Nick Dyrenfurth | Rethinking Labor Tradition: Synthesising Discourse and Experience | Labour History, 90

Rethinking Labor Tradition: Synthesising Discourse and Experience

Nick Dyrenfurth^*

This argument seeks to contribute to the ongoing theoretical discourse surrounding the role of class and language within the practice of labour and social history. A series of inclusive (often denoted as 'bottom-up') studies has added undoubted richness to the fabric of such histories. Yet such scholarly developments have (arguably unfairly) disconnected histories of institutions — for our purposes, the Australian Labor Party — from processes of class formation and identity construction. I am proposing one way forward that seeks to explicitly confront and mediate post-structuralist claims within the field of cultural materialism. Specifically, the historical concept of a Labour(ist) tradition can be revealed more fully via a theoretical approach that synthesises discourse with experience; emphasising its role in representing but also shaping social and political identities. Beyond theoretics, this synthesis has a clear political purpose, for re-conceptualising Labor's past provides practical clues as regards Labor's present malaise and possible regeneration.	1

Introduction: Labor without Class?
Is 'class' dead? This article provides one answer to this pressing question, presenting a largely theoretical argument about class and its relations to collective, institutional action: a further contribution to what Sean Scalmer terms the 'ongoing dialogue concerning the relative virtues of culturalist Marxism and discourse analysis in the study of labour and social history'.¹ In extending Scalmer's excellent theoretical 'map' and a sense of social history organised around 'classes', 'discourses' and 'intellectuals', I want to make a number of critical, concrete suggestions about the role of discourse and the early Australian Labor Party upon and within the experience of class.² Via an exploration of theoretical and historiographical issues concerning the related themes of class identity, language and Labor tradition, I will argue that these three fields can be usefully linked and that each reveals itself more fully through an approach that aims to synthesise discourse theory with cultural materialism, understood as E.P. Thompson's classic notion of 'experience'.³ It is, however, less of an actual demonstration of synthesis than a series of speculatory interventions which heuristically sketch a promising area of scholarship, or at least a reworking of some well-trodden ground. Until relatively recently, the study of the Labor Party and related foundational unions occupied a central and privileged status within Australian labour history. The onset of more inclusive social, cultural and local histories, influenced as they were by the general post-war emphasis upon history from the 'bottom-up', have repeatedly and successfully challenged such orthodoxy (at least at an academic level). The influence of such histories and the critique of narrow institutionalism means we know more about working-class life but, as Frank Bongiorno observes, this has the tendency to downplay the importance of 'language in the construction of social and political identity, and to institutions' role in class formation ... through which workers and employers [often] define their identities and interests'.⁴ Locally, such objections towards a narrow top-down institutional history were first initiated by the materialist historians of the Old Left, and pursued more thoroughly by elements of the New Left, often followers of the Thompsonian school. The so-called 'linguistic turn' associated with post-structuralism further complicated, indeed threw into question, the concept of a singular or dominant working-class 'experience' — though this was clearly not the project all labour historians had been working towards. It has been well documented that repeated attempts to synthesise, let alone reconcile, these theoretical traditions have failed, most conspicuously of all in Britain.	2
Despite these setbacks, I propose a way forward which seeks to mediate the post-structuralist claim of a necessary fragmentation of perspective within the field of cultural materialism; an accommodation, if you like, while recognising that a definitive synthesis or agreement is perhaps impossible. Such a proposal is thus just one attempt to find a way through the impasse, rather than a project to re-invent the theoretic wheel. It does, however, possess a clear and pressing political frame, much like the milieu of the original British and Australian New Left. Our present context confronts a rampant bourgeois hegemony in which neo-liberal individualisms both replace and accentuate working-class demobilisation amidst the concurrent decline of socialisms. Marshalling discourse to the materialist project opens up the possibility of theoretical and practical ways of mobilising language, recognising its central role in promoting, perhaps naturalising, popular understandings and forms of collective life — the essential political purpose to materialist historical scholarship. This synthesis seeks to reinforce the utilitarianism of the Thompsonian concept of 'working class experience' with a politically useful eye towards a currently dysfunctional Labor Party: the institution which purports to represent class experience. Reconceptualising Labor tradition as the mobilisation of language in shaping social and political identities of course follows the recent work of Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer, Verity Burgmann and Neville Kirk. In making an argument about the vitality of language and even populism in inventing and sustaining Labor's class tradition(s), this is simultaneously a case for a present reformulation of populist class analysis, though without the exclusionary baggage of the past. In doing this, I shall trace the partial separation of political Labor from historical processes of class, tying such trends into a critique of labourism, before proceeding towards a methodological and theoretical framework which reformulates these themes within a synthetic approach we might title discursive materialism.⁵	3
Until the 1990s, scholarly developments increasingly disconnected institutions, for our purposes the Australian Labor Party, from processes of class formation and identity construction. This separation can in part be understood to be an overreaction to the somewhat taken-for-granted relationship posited by the Old Left, in which Labor essentially embodied a working-class mobilisation. On a wider scale, this trend accentuates an increasingly popular yet politically damaging tendency to downplay the import of class in past (often conflated with present) conceptions of the social order.⁶ In this context, there is a critical need for concepts such as labourism to be re-located within the ongoing theoretical discourse around class formation and consciousness. This article, then, seeks to look again at the concept of a Labor tradition, contending that studies informed by a post-structuralist framework can actually help to flesh out the complexities and contradictions of working-class and labour experience: how people comprehend, want to change and preserve the social world. Through language, working people and Labor intellectuals expressed both the content and changing nature of experience (and class relationships), connecting such meanings with(in) the material social world.	4

