The passing of Gough Whitlam is a time for
reflection on the rich lessons to be learned from his period of government.
Those lessons embrace the nature of the Labor
Party, the role of the state and imperialist interference in and control of
Australia’s internal affairs.
The capitalist press keeps alive the myth
that Labor is a party of the working class.
It is true that it has more support from the working class than its
conservative rivals, and that it has enacted reforms that benefit the
people. This was particularly true of
Whitlam. He abolished conscription, tertiary
fees, capital punishment, imperial honours and the White Australia Policy. He
created Medibank, poured the earth of the country through the hands of its
original owners and custodians, and recognised the People’s Republic of China.
Such reforms always have a dual
character. On the one hand, they serve
the immediate needs of the people and have a progressive character. On the other hand, they make capitalism more
palatable for the working class and help prolong the life of a system that
keeps the working class in its precarious and vulnerable existence.
The state is the apparatus that maintains the
rule of the capitalist class. Good people
often make the mistake of saying that this or that political party gets into “power”
when it wins an election. This is a
fundamentally mistaken view. Power is held
by the ruling class. Political parties
get into “office” and administer and regulate the power of the ruling
class. Whitlam, for all his charisma and
vision, essentially kept his reforms within the bounds of a capitalist
economy. Marxist historian Humphrey
McQueen tellingly noted that Whitlam’s “socialism required a larger public
sector, never a reallocation of wealth.”
Nevertheless, US imperialism was scared by the
mere rustle of Whitlam’s leaves in the winds.
Whitlam was lifted by a genuinely popular wave of demand for real
independence from imperialism. Riding
that wave, his Christmas 1972 criticism of the US bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong
was a shock to the Nixon administration.
He supported proposals for an Indian Ocean “zone of peace” opposed by
the US. Whitlam also sought to end the outsourcing of US coup attempts in
Cambodia and Chile to the Australian Security Intelligence Service (ASIS),
threatened not to extend the agreements covering US bases in Australia, and
challenged US corporations with vague plans to “buy back the farm”. In 1973, his Attorney-General Lionel Murphy
raided the offices of ASIO through which the US kept the Australian people
under surveillance.
Destabilisation of Whitlam’s government
became a priority for US imperialism. Experienced
coup master Marshall Green was sent as US Ambassador in 1973. When Whitlam sought funds from the Middle
East to finance nationalisation of multinational energy companies, all the
tricks in the book were brought into play.
A fabricated letter was used to force the sacking of Treasurer Jim
Cairns. Various other forgeries were put
together and leaked to the press.
Millions of dollars were channelled from the CIA to the Liberal and
Country Parties through the Nugan Hand Bank, causing Whitlam to label them as “subsidised
by the CIA”.
In the end, there was no need for Marshall
Green to repeat the slaughter he had visited upon the Indonesian people when he
oversaw Suharto’s coup against Sukarno. Whitlam had stupidly appointed Clarrie
O’Shea’s jailer, Sir John Kerr to the Governor-Generalship despite knowledge of
Kerr’s ties to various “foundations” financed and controlled by the CIA. A crisis around the Supply Bills was manufactured
and on November 11, 1975, the very day when Whitlam was to inform Parliament everything
he knew about the CIA and US bases in Australia, he was sacked by Kerr.
Whitlam had more than once declared proudly
that he was bourgeois. Now that class
membership and his underlying fear of an independent, organised working class,
kicked in. He advised supporters to “maintain
their rage”, but remained impotent himself, meekly accepting the transition by
means of a semi-fascist coup, to the caretaker Prime Ministership of Malcolm
Fraser. Future Labor leader and ACTU
head Bob Hawke kept the working class from a general strike.
The message was not lost on Labor. As a party of capitalism that had adopted
some of the policies and practices of a social-democratic party, Labor was to
refashion itself under Hawke and Keating as an ardent supporter of
neo-liberalism. This corresponded with
the ascendancy of finance capital over industrial capital and a change from
Labor’s championing of manufacturing to its embrace of deregulation and
privatisation.
Rather than advancing itself as a champion of
independent nation-building, Labor’s former support for Australia’s national
development was subsumed by its fundamental support for the US-Australian “alliance”,
a relationship in which the demands of the stronger partner are willingly
enacted by the weaker.
The parliamentary process can never buck the
power of the ruling class. The Labor
Party cannot be the party through which the fundamental interests of the
working class are pursued.
Only the development of a revolutionary
movement for anti-imperialist independence and socialism, led by the working
class through its own independent organisation, can realise the vision that the
state and the imperialists conspired to drown when they deposed Whitlam.
The Communist Party of Australia
(Marxist-Leninist) exists for that reason, and for that reason alone.
Building the Party of the working class is a
challenge in Australian conditions, but understanding the significance of the
Whitlam era encourages us to redouble our efforts to regroup, to rebuild, to
resist and to rebel.
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