“Dare to struggle, dare to win.”
– Mao Tse Tung, quoted as a slogan of the BLF and CFMEU.
Badge made by the CPA(ML)[1]
The Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) is a union lauded by the left wing of capital, whether “anarchists”, Trotskyists, or Stalinists, and an oft cited example of a truly “radical”, industrial union in Australia. This rhetoric and mythologising continues to this very day. But how radical was it? Did it strive towards any revolutionary goals? Or was it just like any other bureaucratic, reformist union? Could such a thing as a “radical union” even exist?
The BLF when formed in 1910, was an Australian Labor Party union, like most historical and modern unions, until it was gradually pulled into the influence of the “Communist” Party in 1968. The leadership of the BLF in the 1970s consisted of Jack Mundey (who was voted to become secretary in ‘68) in New South Wales and Norm Gallager in Victoria, both committed Stalinists and apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA [ML])—the CPA’s Maoist split. Although some BLF true-believers argue Mundey was not a Stalinist, and that the CPA was increasingly moving towards the ideas of “New Left”, it is hard to take this argument seriously, as the New Left as a movement was always a rebranding of Stalinist ideas under the guise of “left unity”. The CPA(ML) has been particularly transparent in their defence of nationalism, proclaiming themselves as the most stalwart protectors of the independence of Australian capital vis-a-vis US imperialism.[2] What is evident here is that the union leadership was never distinct from the mercenaries of the Stalinist counterrevolution, which maimed and killed revolutionaries, and prostituted the name of socialism to justify their own ruthless exploitation and manipulation of the working class. There are many leftists, however, who will argue that the main issue with the unions is the conservativeness of their leadership, and thus that the unions should be supported as inherently working-class organisations. According to them, a large section of the working class is organised in the unions, which they deceptively define as just a “group of workers”. Today, this no longer holds true but seemed more plausible in the 1970s, when many workers in Australia were in unions. Per Figure 1, over 50% of workers were in trade unions from 1976 to 1982. So goes the old leftist canard that decrees communists should “go to the masses” and conquer the leadership of the unions.
[3] Figure 1
The flaw with this line of argument is that it can be employed to justify any position or manoeuvre against an illusionary “lesser evil”. Using the same logic, for example, one could argue that since workers support and vote to put political parties in power, we should “go to the masses” by supporting those parties, which now acquire the characteristic of being “workers’ organisations” and involving ourselves in their inner workings. This view is nothing new but has been stock-and-trade among the left wing of capital today since time immemorial. Another complication that the proposed infiltration and conquest of the unions by the left would have to overcome is that the overwhelming majority of the working class in Australia are no longer union members. But these truths are no impediment for the left in Australia, who wishes to return to the ‘70s, when workers were more radical” (read: subordinated to the unions) than today. Unlike the international revolutionary wave of the early 20th century, which was an undertaking of immense—indeed, worldwide—proportions and aspirations, the Australian left limits itself to more “achievable” goals, appealing to the bourgeoisie and its state, and collaborating with them to preserve the capitalist system.
Throughout its existence, the BLF acted wholly within an activist framework, organising around various single-issue—and thus bourgeois—movements; environmentalism was chief among these, with their so-called “Green Bans”. But feminism, “anti”-imperialism, Indigenous and LGBTQ rights have also been among these. Contrary to this approach, as communists, we understand that only a communist society can achieve the full emancipation of the species, regardless of gender, sexuality, or place of birth. This would occasionally oblige them to work with groups that even the left would not consider remotely radical, such as Hunter Hills Trust and the National Trust of Australia, both conservatory organisations concerned primarily with protecting “heritage,” a nebulous and ill-defined idea.[4] This history of class collaboration provides ample proof of the BLF’s commitment to maintaining and expanding its own influence and power within capitalist society on the backs of workers.
The Stalinist leadership never seriously entertained the mere idea of revolution, even when they organised strike actions such as the “work-ins”, better known as occupations, at the Sydney Opera House and Wyong Plaza. The strike is a weapon of the working class, even if it is called by unions to pacify workers and channel their energies and frustrations. This does not in itself make it entirely exempt from criticism, however. On the factory occupations in Italy during the Biennio Rosso (Red Biennium), Bordiga quite rightly wrote that:
“We would not like the working masses to get hold of the idea that all they need [to] do to take over the factories and get rid o[f] the capitalists is to set up councils. This would indeed be a dangerous illusion. The factory will be conquered by the working class — and not only by the workforce employed in it, which would be too weak and non-communist — only after the working class as a whole has seized political power. Unless it has done so, the Royal Guards, military police, etc. — in other words, the mechanism of force and oppression that the bourgeoisie has at its disposal, its political power apparatus — will see to it that all illusions are dispelled.”[5]
Unions form part of what Bordiga calls the bourgeoisie’s political power apparatus. The strike is a powerful tool that the proletariat can wield against its class enemy, and. for many, the unions are synonymous with strike action. However, the opposite is true. The unions pre-emptively avoid strikes and push for collective bargaining more often than not. Whenever the union leadership does call a strike, it is usually as a performance that serves as an outlet for discontented members to express their own outrage about wages and working conditions; there is not even a remote pretence of revolutionary aspirations. The functional imperative to control the rank-and-file membership of the unions sometimes compels the leadership to call strikes in order to avoid haemorrhaging members or having to deal with a “wildcat” strike.
