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The Importance of Anti-Labour History

Marcel van der Linden

The preceding essays can be read as studies in Anti-Labour history.1 Wherever they have fought for the emancipation of the wage-earning classes, labour movements have provoked aversion, fear and hate. Even the most 'peaceful' of all labour organisations, the consumer cooperatives, sometimes met with extreme hostility because retailers felt threatened by them. However, right-wing protests were normally aimed primarily at trade unions and left-wing political parties. At least four issues spring to mind:
  1. Agents: On whom could Anti-Labour draw for support and from what social background did they come? What were their motives?
  2. Targets: Against which institutions, organisations and individuals did Anti-Labour tend to align, and why?
  3. Strategies: How did Anti-Labour try to fight? What forms of organisation and tactics were employed?2
  4. Success: What was the effect of the Anti-Labour struggle? To what extent did it succeed, and how can that success be explained?
 1
      Research into these issues is still in its infancy — not only in Australia, as Andrew Moore notes in his introduction, but almost everywhere else too. There are only a few exceptions to this, mainly those countries where extreme right-wing movements were in power for a time, such as Germany and Italy, and where an extensive historical debate subsequently took place regarding how and why those movements came to power.3 It is, therefore, even more imperative that rapid progress be made in addressing these issues, so for that reason alone the contributions presented in this issue of Labour History are especially welcome. Naturally, they provide no answer to all the central issues. They are merely preliminary explorations, which at the same time show clearly what is needed in the way of further research. All these essays contain information on agents (individuals or groups); most of them examine targets and some go into strategies and relative success. They take as their themes both broader political movements and organisations, and individuals. 2
      Like other countries, even before World War I, Australia saw forms of Anti-Labour aligned primarily against the trade unions and the developing labour parties. However, the global impact of the Bolshevik experiment seems to have caused a qualitative leap everywhere. The fear of the communist threat spread quickly, and gave rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories. The occasional extremity of the paranoia concerning communism is clear from Marinus La Rooij's article on Arthur Nelson Field. 3
      In the 1920s and '30s the effort to prevent a communist takeover led in many countries to the formation of paramilitary bodies and other organisations — Australia was no exception to that.4 Nick Fischer provides a significant impetus to the comparative analysis of this anti-communism. He ascertains, that 'the political, legal and social structures of Australian government hampered the prosecution of anti communism and other authoritarian right-wing political activity', thus revealing the significant degree to which the country differed from the United States. Fischer's observation can be read as an invitation to further research. Both countries were stable democracies with relatively weak central state apparatuses. Should we therefore consider 'the political power of the labour movement and of labour ideals' as the crucial explanatory factor? 4
      Until the late 1930s, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism maintained a certain respectability in conservative circles generally (for a while even Churchill had a high regard for Mussolini), although that does not imply that sympathisers were able to win much influence everywhere, as Andrew Moore shows in the case of Eric Campbell's New Guard. After 1945, in most countries it was only organisations and individuals at the margins who continued along the course set by Fascism. Peter Henderson's essay on Frank Browne, his Australian Party (1955–57) and its political offspring illustrates this very well. 5
      Progressive scholars have devoted a relatively large amount of attention to neo-Fascist groups in the postwar period because they saw in them the potential seed of a new dictatorship. I should like to argue, however, that the real threat to the labour movement during the Cold War came predominantly from anticommunist5 ideologies, which generally penetrated deeply within conservative parties — including Australia's Liberal Party, as Drew Cottle and Angela Keys's case study of Douglas Evelyn Darby proves — and which often gained influence within workers' organisations as well, with the full implication of self-censorship and mutual distrust. 6
      Although neo-Fascist groups continue to exist all over the world, the appearance taken by Anti-Labour has changed drastically since the end of the Cold War. Many early Fascists have become 'post-Fascists', who have reformulated the old ideology in terms of a 'differential nativism' that cohabits easily with neo-conservative populism, an alliance strikingly illustrated in the case of Italy, where a collaboration has been forged between media-politician Silvio Berlusconi and the post-Fascist Gianfranco Fini. In the case of Belgium's Vlaams Belang (until recently Vlaams Blok) the alliance has become internalised: although neo-Fascists are influential in the background, the party presents itself as a right-wing populist formation. 7
      In advanced capitalist countries Anti-Labour generally no longer presents itself as anti-democratic, but as anti-multicultural. In principle, this new right-wing populism can also absorb progressive elements, as is apparent from the movement led by the late Pim Fortuyn in my own country, the Netherlands. His was a movement which combined hostility to the Left with a powerful defence of gay rights. Pauline Hanson has been another example of this trend, as Murray Goot's contribution makes clear. The policy she advocated was a clear example of 'exclusionary populism', whose core doctrine Hans-Georg Betz has characterised as 'a restrictive notion of citizenship, which holds that genuine democracy is based on a culturally, if not ethnically, homogeneous community; that only long-standing citizens count as full members of civil society; and that society's benefits should be restricted to those members of society who, either as citizens or taxpayers, have made a substantial contribution to society'.6 Within the community of 'legitimate citizens' there can be room for emancipatory politics, and this probably goes a long way to explain the 'progressive' elements of Hanson's speech of 1998.7 8
      In short, Anti-Labour has historically been an extremely flexible set of forces that cannot be reduced to just one form. The studies published here are further evidence of that. 9


