This paper is a simultaneous argument about class its relations to collective, institutional action. It is also a critical assessment of the role of discourse within those fields and upon the early Australian Labor Party (ALP). I will argue that these three fields can be usefully linked and that each reveals itself more fully through a theoretical approach that synthesises discourse with cultural materialism, understood as experience. This then is a 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 I propose one way forward that seeks to mediate the poststructuralist claim upon fragmentation and perspective within the field of cultural materialism, while recognising that a final synthesis or agreement is perhaps impossible. Frameworks accentuating locality, uneven development, together with a wider acknowledgment of the social and cultural dimensions of the political and ideological (even without mentioning analyses of gender and race), have added undoubted richness to the fabric of labour history. Yet such scholarly developments have arguably and unfairly disconnected institutions, for our purposes, the, from processes of class formation and identity construction. This builds upon an increasingly popular, yet awkward tendency to downplay the import of class in past (often conflated with present) conceptions of the social order.2 This paper seeks to look again at the concept of a Labor tradition. I would contend that studies informed by a poststructuralist framework can actually help to flesh out the complexities and contradictions of working class and labour experience. And while my ostensible concern is theoretical, it holds practical application and potential clues to Labor’s present and future challenges. The past is most definitely before us. In making an argument about the vitality of language and populism in inventing and sustaining Labor’s tradition(s), this is simultaneously a case for a present reformulation of populist class analysis though without the exclusionary baggage of the past. In attempting to re-conceptualise the issues of class formation and consciousness, and looking anew at the early ALP, I have relied heavily on two British theorists Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. While these authors were the source of heated debate in Britain, their reception in Australia was virtually non-existent. While I can’t engage in a detailed critique of their work here, I do acknowledge notable objectors such as Joan Scott and Neville Kirk, amongst others. Indeed gender, in my theoretic perspex, is crucial to the discursive mapping out of identity and class boundaries. Nevertheless applying their insights to the Australian historiography is an overdue exercise, though scholars such as Kirk have ably delineated such debates, considering the ostensible strengths and problems of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’.3 In extending such discussions, I will initially discuss conventional approaches to Labor tradition, examining the way in which recent approaches have wrongly disconnected issues of class experience and formation from Labor tradition. Finally I shall make some suggestions as to how the Labor tradition can indeed be brought back into the realm of class analysis, in particular suggesting the formative role of language, class, and institution – upon each other and the whole – in turn moving towards the valuable synthesis of experience and discourse.

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. Debating and positioning Labor tradition is an enduring, and is inevitably presented as tradition within itself.

At the same time, attempts to identify a monolithic Labor tradition are possibly mistaken. Labor can be more accurately understood as an evolving project: a contingent and essentially contested tradition, fluid, perhaps malleable to the point of corruption, sometimes contradictory, 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. Despite this paper’s poststructuralist approach, it is still possible to claim a coherent, if fragmented concept of a Labor tradition. However, 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 in the evolution of a seemingly coherent Labor tradition and it is through this perspex, rather than strict empirical studies that tradition should be conceived. At this point it is necessary to (re) state that at its birth Labor was bound up, and reflected the experiences (positive and negative) of the fragmented Australian working classes, but was as much involved in the process and working out of those formations, 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 so easily disentangled such clear examples of what Thompson famously termed ‘experience’ from the discourses bound up within the institutions and practical contingencies of class-based politics? A critical use of discourse is necessary however. Language does not totally govern social life, despite our attention to its ability to structure and contain, in the process shaping real collective and individual possibilities. 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. A larger critique of the concept of experience and cultural materialism is beyond the bounds of this enquiry, however it is eminently possible to use the concept of experience or better perhaps of experiences without decrying the actual and active structural transformations of material life that shape experience. As Scalmer claims ‘the study of labour discourse, of labour movement institutions and of classes may be complementary and mutually supportive’.4 Traditional approaches largely ignore the role language plays in the very development and legitimation of such structures. In this 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 urgently requires a more critical and historically astute usage. Hobsbawm famously argued that ‘traditions’ can be ‘actually invented, constructed and formally instituted’. Yet as Hobsbawm counselled they constitute entirely human ‘responses to novel situations which take their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition’. 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 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’. 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, and the contingencies and specificities of this seminal period. Labor tradition should be viewed in the light of the making of the working classes during the late nineteenth century – suggesting that those constitutions are located within the interaction of experience and language. This is an argument about agency and tradition, and while my focus prioritises the language of leaders, I contend that that discourse (an expression and shaper of experience) was a result of an ongoing dialogue between workers and leaders as intellectuals: an argument that stresses the agency and contingency of both actors and institutions. Within this logic of cultural materialism, I concur with Williams’ primary sense of class culture as the important relations between material and symbolic productions. The ways in which workers and working class families made sense of and constituted the social order are a valuable addition to tracing the development of working class consciousness in the narrative of class formation. This is not to apotheose the worker but rather acknowledges ‘a systematic linkage between culture and politics’. Lucy Taksa in particular has demonstrated the vitality and theoretical utility of such spatially specific and localised ‘cultural building blocks’.5

