Abstract
Nick Dyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party . Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011. 281 pp., AU$44.00 (pbk).
In recent years, a growing number of political and labour historians in Britain and Australia, including Jon Lawrence, Miles Taylor, Duncan Tanner, Matthew Worley, Bruce Scates and Frank Bongiorno, have highlighted the importance of political actors, languages, representations and institutions to the development of Labor and other forms of popular politics. Many of them have taken their cue from Gareth Stedman Jones’ seminal book, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982, published in 1983. In this book, Stedman Jones sought to ‘rethink’ the relationship between the ‘political/linguistic’ and ‘the social’, and to afford more importance to politics and language in the formation of political consciousness and developments than had traditionally been the case with the ‘social’ interpretation offered by Friedrich Engels and other like-minded materialists.
Whether the ‘turn to politics’ is an entirely new historiographical departure or in many ways a return, albeit more pronounced, to an examination of the interplay between political and material factors, as practised, for example, by historical materialists E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, is a matter of debate. Be that as it may, the ‘turn’ constitutes the key methodological underpinning of Nick Dyrenfurth’s splendidly refreshing Heroes and Villains.
This book, based upon Dyrenfurth’s Monash PhD thesis, seeks specifically to reconcile or ‘synthesize’ the ‘linguistic turn’, as ‘pioneered’ by Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce, with the ‘cultural materialism’ of Thompson (pp. 10–11, 234). Whether this process of ‘synthesis’ is logically and empirically consistent and convincing is also a matter of debate and, I would argue, considerable doubt. For example, while Stedman Jones sought formally to rethink the relationship between the ‘political’ and the ‘social’, he opposed not only the economic reductionism of Engels, but also the linguistic ‘determinism’ of some followers of Foucault. Patrick Joyce may be counted among these followers. Furthermore, some scholars, including myself, maintained that in practice Stedman Jones shifted the balance too far in favour of the ‘political/linguistic’ at the expense of the ‘social’. We claimed that he offered a formal reading of words and language that paid insufficient attention to their historical context, change and multiple and contested meanings. As a result, his 1980s’ study of Chartism and other forms of popular politics and his subsequent works have been essentially (often stimulating) exercises in political and intellectual rather than social, economic or ‘total’ history. In his pioneering, but flawed, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (1991) and Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (1994), Patrick Joyce ‘turned’ much more than Stedman Jones. In effect, Joyce’s embrace of postmodernism led him to greatly downplay and even rupture the links and engagements between language, politics, culture and material experiences and structures.
In short, there are important differences as well as similarities between the ‘turns’ of Stedman Jones and Joyce. These differences are inadequately registered in Dyrenfurth’s book. E.P. Thompson, moreover, was critical of Stedman Jones’s ‘turn’ and very hostile towards Joyce’s new-found ‘idealism’. As a result, Dyrenfurth’s attempt to ‘marry’ the work of Stedman Jones, Joyce and Thompson is, to say the least, problematical. I would go further to suggest that, on both logical and empirical grounds, it is inconsistent and unconvincing.
Yet all is not lost, for if we relocate Dyrenfurth’s work within the Thompsonian tradition of a non-reductionist form of historical materialism – involving the flexible engagement of politics, language and materiality, ‘culture’ and ‘structure’, consciousness and being – rather than as part of Stedman Jones’s and (especially) Joyce’s inspired ‘linguistic turn(s)’, then we enter much more fruitful ground. For example, much in the manner of Thompson’s classic book, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and the work of Terry Irving, Sean Scalmer and Ian Syson on Australian labour intellectuals, Dyrenfurth’s Heroes and Villains makes the totally convincing argument that political figures and their ideas do matter. For example, Dyrenfurth clearly shows that the ‘political culture’ of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) – its leaders and activists, its press and their languages, inconography, and so on – contributed significantly to its electoral and overall fortunes. As such, political culture was constitutive of political developments rather than a passive or ‘background’ factor. In showing this, Dyrenfurth mounts an effective critique of the traditionally dominant institutional and socio-economic histories of the ALP.