If either occurs, it reveals to the state that the unions cannot control workers and thus are unnecessary. This might be the case even where the union encourages its workers to engage in strike action. We could arguably see this with the overthrow of the NSW BLF by the Victorian section headed by Gallager, just after that section was deregistered, and then the entire collapse of the union, which the left is divided on. The schism between the pro-Gallager and anti-Gallager camps, minor as it may seem, is worth mentioning, since for some this was a critical inflection point in the history of the organisation: the moment when the Maoist element within the union revealed themselves more or less openly as functionaries of capital, even if it didn’t represent any kind of break with how the union had operated internally from inception. Writing some years later, Bob Carnegie, darling of the Trotskyists and a former BLF organiser in Queensland, would remarks concerning the takeover that:
“The New South Wales BLF did many good things in the 1970s. But industrially it left a lot to be desired. The gains it won on workers’ compensation, superannuation, and so on were much less solid than those won by the Gallagher forces. Workers in the industry today have a much deeper respect for the Gallagher line than for the Mundey line. Victoria [which was Gallagher’s base] has always been the powerhouse of wages and conditions in the construction industry.”[6]
The BLF, both its Victorian and New South Welsh sections, did, in effect, what all unions do: bargain with capitalists on the selling-price of labour-power. It is no more a “radical” or “working-class” union than those leftists characterise as conservative and bureaucratised.
Having brought up the role of Gallager, it becomes difficult to ignore the virulent nationalism that suffused his perspective. Indeed, like any other bourgeois party, the CPA(ML) utilises Australian nationalism to gin up support, as Barry York, a former member, would confirm:
“‘Independence for Australia’ … was part of the left-wing nationalism of some on the Left, associated (like me) with the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) … our nationalist campaign for ‘Independence for Australia’ proved popular (but) it turned sour for us when the racist Right seized upon the Eureka Flag and the same slogan of ‘Independence’.” [7]
It would be an error to chalk up the CPA and its offshoot’s embrace of Australian nationalism as a slide into opportunism. As the vanguard and most sublime product of the bourgeois counterrevolution, Stalinism has always been unashamedly nationalist.[8] It never had any principles to compromise in the first place. Moreover, the effort to frame Australia as a semi-colonial country requiring “independence” from “Yankee imperialism” is laughable on its face. Australia is well-positioned in the imperialist pecking order relative to its neighbours, and in any case, the history of our movement has definitively shown that national struggles have nothing to offer workers, who will continue to be exploited and brutalised by capital.
The use of the Eureka Flag, made infamous by the Eureka Stockade, has become a kind of national symbol for the right and left of capital, such as by Gallager’s CPA(ML), despite its pan-nationalist origins. For the sake of brevity, this article will not go much further into the history of Eureka, but in short, workers of over 20 nationalities were involved,[9] and ironically, a union was not. Instead, the workers organised themselves under the Ballarat Reform League, whose leaders were inspired by British Chartism.[10] Despite this, the flag has been used as a nationalist symbol by bourgeois organisations as diverse as the BLF, the existing Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU), and the fascist Australia First Party,[11] neither having anything to do with Eureka. Raffaelo Carboni, a leader of the Stockade, had the following to say concerning the internationalism of the Stockade:
“…irrespective of nationality, religion or colour to salute the ‘Southern Cross’ as a refuge of all the oppressed from all countries on Earth.”[12]
Despite its serious political and organisational flaws, the experience of the Stockade is part of the history of the international proletarian movement. Nevertheless, ours is a flag that has been used by workers from the earliest days of our movement, and which cannot and has yet to be turned into a national symbol: the plain red flag of the proletarian revolution.
Complementing what has been said above, the BLF’s motivation for declare strike actions never had nothing to do with revolutionary aspirations of any kind; rather, strikes were called and deployed as a tool of trade-unionist manoeuvring and jockeying for power within the capitalist state. For example, Mundey the “communist” explains the Green Bans as follows:
“Yes, we want to build. However, we prefer to build urgently-required hospitals, schools, other public utilities, high-quality flats, units and houses, provided they are designed with adequate concern for the environment, than to build ugly unimaginative architecturally-bankrupt blocks of concrete and glass offices…Though we want all our members employed, we will not just become robots directed by developer-builders who value the dollar at the expense of the environment. More and more, we are going to determine which buildings we will build …The environmental interests of three million people are at stake and cannot be left to developers and building employers whose main concern is making profit. Progressive unions, like ours, therefore have a very useful social role to play in the citizens’ interest, and we intend to play it.”[13]
It should be amply clear from this statement by Mundey that the BLF is not remotely interested in the destruction of class society and the struggle for communism but instead aspires to fight for a kinder, gentler capitalism. As communists, we are not concerned with the interests of “citizens”, an amorphous category that includes exploited and exploiting classes, but rather the interests and power of the proletarian class. The so-called “Communist” Parties in Australia, at one point represented by Mundey and Gallager, and their auxiliary organisations (e.g., the BLF) have never been communist except in name. Instead, such organisations form part of the left-wing apparatus of capital, whose function is to sabotage workers’ struggles, including by derailing them into reformist ends. Here, we follow Marx’s admonition about the unions, which holds true today as much as then:
“Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!””[14]
Given the real, as opposed to imagined or mythologised history, of these organisations, we are inevitably left asking ourselves what it means to be “radical.” For the Left, it is not about fighting the root of humanity’s problems, about abolishing class society, as it was for Marx; rather it is about the uncritical, unconditional defence of ostensibly “socialist” and “workers” organisations: those propped up and controlled exclusively by the left wing of capital. As cogs in the mechanism of purchasing and sale of labour-power, the unions are completely devoid of any revolutionary potential, independently of who is at its head, or who fills its membership rolls. Their entire purpose as organisations is to be arbiters of peace between labour and capital. The proletarian revolution does away with any form of mediation, be it political, as in parliament, or economic, as in the unions—these become totally superfluous from the moment that the exploited masses take their lives and struggle into their own hands.