Cultural Materialism and the Linguistic Turn: turning where?
In my attempt to re-conceptualise issues of class formation and consciousness, and looking anew at the early Labor Party, I have drawn insight (and important lessons) from the two leading exponents of the so-called linguistic turn in Britain, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. The work of these authors in this area was the source of heated debate in Britain and elsewhere, yet its reception in Australia was virtually non-existent, or at the very least lacking a clear theoretical exposition and contestation. In a sense, my aim is to invert or rescue many of the intended and unintended consequences of their work: a kind of post-structuralist mea culpa if you like. Beyond Scalmer's largely theoretical exposition, Bruce Scates incorporated such influences into his A New Australia, arguing that 'a new history of the labour movement must be a history written from below'.⁷ In a similar vein, Mark Hearn addressed issues of language, values and culture in his study of the Australian Workers Union, 'Mates and Strangers'. Another instructive example is Lenore Layman's 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration'. Layman critically highlights the importance of labour's counter-discourse within and against Australian federation. More recently, and working within a defiantly materialist framework, Burgmann has explored the centrality of language to the making and unmaking of the parliamentary Labor tradition.⁸	5
It should also be noted that utilising the insights of Stedman Jones and Joyce does not deny the important differences in their individual approaches to language and related deference, or lack thereof, towards the pioneering work of E.P. Thompson. Common to both Joyce and Stedman Jones is the conception of the vitality of 'popular languages' over and against 'class'. Yet in his Languages of Class Stedman Jones's somewhat narrow cognition of formal political discourse was far more temperate and provisional than Joyce's position in critiquing the Thompsonian tradition. Joyce adopted a far broader conception of language as a system of signs and communication, leading him into an antithetical, absolutist position intemperately denying Thompsonian insights altogether. Where Stedman Jones, partly out of an engagement with Althusserian structuralism, sought to problematise and enliven issues of class, Joyce increasingly sought to decry class altogether, taking particular aim at the alleged determinism of Thompsonian class 'experience'. Accordingly, when I seek to draw upon Joyceian insight it is with heavy qualification. Joyce's allegoric journey from his suggestive Work, Society and Politics to the impressive Visions of the People en route to his controversial Democratic Subjects involved an ever-increasing methodology of linguistic determinism. Joyce effectively reified subjectivity as the pre-eminent determining form of identity, consciousness and historical narrative, contradicting his avowed desire for 'the concept of social class ... to have renewed use'.⁹ Despite these riders, it is possible to claim an anti-reductionist and non-determinist lineage between the writings of Thompson and his critics, Joyce and Stedman Jones. One can use the insights of Joyce and Stedman Jones, particularly their claim upon the constitutive and discursive role of institutions and politics, without agreeing with all of their claims. Applying or more accurately modifying their insights within a materialist perspective is an overdue exercise in Australian historiography.¹⁰	6
It is not the task of the present argument to engage in a detailed critique of those authors. As I flagged earlier, a seemingly endless and often bitter debate has characterised the British historiography. Historians rapidly organised into opposing polar camps, inevitably and unproductively speaking past each other, whilst the brave souls who seek to map a middle way have often been as cast as naïve fence-sitters. Kirk's materialist defence of Thompsonian social history, in which he considers both the strengths and problems of the 'linguistic turn', provides a more than adequate guide to such debates. Whilst rejecting the central tenets and claim to superiority of the linguistic turners, Kirk suggests that: the writings of Stedman Jones and Joyce have acted as a timely reminder that language and systems of discourse play an active role in the creation of aspects of social reality, rather than being mere expressions and reflections of a totally given, or pre-existing external reality.¹¹ In a similar paper, Kirk bemoaned the 'fruitless exchanges' of discourse and experience, meaning 'it is better that they go their own future ways'.¹² However, what Kirk seems to construe as historiographical obiter amidst a wider theoretical incompatibility, I conceive of as the best-practice model for a synthetic approach, one which rejects a totally given determination from either angle. The declinations of Kirk and others, I argue, stem from a shared flawed assumption that synthesis should be singular and universal in application, implying an either/or choice. Moreover, British failures should not be seen as a defeatist warning but conceived of as fruitful site of reapplication in the Australian historiography. Correspondingly, linguistic advocates have erroneously ignored the reality that Thompsonians have (however clandestinely or implicitly) long been attempting to synthesise discourse and experience. Thompsonians pioneered methods of non-reductionism. They were not blind to the constitutive effects of politics, language and culture, rather advocating an epistemological position which denied that class exists as an economistic structure (the material world) predetermining or merely reflecting an essential consciousness. Yet there remains a suspicion that experience, at least in its more singular delineation, posits a certain presupposition of class interests and formation. E.P. Thompson and followers such as David Montgomery were certainly not, despite their clear attention to the importance of language, agency and ideas, somehow 'proto-post-structuralist'.¹³	7
The writings of Joyce and Stedman Jones did entail an obvious epistemological break, but perhaps not one as unambiguous as that perceived by those authors and their followers. In 1982, Stedman Jones produced his seminal work on the language of Chartism, reproduced and expanded upon in his Languages of Class the following year. Less programmatic dogma than a series of speculative theoretical interventions, Stedman Jones's argument sought to destabilise class as a consciousness forged solely by experience and an underlying 'social' structure. In his opinion: Language disrupts any simple notion of the determination of consciousness by social being because it is itself part of social being. We cannot therefore decode political language to reach a primal and material expression of interest since it is the discursive structure of political language which conceives and defines interest in the first place. What we must do is study the production of interest, identification, grievance and aspiration within political languages themselves.¹⁴ Stedman Jones posited 'the impossibility of abstracting experience from the language which structures its articulation'. Largely resting on his revisionist study of Chartism, Stedman Jones argued that 'changes in political discourse ... explain changes in political behaviour'.¹⁵ It is this insight, without discounting his problematic treatment of experience and agency, which makes Stedman Jones's study ultimately valuable. Joan Scott adroitly critiqued his omissions of gender. She also noted his formalistic approach towards Chartist language, arguing instead that discourses should not simply mean 'words in their literal usage but the creation of meaning through differentiation'.¹⁶ This, of course, raises another problem. Whilst language is not simply the printed word, the difficulty is that the spoken word, the gestures, actions and other symbolic productions of cultural politics are often mediated by the printed word. The linguistic vista which Stedman Jones exposed prompted ardent debate, but it was the writings of another English historian of the social that would generate the real heat.	8
Following Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce sought to further problematise, and eventually decry, the concept of social class. He conceived of class as a discursive social construct, which itself constructed experience, rather than as an objective reality and predetermined social category. In Joyce's words, there exists the 'formative role of language and ideas in the formation of attitudes to the social order' whereby experience 'is in fact not prior to and constitutive of language but is actively constituted by language'.¹⁷ As I shall elaborate shortly, I feel it unnecessary to use a sequential and unfairly limiting paradigm of language then experience. They move imperceptibly within and against the force of each other, shaping and narrating the outlook of the individual and collectivity. In his Visions of the People, Joyce sought to place class alongside other conceptions of the social order. As he suggested in regards to nineteenth-century Britain, 'when it comes to how the social order was represented and understood, there were other children too who were every bit as lusty as class'. The lustiest child, according to Joyce, was the radical discursive continuum of populism. Terms such as 'the people' and 'humanity' rather than class hallmarked contemporary understandings. While right to illuminate the populist dimension (which is never really properly defined despite his heuristic aim), he erroneously constructed class and populism as divergent discourses, amidst a wider set of seemingly autonomous 'visions' of the social order.¹⁸ On the contrary, as Kirk suggests in his admonition of Joyceian de-contextualisation, one must study the: extent to which class-based meanings can be expressed within a 'populist' framework and the wider overlaps of usage and meaning between class and populism; or to engage and assess the relative appeals of the two languages within specific contexts and periods of time.¹⁹ Class has rightly or wrongly lost its previous ontological and historiographical certainties, but as Eric Hobsbawm maintained, class is not simply reductive to class-consciousness. Class languages and representations operate in real and specific contexts. In the Australian experience, 'the people' was not necessarily a 'rival' to 'class', but a complementary and overlapping discursive tool which sought to give the languages of class both justificatory continuity and wider popular or extra-class appeal. By re-examining Labor and the broader role of (increasingly national) institutions, one can begin to re-examine the question of how popular, increasingly urban, culture was infused with a classing discourse from the 1880s onwards: what Joyce dismissively refers to as 'new wine in old bottles'. An approach foregrounded in such theoretical insights mediates the post-structuralist denial of a singular working-class experience with the historical abstraction of that formation — but noting the contradictions and paradoxes of working-class experience and agency. Of course, instead of actually decrying class, Joyce's Visions constructed the straw man of proletarian consciousness. It can be argued that Joyce himself employs an essentialist conception of class himself, which benchmarks the crude Marxist teleology of an economistic process of subjective exclusion, conflict and struggle. Despite these problematic tendencies, Joyce's Visions stopped short of denying class altogether; put simply, 'class mattered'.²⁰	9
The publication of Democratic Subjects then embodied Joyce's intensified engagement with post-modernist theory: the full linguistic turn (away from class). Joyce provocatively argued that class was merely an imagined social form, insisting that 'meanings make subjects and not subjects meanings'.²¹ On one level, class is an imagined form of collective subjectivity, but this does not make it any less real as an experience of social structure. Experience, even if we conceive of it as including the acceptance and mediation of abstract meaning, is an active form of the subject's agency. For at some point, or more accurately at a series of points, an external material reality, which was more than often brought into life discursively, came to explain and inform the signifying languages of subjects and the overarching collectivity. It is at this point that a viable synthetic approach must depart from the Joyceian tendency to reify the self, ignoring the historically demonstrable effect the collectivity had, and continues to have, over individual subjectivity. Employing such a linguistic caveat, we can productively illustrate the interdependence of discursive and material spheres. If one believes that the 'experience' of class (however muddied by hegemony and false consciousness) is the primary determinant and often the reflector of 'the social', and that likewise language is the foremost human expression of individual and collective ontological understanding as the shaper, distorter and articulation of that experience, then a synthetic approach seems advantageous.	10
The desirability of such an approach is accentuated in Australia, owing to practical tyrannies of distance which confronted workers, intellectuals, institutions and even capitalists. Additionally, the labour movement had to contend with peculiar nativist bourgeois hegemony, as evinced by the persistent mythology of upward social mobility during the nineteenth century, which obfuscated important material changes. Furthermore, in Australia, the development of a language of class was both informed and deformed by the a priori knowledge, and often very real acquaintance, of the English class discourse which, as Asa Briggs notes, was firmly established by the 1820s.²² Of course, residential, geographic community increasingly complemented the shared experience of work and subordinated social immobility. In this light, the Joyceian emphasis upon the role of language is important when used to highlight the abstracting role of language in constituting and naturalising the ambiguous material changes into comprehensible effects. As Joyce rightly claimed: In the form of mass organisations working on a national level the role of institutions was greatly important in bringing about changes in outlook ... which made it possible and indeed necessary for workers to have a view larger than that of their immediate milieu.²³ Contra Joyce's sense of subjective fragmentation, in Australia and seemingly in Britain, languages worked to discursively transform a series of fragmentary and geographically distinct working classes into a more monolithic, homogenous and national working class. In this light, both Joyce and Stedman Jones problematically detach changes in organisational form and discourse (what they see as the realm of 'the political') from the context of important social and cultural changes. Ironically then, Joyce's conception of organisation change and the crucial role of intellectuals is strikingly similar to Marxist-Leninist theory of the vanguard, which stipulates that the working class, or unconscious mass, needs to be militantly and often discursively lead through revolutionary struggle against capitalism. It should likewise be stressed that an emphasis upon the constitutive role of national institutions and intellectuals does not replace but adds to our non-determinist understandings of class formation and consciousness.	11
The key problem in Joyce's account (and to a lesser extent in that of Stedman Jones) is sequentiality. In both cases it is the major obstacle to synthesis. Determinism is the major charge Joyce and his fellow travellers throw at the Thompsonian concept of experience: that they construct a pre-existing material reality which necessarily constitutes a later working-class experience or culture. In any case, the labels 'social determinist' and 'linguistic determinist' are by and large unhelpful to the practice of social history. Moreover, if Joyce does not himself employ a linguistic determinism, his stress upon language in fact creates a sequential paradigm in which a free-floating set of discourses construct the subjective reality of experience. This paradigm is, in fact, redolent of the crude and misleading Marxian periodic distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself. Language reinforces, mediates and often brings to life underlying experience, but it does not replace it causally. As Donald Reid prudently suggests: we can see language as consisting of signs that derive meaning from their relations to (and differences from) one another as well as from reference to contexts or social and material realities, with the understanding that accounts of the human experience of these contexts or realities are themselves given meaning through language.²⁴ By removing the linguistic paradigm of sequentiality, a methodology exists whereby discursive constructions of the social run parallel with the existence, and subjective understanding, of an objective material reality. This, as Michael Bentley points out, is to see 'language as a crucial instrument in the translation of material forces rather than as a substitute for them'.²⁵ Part of the problem is drawing limits around what language actually does, to emphasise 'the practicality of linguistically informed history rather than a forbidding theoretical rectitude'.²⁶ Language adds to a materialist perspective by demonstrating the identifiable shift via, and within, discursive processes from a material to an ontological reality: the oft-cited alignment of subjectivity and collectivity. Thus, historical actors can be accurately seen to construct the social, what Joyce sees as 'the elaboration of unifying identities, such as "peoples", "classes", or "nations"',²⁷ but in a specific historical context with a conscious and unconscious political logic.	12
Such an approach opens up new possibilities for studying how agents in Kirk's words 'modify and change the meanings and character of ... politico-linguistic formations and continuities'.²⁸ Across the industrialising world, ordinary people historically came to understand their experiences and relationships in class terms, which both materially enlivened and confirmed an abstract language of class. So whether those subjective understandings were illusory or largely imagined may be irrelevant to the contextual collective realities or very real politico-linguistic purpose. It is in this light that the damaging implications of Joyce's later work are fully revealed, approaching what the illustrious Australian historian Brian Fitzpatrick once scorned as 'arid intellectualism'.²⁹ We are not caught in a 'deterministic fix'³⁰ or even in the death throes of Marxism — the choice between culture, materialism and discourse is not, and has never really been, absolute. To be sure, taking the linguistic turn need not teleologically move us away from but rather move us closer towards understandings of class.	13
Despite, or because of the aforementioned theoretical stalemate, historians are increasingly employing a practical synthesis of, or more subconsciously adapting, such insights. In 1998, Jon Lawrence published his revisionist account of British electoral politics, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914. Lawrence argued against any neat social-structural or crude materialist explanations of the rise of class politics, or at the very least postponing class's party political impact until after 1918. In doing so, he stressed the complex relationship between political parties and the 'people' they seek to represent and speak for: the interconnectedness of the material and discursive. Using a critical take on popular languages, Lawrence argued for 'studying the interaction between the worlds of "formal" and "informal" politics, conscious that the relationship between the two is never unmediated'. Far from eschewing materialism, Lawrence argued for exploring the 'non-reductionist and non-teleological' ways in which material changes 'shape both the terms upon which subordinate groups are able to act politically, and many of the fundamental concerns of the politics they embrace'.³¹ In a similar vein, Marc W. Steinberg's suggestive Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England advocated a 'dialogic perspective' around 'collective action', stressing 'how material experiences and their discursive representations exist in a larger interactive and dynamic system that is social life'. In doing so, Steinberg emphasised the role of discourse in mediating and transcending the bounds of the local. Crucially, Steinberg sought to constrain any linguistically deterministic or sequentially restrictive approach, whereby 'discourse is a powerful mediating force in the structuring of group consciousness, but it neither creates this consciousness nor masters those who articulate it'.³² Though I do not feel that conflictual discourse need be the prime determinant of consciousness, Steinberg's work deserves a wider audience in Australia and provides an excellent model for the Australian experience.	14
Most recently, James Epstein's In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain both defines and seeks to put into 'practice' a viable middle way between the cultural materialists and the linguistic turners. In Epstein's opinion, post-modernist rejections of Thompson's influence rest upon an ironic 'anxiety of proximity rather than distance'.³³ Such work is indicative of a growing field of scholarship which is rising above the dead-end debates, positing synthesis and putting such ideas into practice. It is in the spirit of such synthetic endeavours that this article is situated. Yet if the argument I have presented so far belies novelty, then applying such synthetic understandings to the increasingly empiricist notion of a Labor tradition does not. In the next section, I want to discuss conventional approaches to Labor tradition, examining the way in which recent approaches have problematically disconnected forms of class experience and formation from Labor tradition. Applying the insights of our theoretical discussion, I will suggest how the Labor tradition can be brought back into the realm of a complex class analysis, in which the formative role of language, class, and institution reveals the synergetic value of experience and discourse.	15

