p. 381.

  4. 4.

    Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins. Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London: Merlin Press, 2003), p. 61.

  5. 5.

    Marian Sawer, ‘The Ethical State. Social Liberalism and the Critique of Contract’, Australian Historical Studies 31/114 (2000), pp. 67–90.

  6. 6.

    Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, ‘Indigenous and Settler Relations’, in CHA, Vol. 1, pp. 342–352, pp. 358–360.

  7. 7.

    Marilyn Lake, ‘Colonial Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region’, in CHA, Vol. 1, p. 542.

  8. 8.

    Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Parkville: Melbourne University Press, 2008), p. 6.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., p. 138.

  10. 10.

    For example, William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand [1902] (South Melbourne: Macmillan of Australia, 1969); Henry Bournes Higgins, A New Province for Law and Order (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1922).

  11. 11.

    Émile Pouget, ‘La conquête de la journée de huit heures’, in: L’action directe et autres écrits syndicalistes (1903–1910), Textes rassemblés et presents par Miguel Cheuca (Marseille: Agone, 2010), pp. 235–239.

  12. 12.

    Jurgen Tampke (ed.), Wunderbar Country. Germans Look at Australia 1850–1914 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982).

  13. 13.

    Peter Beilharz, ‘Tocqueville in the Antipodes?’, in Peter Beilharz (ed.), Thinking the Antipodes. Australian Essays (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2015), p. 37.

  14. 14.

    Michael Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia (London: Metheun and Co., 1898), pp. 219–220.

  15. 15.

    Henry Demarest Lloyd, Newest England. Notes of a Democratic Traveller in New Zealand, With Some Australian Comparisons (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1900), p. 377.

  16. 16.

    Victor S. Clark, The Labour Movement in Australasia, p. 319.

  17. 17.

    For example, ‘John Turner on the Declaration of Principles’, The Syndicalist 2/5 (December 1913); Haywood and Bohn, Industrial Socialism, pp. 48–49; Tom Mann, From Single Tax to Syndicalism (London: Guy Bowman, 1913).

  18. 18.

    Rae Cooper, ‘“To Organise Wherever the Necessity Exists”. The Activities of the Organising Committee of the Labor Council of NSW, 1900–10’, Labour History 83 (2002), pp. 43–64.

  19. 19.

    Kirk, Comrades and Cousins, p. 99.

  20. 20.

    Macintyre and Scalmer, ‘Class’, p. 360.

  21. 21.

    P. J. O’Farrell, ‘The Australian Socialist League and the Labour Movement, 1887–1891’, Historical Studies 8/30 (1958), pp. 52–53.

  22. 22.

    Bede Nairn, Civilising Capitalism. The Beginnings of the Australian Labor Party (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1989).

  23. 23.

    Australasian Labour Federation Election Platform, 1891, available at: http://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/htm/a000194.htm.

  24. 24.

    “Rules and Platform”, in Brian McKinlay (ed.), Australian Labor History in Documents, Vol. 2 (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1979), p. 28.

  25. 25.

    ‘The Parliament of Labour’, Tocsin, April 27, 1905, p. 4.

  26. 26.

    Australian Labor Party (ALP), Commonwealth Political Labour Conference 1905 (Brisbane: Worker, 1905), p. 10.

  27. 27.

    ‘The Anti-Socialist Association’, Bendigo Independent, May 16, 1904, p. 3.

  28. 28.

    ‘What is Socialism? The Reid Holman Debate’, Clarence and Richmond Examiner, April 7, 1906.

  29. 29.

    Verity Burgmann, In Our Time. Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 135.

  30. 30.

    Geoffrey Hewitt, ‘A History of the Victorian Socialist Party Victorian Socialist Party (VSP)’ (MA Thesis, La Trobe University, 1974), pp. 121–129, p. 174; Liam Byrne, ‘Constructing a Socialist Community. The Victorian Socialist Party, Ritual, Pedagogy, and the Subaltern Counterpublic’, Labour History 108 (2015), pp. 103–121.

  31. 31.

    ‘The New Party’, Socialist, April 2, 1906, p. 4.

  32. 32.

    ‘More About Revolution’, Worker, December 30, 1911.

  33. 33.

    ‘Evolution or Revolution’, Worker, September 26, 1903.

  34. 34.

    Elsie Mann, ‘Evolution or Revolution’, Socialist, April 2, 1906, 6; Tom Mann, ‘The War of the Classes’, in John Laurent (ed.), Tom Mann. Social and Economic Writings. A pre-Syndicalist selection, (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1988), p. 142. For a similar view: Andrew Thomson, A Criticism of the Labor Party’s Socialism, (Sydney: The People Printery, 1905), p. 16.

