Frustrated Preachers

Beatrice and Sydney Webb are still alive, though failing. At least, that is the impression one gets from these five pamphlets, which mark the resurrection of the Victorian Fabian Society since 1980, after temporarily shaking off the mortal after coil. Fabian socialism has not been without mockers in its home land and it has exported somewhat less vigorously than the blackberry and rabbit. The image problem it has patiently endured this past three-quarter century has largely concerned a certain smug quasi-religious righteousness and unwillingness to examine appealing socialist notions very stringently. Publication of pamphlets expressing ‘the ethic of democratic socialism’ – though representing the opinion of the authors, not a collective view – is one of the Society’s main activities. It seeks to be an intellectual arm of the Labor Movement, proclaiming that ‘reason, education and ideas should play a large part in Australian politics’. Several of the authors are friends or acquaintances of the reviewer and he can only marvel that there seems to be something about the Fabian pulpit and the intonation of the word ‘socialism’ that brings out the frustrated preacher in otherwise astute men of mature years and worldly experience. For with one exception the pamphlets read more like religious tracts, or devotionals for the converted, than anything likely to impress doubters or touch off wider discussion leading to action. They tend to be excessively general and grand in scope, showing a quite extraordinary moral and intellectual conceit, in view of the old-hat contents. Labor’s Socialist Objective – Three Perspectives publishes three talks on this most raked-over of political topics. Race Mathews is a Minister in the new Victorian Labor Government and secretary of the Society, Senator Evans is Commonwealth Shadow Attorney-general and Peter Wilenski is Foundation Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management and Commissioner in Charge of the Review of NSW Government Administration. As a soul-search of the Fabian ideals by very senior people, it is obviously worth the greatest attention, but is most remarkable for lack of any new light on the subject since Ben Chifley’s ‘Light on the Hill’, or indeed Billy Hughes’s ‘Case for Labor’ a whole human lifetime ago. Race Mathews preaches a trenchant sermon against capitalist and conservative sin, besides which his handful of constructive suggestions are vague and timid: more cooperatives, use of the company law to involve workers in management, etc. Gareth Evans tries with doubtful success, for the umpteenth time for a Labor politician, to explain ‘the concept of democratic socialism’, while Peter Wilenski points to ‘European’ socialism as if that whole populous continent was one country. In straining to distil the essence of what these three authors really want, to get behind the ritual incantations about equality, liberty, etc., one senses a very important piece of ideology which has been more or less at the back of much Labor thinking throughout this century: That the state or community should have more control or influence over investment capital. A pamphlet which proposed practical ways of doing this, which understood and confronted the objections, would be of real value. At last there would be something tangible to assess, instead of the elusive hints behind the appeals to equality, which is only a little harder to oppose than fresh air. On my calculations, the money available to the Australian rich – those, say, with larger incomes than professors and politicians – for conspicuous consumption is little more than the petty cash of the economy. It would hardly be worth the considerable trouble of hunting down and redistributing to the poor if the present tax system worked efficiently – a hard truth Labor has had to face lately in its fumbling towards a wealth, probate or capital gains tax. Cooperatives, which both Mathews and Wilenski advocate, are not good enough, since they been around as long as socialist tracts. They have failed to spread beyond minor niches in the economy and are often at their best when run most like capitalist enterprises. Likewise worker control, etc., which has been advocated in Fabian drawing rooms and trades hall pubs since 1900 but in practice never encountered other than yawning apathy. Eighty years on, one has to suspect that these ideas may have serious flaws, if they can’t win more general acceptance than they have. Thus, the Fabians, to achieve more equality in society – and on this all the authors are emphatic – have to come to more grips with the issue of investment capital if they are to advance beyond the Billy Hughes of seventy-odd years ago. It is not good enough to avoid, as these writers do, further discussion for fear of a ‘strike of capital’ or some such, since they claim to be thinking of long term ideals. Is it a good idea in itself, or just a superficially attractive notion? Which investment funds would be influenced or controlled? Who would control the funds – and who the controllers? Would it be politicians, bureaucrats, trade union officials or mass meetings of workers? Reshaping Australian Industry – Tariffs and Socialists (Victorian Fabian Society, $1 for first four and $1.50 for No. 37, 20-40 pp each) is the most recent of the pamphlets. The publication of an address by Gough Whitlam shows the former Prime Minister unrepentantly with a touch of grandeur on the ‘moral responsibility of the Labor Party to seek a better life for the world’s impoverished millions’. Ralph Willis, in the publication of a talk to the Socialist International last year, has a similar but less grandiose call for freer world trade to assist developing countries. The introduction by K.D. Gott is a useful brief description of the industrial advances of recent years in much of Asia. Stripped of its heavy moralistic gloss, the pamphlet boils down to a call for lower tariffs on goods from Asia – a reasonable enough case, but one that has been discussed ad nauseam, particularly in the financial press, for the past ten years. The Whitlam and Willis speeches were reasonable enough in the context in which they were given, but to now present them as a pamphlet and a specifically ‘socialist’ case adds little to an old debate. None of the three has any suggestion as to how displaced Australians may be employed under conditions of freer trade. And the high-minded, generalized tone also avoids awkward specifics, such as whether the textile, clothing and footwear industries will qualify as suitably ‘efficient’ for retaining after the seven-year reconstruction now underway at the behest of the Industries Assistance Commission. And what do the authors really want for the hapless Australian car industry – and the steel towns that are so heavily dependent on it? I completed The Politics of Justice – an Agenda for Reform still wondering what the reforms Senator Evans wants are. He seems to be saying that conservative judges aren’t clever and progressive enough and that, on balance, he favours the right kind of bill of rights, and High Court judges being more open about their politics. The Fabian love of mellifluous and magisterial language is also shown by Max Teichmann in Australia Alone – A Case Against Alignment. Unlike the others, he writes amusingly for much of the time, in presenting a respectable case for neutrality instead of alignment internationally with the US. He says this neutrality should be ‘armed’, but has not one jot to say about how armed, or what sort of a defence budget would be required to support neutrality. Until he can come up with some estimates of this, the argument has not advanced much since Teichmann’s last Fabian pamphlet on this subject fifteen years ago. We are left with only one substantial ‘agenda for reform’ out of the whole five pamphlets: John Mathews’ An Occupational Health and Safety Policy for Labor. It is actually packed with information, proposals and challenging critiques of present-day occupational risks. Without much detailed knowledge, I had the immediate reaction that the pamphlet was perhaps too sweeping, inclined to see complex questions in clear-cut outline and too righteously Fabian. But in this wordy company it shines like a good deed. Robert Murray is a reformed Fabian, political agnostic, financial journalist and author of The Confident Years – Australia in the Twenties, and a forthcoming history of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association.

Robert Murray

From the New Issue

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

The Other Side of Daylight: New and selected poems by David Brooks

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93) by Lech Blaine

Selected Stories by Franz Kafka, translated and edited by Mark Harman

You May Also Like

The Ice and the Inland by Brigid Hains & Australia’s Flying Doctors by Roger McDonald and Richard Woldendorp

Power Failure: The inside story of climate politics under Rudd and Gillard by Philip Chubb

Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin: The making of the modern Labor Party by Liam Byrne

The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist diplomacy in the interwar years by James Cotton