Rethinking Labor Tradition
The historiography of the Labor tradition is at once vast yet methodologically and etymologically narrow. Tradition is often seen rather narrowly through constricting arguments over policy or ideological direction, and more than often viewed through the prism of betrayal; continuity or discontinuity; or socialism posited as the converse of a pejorative or celebratory labourism. Labor's traditions and leaders, bound up within a mythology of trial and tribulation, have remained a continuing focus of popular and academic commentary. Debating and positioning Labor tradition is an enduring tradition itself. Attempts to identify a monolithic Labor tradition are most likely mistaken. Labor can be more accurately understood as an evolving project: a contingent and essentially contested tradition, perhaps malleable to the point of corruption, but never static. Tradition is or should at least be conceived as conditional and contextual to the times. However, for much of its history Labor demonstrated an exclusivist and nationalist (often xenophobic and outwardly racist) character. As such there are problems in 'laying' claim to a tradition even when one can be tenuously established. On the other hand, critiques often rest upon what the party is supposed to be, or could become — 'a process of typification by subtraction' — linked to persistent accusations of anti-theoreticism. It is, however, still possible to claim a coherent, if fragmented concept of a Labor tradition. In my thematic perspective, the project of Australian Labor draws upon historical, contemporary and even future discourses and debates, with language being the crucial mediating and constitutive force. It is through this perspective, rather than strict empirical studies, that tradition should be conceived.³⁴	16
At this point, it is necessary to affirm that at its birth Labor was bound up in, and reflected the experiences of, the fragmented Australian working classes.³⁵ R. Neil Massey sees that 'at its birth, [Labor] was a worker's party reflecting the experiences, aspirations and fears of Australia's [white] unionized workers'.³⁶ Yet it was as much involved in the process and working out of those formations and experiences, in particular the shared ontological sense of an imagined, yet not illusionary, national working class. A couple of related points of agency also require attention. If workers, as Raymond Williams suggested, are genuine agents in the creation of values and cultures such as solidarity, then how have we practically disentangled such clear examples of 'experience' from the discourses bound up within the institutions and practical contingencies of class-based politics? Nor should we condemn the role of both historians and political leaders as intellectuals, who in the Foucaultian sense of power and knowledge, structure and order actors, according degrees of historical agency. Yet traditional approaches have largely ignored the role language (and knowledge) play in the very development and legitimation of consciousness, identity and party political affiliation.³⁷	17
In this more complex schematic, early Labor becomes, in terms of culture, experience and language, something more, and something less, within the active making of the Australian working class. The notion of a Labor tradition requires a more critical and historically dexterous usage. Hobsbawm famously argued that 'traditions' can be 'actually invented, constructed and formally instituted'. Yet, as he also counselled, they constitute entirely human 'responses to novel situations which take their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition'.³⁸ While one must be careful about the application of a Eurocentric theory, the creation and consolidation of early Labor correlates with the suggestive notion of invented tradition. Both Bongiorno and Stuart Macintyre have hinted at the utility of the Hobsbawnian approach. Macintyre was acutely aware that 'partly in response to its lack of strategic or ideological purpose, Labor developed mechanisms to mark it off from the existing political practice'.³⁹ Yet institutional forms such as the supremacy and solidarity of caucus and the pledge were intimately bound up within the invention of tradition. In exploring the historical concept of a Labor tradition we need to delve back further, looking to the context of its ostensible invention. Labor tradition should be viewed in the light of the making of the working classes during the late nineteenth century.	18
While my focus highlights the language of leaders, I contend that such discourse (an expression and shaper of experience) was a result of an ongoing dialogue between workers and leaders as intellectuals: an argument which rejects the post-structuralist slight on working-class agency and instead stresses the agency and contingency of both actors and institutions. Labourites boasted of such dialogue as justification for 'practical' representation: The opinions, needs and rights of those who live by manual labor never can be as faithfully represented by other classes as by their own. Their opinions are only fully understood by constant, in fact, daily association; their needs can only be learned by the fullest expressions of fellow-feeling, which workmen only exhibit to those known to be in much similar circumstances to their own ... Class questions require class knowledge to state them, and class sympathies to fight for them.⁴⁰ Within this logic of cultural materialism, I concur with Williams' primary sense of class culture, with its sensitivity towards the agency of workers and ordinary people, as the important relationship between material and symbolic productions. The ways in which workers and working-class families made sense of and imagined the social order are a valuable addition to tracing the development of working-class consciousness amidst wider narratives of class formation. In doing this, the distinction between worker and leader is necessary, though perhaps less bounded than institutional and social histories would have us believe. What is bottom-up history can also be read as top-down. In truth, language works both ways; constituting and reflecting, experience and consciousness forming imprecisely in that mediating interior. The languages workers spoke, mediated, acquired and transmitted gave expression to the particularity of their social experience derived from contextual material relations and from the relations of one class to another. This methodology does not seek to apotheose the worker but rather acknowledges, as Lucy Taksa does, 'a systematic linkage between culture and politics'.⁴¹ It also raises new questions, or perhaps new answers for old questions: how did workers conceive of Labor? Did they feel it represented them? Taksa in particular has demonstrated the vitality and theoretical utility of such spatially specific and localised 'cultural building blocks'. A more abstract and broader application of such theory is appropriate to the Australian historiography.⁴²	19
At the same time, it is important to note that these concepts of culture and representation are historically far more complex for women. This is without mentioning other historically marginalised or deviant discourses and social groupings. We cannot ignore the experiences of half the working class, though it is self evident that on the whole women experienced a fundamentally different set of relations to the means of capitalist production, often via a transformed and mediated sense of internal and external class relations. This is not to suggest that women all of a sudden experienced a set of different gender relations, but that under an intensifying capitalism of the later nineteenth century, they were increasingly defined as economically dependant. Men and women did not 'occupy the culture of their class in the same way. Ideologically their differences were emphasised, institutionally they were separated'. Yet we should also reject the unnecessary binary opposition of femininity and masculinity by acknowledging, as Catherine Hall suggests, 'that they only make full sense when placed in a whole [contingently constructed] social, economic and cultural world'.⁴³ The argument that follows becomes two-fold then. The abstraction and moulding of a particular (however peculiar) sense of Australian working-class consciousness was created in and by language. However much this process was forged by external material changes, the internalised, dualistic role of language came to shape both a consciousness of, and resultant attitudinal relationship to, the social order. It must be recognised that institutions, in particular Labor, came to play a significant (national) role in this series of contextualised moments. Thus, an approach which seeks to highlight the movement and seepage between the discourses of workers and their leaders in the creation of consciousness and experience opens the possibility of not only theoretical synthesis between the materialist and post-structuralist, but across the narratives of the social and institutional.	20
For the moment, however, we shall return to our sense of Labor tradition. It can be seen, perhaps pejoratively, as a way of legitimating current habits of thought and action by creating a past or natural continuity. According to Macintyre, 'it fuses deed and memory, imaginative possibility and action, to proclaim tradition as the guide to action'.⁴⁴ More positively, in Graham Maddox's words, it 'looks backward and forward at the same time ... In so far as it dwells in the past, it understands the nature of what has gone before to constitute what exists at present'.⁴⁵ The empirical, labourist tradition which the Hawke-Keating governments enthusiastically, and somewhat ahistorically, claimed is also the tradition which they are paradoxically viewed as 'emptying out'. Tradition is hegemonic, normalising and totalising. Subjectively formed, often decreed by leaders defending their 'fidelity' to tradition,⁴⁶ it proclaims an objective truth — fusing collective memory and consciousnesses — as the past. Australian Labor tradition is, in this sense, invented or imagined. For, following Hobsbawm, it was somewhat rapidly posited as 'natural' that the disparate classes of modernity, in particular the working classes, 'should tend to identify themselves through nation-wide political movements or organizations ("parties"), and equally natural that de facto these should operate essentially within the confines of the nation'.⁴⁷ The great contradiction of Labor's language of popular class politics was its inordinate attention to winning over voters rather than transforming their condition. Just as early Labor had to imagine a national politics in which it operated as an autonomous, and indeed legitimate actor, so do past and present commentators both imagine, and consciously invent, a coherent and politically viable sense of tradition where it was previously non-existent or tenuous. It is those constructions of tradition that I shall now sketch and critique.	21

