The debate covered a lot of territory but its central question was why the English working class did not become a revolutionary class in the way Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had predicted it would. In other words, at the height of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century—a time of allegedly gross exploitation of wage earners, of child labour and dark satanic mills—why did the English labour movement settle for piecemeal reforms and parliamentary socialism rather than a communist revolution. This was the issue on which hung the credibility of Marxist theory. Anderson’s article that started the debate was titled
Origins of the Present Crisis in which he tried to explain the failure of Marx’s prophecy in terms of political ideology, in particular, the many cultural hangovers from the old feudal agricultural era that persisted into the new bourgeois, industrial age. These hangovers included: English separateness from Europe and provincialism, English religion and English empiricism.
Perry Anderson wrote that, unlike its counterparts on the European continent, the English bourgeoisie rejected the European Enlightenment’s elevation of reason as the arbiter of all things, it sat out the French Revolution and Jacobinism, and it handed on to the working class no impulse of liberation, no revolutionary values, no universal language. Instead it transmitted the deadly germs of utilitarianism and empiricism.
Edward Thompson responded with an article titled
The Peculiarities of the English. He said it was rubbish to suggest there was some crippling disability among English intellectuals. As a counter example, he pointed to the English traditions of radical and working class dissent, and the long campaign to transform the politics of the English political system, or ‘Old Corruption’, which culminated in the 1832 Reform Bill, all of which he had documented in his 1963 book
The Making of the English Working Class. And as for empiricism being an ideological problem that stifled theory, he said empiricism was not an ideology but rather a technique, whose greatest practitioner in the nineteenth century was Charles Darwin, the Englishman whose book
The Origin of Species, had done more to revolutionize thought at the time than any other.
I cannot see empiricism as an ideology at all. Anderson and Nairn have confused an intellectual idiom, which for various historical reasons have become a national habit, with an ideology. Bacon and Hazlitt, Darwin and Orwell, may all have employed this idiom, but they can scarcely be said to have been attached to the same ulterior ideological assumptions.
Thompson also argued that if you write history by relying on a historical model which you assume to be true before you start, and then go to the historical record looking for evidence that supports what you have already decided upon, you will be writing not history but self-serving politics. You will also misunderstand what was really going on at the time.
In particular, Thompson insisted the ideas of an era could not be simply read off from its relationship to the means of production. ‘The problem’, he wrote, ‘is to find a model for the social process which allows an autonomy to social consciousness.’ In short, Marx had been wrong to claim the economic base of a society determined its ideological superstructure.
Now, I read this debate in 1967, in the second year of a BA degree at the University of Sydney. In first year I had taken a course in the theory and methodology of history and found myself very fortunate to read that great work of the British Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was the best work of prose I had ever read. It made reading novels seem frivolous and turned me on to history for life. In second year, my history seminar on the industrial revolution required me to read another 1000-page tome, Thompson’s
The Making of the English Working Class. It too was a mind-altering experience and I became a Thompson aficionado. I took his side in the great debate with New Left Review and could only wonder how several other people in my seminar, who I had previously thought pretty intelligent, could possibly have supported the theoretical approach of Perry Anderson, as they did.
I emerged from this seminar believing that Marxism was right in its belief that the underlying dynamic of human history was class conflict, and that just as aristocratic feudalism created the means of its own destruction by fostering the emergence of bourgeois capitalism, so capitalism was bound to be replaced by the creature it had itself created, the working class. However, none of this was pre-determined. It depended on how people responded. Socialism didn’t need to come about through a violent revolution of the French variety. In 1969 I went to a lunch-time talk in the Wallis Lecture Theatre at Sydney University where Gough Whitlam outlined his vision of the future. This seemed to accord with what I believed and what I thought politically possible and desirable in Australia. A few days later I joined the Australian Labor Party and remained a member, and a loyal canvasser and election booth worker, for the next twenty years.
In 1969 I did the fourth year of my history honours course. As well as seminar papers and exams, we had to write two theses, one based on original research in a history topic; the other on historical method or historiography. I did my method thesis on The Making of the English Working Class, but in the course of it became aware of two of its major failings.
First, it was a study only of the working classes. Despite Thompson’s insistence that social class was a dynamic relationship between classes, he paid very little attention to the social class the workers were supposedly struggling against, that is, the middle class. The detail and care of Thompson’s research and the eloquence and passion of his prose did not extend to the bourgeoisie. In fact, he treated them more as a social category driven by their relationship to the means of production than as real people — the very sin he had once accused Anderson and Nairn of committing.