Endnotes

1. As far as I am aware, this term dates from the early 1970s. See K. D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History. Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain, Macmillan, London, 1974. Brown and his collaborators interpret Anti-Labour mainly in an institutional sense; K. Nield, 'Anti-Labour History', Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 30, 1975, pp. 63–67, is a plea for a broader approach, which includes the 'struggle for control of the work situation' and the 'manipulation of working-class culture' through mass media, and so on.

2. The actions of Anti-Labour forces can take on various forms, which I would designate as: (i) Fear Stuff, (ii) Sweet Stuff, (iii) Evil Stuff and (iv) Subversive Stuff. The first three terms are taken from Donald F. Roy, 'Fear Stuff, Sweet Stuff and Evil Stuff: Management's Defences Against Unionization in the South', in T. Nichols (ed.), Capital and Labour. Studies in the Capitalist Labour Process, The Athlone Press, London, 1980, pp. 395–415, though my interpretation of them is slightly different from his. 'Fear Stuff' refers to the intimidation of workers by threatening to cut their wages, to dismiss or imprison them, or physically to assault them. 'Sweet Stuff' refers to attempts to lure workers away from the labour movement by offering paternalistic or nationalistic 'alternatives', such as corporate housing or yellow unions. 'Evil Stuff' is about attempts to show, through propaganda and 'revelations', that the labour movement has concluded a pact with the devil and intends to betray the fatherland, the white race, or whatever. 'Subversive Stuff' seeks to undermine workers' organisations by means of espionage, provocation, and so on.

3. Nonetheless, historians of these countries tend to regard each country as an "exceptional case" and they seldom attempt serious international comparisons. Only in recent times has that begun to change somewhat. A striking study offering new perspectives for Anti-Labour studies is S. Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde. Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA, Böhlau, Cologne, 2002, which compares favourably with sound but more conventional studies such as M. Franzinelli's recent Squadristi. Protagonisti e techniche della violenza fascista, 1919–1922, Mondadori, Milan, 2003.

4. A. Moore, The Right Road? A History of Right-wing Politics in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1995, pp. 28–30, 40–43. An important facet of this and one which the present essays address only indirectly is the gender aspect of such organizations. A comparative test of the relevant hypotheses from Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987, is very important in understanding the cult of masculinity and the representation of women in paramilitary groups. Theweleit wrote his work at the request of his friend, Erhard Lucas, who devoted a huge study to the revolutionary confrontations in the German Ruhr area in 1920, and found some behavioural patterns of the proto-Fascist Freikorpse hard to understand. See Lucas, Märzrevolution 1920, 3 volumes, Roter Stern, Frankfurt am Main, 1973–78.

5. It is, I believe, necessary to distinguish anti-communism and anti-Stalinism. Anti-communism opposed the existence of the Soviet Union and similar societies as such, while anti-Stalinism rejected important elements of these societies, including their dictatorial power structures.

6. Hans-Georg Betz, 'Against Globalization: Xenophobia, Identity Politics and Exclusionary Populism in Western Europe', Socialist Register 2003, pp. 195–213, at 194–195.

7. It is of course true, as Goot observes, that some of Hanson's positions on issues of race and ethnicity 'had been core Labor Party values sometime before'. Unfortunately, labour organizations can be partly Anti-Labour, especially when issues of being 'in' or 'out' are involved. Trade unions and left-wing parties almost everywhere have a rich history of discriminating against and excluding migrants, women, people of colour, or precarious and unskilled segments of the working class.

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