Lost Labours? Old and New Lefts
Labor historiography parallels the direction of the broader Australian historiography. Australian writers have historically interpreted Labor in government in pejorative terms, swaying between a Marxian understanding of the capitalist state and a lament of Labor's alleged pragmatism and anti-intellectualism. The posthumously known Old Left saw Labor as the native expression and inheritor of a past but still guiding radical nationalism. From the late 1960s such historical interpretation and methodology came under sustained and heavy critique. The most important expression remains Humphrey McQueen's A New Britannia. McQueen's Labor was 'the highest expression of a peculiarly Australian petit bourgeoisie'. While right to highlight the deficiencies of the labour movement, he was clearly wrong to reduce working-class formation to consciousness. However, my reading also finds fault with his approach, or lack thereof, to language. For instance, in a revealing and little-commented-upon passage, McQueen objects to the characterisation of 'volunteer labour' as 'scab': 'scab is such a filthy word that it should never be applied to another human being'.⁴⁸ Yet in 1894, the very Henry Lawson that McQueen presents as a fascist was moved to write, 'it is a great pity that the word "scab" ever dirtied the pages of a workman's newspaper. It is a filthy term'.⁴⁹ For one claiming a historical absence of working-class consciousness, and practically eschewing the notion of experience, his criticism of the language of class solidarity seems anomalous, but not entirely unexpected. The term 'scab' was increasingly a marker of class solidarity, and also indicative of the counter languages and symbolic identities that Labor was articulating in order to separate itself from colonial liberalism and the asocial tendencies of capital. Likewise, politico-cultural productions such as oppositional 'Fatmen' embodied the conscious opposite of the positivist identity which labourite intellectuals were constructing for 'the worker': fat capitalists threatened not only the material well-being of the people but the gender and racial orders in which they located their identities.⁵⁰ McQueen's explicit and implicit ignorance of the socially explanatory role of language meant that the actual practices of Labor and the working class within hegemonic settings were never investigated. To be sure, the Australian working classes were present at their own making; the problem was McQueen was not partial to what they had made. Around the same time, however, Macintyre developed a clearer sense of labourism: 'a set of institutions and practices rooted in a specific social formation at a particular historical juncture' that 'accepts both the economic relations of the capitalist mode of production, and the legitimacy of the capitalist state'. However, Macintyre, adjusting McQueen, suggests that: this acceptance is qualified by a limited but powerful class consciousness — labo[u]rism forges its own associations, institutions and practices which are generally subordinate to, but nevertheless distinct from, bourgeois society.⁵¹	22