Second, the condition of the working classes in Britain during the time Thompson was writing about, from the late eighteenth century up to 1832, did not conform to orthodox Marxist theory at all. Marxism held that as capitalism advanced, the standard of living of the workers would decline, leaving them cold and hungry and ripe for revolution. But this didn’t happen, despite the best efforts of Thompson and his Marxist colleague
Eric Hobsbawm to prove otherwise. Between 1957 and 1970 there was a great debate among economic historians over the standard of living in Britain during the industrial revolution. It was fought out in the pages of the
Economic History Review and the
Journal of Economic History, with Hobsbawm the main protagonist for the Marxist side, and the Australian academic Marx Hartwell, then at Oxford, on the other side, arguing that the standard of living at the time actually rose. Hartwell was not some anti-communist ideologue. He had famously resigned as Professor of Economic History at the University of NSW in 1955 after the vice-chancellor refused to appoint his nominee for a lectureship, Russell Ward, because Ward was a communist. Hartwell crushed Hobsbawm completely in both the range of data he produced to show the period was one of long-term economic growth which, apart from some periods of economic recession, produced rising wages. In fact in the period covered by Thompson’s book, real wages actually doubled. Hobsbawm never conceded this until the day he died but Thompson withdrew graciously in defeat. A passage in the Postscript to the Penguin paperback edition of The Making of the English Working Class in 1968 acknowledged that his chapter on the standard of living debate was ‘trivial’ and that ‘the reader who wishes to inform himself on this, or the problems of health, housing and urban growth, must on occasions turn to the work of those economic historians whose assumptions are, in this chapter, under criticism.’
Now, I knew about both these problems with Thompson’s book but, because they let the side down, I chose to ignore them, both in my method thesis and, to my own cost, in the Australian PhD thesis I tried to write between 1970 and 1973. My idea was to write something like “The making of the Australian working class”. I was not only influenced by Thompson but also by Russell Ward whose 1959 book
The Australian Legend had studied the folk songs and poetry of outback workers. His conclusion was that, without the benefit of Marxist theory, they had spontaneously developed a culture of egalitarianism and collectivism. Through the influence of publications like
The Bulletin, this peculiarly Australian form of mateship had spread from the bush to the city to create what Ward thought was a pre-socialist national ideology. I thought that Ward’s case needed some shoring up with hard historical evidence of class consciousness in action not only from bush ballads but from the history of nineteenth century trade unions, especially unions of shearers, miners, wharfies, construction labourers are the like. I spent three years reading the newspapers and minutes of meetings of workers from these unions from the 1880s to the First World War – the main one was the Amalgamated Shearers Union, later the AWU – trying to build a story around their use of the language and concept of the words ‘class’ and ‘working class’.
I had very little luck. In all I read, the term class was used only rarely and at one stage I had found more examples of employers referring to the workers as a ‘class’ than did trade union leaders or workers themselves. The concept of workers having ‘class interests’ as opposed to the ‘class interests’ of their employers was conspicuous by its absence.
The person who confirmed my own findings was Humphrey McQueen. In the early 1970s in his book
A New Brittania, he pointed out that the shearers who founded the AWU and who made up the bulk of its early membership were not a ‘nomadic tribe’ of proletarians as Russell Ward portrayed them, but mainly small farmers and graziers who hired themselves out during the shearing season to make enough money to keep their own farms afloat. They developed strong union ties and collective tactics in order to make as much money as they could from the big landowners. Their aim in life was to make enough to become bigger landowners too.
In fact, I should have known this all along because one of the major political demands of late nineteenth Australia was the movement to ‘unlock the lands’, so that small holders could get title to some of the large tracts of land originally seized by the first squatters. At the same time as I was trying to pin the label of ‘working class’ onto the shearers, I was also tutoring in Australian history at the University of NSW where one of our main topics was the politics of the ‘unlock the lands’ campaign. Yet the Marxist theory about the emergence of the working class blinded me to the obvious connection between the two.
I should add that Humphrey McQueen made this connection not because he some ideological cleanskin. McQueen was a Maoist who was trying to dislodge the concept of ‘labourism’ or labour reformism, which he claimed was the historical legacy of both the Labor Party and the Communist Party. He saw Russell Ward and his Australian Legend as ideological supporters of the right-wing union, the AWU, and the broader notion of the Labor Party’s Australian nationalism. He wanted the Australian Left to follow the thought of Chairman Mao Tse Tung. The Maoists, however, turned out to be the greatest hypocrites and political opportunists of all.
