At the heart of the Marxist theory of history is the argument that in complex societies, the principal means of production are controlled by a minority class which exploits the labour of the direct producers. This exploitation is resisted by the direct producers, and it is this resistance, as well as competition amongst the minority who control society’s resources, that necessitates the parallel development of an armed state to impose social order, and a formalised set of ideas by which the business of exploitation can be legitimised. In one famous passage, Marx theorised this as base and superstructure, the idea that the “legal and political superstructure” of society rested on its productivity and its
relations of production; that changes in the material production of social life led to struggles for control of the political superstructure and over the content of social ideas.1 For the past 150 years, this formula has been enormously
controversial. Particular formulations in Marx were used by some—most notoriously, by Stalinist regimes and parties—to insist that the nature of a society’s state and politics were determined by its economic and class structure.
Mechanical determinists also asserted that human society had passed through a series of predetermined changes in economic and political structure and that a final stage, socialism, would be the inevitable result of economic development.2 Such a reading had little in common with Marx, who emphasised the ability of the state, the legal system and ideas (including religion) to partially shape the
1 Karl Marx, Preface and introduction to A contribution to the critique of political economy, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1976, pp. 3-4.
2 This tendency is discussed in Chris Harman, “Base and superstructure”, International Socialism (UK), no. 32, summer 1986, pp. 4-9.
nature of economic relations. Marx also canvassed the possibility that
revolutionary change could be defeated and social progress radically reversed.
In an important exposition of Marx’s theory, Chris Harman argued that the superstructure of any society was inherently conservative, with the state protecting particular systems of exploitation, particular ruling classes, and the role of the particular structures of thought in naturalising these.3 It was not only the class struggle of the exploited but also the incremental development of human productivity, and new relations of production and exploitation, that challenged the institutions of the superstructure, which in turn resisted change.
If exploitation and class struggle necessitated the development of a
superstructure, the superstructure itself worked to intensify that class struggle, as new classes and class elements gained in strength. The ultimate result, Marx argued, would be “an epoch of social revolution”, ending in either the
“revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the ruin of the contending classes.”4
Two elements of this theory are particularly important for this thesis. The first is that a ruling class is neither to be defined in a narrow political sense, as the social group in control of the state; nor in a narrow economic sense, as those who own the means of production; but as consisting of the entire layer that rules society and benefits from the routine exploitation of other people’s labour.
In late colonial Australia, this included the medium and large capitalists and their managers, large landowners, politicians and top state officials, and the
3 Harman, “Base and superstructure”, esp. pp. 18-23.
4 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the communist party, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1965, p. 89.
priests, journalists, ‘respectable’ humanitarians, sectarian organisers and intellectuals who dominated the production of ideas in society. The issue is confused by the nineteenth-century tendency, even in Marx, to designate the bourgeois element as “middle class”, long after they had conquered economic and political power in Britain.5
Within a ruling class so defined, there is both a division of labour and a conflict of interests. For capitalist society in particular, the business of politics and the creation of ideas about the world is subcontracted to professional specialists—
politicians, journalists, academics, priests, lawyers and judges. Hal Draper sees in Marx an argument that the bourgeoisie has a particular inaptitude for politics and ideological development.6 This division of labour also means that there can be sharp conflicts between the direct capitalists and their politicians or
ideologists over specific issues. Alongside this division of labour there is a conflict of interests, as different industries call for different state measures and different ideological justifications. These conflicts are frequently fought out within the state apparatus, and compromises reached. The long conflict between manufacturers (and others) and pastoralists (and others), over free trade and protection in late colonial and early federation Australia, is an example of this.7
5 See Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s theory of revolution: Volume II: The politics of social classes, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1978, p. 290; see also p. 169n.
6 Draper, Karl Marx, vol. II, chapter “Intellectual labor and laborers”, pp. 486ff; this is also extensively discussed in his Volume I: State and bureaucracy, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1977.
7 Phil Griffiths, “The decline of free trade in Australian politics, 1901-1909”, BA (Hons) thesis, Macquarie University, 1998.
If rival economic interests, or rival ruling class strategies, lead to conflict and some kind of resolution, that resolution is then embodied in laws, institutions and ideas—superstructural elements—and these in turn shape the further development of class relations and the productive forces of society. The victory of protectionism in 1907 changed the Australian economy and ideas about Australian society. The stability of this victory and its capacity to become an enduring policy were dependent on the continued accumulation of capital at a rate sufficient to match the capital attached to rival nations. By the 1970s, this strategy was failing as a means to accumulation, and a radical shift took place in ruling class thinking, with a new, neo-liberal paradigm triumphing in the 1980s, which in turn also had a dramatic effect on class relations and productive
capacity.8
This thesis argues that the structures of racial exclusion in Australia should also be seen in this way—as the result of a fight within a ruling class that had a variety of economic interests and strategic opinions. One of the former was plantation agriculture, especially sugar, which was for decades based on substantially unfree labour and relations of production with very different dynamics to those based on so-called “free labour”. The solution to this conflict involved the state imposing more and more onerous restrictions on the use of unfree labour. The victory of the exclusionists paved the way for federation, shaped the composition and size of the Australian working class, and limited capitalist development in the north.