Inverting Labourism the task of the New Labor Right
Despite the New Left, a classical interpretation remained in vogue. Bede Nairn's Civilising Capitalism remains the most prominent example, endorsing a moderate labourism as the mainstream ideology and practice from the outset. An ironic account of the pragmatic argument emerged, inverting the pejorative tones of labourism. Jim Hagan's The History of the ACTU is the classic expression. The inversion reached its celebratory zenith when Michael Costa and Mark Duffy argued that free trade and non-compulsory arbitration 'exist within forgotten strands of the rich labour tradition'.⁵² Such an account was indicative of the ways in which tradition could be moulded and distorted to suit the political moment of the present. With the emergence of labourism as a political and historiographical tool in its own right, two clear strands of historiography formed: an orthodox approach and a more critical (neo)-Marxist approach. Though working out of differing theoretical traditions, both share a similar 'political agenda' in characterising tradition as non-socialist — one ironically defensive, yet celebratory, the other critical and mocking. The more critical neo-Marxist description concurred with the orthodox school's sense of continuity, but conceived of Labor as irredeemably bourgeois and non-socialist — intent on not only the maintenance but improvement of the capitalist (class) system. Labourism prevented the party from 'fulfilling its historical destiny'. Yet as Irving argues, 'in this meta-history it was difficult to draw out in any precise way the actual ideas and practices of labourism'.⁵³	23
The advent of the successful though iconoclastic federal Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating triggered the so-called betrayal debates and a dissenting view of 'discontinuity', which claimed a 'break' with a largely socialist tradition. Tim Battin, through a comparative study of the 1940s and 1990s, argued for a fundamental break in the past. Battin contended that labourismot a useful 'explanatory term', obfuscating as it did the interplay of 'particular circumstances or events, economic interests and the battle of ideas'.⁵⁴ On the contrary, I see labourism as capturing that contingency of historical thought and action. Other important theses of discontinuity focused more upon structural issues. A continuity of labourism also emerged within a new stream of thought, utilising a neo-Marxist functionalism, and emphasising the limits of reform within a liberal and capitalist society. Carol Johnson is its most adept practitioner, and her notion of the historically contingent confluence of the discourse and practice of 'social harmony', was the outstanding thesis amongst the betrayal debates. Social harmony aimed to create a humanised capitalist society that would benefit both wage earners and business. This ideology rested upon a basic premise (and, of course, language) which argued that all Australians had a common interest in ensuring the creation of a healthy, humanised capitalist economy and society. She rightly avoids the tendency 'to criticize Labor governments for "betraying" socialist ideals which they never believed in'. Rather, she draws attention to the problems inherent in their programs for reforming capitalism. Labor frequently overestimated the shared interests of labour and capital: underestimating the structural-ideological constraints imposed upon their policy interventions. The one weakness of Johnson's work is a neglect of the historical bases of social harmony. Irving, for instance, locates the bases of such tradition as initially founded on the 'class collaboration' of the 1850s.⁵⁵	24

Beyond Betrayal
In the claims of both continuity and discontinuity theorists, there exists an uncritical assessment of post-federation Labor, creating a 'forgotten' element of tradition. More recent accounts focus on the 'three great epochs' methodology by analysing the Curtin/Chifley, Whitlam and then the Hawke and Keating governments as existing either in continuity or discontinuity. Hence, the foundational governments and oppositions are either ignored or written off as ineffectual episodes: the mere extension of colonial liberalism. It is not surprising that a critical appraisal of Labor's leaders in the so-called Deakinite decade has not occurred. Sandwiched between the romantic deeds of the 1890s and the cataclysmic events of World War I, they are relatively tame years, if institutionally productive. The monolithic idea of a national settlement also obscures the sense of conflict and complexity. Moreover, figures such as 'Billy' Hughes are somewhat understandably written out of labourism, owing to their eventual 'ratting'. Yet ratting, within the cultural discourse of labourism, was 'built into the very fabric of the new Party'.⁵⁶ Similarly, the non-Catholic or non-native background of the three early leaders and Prime Ministers John Watson, Andrew Fisher and Hughes, seems to lack the romanticism of the Irish-Catholic legend so crucial to the narratives of Curtin, Chifley and even Keating. Whilst avoiding romantic allusions, these foundational leaders should be crucial to any proper sense of tradition — the experience and discourse of class politics. Consciously and unconsciously, they invented and appropriated the historical notion of a Labor tradition. Metaphorically they broke away, via the power and mythology of language, from many of the strictures of bourgeois politics. Labor's discourse of practical politics should: be placed in the context of Labor's actual struggles and its use against the barrage of conservative propaganda ... Labor's self-confessed practicality [w]as a part of its subtle, intellectual and counter-hegemonising practice.⁵⁷ This formulation reacted to ruling (and middle) class discourse — the abstract language of conciliatory class relations, autonomous citizens and shared material interests. It was, however, a paradoxical rejection and embrace. The 'break' was never whole and possessed ongoing implications for the later party.	25
Out of the betrayal debates emerged a more nuanced and historically aware sense of tradition that acknowledged the socialist influence, but sought to critically explain the historical discourse and practice of labourism. Massey promoted a far more convincing interpretation of labourism as 'an analytical device to catch the very real ambiguities, contingency ... as a way of orientating the ALP to the often heterogeneous and contradictory agencies of Australian state formations'.⁵⁸ This methodology problematises Scalmer's assertion that 'labourism implies that the Labor Party has not changed at all, and therefore forfeits the ability to explain such changes'.⁵⁹ Beilharz positions betrayal as actually the 'exhaustion' or 'emptying out' of labourism, emphasising the cultural importance of language and its anti-modernist roots.⁶⁰ As labourism reasserted itself, further studies emerged, which though localised, attempted to explain the nature and emergence of early Labor. In Bongiorno's study of Victorian Labor, class became just: 'one thread in a web of collectivities'. Labor's 'populist' language of mutuality, harmony and work connected, and necessarily abstracted, workers' diverse experiences to the struggles of 'labour', 'the masses' and 'the producers'.⁶¹ In a similar vein, Ray Markey, proceeding down a populist path trodden by both Robin Gollan and Peter Love, argued that populism rather than class was the central ideological and practical inspiration behind the making of the Labor Party in New South Wales.⁶²	26