  35. 35.

    Tom Mann, Socialism (Melbourne: Tocsin, 1905), p. 58.

  36. 36.

    Overcoming its past circularity: Martin Jay, Essays from the Edge. Parerga and paralipomena, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 36–37.

  37. 37.

    Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy. The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 26.

  38. 38.

    Marilyn Lake, ‘State Socialism for Australian Mothers. Andrew Fisher’s Radical Maternalism in its International and Local Contexts’, Labour History 102 (2012), pp. 55–70.

  39. 39.

    Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 66, p. 97.

  40. 40.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 55; Frank Farrell, International Socialism & Australian Labour. The Left in Australia 1919–1939 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1981), p. 10.

  41. 41.

    ‘Labour in France’, Brisbane Courier, June 20, 1908; ‘The Strike in France’, People, August 8, 1908.

  42. 42.

    ‘Direct Action’, People, November 9, 1912; ‘War of the Workers’, Northern Star, September 1, 1913.

  43. 43.

    ‘Universal Social Unrest’, Labor Call, December 21, 1911, p. 9.

  44. 44.

    Mei-Fen Kuo and Judith Brett, Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang 1911–2013 (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Press, 2013).

  45. 45.

    ‘What Labor Will Do for Working Men and Women’, in Brian McKinlay (ed.), Australian Labor History in Documents. The Labor Party, Vol. 2 (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990) p. 36.

  46. 46.

    For example, ‘The Judge and the Miners’, Worker, August 14, 1913.

  47. 47.

    ‘Arbitration v. Revolution’, International Socialist, October 14, 1911.

  48. 48.

    For example, ‘An Unexpected Strike’, Gympie Times, January 20, 1914.

  49. 49.

    Macintyre and Scalmer, ‘Class’, p. 363.

  50. 50.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 40.

  51. 51.

    Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, pp. 23–24.

  52. 52.

    Tom Mann, ‘The Way to Win’, in John Laurent (ed.), Tom Mann’s Social and Economic Writings. A pre-Syndicalist selection (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1988), p. 144.

  53. 53.

    Tom Mann, ‘Industrial Conditions in Australia’, Daily News, January 29, 1910.

  54. 54.

    ‘The Strike. What Next?’, Catholic Press, December 9, 1909; Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 37.

  55. 55.

    ‘Revolution by Strike’, Freeman’s Journal, February 8, 1912; ‘The Brisbane Revolution’, Sydney Stock and Station Journal, February 6, 1912.

  56. 56.

    Strike or Arbitration?’, Advertiser, November 12, 1913.

  57. 57.

    Hewitt ‘A History of the Victorian Socialist Party Victorian Socialist Party (VSP)’, p. 193.

  58. 58.

    ‘Editorial’, Argus, December 5, 1913.

  59. 59.

    ‘The Interstate Conference’, Socialist, June 22, 1907, p. 2.

  60. 60.

    T: Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 57.

  61. 61.

    Bruce Scates, A New Australia. Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 60, p. 62.

  62. 62.

    Verity Burgmann and David Milner, ‘Futures Without Financial Crises. Utopian Literature in the 1890s and 1930s’, Continuum 23/6 (December 2009), pp. 839–853.

  63. 63.

    David Andrade, The Melbourne Riots and How Harry Holdfast and His Friends Emancipated the Workers (Melbourne: Andrade, 1892), p. 64. See also: Horace Tucker, The New Arcadia (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1894).

  64. 64.

    S. A. Rosa, The Coming Terror, or, The Australian Revolution. A Romance of the Twentieth Century (Sydney: S.A. Rosa, 1894), ‘Preface’ [n.p.].

  65. 65.

    W. H. Galier, A Visit to Blestland (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1896).

  66. 66.

    John Kent and Alen Kent, ‘The Red League. A Tale of the General Strike in Australia’ [henceforth ‘RL’], Worker, March 27, 1909.

  67. 67.

    ‘RL’, Worker, March 20, 1909.

  68. 68.

    ‘RL’, Worker, March 27, 1909.

  69. 69.

    Kent, ‘RL’, Worker, April 3, 1909.

  70. 70.

    Kent, ‘RL’, Worker, May 29, 1909.

  71. 71.

    Kent, ‘RL’, Worker, July 3, 1909 and July 24, 1909.

  72. 72.

    Kent, ‘RL’, Worker, July 31, 1909. This does not seem to have occurred.