Dyrenfurth’s key substantive argument, clearly and logically developed in the course of the Introduction and the six chapters of the book, largely endorses the ‘populist’ case already made by Ray Markey. This argument may be summarized in the following way. The early ALP’s precocity and electoral successes, unmatched by any other comparable party in the world, resulted from its ability to combine an appeal rooted in class, nation (‘populism’) and race. The party of John Christian Watson and, especially, Andrew Fisher related to the hopes and fears not only of the ‘honest’, ‘upright’ and ‘patriotic’ ‘white’ men and women who formed both its ‘natural’ working-class constituency and a majority of the New Commonwealth’s population, but also a wide range of ‘white’ and equally ‘respectable’ and ‘community-minded’ professionals and urban and rural small ‘producers’. In addition, the ALP saw itself as the representative of ‘true Australianism’, rooted in the White Australia policy, arbitration, ‘New Protection’ and the fight for a more autonomous and independent Australia within an enlightened British Empire.
In contrast, as seen in the splendid cartoons that illustrate Dyrenfurth’s text throughout, the ALP successfully portrayed its ‘Fat’ opponents in industry, agriculture and politics as ‘exploitative’, ‘parasitical’, ‘monopolistic’ and ‘selfish’. They were accused of placing their personal and sectional interests above those of the community and nation as a whole, and as being ‘grovelling Imperialists’ who elevated the interests of Britain above those of Australia. As such they were portrayed as the enemies not only of the workers and producers, but also of the ‘new’ and progressive nation.
The ALP thus became the party of class (in the best traditions of ‘Australian’ ‘mateship’, the ‘fair go’ and ‘generosity of spirit’), the nation (‘true Australianism’) and ‘whiteness’ (a combination of resolute opposition to the threat of ‘cheap’ and ‘debased’ ‘coloured’ labour from ‘without’ and the provision of ‘protection’ and ‘paternalism’ to ‘primitive’, ‘child-like’ Aboriginals ‘within’). The experiences of the First World War, however, split the party over conscription, saw it move to the left and disastrously adopt a ‘sectional’, ‘selfish’ and unproductive notion of class in place of its previously successful ‘populism’. At the same time, its Nationalist opponents successfully captured the ‘populist’ patriotic and imperial ground and demonized the federal ALP as extreme and disloyal to the nation and empire. The result of these combined factors was that for most of the interwar years, the federal ALP was cast into the electoral wasteland.
There is much to admire and engage with in Dyrenfurth’s narrative. In the manner of Stedman Jones and Jon Lawrence, he correctly allows political actors of the time to ‘speak for themselves’ in their own contexts rather than incorrectly assuming, as many Australian historians have done, that their structured conditions of life should have largely programmed these actors to speak in particular, ideological ways (whether ‘labourist’ or ‘socialist’ and so on). He convincingly shows that questions of class and the people had multiple meanings over time and in different contexts. Class, for example, could be equated with the progressive and altruistic majority national interest or portrayed as narrow, resentful, selfish and at odds with the wider common good. Class and ‘populism’, furthermore, were by no means necessarily ‘rivals’, but at key points in time and in certain contexts formed ‘complementary and overlapping’ discourses and practices (p. 11). He also employs visual sources with great skill and to convincing effect.
Finally, he lays down the substantive gauntlet to historians of the ALP and the Australian working class in two specific ways. First, he argues that military conscription for overseas service was not necessarily anti-labour in character. This is a viewpoint meriting further investigation at the national and subnational levels. It would also benefit from the adoption of a cross-national comparative approach to Labor attitudes to conscription. Second, his contention regarding the ALP’s disastrous post-1916 ‘retreat’ into a more narrow, left-wing, militant and sectional form of ‘class’ at the expense of its previous ‘populism’ merits more detailed treatment. The latter should go beyond the internal history of the ALP to include the actions and ideologies of other political parties and the wide-ranging effects of the First World War and Bolshevik communism upon Australia.
In conclusion, we owe Nick Dyrenfurth a considerable debt of gratitude. He has written an innovative and challenging book, which both contributes significantly to the history of the ALP and popular politics more generally, and will spark off many debates. It will be interesting to see how Australian historians respond to this latest example of the international political ‘turn’.
NEVILLE KIRK
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK