by Kerry Bolton
There were no such illusions among the workers at the time as to their conditions, or feelings of guilt for supposedly being members by birth of an exploiting ‘race.’ In 1830, the Rev. Richard Oastler, a Methodist minister in York, protested the conditions in the Bradford woollen mills where little children laboured thirteen hours a day and were beaten if they fell asleep. Oastler attacked the hypocrisy of Yorkshire clergymen and politicians who zealously condemned the enslavement of Blacks in the West Indies while in England, ‘thousands of our fellow creatures . . . are this very moment . . . in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system of colonial slavery.’ Oastler was publicly thanked by a delegation of English labourers at a meeting in York, ‘. . . for his manly letters to expose the conduct of those pretended philanthropists and canting hypocrites who travel to the West Indies in search of slavery, forgetting there is a more abominable and degrading system of slavery at home.’[8]
Moreover, the assumption that slavery was based on White privilege is a myth. Free Africans and American Indians were able to own White slaves, indicated by a proposal in South Carolina in 1717 that free Blacks could vote if they owned ‘one white man.’[9]
As the Old Labour pioneers stated, the money-merchants had no loyalty to anything beyond profits. The same is true today. It is therefore nonsense to say that capitalism or even European colonialism were predicated on ideas of ‘White supremacy,’ and that the poorest classes of Whites shared in the legacy of exploitation on the sole basis of ‘White privilege’ vis-à-vis non-White slaves. The system of mercantile economics that is again predominant in the world and has now become international (globalisation) saw—and sees—people only as economic units. Economists, businessmen, and politicians regarded poor Whites in England, Scotland, and Ireland as a burden that could be solved by enslaving them. Hence, in February 1652 in England it was enacted that
. . . it may be lawful for . . . two or more justices of the peace within any country, citty or towne corporate belonging to this commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant . . . cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant . . . in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the port of London, or unto any other port . . . from where such person or persons may be shipped . . . into any forraign collonie or plantation . . .[10]
While one of the major complaints of present-day Leftist activists is that of the large numbers of Africans who died on board ship to the Americas, nothing much is said of the little vagabonds from England who were shipped to the colonies:
From that time on little is known about them except that very few lived to become adults. When a ‘muster’ or census of the [Virginia] colony was taken in 1625, the names of only seven boys were listed [of the children kidnapped in 1619]. All the rest were dead . . . The statistics for the children sent in 1620 are equally grim . . . no more than five were alive in 1625.[11]
The attitude of the international oligarchy[12] remains the same: people are here to be treated as economic units regardless of one’s race, nation, culture, class, or ethnicity. It is therefore fallacious, and plays into the hands of oligarchy, for the Left to claim that all ‘Whites’ have a heritage of ‘privilege’ vis-à-vis everyone else. Another example is the oft-stated indignation that the Maori children of New Zealand were punished if they spoke Maori at school because of the system of White racist colonial oppression, which wanted to Anglicise the native subjects.
British imperialism did not act as a racial expression but as an economic expression. As indicated already, plutocrats did not owe allegiance to their own race a century and more ago, any more than they do today. Hence, Afrikaner children who spoke Afrikaans at school were also punished, and not only Afrikaans but also the Dutch language were suppressed. Indeed, the oligarchy in Britain, epitomised by the Rothschild family, looked down upon the Afrikaners just as much as they looked down on working-class Britons. For example: ‘In 1906, the English Cape Town newspaper The Cape Times could condescendingly write that “Afrikaans is the confused utterance of half-articulated patois.”’[13] When colonialism was transcended by internationalism and when the money centres focused on New York rather than the capitals of Europe, plutocrats who had been avid imperialists were just as eager to scuttle the empires in pursuit of a global economy, as will be shown in the next chapter.
[1] Eduardo Martínez Zapata, ‘What Immigrants Need: Amnesty, Open Borders, and a Movement That Won’t Back Down,’ Freedom Socialist Bulletin, Winter–Spring 2006, http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/1502.
[2] Freedom Socialist Party, ‘About Us,’ http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/2.
[3] Freedom Socialist Party, Platform, ‘For a Mass Workingclass Party,’ http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/16.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), ‘The Coloured World-Revolution,’ 204–30.
[6] Colours of Resistance, http://www.coloursofresistance.org/741/shinin-the-lite-on-white-part-one-white-privilege/.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Cecil Herbert Driver, Tory Radical: The Life of Richard Oastler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 36–55.
[9] Journals of the Commons House of Assembly of the Province of South Carolina: 1692–1775, 5:294–95.
[10] Egerton Manuscript, British Museum.
[11] Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), 147.
[12] ‘His sole obsession is to make money.’ Plato, The Republic, ‘The Oligarchic Character,’ 9:5.
