By Phil Griffiths, Canberra, Australia. Back to my home page: Australian history: Towards a Marxist analysis
This article was an attempt to sum up a socialist analysis of immigration
and racism in Australian history; and to explain the various responses to the
anti-Asian mobilisation which began with Geoffrey Blainey in 1984. In particular,
it was an attempt to confront the problems of mainstream left nationalism in
Australia when dealing with issues such as racism, which is why it was written
as a review of and response to Jock Collins' book: Migrant Hands in a Distant
Land (Pluto Press). It was published in The Socialist, August/September
1988.
There is, however, an ungenerosity and polemical
stridency to this review, a feature of all my writing at the time, and for which
I apologise. It tends to hide and diminish the enormous value of Jock Collins'
book to people interested in the long sweep of immigration and racism in Australia.
I believe the article still has merit despite this.
•••••
JOHN HOWARD'S campaign to cut Asian immigration is just the latest in a long tradition of anti-Asian racism in Australia.
Barely four years ago [ie in 1984], Professor Geoffrey Blainey launched a campaign against the Vietnamese boat people who were settling here, claiming that Australia was being "overrun" by Asians, that our "heritage" was under threat, that "social cohesion" was in danger, and the government, far from "defending" us, was allowing this to happen.
The immediate result was a wave of activity by the fascist thugs of National Action and a sharp rise in physical violence against Asian people.
But all that Blainey really did (which Howard is attempting to emulate) was to tap into an extraordinarily deep well of racial hostility that runs right through Australian society. Indeed, Australian nationalism has, for most of this century, been expicitly based on racism.
Billy Hughes who later became a Labor Prime Minister proudly proclaimed in 1901 that:
Our chief plank, is, of course, a White Australia. There is no compromise about that! The industrious coloured brother has to go — and remain away.
This White Australia Policy, which excluded non-European people from Australia, was one of the founding principles when the six states federated in 1901. It illustrates how closely the questions of immigration and racism have been linked in Australian history.
But whilst the campaigns by Howard and Blainey may have their roots in White Australia, the White Australia policy itself has been formally buried since 1972. Australia today has upwards of 100,000 Vietnamese refugees living here.
The second target of Howard's (and Blainey's) campaign is multiculturalism. Again we can see that these racist campaigns have deep roots in traditional Australian nationalism, which was fanatical about our "British roots". Yet the ideology they're fighting, multiculturalism, the idea that Australia is composed of people from a variety of backgrounds, is itself an indication of how the prevailing ideas have changed since the war.
This is not to downplay the importance of what Howard is now doing. We have now had five years in which Labor has cut our living standards, and a large number of ordinary workers are very angry about things. They are looking for people to blame. In the absence of a struggle against the real problem — Australian capitalism and its administrators in the Labor government — workers and unemployed people can lash out in any direction, especially in the direction of even more powerless scapegoats.
The potential for a massive increase in violent racism is very real. And if such a movement does develop, it will not only have horrific consequences for the victims, it will also let the ruling class off the hook, allowing them to impose austerity, unemployment and speedups on the mass of the working class.
To fight such a development, we have to understand it. And that means understanding firstly the roots of racism in Australia, how they are connected with the question of immigration, and why it is that major changes have taken place.
With that in mind, a major new book on Australia's post-war immigration by a left-wing academic ought to be something to welcome. Unfortunately, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land, by Jock Collins is a failure.
Not that it doesn't have much valuable material within it, especially on the discrimination faced by immigrants and the different experiences of the various national groupings to come here. But the book fails politically. Thoroughly permeated by left nationalism, it fails to outline how the interests of the working class (and the immigrants generally) can be defended against the racists.
WHY is it then, that the question of immigration has so consistently aroused extreme racism in Australian history?
The answer lies in Australia's origins as a white, colonial, settler state in Asia. Initially, the white settlement of Australia 200 years ago was undertaken to expand the British empire, to extend Britain's military power and keep the rival French out.
This imperialism needed a set of ideas to justify and even ennoble its outrages against the indigenous peoples it conquered. This was white racism, the idea that the conquered were sub-human, and later, that the British were bringing civilisation to the heathen savages of Asia and Africa, that it was all for their own good.