In February 1974, Mao Tse Tung set out the
Theory of Three Worlds, which defined Australia as part of the Second World, and subject to the two predatory imperial states of the First World, the USA and the USSR. Mao’s political prescription for combating this oppression was anti-imperialist nationalist struggle, a movement which he hoped would unite the whole world under his leadership in a combined force against the two superpowers. Dutifully following the command of the Great Helmsman, the Australian Maoists formed the Australian Independence Movement to reassert Australian national interests. Australian employers, who had until then been denounced as the villains of history, were suddenly redefined as a “national bourgeoisie” allied with the workers in the struggle for national independence.
Poor Humphrey McQueen, who had just made his name denouncing nationalism as the ideology of the racists in the labour movement, had to do a complete about-face. In A New Britannia, he had portrayed the miners at the Eureka Stockade as aspirant property owners, whose greatest concerns were the high price of foodstuffs and the rough justice of the mining licence system. The Maoists re-defined them as a revolutionary vanguard and adopted their Southern Cross flag as the ensign of national liberation. In A New Britannia McQueen had dismissed Ned Kelly and his brothers as “louts of the contemporary bikie variety”, but under the Theory of Three Worlds they suddenly metamorphosed into Irish rebels who provided fine models for the struggle against imperialism. Like other leftists before him, McQueen was writing not history but self-serving politics.
In 1978 a British academic friend of mine,
Malcolm Caldwell, visited Cambodia with a party of journalists to interview Pol Pot. After the interview, Caldwell went back to his hotel where Pol Pot’s gunmen shot him dead. I first met Caldwell in 1971 when I was an activist in the campaign against the war in Vietnam. He came out from London to speak at a conference I helped organize, and we billeted him at our house then, and again when he came back the following year. Caldwell was a political economist who produced statistics to show the world’s oil would run out in the 1990s. He thought the West had entered a long period of economic recession and the future of humanity lay in the Third World. The standard of living in industrial society was ecologically unsustainable. When the oil ran out, Western living standards would plummet to those of the peasants of Asia. He was a supporter of the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge because he thought they would be the first regimes to transform his vision into reality. But as his murder revealed, he did not understand them at all. For me, this was quite a shock. He was the first person I knew who was killed for his politics. It brought home to me how sheltered was the Australian Left from the consequences of its opinions, and how juvenile it was to play with political ideas that elsewhere were life and death matters. By the time Malcolm was killed, his thesis about oil supplies had been badly mauled by critics and I had come to regard his futuristic scenario as eccentric and fanciful. I have been a sceptic about environmental doomsday predictions ever since.
In 1977 I got a job at what was then called the NSW Institute of Technology, now the University of Technology Sydney, lecturing in history and journalism. I could teach journalism because, between leaving high school and going to university, I had spent six years as a journalist on daily newspapers and magazines. I’d also written articles about the media for several journals. At that time, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at NSWIT, which was largely devoted to teaching a major in communications, was in the process of being captured by refugees from the split in the philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. These were not refugees grateful for their new home. They were from the the left faction who split from the Armstrong faction and, led by Bill Bonney, they were determined to expel the existing humanities staff at NSWIT and install a regime of their own. I got a job with them partly because I was seen to be on side, and partly because none of them had ever been employed in the media and they needed someone with industry experience to give them credibility in communications.
Although they were academic philosophers, their main objective was to colonise the new territory of cultural studies. Bill Bonney’s great ambition was to set up an antipodean version of the then fashionable Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, with himself as the local equivalent of the British
Marxist guru Stuart Hall. I soon found the philosophy that underpinned their aims was the brand of Marxism espoused by the French Communist Party theorist
Louis Althusser, mixed, quite inconsistently, with radical feminist philosophy from the Sydney department. At this time, Althusser and other French philsophers had become favoured contributors to New Left Review. I soon recognized yet another version of Perry Anderson’s attempts in the 1960s to find the correct Marxist theory that would guide the world to the socialist revolution. Althusser was still trying to explain why the workers did not revolt the way Marx said they would. He claimed the maintenance of capitalism was dependent on massive ideological indoctrination by the ruling class. The mass media were among the Ideological State Apparatuses of the system. Also included were such cultural institutions as the education system, the law, and the churches. Journalists were supposedly part of that most despised of all social classes, the petit-bourgeoisie. So, the poor students who unwittingly enrolled for a communications degree at the NSW Institute of Technology found most of what they were taught was French Marxist theory that indicted the news media as the enemy of humanity.
