Extracted from ‘The Social Revolutionary Nature of Australian Nationalism’ by Alec Saunders.

The following two points from the 1908 manifesto of the Australian Labour Party will illustrate some of the objectives of the Australian social-nationalistic movement.

“The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened self-reliant community.”

“The securing of the full results of their industry to all producers by the collective ownership of monopolies and the extension of the industrial and economic functions of the state and the municipality.”

Both the progressives and the radical-nationalists were tribal-socialists and not proletarian-socialists. The Marxist notion of a state transcending organic realities, such as race and nationality, so as to create solidarity of all urban industrial workers at the expense of one’s own spiritual and biological kindred, was regarded as a perverse absurdity by most early Australian-socialists. Thus it is self-evident that “AUSTRALIAN-SOCIALISM”, as an ideology, was hardly Marxist, and philosophically opposed to the cosmopolitan materialism of the Marxist and liberal conception of life. It is only in recent times that Marxist/liberal internationalism has infiltrated the Australian Labour movement, and as an ideology it only has infected its trendy cosmopolitan leadership and not the rank and file.

The basis of our contemporary multiracial / multicultural society lay in the influence that Tom Mann who argued for a cosmopolitanism to be adopted by the Victorian Socialist Party and the whole labour movement – finally being implemented by the Whitlam new-Labor government Mann vied with Frank Anstey for intellectual influence over John Curtin, but ultimately Anstey’s position prevailed, with its unremitting commitment to a White Australia Policy. This was endorsed by the ordinary Australian workers (ie the producers of all types, reconciled in an organic national community, representing more than the urban industrial workers of the so-called proletariat and desiring the state of the whole people) who continue/d to remain adamantly racial-nationalistic despite their betrayal by the Labour leadership.

This type of socialism was neither Marxist, nor fascist, nor liberal, nor libertarian – although it shared characteristics with all of them. It is more properly defined as producerism.  Since the Whitlam government endorsed the Lima Declaration, we have seen a general transfer of Australian capital to Third World countries, leading to the undermining of Australian manufacturing. The Liberal / National coalition governments continued this trend, abandoning their own version of producerism, known as ‘Black Jack McEwenism’ – and ultimately they adopted laissez-faire liberal neo-conservatism. This was then to be absorbed into the Hawke-Keating Labor deregulating governments. The contemporary KRuddite (Gillard) Labor Party, as evidenced by the address of Lindsay Tanner (Labor Minister for Finance and Deregulation) to the Melbourne Institute in 2008, is totally opposed to producerism ( see:”The Battle Against Producerism”). In Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century, producerism was defined as ‘socialism without doctrines’ by our respective labour movements.