This racism, strong as it was in Britain itself, became even more virulent the closer you got to the front line of the race war. And so in South Africa, Zimbabwe, India and Australia, this racism was at its most extreme. In more recent times, we can see much the same phenonemon at work in the zionist invasion of Palestine. Building an exclusive settler community by forcing out the original inhabitants forced zionism to take up an extreme form of anti-Arab racism.
Today in Australia, it is the towns in the NSW, Queensland and Western Australian countryside that see the most violent racism against Aboriginal people.
But racism in Australia was never just directed at the Aboriginal people. Australia was Britain's white beachhead in South-East Asia and the Pacific, and a vast, wealthy, underpopulated continent in a region reduced to extreme poverty by imperialist conquest.
As the Australian economy developed and the local ruling class became the junior partner of British imperialism in the region, so being white and British became the central element in Australian nationalism and "fear of Asia" the central element in Australian racism.
Securing the continent for British imperialism could never just be a question of sending a few soldiers (and convicts) to Port Jackson. It had to involve populating the continent and building up agriculture and industry. When a specifically Australian capitalism began to rapidly develop in the 1830s with the explosion of the wool industry, the Australian bosses themselves wanted more immigration and set up the first assisted passage schemes.
One motive of the squatters was the desire for cheap, obedient labour to do the uncomfortable, dangerous and lonely work of minding their sheep. And certainly, prolonged periods of labour shortages have, over the past 150 years, encouraged the bosses to finance large-scale immigration. Indeed, of the seven million people who migrated to live in Australia over the past 200 years, over half, approximately 3.7 million, came on assisted passages paid for by various governments.
But easing labour shortages (and undermining the bargaining power of workers) was only ever part of the reason for large-scale immigration. Indeed, the bosses have been prepared to continue it in periods when unemployment was high enough to guarantee sufficient labour, at times when government financed immigration would have seemed to be a poor investment, periods like the 1920s, when despite unemployment averaging about 8%, over 200,000 immigrants (out of a total of 300,000) were paid for by various governments, many of them put on farms given to them by governments.
In his book, Jock Collins presents Australia's immigration as essentially similar to that of Europe at the height of the post-war boom, when millions of immigrants and "guestworkers" were sucked into Europe from Turkey, Algeria, Morrocco, Pakistan, Jamaica and so on.
From this he draws the conclusion that the populations of the under-developed countries essentially fitted Marx's category of "reserve armies" of labour, to be drawn into production during economic expansion, and then discarded afterwards. This analysis does generally apply to Europe, but the Australian experience was quite different.
The immigrants drawn to Australia were not simply brought here to work while they were useful and then "go home" in times of recession. The government brought them here to be permanent settlers. Of course, workers from non-English speaking backgrounds were often the first to be laid off during major recessions, but they were not then sent home. Nor, apart from a tiny fringe, was there any pressure for this. Indeed, there was continuing immigration throughout the post-war recessions, even if the numbers were cut.
The reason for this lies in the long-term needs of Australian capitalism. A significantly larger population would mean a much larger home market, the ability of local capitalists to create much larger businesses selling to much larger markets. You only have to think of the size and power of Australian capitalism today compared with before the Second World War.
The large-scale post-war immigration provided both the labour and the demand to build a significant manufacturing industry. Had this not happened, Australian industry would have remained far more backward than it is. You only have to look at the power of the United States and the Soviet Union today, at least part of which comes from their large populations compared with the rest of the industrialised world.
Then, finally, there are military considerations, always an important factor for a ruling class seeing itself as an outpost of western imperialism in the East.
It is no accident that the cry "Populate or Perish" was raised most vigorously after the two world wars. In May, 1944, well before the end of the war, but after the decisive defeat of Japan's Pacific thrust, the Deputy Prime Minister, Frank Forde, drew the following lesson:
The war has taught us that the financial and man-power obligations and other difficulties associated with the defence of Australia must be spread over a very much bigger population than our 7,000,000. History will one day reveal how closely Australia escaped being over-run by a ruthless enemy. Providence gave us another chance. The responsibility is ours to see that we shall never again be unprepared.