  73. 73.

    Kent, ‘RL’, Worker, May 15, 1909 and July 31, 1909.

  74. 74.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 69.

  75. 75.

    Joan Beaumont ‘Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914–1918’, Australian Historical Studies 31/115 (2000), pp. 273–286.

  76. 76.

    For example, C. E. W. Bean, Anzac to Amiens. A Shorter History of the Australian Fighting Services in the First World War (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, Fifth Edition, 1968).

  77. 77.

    ‘Crisis of our Fate’, Argus, August 3, 1914, 14; ‘Speech by Mr Fisher’, Evening Echo, August 4, 1914, p. 4.

  78. 78.

    RN Walton, ‘The War and the Elections’, Labor Call, August 13, 1914, 2; W. Wallis, ‘Federal War’, Labor Call, September 3, 1914, pp. 4–5.

  79. 79.

    Grant Mansfield, ‘The Costs of War’, History Australia 6/1 (2009), 09.1–09.19.

  80. 80.

    Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: 1901–1942, The Succeeding Age, Vol. 4 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 155, p. 163.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., p. 146.

  82. 82.

    Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013), p. 151.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., p. 213.

  84. 84.

    ‘The “To Arms” Poster’, Direct Action, October 1, 1915, p. 3; Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, p. 190.

  85. 85.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, pp.78–79.

  86. 86.

    Robin Archer, ‘Stopping War and Stopping Conscription: Australian Labour’s Response to World War I in Comparative Perspective’, Labour History 106 (2014), p. 66.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., pp. 43–67.

  88. 88.

    Sean Scalmer, ‘Legend and Lamentation: Remembering the Anti-Conscription Struggle’, in Archer, et al. (eds.), The Conscription, pp. 200–208.

  89. 89.

    Australian Trades Unionism and Conscription (Melbourne: Labor Call Print, 1916), p. 13.

  90. 90.

    Holloway, The Australian Victory Over Conscription in 1916–17, p. 7.

  91. 91.

    ‘Trades Hall Council’, Labor Call, October 12, 1916, p. 7; Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 109.

  92. 92.

    ‘The Conscription Referendum of 1916: The struggle in Broken Hill’, in Brian McKinlay (ed.), Australian Labor History In Documents, The Radical Left, Vol. 3 (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990), p. 77; Paul Adams, The Best Hated Man in Australia. The Life and Death of Percy Brookfield 1875–1921 (Glebe: Puncher and Wattman, 2010), pp. 53–73.

  93. 93.

    Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space. The Anti-Conscription and Anti-War Campaigns of 1914–1918’, Labour History 60 (1991), pp. 1–15; Judith Smart, ‘The Right to Speak and the Right to Be Heard. The Popular Disruption of Conscriptionist Meetings in Melbourne, 1916’, Australian Historical Studies 23/92 (1989), pp. 203–219.

  94. 94.

    Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, p. 126.

  95. 95.

    Childe, How Labour Governs, p. 152.

  96. 96.

    For example, Australian Trades Unionism and Conscription, pp. 1–6; ‘Conscription Disloyalty’, Evening Echo, August 3, 1916, p. 2.

  97. 97.

    Frank Bongiorno, ‘Anti-Conscriptionism in Australia. Individuals, Organisations and Arguments’, in Archer, et al. (eds.), The Conscription Conflict, pp. 80–83.

  98. 98.

    Scalmer, ‘Legend and Lamentation’, p. 191.

  99. 99.

    ALP, Report of the Proceedings of the Special Commonwealth Conference (Melbourne: Labor Call, 1917), p. 4.

  100. 100.

    Ibid.

  101. 101.

    On the ‘rat’ and solidarity Jacqueline Dickenson, Renegades and Rats. Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations in Britain and Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2006).

  102. 102.

    Stephen Garton and Peter Stanley, ‘The Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–1922’, in CHA, Vol. 2, p. 51.

  103. 103.

    Ibid., pp. 50–51.

  104. 104.

    Childe, How Labour Governs, xiv–xvi.

  105. 105.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, pp. 139–161.

  106. 106.

    Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No. 11 (Melbourne: Carron Bird & Co., 1918), p. 1144.

  107. 107.

    ‘Strike Processions’, Australian Worker, August 16, 1917, p. 15.

  108. 108.

    ‘Who Is to Rule?’, Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 1917, p. 6.

  109. 109.

    Judith Smart, ‘Respect Not Relief: Feminism, Guild Socialism and the Guild Hall Commune in Melbourne, 1917’, Labour History 94 (2008), pp. 113–132.