I didn’t say publicly then what I really thought: that this was an embarrassing academic disaster, and we were deceiving students who enrolled thinking they would get jobs in the media through a course actually designed to turn them off the media. Fortunately, Edward Thompson came to my rescue in 1978 by publishing the book,
The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. The biting satire of Thompson’s withering critique of Althusser’s theories of history and epistemology demonstrated their direct affinity with the world view of Joseph Stalin. By simply telling my colleagues I was reading The Poverty of Theory, I saved myself a lot of fruitless argument with them and distanced myself from their company. I kept my thoughts on the media for a book I wrote once I’d escaped this deranged department. By 1980, Althusser had gone completely mad and had strangled his wife, an act that I thought must finally test the loyalty of even the most dedicated of the feminist philosophers who had till then hung on his every word.
But I am hardly one to talk, because I was still trapped within much the same intellectual paradigm. After my search for the historical Australian working class proved fruitless, I found another victim group to write about, the unemployed. In 1974-75, the Whitlam government presided over the first real recession in Australia since the Great Depression. So self-confident were they, the members of this government did not believe their policies could actually throw people out of work. They presided over a rise in unemployment from around the 1 to 2 per cent it had been since World War II, to double the figure. Rather than a failure of economic policy, they attributed this to their own generosity in substantially increasing the dole. I’m not sure who in the Labor Party coined the term ‘dole bludger’ but the media picked it up with alacrity. The Fraser government that followed retained it and milked it for all it was worth. The younger generation had supposedly gone work shy and were betraying the Australian ethos. There were front page stories on the newspapers with pictures of girls dubbed ‘dole dollies’ sitting in their bikinis around the pool of the house they could rent while living on welfare.
At the time, I’d been reading some new literature about the sociology of deviance by the English academics and criminologists Stanley Cohen and Jock Young. They identified several examples of phenomena they called
moral panics in which the news media found groups of young people who appeared to threaten society in some way—at the time, it was ‘mods’ versus ‘rockers’— and then mounted campaigns for laws to be changed and order restored. I saw the campaign against dole bludgers fitted the same pattern, but to flesh it out I had to do some research into employment statistics, economic growth, and the social conseqences of unemployment. I wrote a lot of articles about this for various leftist newspapers and journals and extended the issue well beyond the sociology of deviance. By 1977 I’d written 100,000 words on the topic and approached Penguin Books who agreed to publish it. I took the line that unemployment was only going to get worse because the Australian economy was restructuring in ways that required far less unskilled labour than in the past, and that young people who left school at the then most common leaving age of 15, were not wanted by the new economy. My economic theory came from the Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel and his book
Late Capitalism, but also about a year later from the Labor politician Barry Jones and his book
Sleepers Wake, which made a similar analysis of the labour market to me. The line I took was that, without radical state intervention, unemployment would grow to crisis proportions, as it did in the 1930s. The ABC approached me to do a three-part television documentary series which we titled Work That Was. We filmed it in 1979 and it was broadcast in prime time in 1980.
I had many requests to give talks on the subject but at one conference in the early 1980s I was brought up short by
Laurie Carmichael, the head of the Metal Workers Union and a well-known Communist. He said: “You’re doing a good in alerting people to the problem, Keith, but apart from big talk about creating socialism, you don’t offer any solutions. As well as fear, people need hope.” I thought about this for a while and realized he was right. I was talking a lot of hot air that made me and my political activist and welfare worker friends and supporters feel good, but I was offering no hope to the victims. In fact, with a new academic job in social policy at the University of NSW, a big-selling Penguin book, and an ABC-TV series, I was doing very well out of the victims.
So I decided to look for practical solutions. By 1983, both the Commonwealth and the NSW governments were in the hands of the Labor Party. Although I was known as a leftist and not taken seriously by orthodox economists, my reputation among social welfare people got me a lot of consultancy work from both governments. I evaluated the successes and failures of existing programs in employment and training, and also gave policy advice on job creation and the transition from school to work.