In reality, history (in the form of captured war documents) has proven that the Japanese military had neither the desire nor the resources to "over-run" Australia. It would have required a million soldiers and a fleet vastly bigger than the one they had. But for the ruling class that was not the point. They were scared that another power might be able to assert itself in their back yard. After all, the Japanese did conquer half of Nuigini, and that was very much an Australian possession.
As well as spurring the ruling class into large-scale immigration schemes, the two world wars also spurred on the development of industry. The First World War led to the rapid completion of the first steelworks at Newcastle; the second to the massive program of industrialisation that saw the growth of steel, cars, whitegoods and so on in the 50s and 60s. After all, industry is just as important to waging a war as population. The soldiers need guns (and submarines and fighter planes) if they are to defend the bosses successfully.
This drive to develop was not purely a question of chasing profits; at times, vast railway, engineering and farming projects were organised seemingly without regard to their potential profitability, and in both the 1890s and 1930s these huge, unprofitable investments added to the problems caused by a general economic crisis.
So the particular form that Australian capitalism took as a white settler state in Asia, led to two parallel phenonema: a virulent racism to promote the interests of the imperialist spearhead, and a continual drive to attact new settlers and to build up the economy.
And the two came together in the White Australia policy, officially introduced in 1901, that excluded non-Europeans (and most non-British Europeans) from settling in Australia for over 60 years. Not only did the racism dictate immigration policy, but massive British immigration was consciously seen as a way of asserting the dominance of the "British" race in the New World.
The labour movement newspaper, The Hummer, put it clearly: "The camels must go; the chows must also leave; and Indian hawkers must hawk their wares in some other country. This country was built expressly for Australians and Australians are going to run the show."
THE society we see in Australia today is a long way from the days of the White Australia policy. The massive post-war immigration program has turned Australia from an almost exclusively British enclave into one of the more ethnically diverse countries in the world.
Whereas the ideas of a British White Australia were absolutely hegemonic in 1945, today fully a quarter of the population is of non-English speaking origin. Indeed, a growing number of settlers today come from Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa, something that would have been unthinkable in 1945.
Of course, the government in 1945 didn't set out to create an ethnically diverse society — far from it. Neither did it set out to create the idea of multiculturalism, the idea that Italian, Greek, Lebanese and other immigrant cultures were welcome here and could be integrated into a new idea of what Australian nationalism was all about.
Indeed, for more than a decade during which large number of non-British immigrants came to settle in Australia, the official government policy was "assimilation"; in other words, they should abandon their old language and culture and become just like "Australians", British Australians, that is.
Behind this major change in Australian society and attitudes lay two immediate factors. Firstly, the willingness of the government from the very beginning to accept, indeed to seek, non-British immigrants if British weren't available. The second was the changing nature of imperialism which opened the way for the rapid integration of the Australian economy with the Japanese.
The proposal to seek large numbers of non-British immigrants from war-ravaged Europe meant the collision of two ideas that had been central to the building of Australia as a colonial settler state tied to British imperialism: the drive to national development, but on a racially, ethnically exclusive basis.
Underlying the mass immigration program was, of course, the ruling class's long-term strategy of building up the population for national development. But the fright they got during the Second World War, and the extreme labour shortages they faced, gave proposals for mass immigration a powerful impetus. It led people like Arthur Calwell, the Labor politician who was the architest of post-war immigration, to begin breaking with some of the ideas of the past. As early as 1942, he was arguing,
When I see the splendid specimens of American manhood walking the streets of Australian cities and recollect that America has been for more than a generation, a melting pot for European nations, I am satisfied with the result of the amalgamation.
We should lose nothing by adopting a similar policy. It would be far better for us to have in Australia 20 million or 30 million people of 100 per cent white extraction than to continue the narrow policy of having a population of 7 million people who are 98 per cent British.
But the break with the past was only partial. White Australia and racist "fear" of the "yellow hordes" was still an important element motivating him — indeed, as Immigration Minister he tried to expel 1000 Asian refugees from Australia at the end of the war. "While we have very few people in this country we shall naturally excite the avarice and covetousness of our coloured neighbours to the north."