[13] Kwesi Kwaa Prah, ‘The Language Question. The Struggle between English and the Other Official and Unofficial Languages’ (South Africa), p. 1, http://www.språkförsvaret.se/sf/fileadmin/PDF/The_Language_Question.pdf.
Labour & the White Australia Policy
William Lane
Prior to 1878 there had been continuous but ad hoc opposition to Asian immigration by Australian workers. Chinese immigrants meant not only low wages but also strike breaking. The most eminent of Australia’s Labour fathers was William Lane. He established the first union-owned newspaper in Australia, The Worker, and founded the Australian Labor Federation, which gave birth to the Australian Labor Party. Lane stated that the Labour movement’s struggle was ‘more than national or social. . . . It is a true racial struggle.’ How different that outlook is from today’s socialists. In contrast to the Marxist and anarchist notion that the working class has ‘no nation, no nationality,’ Lane declared in his labour newspaper, The Boomerang, bylined as ‘A Live Newspaper Born of the Soil’:
We are for this Australia, for the nationality which is creeping to the verge of being, for the progressive people. . . . Whatever will benefit Australia: that we are for. Whatever will harm Australia: that we are against. While we plough our fields and measure our calico, and swing our hammers, history is being made and we ourselves are taking part in a stirring drama.
Here we face the hordes of the east as our kinsmen faced them in the dim distant centuries, and here we must beat them back if we would keep intact all that can make our lives worth living. It does not matter that today it is an insidious invasion of peaceful aliens instead of warlike downpour of weaponed men. Monopolistic capitalism has no colour and no country.[1]
‘Monopolistic capitalism has no colour and no country.’ Lane is succinctly stating the precise opposite of Marx who said that the working class has no country, any more than the money-broker and the global oligarchy.
In 1889 Lane wrote a novel White or Yellow? A Story of Race War 1908. This work predicted an alliance between the pastoralists and wealthy of the Queensland Establishment and Asian capital. A treacherous Queensland Premier would pl
ace the colony in the hands of these alien capitalists. But trade union patriots led by an ordinary nationalist worker fought the enemy, expelling the Chinese ‘invaders’ and settling accounts with the local traitor class. Today, the trades union leaders would be in alliance with the oligarchy and Asian capital.
W. G. Spence
W. G. Spence, president of the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union, which was the precursor of the Australian Workers’ Union, stated: ‘True patriotism should be racial.’[2] He explained:
Unionism came to the Australian bushman as a religion. It came, bringing salvation from years of tyranny. It had in it the feeling of mateship which he understood already, and which characterised the action of one ‘white man’ to another. Unionism extended the idea, so a man’s character was gauged by whether he stood true to Union rules or scabbed it . . . Rough and unpolished many of them may be; but manly, true, and ‘white’ all the time and the Movement owes them much. . . . The exclusion of alien and coloured races gives a chance for the development of the Australian island continent of a great nation of the white race . . .[3]
Opposition to Chinese labour galvanised the workers’ movement, Spence writing of the successful resistance against the mine owners:
The anti-Chinese movement was one of the early developments of democratic feeling in Australia. So strong was it that in 1861 it led to riot amongst the diggers at Lambing Flat, Burrangong, New South Wales. They drove the Chinese off the field, some of the pig-tailed heathens losing their lives. There were at that time 38,000 Chinese in the two colonies of New South Wales and Victoria—12,988 in the former, and 24,732 in the latter. But for the action of the gold diggers and restriction of Chinese immigration by a poll tax and otherwise, Australia would have been practically a Chinese possession. The same strong feeling that caused the Lambing Flat diggers to revolt actuated the miners of Clunes, Victoria, in 1876. The directors of the Lothair Gold Mining Company decided to introduce Chinese labor. The miners, who were all members of the A.M.A., determined to resist.[4]
Spence was one of the founders of the Australian Labor Party. He described the party doctrine in terms that would make him anathema to today’s Labor party careerists:
The party stands for racial purity and racial efficiency—industrially, mentally, morally and intellectually. It asks the people to set up a high standard of national character. . . . We want a people self-reliant in moral character and manhood able and willing to defend their hearths and homes in the advent of invasion. . . . Labor takes the home as the unit of the nation and works for all that is calculated to make it happy. . . . The present competitive struggle for existence will disappear . . . The Labor Party is dominated by two moral convictions—the Ethics of Usefulness and the Ethics of Fellowship. It holds that all work must have a social value to entitle to an income. . . . Governed by the Ethics of Fellowship there will only be one class, and that is the producing class. . . . Such a condition must come sooner in white Australia than in older lands.[5]
These early Australian socialists saw in Australia the promise of a new White workers’ paradise free of the class war and exploitation of Europe at the time of the industrial revolution. How far their cry is from the puerile ideology of the liberals, Marxists, and anarchists. In Australia in Spence’s day it was the ‘anti-Socialists’ who were unpatriotic, sooner employing non-European labour rather than provide decent conditions for workers of their own kind; while the labour movement was the herald of an Australian nationalism:
The Anti-Socialist is invariably the most unpatriotic person to be found. He belongs to the ‘stinking fish’ party. If he cannot get his own stupid way he denounces the country in which he has done so well. The bedrock of the cry for a colour line across the continent, so that Anti-Socialists could boss niggers and yellow men, is found in the Anti-Socialist’s nature. He is a born tyrant, and as the white Australian will not stand his tyranny he must have a nigger to order about. There is no patriotism in the Anti-Socialist press, hence it barracks for anything the capitalist crowd asks for.[6]
While the nature of capitalism has not changed, the character of the ‘labour’ and ‘socialist’ movements has, having long been in accord with the oligarchs.