  110. 110.

    Smart, ‘Feminists’, pp.123–124, p. 131.

  111. 111.

    Childe, How Labour Governs, pp. 184–185.

  112. 112.

    ‘Bolshevism’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 16, 1919, p. 6; ‘Yarra Bank Bolshevism’, Argus, March 27, 1919, p. 4; ‘Australia’s Choice’, Sydney Morning Herald, June 19, 1919, p. 8.

  113. 113.

    Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, p. 71.

  114. 114.

    Ibid., pp. 203–228; Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, pp. 122–138.

  115. 115.

    Diane Kirkby, ‘In Not a Few Respects, a Common History: Women, Wartime Lawmaking, and the Prosecution of Dissenters’, in Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist (eds.), Frontiers of Labor (Urbana: Chicago and Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2018), pp. 86 and 96.

  116. 116.

    Macintyre and Scalmer, ‘Class’, p. 365.

  117. 117.

    ‘Red Flag in Melbourne’, Geelong Advertiser, August 14, 1918, p. 4.

  118. 118.

    Kevin Windle, ‘“A Crude Orgy of Drunken Violence”. A Russian Account of the Brisbane “Red Flag Riots” of 1919’, Labour History 99 (2010), p. 175. The definitive treatment is Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988).

  119. 119.

    Garton and Stanley, ‘The Great War’, p. 57.

  120. 120.

    ‘Capitalist System a Failure’, Labor Call, July 11, 1918, p. 7.

  121. 121.

    ‘Into Slavery’, Worker, March 21, 1918, p. 4.

  122. 122.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, pp. 206–210; Stuart Macintyre, The Reds. The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998), 22, pp. 54–55.

  123. 123.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 183.

  124. 124.

    Ibid.

  125. 125.

    Ibid.; Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, pp. 183–184.

  126. 126.

    ‘Annual Conference Report’, Labor Call, May 29, 1919, pp. 4–5.

  127. 127.

    Official Report of the All-Australian Trades Union Conference (Melbourne: Labor Call Print, 1921), p. 3.

  128. 128.

    Ibid., p. 5.

  129. 129.

    Ibid., pp. 14–22.

  130. 130.

    Ibid., p. 9.

  131. 131.

    R. S. Ross, Revolution in Russia and Australia (Melbourne: Ross’s Book Service, 1920), p. 11, p. 46, p. 49, pp. 55–57.

  132. 132.

    ALP, Official Report of Proceedings of the Ninth Commonwealth Conference (Melbourne: Labor Call Print, 1921).

  133. 133.

    Ibid., p. 6, pp. 11–16.

  134. 134.

    Ibid., p. 27.

  135. 135.

    Ibid., p. 27.

  136. 136.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 224.

  137. 137.

    Workers’International Industrial Union, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism (Melbourne: Literature and Education Bureau of the Workers’ International Industrial Union). Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 186, p. 189.

  138. 138.

    Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics, p. 188.

  139. 139.

    Childe, How Labour Governs, v.

  140. 140.

    Ibid., pp. 209–210.

  141. 141.

    Garton and Stanley, ‘The Great War and Its aftermath, 1914–22’, p. 40.

  142. 142.

    Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss. Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Melbourne and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  143. 143.

    Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac. The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014).

  144. 144.

    Ross McKibbin, ‘Conscription in the First World War. Britain and Australia’, in Archer, et al. (eds.), The Conscription Conflict, p. 185.

  145. 145.

    Bollard, In The Shadow of Gallipoli, pp. 185–186.

  146. 146.

    Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, 18 (Melbourne: Carron Bird & Co., 1925), p. 586.

  147. 147.

    ‘New Books’, Manchester Guardian, August 16, 1923, p. 5; E.M.H. [E. M. Higgins], ‘Labour Over the Threshold’, Labour Monthly 5 (July–December 1923), pp. 423–426.

  148. 148.

    Ibid., p. 426.

  149. 149.

    The argument of Alistair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia. A Short History (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1969). But compare: Macintyre, The Reds for a rival view.

  150. 150.

    Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian labour movement, 1920–1955 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985).

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  1. Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Liam Byrne & Sean Scalmer

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  1. Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Stefan Berger

  2. Faculty of History, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Klaus Weinhauer

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Byrne, L., Scalmer, S. (2023). Vanguard to Laggard in a Revolutionary Age: Australian Labour, Democracy, Revolution and Reform. In: Berger, S., Weinhauer, K. (eds) Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04465-6_11

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