Quite apart from the grandiose nation-building ambitions of the government, there was an extreme demand for labour, a demand that could not be satisfied in the short term. In December 1947, there were just 123 people registered as unemployed in Victoria, with just 37 on unemployment or sickness benefits in Melbourne. Meanwhile, there were over 20,000 vacancies, and over 80,000 nationally.
And there was an extreme shortage of shipping available to bring people from Britain, meaning that only 6500 came in 1947. At the same time, in the refugee camps of Europe were millions of people whose lives had been destroyed. The Chifley government saw in these people the chance to carry out its nation-building. Indeed, there was a strong push within the government to bring 50,000 orphaned children to Australia over three years. As Andrew Markus has commented,
Children were ideal immigrants [as they] could be housed in converted military establishments, and because of their youth would be adaptable and have a long working life ahead of them… In the view of the Army representative, Captain Plimsoll, if necessary the children could be taken from defeated countries without consent and given English names.
Although this grotesque scheme never got off the ground, it shows exactly the logic behind the immigration program. It had nothing to do with the needs of the refugees. They were nothing more than human clay to be moulded to the needs of Australian capitalism.
The refugee program brought nearly 200,000 people to Australia in just a few years. Left-wing refugees were systematically weeded out — specifically the large pool of Spanish republicans living in France as a result of Franco's dictatorship — as was anyone "too old", disabled, or in any other way unable to work hard for a new set of masters.
But whatever the government might want, the ideas of White Australia were still dominant, and nowhere more so than amongst union officials. Calwell engaged in a double game. He promised that "for every foreign migrant there would be ten from the United Kingdom". And he did everything possible to maximise the number from Britain.
But at the same time, he set out to soften the extreme racism towards other Europeans, with a range of pamphlets and other propaganda arguing for a liberalisation in people's attitudes. The course towards multiculturalism was gradually being set.
But if entrenched racism in the unions forced a certain amount of diplomacy on Calwell, it did have other advantages. It enabled the government to impose the most appalling conditions on the refugees it brought out. They were brought on two-year indentures which guaranteed that they would do jobs unwanted by anyone else, often in remote regions. They were prohibited from involvement in politics or industrial action. The unions not only accepted this, but insisted on it, so that "their members" were not disadvantaged.
Thus was entrenched the "two-class" immigration program that still exists today, with British and northern European immigrants generally moving into work similar to what they were able to do in their country of origin, and another layer of first, refugees, and then Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Lebanese immigrants who were sent to work in the Snowy Mountains, laying new railroads, into the steel mills, the car plants, the textile factories and onto the roads doing the dirtiest work for the lowest wages.
The left inside the union bureaucracy, thoroughly tainted with racism as it was, went right along with this. Indeed, in the late 1940s, the communist-controlled Ironworkers Union developed a scandalous alliance with BHP to condemn migrants from the Baltic countries to the worst jobs and punitive working conditions in the steel mills because they came from "anti-communist" backgrounds.
The beneficiaries of these divisions were the ruling class. This partial segmentation of the working class meant they got a guaranteed supply of relatively low-cost labour, on the basis of which they were able to massively industrialise the Australian economy.
IMMIGRANT workers didn't take this oppression lying down. It is undoubtedly true that the extreme racism faced, for instance, by Italian immigrants in the early 1950s — a racism more extreme than that faced by the Vietnamese today — often intimidated them from fighting for their rights. But there were some important struggles.
When they came to Australia, migrants were often forced to live in barracks in appalling conditions until work was found for them. One of the most notorious was at Bonegilla, in northern Victoria near Albury. During the recession of 1961, this work dried up and many who had come to Australia on the promise of good jobs found themselves stuck in this isolated, primitive camp with $2 a week to live on.
They began to hold protest marches every week. Eventually, when a cop manhandled a demonstrator, one of the marches became violent. Police were brought in from Melbourne with pistols and clubs and one of the barracks violently cleared.