However I think a more abstract and broader application of such theory is appropriate. At the same time, it is important to note that these cultural and relational concepts are far more complex for women and other historically marginalised or deviant discourses and social groupings. Men and women as Hall suggests did not ‘occupy the culture of their class in the same way. Ideologically their differences were emphasized, institutionally they were separated’. Yet we should also reject the unnecessary binary opposition of femininity and masculinity, acknowledging as Hall does ‘that they only make full sense when placed in a whole social, economic and cultural world’. The influence and usage of social histories and the critique of narrow institutionalism means we know more about working class life, but this also as Bongiorno observes, has the tendency to downplay the importance of ‘language in the construction of social and political identity, and to institutions’ role in class formation’. Bongiorno’s commentary itself derived from an extensive British literature. This is most explicitly discussed in one of the most important recent theoretical expositions pertaining to class. In his Visions of the People, Joyce argued for the vitality of alternate visions of the social order where: ‘the formation of social identities is not therefore something peripheral to a broader social and cultural history but is quite central to it … this formation was something accomplished in and by language’.6 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. That said, I think it must be recognised that institutions, in particular Labor, came to play a significant 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 material and poststructuralist, but between the narratives of social and institutional. For the moment however I 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. The empirical, labourist tradition which the Hawke-Keating governments enthusiastically and somewhat a-historically 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), 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 class, ‘should tend to identify themselves through nation-wide political movements … and equally natural that de facto these should operate essentially within the confines of the nation’.7 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 to those constructions of tradition that I shall now sketch and critique.

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, or lamenting 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 and early 1970s 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’. Yet in 1894 the very Henry Lawson that McQueen intimates 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 …’ 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 a marker of class solidarity and also indicative of the counter languages and symbolism that Labour was articulating in order to separate itself from colonial liberalism and the asocial tendencies of capital.

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 wasn’t 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 suggests, adjusting McQueen that ‘this acceptance is qualified by a limited but powerful class consciousness – laborism forges its own associations, institutions and practices which are generally subordinate to, but nevertheless distinct from, bourgeois society’.8

Despite the New Left, a classical interpretation remained in vogue. Bede Nairn remains the most prominent, 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 Costa and Duffy argued that free trade and non-compulsory arbitration ‘exist within forgotten strands of the rich labour tradition’. Such an account was indicative of the ways in which tradition could be melded 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 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 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 clamed a ‘break’ with a largely socialist tradition. 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. Johnson is its most adept practitioner, and her notion of the historically contingent confluence of the discourse and practice of ‘social harmony’, was the stand out thesis amongst the betrayal debates.9

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 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. The monolithic idea of a 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 foundations of the party. 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 and the experience and discourse of class. 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. Indeed 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’. 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. 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’. This successfully avoids Scalmer’s charge that ‘labourism implies that the ALP has not changed at all, and therefore forfeits the ability to explain such changes’. Beilharz positions betrayal as actually the ‘exhaustion’ or ‘emptying out’ of labourism, emphasising the cultural importance of language and its anti-modernist roots. 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, worker’s diverse experiences to the struggles of ‘labour’, ‘the masses’ and ‘the producers’.  In a similar vein, Markey working out of a populist path trodden by both Gollan and Love,10 argued that populism rather than class was the central ideological and practical inspiration behind the making of the ALP in NSW.

Such theoretical discourses of class and labour history point the way towards a new Labor history. Bongiorno and Markey’s accounts are instructive of the way in which labourism actually developed, catching the contingency and contradictions that bedevilled early Labor and the wider movement. Such approaches illustrate the growing vitality of a 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. Following the important lead of Joyce, class exists alongside other populist visions of the social order. Joyce was criticised, unfairly in my opinion, for replacing one meta-category of understanding with another. Indeed it was Joyce’s later publication Democratic Subjects, in which he controversially argued that ‘meanings make subjects and not subjects meanings’ that generated most dissent, practically muddying his more incisive claims. Joyce’s ‘family’ of ‘populisms’ gives shape though ambiguity to class-consciousness, indeed the meanings of class and populist terms such as ‘the people’ overlapped and were often substituted. 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. And as Joyce suggests, ‘the consciousness of a class need not be the consciousness of class’.11 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 – 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 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.

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 ALP: 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’. The example of Joyce (and by implication Stedman Jones) is also instructive. For as Joyce argues, ‘the emphasis on the role of organisations is of historiographical interests in its own right … changes in outlook [can] be seen as the outcome of changes in organisation rather than the other way round’. Such insights should also be applied to the realm of leaders as intellectuals. 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. As W.H. Sewell argues (and I believe we can read this onto a specific Australian experience) ‘this means reconstructing the meanings of the words, metaphors, and rhetorical conventions that they [workers] used to talk about their experiences’. In doing so, 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, whereby as Reid echoing Joyce suggests ‘language works to constitute rather than simply reflect social groupings’. 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 claim upon class formation and experience perhaps needs further clarification. For as Reid also argues ‘[common] interests are constructed through both unconscious and conscious uses of language, and the meanings of specific actions take shape in relation to these constructions’.12 This is where the role of institutions in drawing and shaping political identities and the consciousness of such collective possibility and action can come into play. 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 ‘it was not consciousness (or ideology) that produced politics but politics [and language] that produced consciousness’ as Stedman-Jones claims in his poststructuralist study Languages of Class, can only be born out by further particularised study. Yet there is some force in the suggestion that socially contextualised discourses, represent and mediated by institutions, historically defined Australian workers as abstract groupings, constituting and explaining their experiences. If we were to accept McQueen’s bourgeois nature of labor and the working classes of the late nineteenth century, this may make sense as the labor institutions, however circumscribed by hegemony, operated and took root themselves in the workings of bourgeois politics. This extension and particularisation of the role of discourse is however a highly suggestive though theoretically iconoclastic proposition – particularly set against an Australian scholarship which has only recently and often ambivalently taken the linguistically attuned turn within labour history. 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’. In a similar vein, Mark Hearn addressed issues of language, value and culture in his study of the AWU, ‘Mates and Strangers’. Yet we should be aware and prepared to clearly delineate how language acts to enliven our sense of the material world, in American historian Marc Steinberg’s evocative words, ‘where structural position and fighting words … conjoin’. Discourse, according to Steinberg, is thus a not the ‘powerful mediating force in the structuring of group consciousness’. So we are not caught in a ‘deterministic fix’ or even in the death throes of Marxism – the choice between culture and materialism is not and has never really been absolute.13  Steinberg’s work also deserves a wider audience in Australia (though I do not feel that conflictual discourse need be the prime determinant of consciousness) and provides an excellent model for the Australian experience.