About five years later, after I had done a huge amount of research, writing, talking and attending conferences in various countries, I began to doubt what I was doing and I finally concluded it was largely a waste of time. This realisation came when I did an evaluation of the delivery of programs under the Community Employment Program for the NSW government. This was a Commonwealth government make-work program that funded local community groups to find unskilled jobs and give appropriate training to the long-term unemployed. I found that while the great majority of people who undertook a CEP job went back on the dole after it finished, about 20 per cent got other jobs afterwards. So my conclusion was that this was a reasonable outcome and the program had made the difference. I pronounced it a success.
I was asked to present the findings to a small policy group in Canberra, which I did. However, when I’d finished some guy from Treasury got up and said my criterion of success was hopeless. I should have compared the rate of post-program employment under the program to the rate at which the long-term unemployed got jobs without any government program to assist them. He said that about 20 per cent of the long-term unemployed were always picking up jobs without any help. If the program had really made a difference it should have scored a much higher rate of employment outcome. I tried to argue the statistics with him, and did the same with myself when I got back to my office. It is actually very difficult to make the comparison that he said I should have done, because a lot depends on the time scales you choose. But I knew then that my critic was probably right. With or without a government job-creation scheme, the outcome for the long-term unemployed is pretty much the same. The government was wasting its money and giving false hope to those who trusted it.
So it was a surprise to me when in the run-up to the 1993 election, Paul Keating announced he would spend $5 billion on a scheme much like the CEP to assist all those rendered unemployed by his ‘recession we had to have’. Treasury certainly knew then that schemes of this kind did not work and they must have told the government this. I thought Keating’s policy was a fake, and the $5 billion he proposed to spend was no more than a promotional stunt to get himself re-elected. I decided I would not renew my Labor Party membership.
Some of you here today might recognise that the CEP program, run by the government in the 1980s, bears some similarities to the government-outsourced scheme in which Kevin Rudd’s wife, Therese Rein, became involved in the 1990s, a business which she subsequently came to dominate in both Australia and the UK, and which she recently sold for $220 million.
Even though I still couldn’t bear hearing Margaret Thatcher ‘s imitation posh voice on television, I had to concede to myself, and publicly, that in the whole of the previous decade the only thing that had worked to increase the number of jobs available had been the economic reforms she recommended: the deregulation of the finance sector, the privatization of government firms, the freeing-up of the labour market, and the other reforms in the package now still denounced in most of our universities as neo-liberalism.
For me, this was the end of the left-wing road I had been on for twenty years. I no longer believed in the social welfare policy I was obliged to teach students so in 1990 I took three years unpaid leave from the university with the aim of never going back. I was still in my forties and thought I’d try to focus on being an author, partly through books and partly through journalism where I found the work much more engaging and the personal relationships much more congenial than the poisonous hatreds and jealousies that permeated most of the academic departments in which I had been employed.
However, I still did not regard myself as a conservative. That took another decade. In 1994, I published
The Killing of History, which was one more book critical of French theory, this time about the assaults on the writing of history mounted by French authors Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau and their English-speaking academic followers in poststructuralist and postmodernist theory. To my surprise, I received a number of compliments and friendly approaches from old Trotskyist and Communist friends. Some of them were still in the party for reasons I could never fathom. They still regarded themselves, and Karl Marx, as modernists and they despised the fashion for postmodernism and cultural studies that in the 1990s was so fashionable in the universities. They said they were very glad to see me take on this enemy of reason. On similar grounds, between 1996 and 2001, I also became a regular guest on the academic lecture and conference circuit in history departments across the United States. By that time, I was also a regular correspondent for the conservative journal, the
New Criterion in New York, which advertises itself as “America’s leading journal of culture and the arts”, a description I find quite apt.
I soon discovered I agreed with almost everything I read in New Criterion, especially its critique of the tragic decline in standards of the universities under the dominance of Lest-wing intellectuals. In 1999 I read the book by New Criterion editor Hilton Kramer,
The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Cold War, and discovered that far from being alone in my journey from Left to Right, plenty of other American writers had been making the same trek since the 1930s. In 1998, when Paddy McGuinness became editor of
Quadrant Magazine in Australia, he invited me to write for it, which I did. I discovered from the writings of an earlier Quadrant editor, Peter Coleman, that the organization that founded the magazine in 1956, the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, was composed not of people who had been conservatives from birth but of intellectuals known as the ‘Anti-Communist Left’. They had become the staunchest defenders of Western society primarily because they had experienced the radical left in their youth and had developed such an aversion to it, that they dedicated the rest of their lives to combatting it.
So, among this company, I finally felt at home.