The car factories have long profited from the sweated labour of the most recent wave of immigrants, and this has led to a number of explosive struggles. In 1964 there was a long strike for a $6 pay rise. The militancy of the workers terrified the conservative bureaucrats of the Vehicle Builders' Union who organised a fraudulent ballot to get the workers back to work.
But perhaps the most important struggle was a long strike at the Ford Broadmeadows plant in 1973. After four weeks, the union officials, led by the Communist Party's Laurie Carmichael, tried to get them back to work by falsely declaring a vote to go back carried. The workers erupted and stormed the stage. Carmichael's coat was torn as he was shepherded to safety. The next day at the plant, 1500 workers staged a mass demonstration, tearing down a 30 metre wall and getting those workers who had gone back out on strike again.
There were many other struggles, some big, many small. The bulk of the membership of the Builders' Labourers' Federation were migrants, expected to work in dirty, dangerous conditions for low pay. A series of militant strikes in the late 60s and early 70s won such things as the right to toilets and showers on building sites, as well as better safety and higher wages.
The growing prominence of migrants in strikes was part of a general process in society. There was a rising level of struggle amongst the whole working class as strike days rose from around a million in 1968 to six million in 1974. This created a climate of confidence and militancy — you could win real gains — and along with the victory against America in Vietnam, helped shift politics sharply to the left.
This upturn in class struggle also inspired many of the oppressed to fight, and so the early seventies saw the rise of the Women's Liberation and Gay movements, putting an end to the sexual ice-age which had begun in the fifties.
Government attitudes to migrants had been racist and contemptuous, hostile to the languages, culture and traditions they brought with them. In the late 1940s, the first secretary of the Department of Immigration blocked moves to print information for migrants in their own languages. He argued:
A knowledge of the English language is the first prerequisite for a European migrant to help his [sic] assimilation into the community. Any obstruction to his learning the language should be strongly resisted. We think that catering for him in his own tongue would constitute such an obstruction.
The government had been forced to back away from some of those attitudes in the mid-1960s, because they found an increasing number of immigrants were returning home — around 15% — a loss that seriously worried the government. Australia wasn't so wonderful after all, and the post-war boom was reaching even the most underdeveloped areas in Europe, transforming the prospects of people who lived there, making the journey to a hostile Australia less attractive than it had been.
The government responded by dropping the official policy of "integration" which demanded that migrants give up their past and become just like "Australians". Money was given to migrant communities for welfare work and some cultural activities, and English language programs for migrant children were finally introduced into the schools.
The Labor Party, under Gough Whitlam, moved even more sharply to respond to migrant anger and frustration, appointing the Italian-born Al Grassby as Minister for Immigration. Grassby presided over the introduction of multiculturalism, which was rapidly accepted by the Liberals as well.
The ruling were in a dilemma. The dominant Australian nationalism emphasised Australians as a "British" people, and discrimination against European migrants reinforced the attachment of many middle class people and backward workers to this nationalism. So there were real dangers in making migrants "equal".
But for thirty years they had built up a large European immigrant population, who they systematically exploited and discriminated against, making big profits in the process. Now these people represented a large proportion of the ppopulation, and an even greater proportion of workers in basic industry, where as unionists they had great economic power.
If they kept these people outside the dominant political framework, they could become a major base for radical opposition to the system, less likely to accept "sacrifice" in the "national interest". Bosses, Labor politicians and trade union officials alike had been shaken by the vehemence and militancy with which the Ford strike had been waged, and the inability of even communists to contain it.
They opted very firmly for incorporation. The government set up an array of ethnic affairs commissions, enquiries, radio stations, new welfare programs, anti-discrimination legislation and the like, with the aim of drawing in middle-class immigrant activists.
And the politicians set out to redefine Australian nationalism so that it could no include migrants. This was the central role of multiculturalism. It said that the majority of Australian should accept minority groups, while minority groups must accept primary loyalty to Australia.
This is just what the middle-class business people and professionals wanted to hear. it gave them a role within Australian capitalism: representing "their community". It also encouraged immigrant workers to now identify as "Italian-Australians", "Greek-Australians" and so on, in other words to identify as a product of the nation they had left, as part of identifying with the nation they now lived in.