It has been the core, though 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. It is however far more complex than its empiricist form. Critically using the post-structuralist stress upon 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 Beilharz and 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’. 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’.14 Australian labourism generally avoided being labelled deviant. Yet 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.

Such understandings resonate with Connell and Irving’s sense of class hegemony as ‘strategic’ rather than ‘structural’. As we have seen, 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, nonlabour’s rhetoric of citizenship has historically influenced, and is inextricably linked, to the 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 Labor Party, 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’. 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, as it sat uneasily with Labor’s language of practical politics. In truth, both claims have merit. Language is a complex historical process, to be looked at through the lens of context and contingency, but recognising that culture and materialism are often bound up within the same reflective superstructure. Labourism has been a historical, contingent but partial and often ambivalent discourse about citizenship.  Labourism is also, as Markey argued the inheritor of a specific ‘populist’ tradition and outlook – socio-economic geography was critical. Massey also sees that ‘at its birth, the Labor Party was a worker’s party reflecting the experiences, aspirations and fears of Australia’s [white] unionized workers’. In critically emphasising the material conditions and experiences of class, this view accords with Thompson’s classic and oft-repeated understanding of working class formation and labour history as defined by ‘experience’ and ‘relationship’. 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’. Antipodean historians must continue to wrestle with the notion of experience while resisting the oft temptation ‘to collapse the cultural, the political and the economic onto a single plane’. At the same time as Stedman Jones warns, there exists ‘the impossibility of abstracting experience from the language which structures its articulation’. Similarly Joyce, in arguing for the centrality of ‘extra-economic’ populism within British popular radicalism, suggests that there exists the ‘formative role of language and ideas in the formation of attitudes to the social order’ whereby experience (which Thompson argues shapes consciousness) ‘is in fact not prior to and constitutive of language but is actively constituted by language’. However I feel it unnecessary to use a sequential and unfairly limiting paradigm of language and experience. They move imperceptibly within and against the forces of each other, shaping and narrating the outlook of the individual and collectivity. Yet as Joyce also argued, one should, while dispelling the notion of a linear or clearly singular development of class, also caution against a discourse or cultural usage of class that makes its subject fragmentary to the point of denial.  Class has certainly and rightly lost its previous ontological and sociological certainties, but as Hobsbawm maintained, class is not simply reductive to class-consciousness.15 Class languages and representations operate in real and specific settings and contexts. 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.

A more critical integration of the social, cultural and institutional should be applied to the Australian Labor experience: ‘class needs to be seen in cultural and political terms of the playing out of value and traditions in different circumstances’. However a similar argument has recently been put in Britain. Applying the lessons of much of the British literature, Jon Lawrence has argued for ‘studying the interaction between the worlds of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ politics, conscious that the relationship between the two is never unmediated’. In this paradigm, history from below acts to enliven our sense of the meanings of high politics or ‘the role of political organisations, formal political discourses and state policy’. Such an understanding points towards the revitalisation of a critically aware Thompsonian history. 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, [but] made in terms of what was seen as a tradition rather than revolutionary strategy’.16 We should build upon Rickard’s still path-breaking 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.

In utilising the insights of Stedman Jones and Joyce it should be clear that such arguments are more than complementary and indeed bear out a symbiotic and somewhat natural relationship to Thompsonian history. Indeed as Kirk points out, Thompson (and Williams) pioneered methodologies of non-reductionism later intensified (but ironically critiqued) by poststructuralists.17

We should embrace 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 class and consciousness following Thompson’s sense of experience, but successfully mediating this with the poststructuralist claim upon discourse and fragmentation. In this more complex view, a dualist vision of class emerges, working backwards and forwards, one in which class constitutes language, and languages frames the experience of class. 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. Rediscovering the richness and constitutive symbiosis of this past relationship while of important historiographical interest in itself, may also point the way towards a reinvigoration of a currently dysfunctional ALP’s practical and theoretical apprehension of and relationship to class experience. This may lead to a reformulated, inclusive class analysis based in the best traditions of populism for the present and future.