8 These issues are canvassed in Paul Kelly, The end of certainty: Power, politics & business in Australia, revised edition, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards (NSW), 1994; and David Love, Straw polls, paper money, Viking, Ringwood (Vic), 2001, albeit from a neo-liberal point of view.
Seeing the ruling class as divided does not obviate an understanding of the rich and powerful in colonial Australia as a class. A vast panoply of ideas and legal institutions were defended by all of them, including wage labour, property law, the nation state, and national citizenship. The common bourgeois reaction—
economic, legal and ideological—to the great strikes of the early 1890s was compelling evidence that Australia had its own powerful ruling class; as was the ability of their politicians to bury previously bitter disagreements and unite into a single right wing party when finally confronted with a mass labour party.9 Such an understanding reflects the methodology of historical materialism—to find the class and sectional/class interests behind major conflicts in politics and ideas.
The second element of Marx’s theory important for this thesis is the proposition that the outcome of class and social struggles is never pre-determined, but shaped by the relative political and material resources of each side, their ability to mobilise force and popular support, and the determination and resolution of each side, which includes the quality of its leadership. If this thesis appears to focus disproportionately on the role of Sir Henry Parkes, it is not just because his papers are amongst the few to survive from amongst his contemporaries, but also because of his extraordinary ability both to lead the bourgeoisie of New South Wales, and represent their interests.
Marx’s theory of base and superstructure was attacked from within Marxism by EP Thompson, as “a bad and dangerous model”, because of the way it was used
9 Griffiths, The decline of free trade, passim.
by Stalin to remove human beings from the making of history,10 and asserted that “class is a cultural as much as an economic formation.”11 Thompson’s primary target was the anti-humanism of Althusser and his followers, but one of the legacies of his argument was a generation of social historians who looked at the world from the experience of those at the bottom, ignoring the broader structure of class relations shaping that experience.
Thompson’s own work did not reflect these theoretical positions. It was materialist, grounded in the development of new relations of production and focused on class struggles that were driven by conflicting interests, and alive to the impact of changing relations of production on ideas and institutions and the impact of politics and legal structures on economics. The making of the English working class described the transformation of a disparate layer of wage earning artisans and labourers, who identified predominantly with their separate trades and the struggle against the landed interest, into a self-conscious class, singular, in open conflict with its symbiotic rival—the class of (especially manufacturing) employers, and the government. The strike, trade union and radical press tended to replace plebeian mass actions such as the “food riot”, while
politically, the radical constitutionalism of the 1790s, gave way to Owenism and quasi-socialist political economy. Underpinning this class polarisation were changed methods of production, changed economic relations, and also a rapprochement between the landed gentry and emerging manufacturers, pushed together by their mutual counter-revolutionary panic.12 The essays
10 Quoted in Harvey Kaye, The British Marxist historians: An introductory analysis, Polity Press, London, 1984, p. 172.
11 EP Thompson, The making of the English working class, Penguin, Harmondsworth (UK), 1968, p.
13.
12 Thompson, Making of the English working class, passim.
making up Customs in common looked at the growing polarisation between patricians and plebs, the fights over enclosure of the common lands, and the attempts to enforce the imperatives of the commercial grain market against those who insisted on feeding the local community in times of dearth.13 Whigs and hunters found Thompson searching for the reasons behind the sudden declaration of fifty new capital offences in England in 1723, and discovering an eruption of “class war” in the forests of East Berkshire and Hampshire, driven by rival claims for the use of forest resources between the declining gentry and yeoman class of the long-established forest communities, and the newly rich landowners and lords (temporal and ecclesiastical) who asserted their right to graze their deer unimpeded in “their” forests. Also involved was a struggle over the legal and ideological bases of economic life as “non-monetary use rights were being reified into capitalist property rights”14. Matt Perry has suggested that for Thompson and other humanist Marxists, such as Eugene Genovese and Christopher Hill, the “contradiction between the explicit theoretical abandonment of base and superstructure and the practical
attachment to it, allowed their work to continue within the very best tradition of Marxist history” while undermining the ability of future historians to clearly grasp the theoretical issues involved in understanding the past.15
13 EP Thompson, Customs in common, Penguin, London, 1993.
14 EP Thompson, Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 244.
15 Matt Perry, Marxism and history, Palgrave, Basingstoke (UK) and New York, 2002, p. 123.