Australian Labourism: the Discursive Dynamics of Class, Language and Populism
Such theoretical discourses of class and labour history point the way towards the new Labor history I am advocating. Bongiorno's and Markey's accounts are instructive of the way in which labourism actually developed, catching the contingency and contradictions that bedeviled early Labor and the wider movement. Such approaches illustrate the growing vitality of an anti-empiricist methodology that aims to synthesise specificity and locality with more abstract notions of a labour experience. However, in accepting the counsel of both authors, I would tentatively suggest that such populism, and at times radicalism, was a contingent and contextualised working-class theorising of social structure and possibility, imprecise in its program and outlook: not simply the product of professional politicians and populist unions. The meanings of the 'working class' or 'classes' and populist terms such as 'the people' or 'masses' overlapped and were often substituted. The newer class politics was consciously and unconsciously tied into the struggles of the people. W.E. Murphy retrospected the Miners' struggles of the 1870s, consciously linking them to the goldfields disturbances of the 1850s and the struggles of 'the people': unionists merely 'awoke again a vigorous spirit'.⁶³ Inventing tradition, the intellectuals of New Unionism drew on this collectively imagined past. As M. Woolfe somewhat dubiously claimed, 'Local self-government in Victoria had its origin with the working classes'.⁶⁴ In this light the later Old Left accounts of democratic progress confused a lineage of tradition with labour's subsumptive claim upon the radical and egalitarian tradition of the people. Yet it was Fitzpatrick who shrewdly noted the choice of NSW Laborites in using the Eureka colours of blue and white in the famous elections of 1891. Populism also makes for an easy slippage between moral languages and the counter discourses of collective politics, which again works to complicate, yet enliven, the issue of class. As Joyce notes, 'the consciousness of a class need not be the consciousness of class'.⁶⁵	27
To look again at early Labor is to look critically at how it engaged and drew upon the formation of the Australian working class and the ontological discourse of modernity and industrialisation, seeking to relate this to the practices and discourses of Labor after 1901. We can now critically position tradition as the inexact and contested product of the ongoing but historically grounded discourse between experience, language and institutional practice. In considering Labor and its relations with the working class we should highlight the contingency and context, the heterogeneity and contradiction: looking how these formations operate within the alleged settings of class and ideological hegemony, but sensing the interconnectedness of this experience. I shall now attempt to theorise the emergence of class-consciousness and Labor's role more thoroughly, seeking to provide one possible answer, through the concepts of experience and language, to the problem of how to incorporate class into labour history.	28
As I have been stressing, the dominance of a specific empiricist analysis of Labor in government, despite recent additions, has characterised and limited shared understandings. Just as labour historians have shown how the working class was present and active in its own making, so too should critical eyes look to the Labor Party: as an active constructor of experience and class identity in itself. According to Margaret Somers this means (re)engaging with 'the constitutive place of narrativity in social theory ... [how] we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and through which we constitute our social identities'.⁶⁶ Conventional analyses on all sides have generally neglected more esoteric issues of language, ritual, style and culture. In reality, language and such cultural productions lie at the heart of political and social experience, which inform and sustain tradition. We should reject analyses that merely see institutions, acting under the pressure of bourgeois hegemony, as stifling or de-radicalising (militant) consciousness. The issue of consciousness of class has been irrevocably muddied, but whether 'given the existence of good material grounds for discontent, it was not consciousness (or ideology) that produced politics but politics [and language] that produced consciousness'⁶⁷ as Stedman Jones claims in Languages of Class, can only be born out by further particularised study. To emphasise the constitutive place of politics is not, as some posit, 'returning to the point of departure after a long and fruitless detour away from "the political"'.⁶⁸ There is some force in the notion that socially contextualised discourses, represented and mediated by institutions, historically defined Australian workers as abstract groupings, constituting and explaining their experiences. W.G. Spence's call to solidarity is an excellent example: what is there in common between the calling of a seaman and a miner? ... when the seamen of Sydney were out on strike, they asked for and obtained assistance from the Amalgamated Miners ... Nor did the seamen forget that assistance ... Every tradesman in the colony had an interest in his fellow-tradesmen, however dissimilar their respective callings might be.⁶⁹ We need to contextually re-read discourses of populism, gender and race to fully comprehend how Labor drew on an embryonic class experience through discursively relating its legitimacy to these more dominant subjective and collective understandings. These discursive themes are often hard to neatly demarcate. For instance, H.A. Harwood collapsed together visions of populism and anxieties of gender and race, as the bourgeois extricated itself from the inner suburbs and working men perceived their employers as being increasingly unpractical, out of touch and to be envied: They live in fine houses, pleasantly situated, and are surrounded by refined associations. Their daughters are not tempted, and drugged, and degraded. Their callings and incomes are not interfered with hence they see no harm in thousands of Chinese being allowed to come here.⁷⁰ Further, if we were to accept McQueen's conception of an irredeemably bourgeois consciousness permeating Labor and the working classes of the late nineteenth century, this may make sense as the Laborite institutions operated and took root themselves in the workings of bourgeois politics. Yet a language of petit-bourgeois deference eventually moved towards discursive and material contestation. William Roylance, secretary to the inaugural 1879 Intercolonial Trades Unions Congress, respectfully declared: we consider it our simple duty to investigate deeply the remote sources of our actual position; not, however, with a view to bring other classes down to our present level, but in the hope of raising our own to that standard which could secure for us individually the full fruits of our industry ...⁷¹ Just six years later, according to John Norton, the 1885 congress marked: an epoch in the history of the struggle between capital and labour. It is a record of the matured opinions of the working classes of these colonies on the important social and political questions of the hour ... the vast strides which have been made in the education and organisation of this class of society during the last five or six years.⁷² A year later in 1886, W.A. Robinson argued it was 'another step towards the emancipation of the working classes ... the seed thus sown broadcast will germinate and bring forth an abundant harvest in the future'.⁷³ Proclaiming tradition begot tradition and political action in itself.	29
It has been the core, not entirely unproblematic, assumption of this paper that the dominant practices and discourses of Labor for better or worse have revolved around some of the central tendencies of the labourist paradigm. This paradigm is, however, far more complex than its empiricist form. It exists, as Irving rightly sees, as a 'labourist genealogy' — necessarily arising out of the diversity of working-class and labour politics — where 'certain common ideas, policies and practices ... distinguished the party and enabled it to persist as a single party'.⁷⁴ And to proclaim a labourist tradition does not deny that a socialist tradition exists, which has tempered some of the electoralist tendencies of parliamentary Labor. Using discourse, we are able to more fully understand labourism as a process, contingent strategy and firmly rooted abstraction of experiences, rather than a monolithic and unchanging thing. This overarching discourse positions the concept of labourism as shaping the contours of thought, possibility and action. As Peter Beilharz and Rob Watts suggestively argue, there exists 'a discourse of labourism understood ... an unfolding pattern of perceptions, values, metaphors and prescriptions'. The practice and language of labourism, whether a victim of liberal hegemony or not, has acted in hegemonic fashion by 'set[ting] up the political agenda for the Left in terms of "natural" and "obvious" enemies, allies and directions'.⁷⁵ Stuart Hall has explained how dominant ideological systems structure the legitimacy of values and discourses within an overarching 'public language': which 'represent themselves as the natural mental environment and horizon of the whole society'. This is what Hall eloquently designates as 'maps of meaning', where certain groups' and classes' claims and arguments are legitimised whilst others are deemed and marginalised as 'deviant'. In the Australian experience this has tended towards the practical privileging or imaging of a particular type of community, imbued with a particular character. Drawing on such theoretical apparatuses, our sense of labourism constitutes it as both the coloniser and colonised of a naturalised and hegemonic 'language of legitimacy'.⁷⁶ Australian labourism generally avoided being labelled deviant.	30
Gender was a clear example of how labourism acted hegemonically, not only in its attitude to female workers but in its representation and understanding of women's relations to the means and mode of production. Expressions of class support and solidarity were infused with a hegemonising patriarchy. When in July 1889 the Brisbane Trades and Labour Council finally agreed to organise women workers, it coined the motto, 'Only by the aid of the stronger that the weaker can help to secure social justice, which is the right of all'.⁷⁷ Such exclusive conceptions of a gendered, labouring hierarchy (and total disregard of unemployed men) practically prevented a wider consciousness and solidarity. Nonetheless gender, I would argue, is crucial to the discursive mapping out of identity and class boundaries. In this light, we still lack a labour history that places gender, and interlapping discourses of femininity and masculinity, between and amongst classes, in its proper place — at the heart of the discursive and material making of the Australian working class(es). Gender, as Joan Scott explained in her critique of Stedman Jones, is vital in producing naturalised meanings of class.⁷⁸ Even the most cursory glance at working-class discourse over the late nineteenth century reveals the primacy of gender discourse in articulating and bemoaning the differentiation born of class. Labourites used gender as a reference point of difference and similarity as well as linking such understandings with older populist discourses in which such grievances had traditionally been located. When The Labour Bulletin appealed to the male honour of the 1890 strikers, it suggested that, 'Our money is for manhood'. It also drew analogies to past racialist battles: 'Remember the maritime men before this fought to keep Australia from Chinese, and conquered'.⁷⁹	31
Any use of discourse must be critical. For Labor's discourse was combative but also reactive. Discourses need a connection to lived experience, and in this class context, non-labour's rhetoric of citizenship has historically influenced, and is inextricably linked, to Labor's growing sense of tradition and use of language. Judith Brett has referred to the term 'citizen's' 'partisan' dimension whereby citizenship was 'embedded in non-labour's claim to political virtue, in contrast to its representation of the ALP, committed to the self-interested pursuit of sectional claims regardless of the national interest'. Labor was apparently more interested in 'the people', in general a pragmatic and populist pre-text signifying 'workers'.⁸⁰ For instance, Labor representation and reform was coded in the interests of the people: 'Government for the People, Land for the People, Work for the People, Wages for the People'.⁸¹ However, as I have argued elsewhere, an argument could be made, extending Scalmer's sense of Labor's discourse of practicality, that Labor may actually have bequeathed non-labour with the abstract term 'citizen', as it sat uneasily with Labor's language of practical popular politics. In truth, both claims have merit. Labourism has been a historical, contingent but partial and often ambivalent discourse about citizenship.⁸²	32
In this light, a linguistic focus upon labourism can help flesh out Thompson's still-relevant claim that 'class-consciousness is the way ... experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms'.⁸³ John Rickard first applied Thompson's notion of experience to the Australian experience. Rickard's sense of class-consciousness saw that: the very rhetoric used by Labor leaders in Australia when they spoke of 'the workers' rather than the working class ... was an appeal to class consciousness, made in terms of what was seen as a tradition rather than revolutionary strategy.⁸⁴ We should build upon Rickard's still path-making work, with a more critical take on experience, starting with the premise that when leaders spoke to a seemingly taken-for-granted tradition, they were consciously and unconsciously shaping the direction and consciousness of such class language and identity. For just as important as legitimating oneself to external audiences was Labor's internal claim upon working-class representation and hegemony. Labor used and conflated the concurrent memories of industrial and human turmoil by invoking a language of betrayal, trust and solidarity. In the making and remaking of the Australian working class, Labor's conscious and unconscious conflation of loyalty to party as solidarity to class was one of the most important components. As future Labor Prime Minister John Watson argued in 1896, 'The Labor party is the best the workers can get'.⁸⁵ Likewise, one of the first resolutions at the 1893 NSW special conference declared: Only by preserving the political solidarity of the workers can any peaceable amelioration of their condition be obtained; that any benefit gained at the expense of dividing their political forces must be of a temporary and disappointing character; and that any man engaged in creating dissensions within their ranks must be regarded as an enemy of labour and a traitor to its cause.'⁸⁶	33