This is not to discount the importance of the reforms and the positive edge to multiculturalism; the implicit rejection of some of the old ideas of Australian nationalism, and an acceptance of people who had previously been little more than "dagoes" or "wogs". But we should be clear that multiculturalism was always far more aimed at the immigrants — winning a commitment from them to be loyal to "Australia" — than the Anglo-Australians. You only have to compare the coverage of the issue on SBS with any other TV network to see this.
Nevertheless, the economic security engendered by the historic post-war boom, the sheer size of the European immigration, the presence of many immigrants in factories and workplaces working alongside Anglo-Australian workers, the involvement of immigrants in strikes and the gradual shift of attitudes in the unions meant that multiculturalism was generally accepted without hostility and embraced and officially pormoted by Fraser.
But it hasn't changed the real position most people from non-English backgrounds face, and it only ever toned down and adjusted the racism that dominated Australian society.
HOWEVER it was not primarily the large-scale post-war immigration that put an end to the White Australia Policy. The central role here was played by Australia's changing relationship to the world system, and specifically to Japan.
For most of this century, Japan has been the focus of racist paranoia towards Asians. From the moment Japan defeated the Russian navy in 1904, news about Japan was guaranteed to arouse the most extreme hysteria. For many Australians, the Second World War was the race war against Japan that had long been inevitable. Even today, people like Bruce Whiteside and his pathetic anti-Japanese movement on the Gold Coast can build on decades of anti-Japanese racism.
But out of the ruins of war, Japanese bosses built a powerful industrial state, one that needed massive imports of coal, iron and other raw materials. In 1958, the Australian government signed its first formal trade agreement with Japan. Soon Japan had displaced Britain as Australia's biggest trading partner.
The world had changed. Australia had long stopped being a colonial settler state. Now it was a junior partner to American imperialism, but American imperialism took a different form to the British imperialism of pre-war days. South-East Asia was no longer a series of colonies ruled from Europe, but now a series of independent nations incorporated into the western camp.
Decolonisation meant that the form of racism that had dominated the west in the past could now be a liability. Countries like Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Singapore and so on would have to be treated as equals, not as vassals. The breaking down of the old imperialist empires into one big western bloc meant that there were now new investment and trading opportunities.
And in the last decade, japan has become a major source of capital for investment in Australia, and japanese tourism a major element in the spectacular growth of the tourist industry. Anti-Asian racism in Australia can only harm Australian bosses in these areas.
So the changing nature of world capitalism gave rise to the idea that Australia was really an Asian country, and Australian capitalism would have to carve out its future as part of the Asian-Pacific rim. That was one of the motivations for the Colombo Plan, a scheme which saw thousands of young Asians studying at Australian universities.
Now this was only really part of the story. Australia still remained a junior partner of American imperialism in the region, a far more reliable ally than poorer and less stable countries.
American investment in Asia often flowed via Australian subsidiaries.
Australia maintained a major military presence in the region, with heavy involvement in the Korean War, in Malaysia against a guerilla insurgency, and when America invaded Vietnam, it was Australia which pushed up the scale of the war and sent thousands of troops to back the Americans up.
This imperialist presence provided a counter-pressure towards maintaining anti-Asian racism, so the shift away from it was very uneven. Indeed, the need to win support for the Vietnam war meant a whole new lease of life for anti-Asian racism as right-wing politicians drew maps on television of a region threatened with being overrun by the "yellow hordes".
But the defeat in Vietnam and Nixon's recognition of China all forced a reassessment on Australia's political establishment. In addition, thousands of the people radicalised over Vietnam were forced to confront the question of anti-Asian racism, and they represented a significant base of support for moves by the ruling class away from White Australia, though the anti-Asian racism it embodied still remains potent a decade and a half after its formal burial.
Today, immigration remains important for expanding the home market. Likewise, racism remains important, to divide the working class and guarantee that there will always be pressure on immigrants to accept the shit jobs at the bottom of the ladder.
But the changing Australian economy, and the change in Australia's relationship to the dominant imperialism have partially disconnected the two. No longer is immigration a way of guaranteeing the triumph of the "British race"; no longer does racism exclude non-British (or non-white) immigrants. Mainstream Australian nationalism now encompasses non-English speaking traditions, and is far more oriented to economically penetrating world markets than keeping out Asians and rival powers.