The multicultural character of the British Empire saw a reluctance of the British Colonial Office to pursue policies that might undermine that character, as well as interfering with the ‘rights’ of business to utilise colonial subjects, whether White or coloured, as commercial circumstances required. Then as now, the doctrine of ‘free trade’ was dominant. Joseph Chamberlain, Britain’s Colonial Secretary, stated that immigration restriction could not be condoned ‘lest it offend Her Majesty’s Indian subjects.’ In 1896 Chamberlain informed the Intercolonial Conference that because Britain was seeking an alliance with Japan, Australia would have to moderate her immigration laws, but Australians resisted. Business interests were undermining Australia’s immigration policy. In Northern Queensland sugar plantation owners imported several thousand Melanesians. In 1891 pastoral companies employed Chinese scab labour during the shearers’ strike.
Ironically, less than a century later, it was the Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who jubilantly declared the ‘White Australia Policy’ to be ‘dead’ in 1973, having already pushed for the removal of the ‘White Australia Policy’ from Labor’s platform in 1965, to the objections of the old guard led by Arthur Calwell. Liberal governments had already dealt more subtle blows to the White Australia Policy in the aftermath of World War II.[7] The fact that media magnate Rupert Murdoch, the perfect specimen of a globalist oligarch, backed the Labor Party under Whitlam indicates the direction of ‘modern Labor’ from this time. Among Whitlam’s decisions was the vote of the Australian delegate for sanctions against South Africa at the United Nations Organization.
Joseph Chifley
Another great Labour statesman who championed the White Australia Policy was Joseph Chifley. In 1928 Chifley stood for the seat of Macquarie and won on the campaign that the government was undermining the White Australia Policy, although the incumbents were returned. In the rough and straight language of the pre-PC era, Chifley criticised the government for admitting ‘so many Dagoes and Aliens into Australia.’
The Labour newspaper The National Advocate called on electors to vote for Chifley to protect White Australia. Chifley was a Labour nationalist who supported a centralised government to maintain national unity, and was a principal advocate for the nationalisation of banking.
In 1929 Labor assumed government. However, the Bank of England and the private banks forced the Scullin government to continue orthodox financial policies. From the backbenches Chifley opposed the government’s financial orthodoxy. In 1931 the Scullin government was defeated. However in 1935 Chifley was appointed to the Royal Commission into the banking system. Chifley disagreed with the commission’s findings and submitted his own report calling for bank nationalisation. In 1941 he became Treasurer in the Curtin government, and served as Prime Minister from 1946–49. Chifley’s Labor nationalism combined the need for economic freedom with that of White Australia, like Jack Lang and other stalwarts of the Old Labor movement.
Arthur Calwell—Last of Old Guard Labor
While communist elements in the Australian labor unions, and the Australian Confederation of Trades Unions, undermined the White Australia Policy of the Old Labor movement in favour of Marxist internationalism, it was under the Liberal governments of Robert Menzies (1949–66) and Harold Holt (Minister for Immigration 1949–56, Prime Minister 1966–67) that the first major cracks began to appear in the protective walls of the White Australia Policy which, as mentioned previously, was finished off by the Whitlam Labor government during the 1970s. The dictation test was abolished, skilled non-Europeans were allowed in, naturalisation was easier, and Australian citizens could bring in Asian spouses and their children.[8]
Harold Holt became
Prime Minister in January 1966. Former Labor Immigration Minister and staunch defender of the White Australia Policy, Arthur Calwell wrote: ‘Significantly, Mr Holt’s first action as Prime Minister was to announce liberalisation of our immigration regulations regarding Asians . . . Those changes can yet be disastrous for Australia.’[9]
Academics and white-collar professionals who looked with disdain upon the White Australia Policy had undermined the Labor Party. The Old Guard was led by Arthur Calwell, leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party. The trades unions still had considerable power at executive level and ensured that the policy was maintained, whilst the opposition was forming behind Gough Whitlam and Don Dunstan. Attempts to have the policy dropped failed in 1959, 1961, and 1963.