Conclusion: Re-thinking Class; Re-making Labor?
Moving towards synthesis, at least as presented in this article, embraces the revitalisation of class as a historiographical and ever-present tool. Whilst rejecting mechanical crudity, we should not completely reject the idea of a classical class analysis in itself, nor repudiate the tools of hegemony and consciousness (or lack thereof). On the contrary, I am arguing for a discursive complex of materiality and consciousness. In this more complex view, a dualist vision of class emerges, working backwards and forwards, one in which class constitutes language, and language frames the experience of class. The discordant tones of class discourse verified material changes, but discursive processes themselves were vital in the collective ontology of class experience, if not consciousness. In the period before World War I, it is impossible to consider Labor without the notion of class. Labourism, as a contingently rooted tradition of discourse and practice, provides a valuable tool by which to re-examine the role of institutions in shaping class experience and identity, and vice versa. Australian labour historians should pursue such avenues, seeking to investigate the complexity of the relations between Labor and the Australian working classes. While of important historiographical interest in itself, rediscovering the richness and constitutive symbiosis of this past relationship may also point the way towards the reinvigoration of a currently dysfunctional Labor Party's practical and theoretical apprehension of and relationship with class experience. Informed by a theoretical appreciation of the utility and power of language as employed by class intellectuals (concomitant with an understanding of class as the overriding structuralised experience), Labor can both reflect and influence the consciousness of subordinated social groupings — practically critiquing the hyper-individualisation, indeed anti-collectivism, of our experiences. Above all, Labor, in fact the wider labour movement, must materially and discursively re-connect with the working class, even (re)invent the working class. This is what the experientially focused first New Left failed to do in practice. This is unlikely to be achieved by interpolating subjects in class vocabulary; rather, linguistic tools such as 'the people' could purposely be used to develop and more optimistically naturalise class understandings: 'to change the self-identification and behaviour of this addressed'.⁸⁷ Harnessing discourse theory towards the materialist project is ultimately to envisage an intellectual activism, or Bob Gollan's classic sense of labour history's 'immediate practical value',⁸⁸ which seeks not merely to enquire and critique but actually transform inequitable social relations.	34
Nick Dyrenfurth is a PhD candidate and teaches in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University. He was co-organiser with Kate Murphy of the February 2006 'Mateship' conference and chief organiser of the 'Relaxed and Comfortable? Challenging John Howard's Australia' Conference. He has had papers published in the Australian Journal of Political Science, Arena Magazine, Overland and the Australian Journal of Politics and History. <nick.dyrenfurth@arts.monash.edu.au> Endnotes ^* I would like to thank Marian Quartly, Greg Patmore, Paul Strangio, Marc Brodie and Kate Murphy as well as the anonymous Labour History referees for their helpful and constructive comments. ^1. Sean Scalmer, 'Experience and Discourse: a Map of Recent Theoretical Approaches to Labour and Social History', Labour History, no. 70, May 1996, p. 156. ^2. Whilst I talk of political Labor, I would contend that the role of often like-minded socialist and radical institutions and publications (at least until the late 1890s), not to mention more grass-roots unions, was equally as important. Throughout this article I will use Labor in regards to the political, parliamentary field despite the prevailing double-use of Labor and Labour around the late nineteenth and early 20^th century period. Labour refers to the broader field of the industrial movement, to incorporate not only the idea of a wider social class but of the associated radical and socialist groupings, and later also the intellectual practice of the disciple of labour history. Labourism, and intellectual or leading Labourites, refers to the broader strategy or tradition of the political and industrial movement — but generally its inflection is slanted towards the public political dimension. ^3. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, London, 1963. ^4. Frank Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996, p. 8. ^5. Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving, 'Labour Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations', International Review of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, April, 2005, pp. 1–26; Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving, 'Australian Labour Intellectuals: An Introduction', Labour History, no. 77, 2000, pp. 1–10; Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914, Merlin Press, London, 2003; and Verity Burgmann, 'Language and the Labor Tradition', in Tim Battin (ed.), A Passion for Politics: Essays in Honour of Graham Maddox, Pearson, Frenchs Forest, 2005. With regards to visual intellectuals, see Marian Quartly, 'Making Working Class Heroes: Labor Cartoonists and the Australian Worker, 1903–16', Labour History, no. 89, November 2005, pp. 159–78. ^6. Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Contending Judith Brett's Class', Arena Magazine, no. 75, February-March 2005, pp. 20–3. ^7. Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 8. ^8. Mark Hearn, 'Mates and Strangers: The Ethos of the Australian Workers Union', in David Palmer, Ross Shanahan and Martin Shanahan (eds), Australian Labour History Reconsidered, Australian Humanities Press, Parkside, 1999; Lenore Layman, 'Fighting Fatman Fetteration: Labour Culture and Federation', in Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore (eds), Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation, 1890–1914, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001. Also see Nick Dyrenfurth, 'The Language of Australian Citizenship', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 40, no. 1, March 2005, pp. 87–109; Burgmann, 'Language and the Labor Tradition', pp. 15–26. ^9. Patrick Joyce, 'Foreword', in John R. Hall (ed.), Reworking Class, Cornell, New York, 1997, p. xi. ^10. Neville Kirk, 'History, Language, Ideas and Post-Modernism: A Materialist View', Social History, May 1994, p. 231. ^11. Kirk, 'History, Language, Ideas and Post-Modernism', p. 233, and Neville Kirk, 'Postmodernism, History and Class', in Phil Griffiths and Rosemary Webb (eds), Work, Organisation, Struggle, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Canberra, 2001, pp. 1–15. ^12. Kirk, 'Postmodernism, History and Class', p. 15. Patrick Joyce espouses a postmodernist version of incompatibility in his 'Introduction' to Patrick Joyce (ed.), Class: A reader, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995. ^13. Kirk, 'History, Language, Ideas and Post-Modernism', p. 222; David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, 'Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language', Social History, vol. 17, 1992, p. 179. See the response by Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, 'The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language', Social History, vol. 18, 1993, pp. 1–15, and Patrick Joyce, 'The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne and Lawrence and Taylor', Social History, no. 18, 1993, pp. 81–5; James Vernon, 'Who's Afraid of the "Linguistic Turn"? The Politics of Social History and its Discontents', Social History, no. 10, 1994, p. 97. ^14. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 21–2. Also see Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The Language of Chartism', in James Epstein and David Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience, Macmillan, London, 1982. ^15. Ibid, p. 21. ^16. Joan Scott, 'Language and Working Class History', in Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988, p. 55. ^17. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991, p. 1. ^18.Ibid. ^19. Kirk, 'History, Language, Ideas and Post-Modernism', p. 236. ^20. Eric Hobsbawm, 'Class Consciousness in History', in Istvan Meszaros (ed.), Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, Routledge & K. Paul, London, 1971; Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 29. ^21. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 13. ^22. Asa Briggs, 'The Language of "Class" in Early Nineteenth Century England', in Asa Briggs and John Saville, Essays in Labour History (2nd ed.), Macmillan, London, 1967. ^23. Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 6–7. ^24. Donald Reid, 'Labor History and Language', in Lenard R. Berlanstein (ed.), Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Class and Discourse Analysis, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1993, p. 42. ^25. Michael Bentley, 'Victorian Politics and the Linguistic Turn', The Historical Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, 1999, p. 899 (my emphasis). ^26. Reid, 'Labor History and Language', p. 51. ^27. Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 27. ^28. Kirk, 'History, Language, Ideas and Post-Modernism', p. 229. ^29. Brian Fitzpatrick, 'The Garden Philosophy', Bulletin, 2 April 1965, cited in Don Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, A Radical Life, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, p. 26. ^30. Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s', History Workshop Journal, no. 42, 1996, pp. 19–35. ^31. Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914, Cambridge University Press, London, 1998, pp. 61–2 and p. 40. ^32. Marc W. Steinberg, Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England, Cornell University Press, London, 1999, p. xiii. ^33. James A. Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003, p. 3. ^34. I share Jon Lawrence's sense of (British Labour) mythology as 'not ... untruths, but rather shared stories about the party's origins and development which, regardless of their veracity, take on a life of their own within the collective identity and historical consciousness of party activist'. (Lawrence, Speaking for the People, p. 257.); Terry Irving, 'Labourism: a Political Genealogy', Labour History, vol. 66, May 1994, p. 1; Stuart Macintyre, 'Who are the True Believers?', Labour History, no. 68, May 1995, p. 156. ^35. R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class structure in Australian history, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980. ^36. R. Neil Massey, 'A Century of Labourism, 1891–1993: an Historical Interpretation', Labour History, no. 66, May 1994, p. 49. ^37. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950, Pelican, Middlesex, 1963. ^38. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 1. ^39. Bongiorno, The People's Party, p. 2; and Macintyre, 'Who are the True Believers?', p. 156; Stuart Macintyre, Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 51. ^40. 'Report of the Parliamentary Committee', Second Intercolonial Trades Union Congress (as read to a meeting of the Trades' Hall Council), 17 July 1885, pp. 10–11. ^41. Lucy Taksa, '"Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place": Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railways Workshops', Labour History, no. 79, November 2000, p. 13. ^42. Raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985. ^43. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 13, 97, 147. Also see Rae Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. ^44. Macintyre, 'Who are the True Believers?', p. 158. ^45. Graham Maddox, 'Revisiting Tradition: Labor and Socialism', Overland, no. 173, 2003, pp. 56–7. ^46. Macintyre, 'Who are the True Believers?', p. 162. ^47. Eric Hobsbawm, 'Mass-producing Traditions', in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 265. ^48. Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1970, pp. 210, 236. ^49. Henry Lawson, 'The Cant and Dirt of Labor literature', Sydney Worker, 1894, reprinted in Colin Roderick (ed.), Henry Lawson: Autobiographical and Other Writings 1887–1922, Volume Two, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1972, p. 26. ^50. Nick Dyrenfurth and Marian Quartly, 'Fat vs the People: Past Makings and the Contemporary Possibilities of Oppositional Identities', Paper presented to the 'Relaxed and Comfortable? Challenging John Howard's Australia Conference', Melbourne, March 2006. ^51. Stuart Macintyre, 'The Concept of Class in Recent Labourist Historiography: Early Socialism and Labor', Intervention, no. 8, March 1977, pp. 82, 86; Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People, 1788–1945 (2nd ed.), Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1951; Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Rawson's Bookshop, Melbourne, 1944; Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: a Study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1960; Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: the Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900–1921, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979. ^52. Bede Nairn, Civilising Capitalism, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1989; Jim Hagan, The History of the A.C.T.U, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1981; Michael Costa and Mark Duffy, Labor, Prosperity and the Nineties: Beyond the Bonsai Economy, Federation Press, Sydney, 1991, p. viii. Responding to the Labor Right, Verity Burgmann claimed that socialism played a significant role within the working-class and labour movements of the late nineteenth century. Her pejorative understanding of a seemingly falsely conscious labourism lead Burgmann to problematically dismiss the agency and ideological content of labourism. However, her account also possessed a practical sense of ambit, much like the writers of the first New Left, as a reaction to the celebratory claims of the unapologetic pragmatists. Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885–1905, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 195. ^53. Irving, 'Labourism', pp. 3, 4. ^54. Tim Battin, 'A Break from the Past: The Labor Party and the Political Economy of Keynesian Social Democracy', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 28, 1993, p. 222. Battin problematically excluded Whitlam (arguably the 'transition' government); Tim Battin, 'Keynesianism, Socialism, and Labourism, and the Role of Ideas in Labor Ideology', Labour History, no. 66, May 1993, pp. 33, 34. More specifically, Battin and Maddox conceived of a break with Labor's democratic socialist tradition, Tim Battin and Graham Maddox, 'Australian Labor and the Socialist Tradition', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 26, 1991, p. 181. Also see Graham Maddox, The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition, Penguin, Ringwood, 1989. ^55. Andrew Scott, Fading Loyalties: the Australian Labor Party and the Working Class, Pluto Press, Leichhardt, 1991; Andrew Scott, Running on Empty: 'Modernising' the British and Australian Labour Parties, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000; Dean Jaensch, The Hawke/Keating Hijack: The ALP in Transition, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989; Carol Johnson, The Labor Legacy: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989, pp. 1, 2; and Terry Irving, 'Society and the Language of Class', in Neville Meaney (ed.), Under New Heavens: Cultural Transmission and the Making of Australia, Heinemann Educational, Port Melbourne, 1989, p. 58. ^56. John Iremonger, 'Rats', in John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre (eds), True Believers: the Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Allen & Unwin, East Melbourne, 2001, p. 267. ^57. Sean Scalmer, 'Being Practical in Early and Contemporary Labor Politics: A Labourist Critique', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 43, no. 3, 1997, p. 302. ^58. Massey, 'A Century of Labourism', p. 47. ^59. Sean Scalmer, 'The Affluent Worker or the Divided Party?: Explaining the Transformation of the ALP in the 1950s', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 32, no. 3, November 1997, p. 401. ^60. Peter Beilharz, Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor decade in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1994. ^61. Bongiorno, The People's Party, p. 22. ^62. Ray Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, 1988; Robin Gollan, 'American Populism and Australian Utopianism', Labour History, no. 9, November 1965, pp. 15–21; Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890–1950, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1984. ^63. W.E. Murphy, 'The Circumstances Leading to the Formation of the A.M.A, 1872', cited in Noel Ebbels, The Australian Labor Movement, 1850–1907: Extracts from Contemporary Documents, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1960, p. 103. ^64. M. Woolfe, Official Report of the Fourth Intercolonial Trades Union Congress (hereafter Fourth Intercolonial Congress), Adelaide, 2–7 September 1886, p. 42. ^65.Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, p. 90; Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 15. ^66. Margaret Somers, 'Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory', in John Hall (ed.), Reworking Class, Cornell, New York, 1997, p. 74 and p. 82. ^67. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, p. 19. ^68. Mayfield and Thorne, 'Social history and its discontents', p. 167. ^69. W.G. Spence, Official Report of Second Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Melbourne, 22–25 April 1884, p. 67. ^70. H.A. Harwood, Official Report of the Third Intercolonial Trades Union Congress (hereafter Third Intercolonial Congress), Sydney, 4–7 October 1885, p. 70. ^71. William Roylance, Official Report of the First Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Sydney, 1897, p. 3. ^72. John Norton, Third Intercolonial Congress, p. xi. ^73. W.A. Robinson, Fourth Intercolonial Congress, pp. viii-ix. ^74. Irving, 'Labourism', p. 2 ^75. Peter Beilharz and Rob Watts, 'The Discourse of Labourism', Arena Magazine, no. 77, 1986, pp. 96–7. ^76. Stuart Hall, 'Deviance, Politics and the Media', in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Routledge, New York, 1993, pp. 80, 85, 87. ^77. Brisbane Trades and Labour Council, July 1889, cited in 'Sinking the Fiscal Issue', leaflet published by the Central Executive of the Labor League, c 1894, Joe Harris, The Bitter Fight: a Pictorial History of the Australian Labor Movement, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1970, p. 51. ^78. Apart from Marilyn Lake's path-making work (Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', Historical Studies, no. 22, 1986, pp. 116–31; and Marilyn Lake, 'Socialism and Manhood: the Case of William Lane', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986) see Michael Leach, ''Manly, True, and White': Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism', in Geoff Stokes (ed.), The Politics Of Identity in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 63–77; and Bruce Scates, 'Mobilising Manhood: Gender and The Great Strike Of 1890 In Australia and New Zealand', Gender and History, vol. 9, no. 2, 1997, pp. 285–309; Scott, 'Language and Working Class History', p. 60. ^79.The Labour Bulletin, Brisbane, August 1890. ^80. Judith Brett, 'Retrieving the Partisan History of Australian Citizenship', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 36, no. 3, 2001, p. 424. ^81. Harris, The Bitter Fight, p. 122. ^82. Scalmer, 'Being Practical', pp. 301–11; Nick Dyrenfurth, 'The Language of Australian Citizenship', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 40, no. 1, March 2005, p. 105. ^83. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 10. ^84. John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890–1910, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, p. 297. ^85. J.C. Watson, The Worker, 14 November 1896, cited in Brian McKinlay, Australian Labor History in Documents: vol. 2 — The Labor Party, Collins Dove, Melbourne, 1990, p. 20. ^86. As published in Sydney Morning Herald, 13 November 1893, cited in McKinlay, Australian Labor History in Documents, p. 20. ^87. Scalmer, 'Experience and Discourse', p. 157; Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, p. 24. ^88. Robin Gollan, 'Labour History', Labour History, no. 1, 1962, p. 4.

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Rethinking Labor Tradition: Synthesising Discourse and Experience

Nick Dyrenfurth*

Introduction: Labor without Class?

Cultural Materialism and the Linguistic Turn: turning where?

Rethinking Labor Tradition

Lost Labours? Old and New Lefts

Inverting Labourism the task of the New Labor Right

Beyond Betrayal

Australian Labourism: the Discursive Dynamics of Class, Language and Populism

Conclusion: Re-thinking Class; Re-making Labor?

Endnotes

Nick Dyrenfurth^*