But that doesn't mean that the ideas of White Australia have disappeared. Ideas live on long after the conditions that give rise to them have evaporated. Racism, especially, is continually regenerated by the insecurity and competition of capitalism, and Australia's position as a junior partner for American imperialism in Asia will always mean the potential for a ruling class sponsored revival of anti-Asian racism.
With all that in mind, it is no accident that the so-called "Blainey debate" took place shortly after the worst recession in 50 years, and no accident that John Howard can get away with going on the offensive after five years of falling living standards have finally started generating real resentment amongst Australian workers.
What the changing conditions do mean is that there is a section of the ruling class that is hostile to Howard's strategy. And it also means that there is a section of the migrant community who see the danger that if anti-Asian racism is stoked up, they can be the next victims.
But because racism is such a fundamental weapon for dividing the working class, there is no way the bosses can seriously fight it. At best, they will put pressure on Howard to tone down or shut up, but they won't fight racism in general — indeed they are responsible for the conditions that nurture it.
THE TRAGEDY of the Australian left is that with a few honorable exceptions, it has always succumbed to the dominant racism, and often even promoted it.
Capitulation on the question of racism in turn has always been linked to accepting Australian nationalism. That's easy to see in the days of the White Australian settler state, when racism was fundamental to the Australian nation, but it's just as true today.
If your starting point is nationalism, then the rights of ordinary people in other countries lose any central importance. You accept the division of the world into hostile, competing nations, rather than exposing the really fundamental division in the world between bosses everywhere and the workers they exploit.
You identify with the "economy", or the "social cohesion" of your own country before you identify with the plight of Vietnamese boat people being turned away in their thousands from the refugee camps in Hong Kong. But what is it that differentiates "us" Australians from "them" Vietnamese? Race and nationality.
You cannot consistently fight these divisions on a nationalist basis and tragically, Jock Collins' book is a classic example of that truth. Collins sees himself explicitly as a Marxist and is clearly hostile to racism in general, supports multiculturalism and clearly identifies with the oppressed.
But what does he end up arguing for? A tighter limit on immigration than we have at the moment. "The annual immigration intake must not undermine the growing racial tolerance and the relative absence of racial conflict."
Is this so very different from Howard's argument that, "If it [the level of Asian immigration] is, in the eyes of some in the community too great, it would be in our immediate term interests and supportive of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little so that the capacity of the community to absorb were greater."
True, Jock Collins does not single out Asian immigration, but does anyone seriously imagine that British immigrants "undermine the growing racial tolerance" in Australia?
He proposes that immigration be restricted to about 100,000 people a year (compared with around 140,000 at the moment), that beyond this, people should be prevented from settling in Australia in case unemployment starts to provide the racists with mass support.
In other words, he argues for a "soft" racist immigration policy (not to many "foreigners") in the hope that this will keep the Blaineys of the world marginalised. Like Howard, he expects the victims to pay for racial prejudice in society. Rather than confronting racism, rather than rooting it out, he ends up compromising with the racists.
Jock Collins' nationalist framework ends up completely undermining any possibility of his book being a Marxist guide to how to fight racism, because it leads him to abandon any working class perspective. This nationalism is summed up in the title of the final chapter: "Guidelines for an Australian Immigration Policy". What can this possibly be about except advice to the Australian government, on the pretence that there is an Australian national interest?
But the interests of Australian bosses and Australian workers are fundamentally counterposed, with the government ruling in the interests of capitalism. How can an "Australian" immigration policy be anything other than a policy for the bosses and their government?
And that's how it turns out. "Illegal immigration should be policed more closely," "immigration has by and large been seen as a benefit," "The limits on intake are not Australia's ability to recruit migrants, but its ability to ensure successful settlement," and so on. How does any of this benefit the working class in its struggle against capital? Who's going to be doing this "policing", and in whose interests? For whom has immigration been seen as a "benefit"?
