Immigration, racism and Australian capitalism
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.
Australia: A colonial settler state
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.
The military impulse to growth
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 post-war immigration
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.
Immigrants fight back
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 turn to multiculturalism
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.
A changed imperialism
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.
Compromising with racism
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.
Why controls are racist
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...
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~griff52/immigration1988.htm