When has racist, capitalist Australia ever been able to "ensure successful settlement" for migrants, and anyway, successful in who's eyes? Sure, immigration has been successful for the bosses, but how successful has it been for the immigrants? Collins' own book goes over and over and over the way migrants have suffered to be able to settle in a new country.
At the moment, there is a debate going on in the ruling class about immigration — how many to allow, on what basis and so on — and this is part of a wider debate about the future of Australian capitalism.
The Labor government has sharply increased the number of immigrants allowed in, and there are those like John Elliott and Phil Ruthven of the consultancy firm IBIS who want the level raised to 250,000 a year. They see large-scale immigration as a way of continuing to attract large-scale capital inflow, massively building up the economy and the power of the Australian ruling class in the world.
Others are more concerned. For instance, Blainey and Howard are arguing that multiculturalism threatens to break down the existing British-centred nationalism that has served the bosses so well. And they can see that nationalism, the kind of ideas that have persuaded workers to accept five years of wage cutting in the "national interest", are very important to the ruling class.
Rather than giving a lead to militant or class conscious workers, Collins engages in that debate; about what's best for "Australia". It's a political position no different from that of the ACTU when they promote wage restraint, changed work practices and higher productivity.
Revolutionary socialists have always taken an entirely different standpoint. Whilst immigration has only ever been allowed by the government if it thinks it's in the interests of the bosses, we have always been opposed to immigration controls against ordinary people.
The starting point of our analysis is that racism and nationalism are weapons for the ruling class in its efforts to divide the international working class. So we argue that anyone who wants to come to live in Australia should have the right to do so. Once you start denying people the right to live where they choose, you end up with a racist policy. It's unavoidable.
YOU CANNOT devise an immigration policy that doesn't have racial implications, and these implications are inevitably drawn out by the racists in society.
That, after all, is what John Howard is doing: saying that he'll cut the level of Asian immigration by cutting family reunion — because the bulk of family reunions apply to the most recent immigrant communities, such as the Vietnamese.
Labor too is scaling down family reunion, but is much quieter about pointing out the racist implications. That doesn't mean they go unnoticed.
And once migrants arrive, we have to argue for unions to fight for their rights, to fight all attempts to give them the shit jobs, all attempts to divide the Australian-born off. It is so much harder to do this if you allow racism and nationalism any quarter at all.
Migrant Hands in a Distant Land is not a book for fighters against racism, but primarily an exercise in sterile sociology. It has lots and lots of statistics about the discrimination suffered by non English-speaking migrants, and this information is very useful. But this is where the value of the book ends, because it primarily views migrants as victims.
There are, in the entire book, barely a few paragraphs mentioning strikes involving migrants workers. Virtually nothing on how the migrants themselves fought racism, fought their terrible conditions and low wages, fought the intimidation they faced from supervisors and government. And nothing at all on how racism and discrimination were fought by the left.
Yet it is in the workplace that racism can most effectively be fought, in workplaces where immigrant and native-born Australians work side by side and cooperate, where they are forced to unite in union action if they are to defend their wages and conditions.
And it is on the factory floor, in the workplaces where profits are made and where workers, immigrant and otherwise, have the power to change society. It is when they exercise that power, when they develop the confidence that comes with taking on the bosses and winning, that the native-born Australians can start to throw out their racist hostilities and develop a class view of the world.
None of this exists for Jock Collins. Not even the basic class arguments against racism are made. For him, the focus for changing things for immigrants lies with the government: multiculturalism, teaching English, interpretors, welfare provided through community organisations, and so on. These topics get page after repetitive page. And in this way, the idea of migrants as victims who need to be looked after feeds into his nationalist perspective, with change centred on government action.
Social management (in the national interest) rather than self-emancipation is the order of the day.
So Migrant Hands in a Distant Land is a failure. Its analysis of why the ruling class promoted immigration is flawed, it ignores the struggles of both anti-racists and the migrants themselves, making it impossible for any activist to draw any conclusions about how to fight today. And its nationalist framework leads Jock Collins to promote a softer version of the racism he hates, the racism that so dominates Australian society, even today.
This page updated 14 November 2002. For feedback email phil.griffiths@optusnet.com.au