The trend of Stalinists holding leadership positions in the unions continued into the CFMEU after it was formed in 1992, into which the BLF integrated after it became deregistered. Among them were John Cummins of the CPA(ML), and secretary of its Victorian branch, and Vinnie Molina, former president of the CPA, who was an organiser for the Perth Eastern Suburbs.[15] [16] Ben Carslake, the secretary of the construction division in South Australia and member of the CPA also joined the new union.[17] Today, the far-left of capital does not nearly hold enough influence within the union to assert their interests and yet it is characterised as the “more radical union,” this in spite of the rightwards shift within the membership as of late,[18] and until recently, it was officially affiliated with the left of the Labor party.[19] In fact, during the process of writing this article, it has been revealed that motorcycle gangs have been involved in the CFMEU, as well as intimidation of workers and union officials who oppose the union and its efforts, which finally led to John Setka, the Victorian secretary of the construction division, and often described as the “boss” of the whole union, to resign.[20] Before this, Setka was well known for intimidation and abuse, including his own then-wife.[21]
Despite this sordid history, which has parallels in every country, the left still holds on to the illusion that communists can turn the unions “red” (i.e., make them revolutionary) by winning leadership positions, or enter into the unions to win over workers. The experience of our movement has refuted this stratagem and demonstrated the futility of communist efforts to “reclaim” or even to organise within them. More often than not, participation in union activity transforms communists into functionaries of the unions,[22] as opposed to the inverse, for the political and economic are fundamentally intertwined, as Munis explains:
“[…]every idea or political action arises from an economic foundation which then plays both a controlling and determining role.”[23]
To proclaim, therefore, that communists can simply “reclaim” this organ, which owes its continued existence to the capitalist system, for the proletariat is a pipe dream of the highest order. Unions, even those that posture as “militant and radical”, are essentially conservative organisations with a specific design and function within capitalism. What is the alternative, then? How are we to organise our struggle? Historical experience has revealed this, too, as an irrefutable fact: the class builds its power by organising its own combat organisations, such as workers’ councils, strike committees and mass assemblies; whose delegates are subject to mandate and instantaneous recall. As organs forged in the heat of the pure class struggle and created by the workers themselves precisely for this purpose, these organisations alone can take up the communist programme and organise the communist transformation of society.
– NL (League of Internationalist Communists)
Sunday, 01 September 2024
[1] https://wearyourcolours.moadoph.gov.au/badges/2012-0244.html
[2] As seen in their current general program: “The Australian people have achieved an important measure of formal independence; however, it is still limited. The US replaced Britain as the dominant imperialism in Australia after World War Two. The nation as a whole is trapped in a very powerful net of economic, political, military, diplomatic and cultural dependency. It is dominated by imperialism, primarily US imperialism. Australians must break free of capitalism and imperialism to gain genuine and lasting independence.”
[3] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/trade-union-membership/latest-release
[4] https://huntershilltrust.org.au/kellys-bush/
[5] https://libcom.org/library/power_or_factory_bordiga
[6] https://archive.md/20130416070339/http://www.workersliberty.org/node/3805#selection-513.0-513.465
[7] See footnote 1.
[8] For more on Stalinism, we recommend you check out Grupo Barbaria’s piece on the subject, linked here.
[9] https://ballaratheritage.com.au/article/eureka-a-multicultural-affair/
[10] https://www.eurekapedia.org/Ballarat_Reform_League_Charter
[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20160422060113/https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-12/anger-over-australia-first-partys-use-of-eureka-flag/7319484
[12] See Carbroni’s text The Eureka Stockade here.
[13] https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/green_bans_movement
[14] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm
[15] https://cpaml.org/post4.php?id=1426159751&catitem1=Our%20Comrades&catid1=11
[16] “We could work with the Greens and Labor, because altogether we have a got a responsibility to build a new form of government,” Molino said: https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/communists-elect-wa-president-20090223-8fg7.html
[17] https://cg.cfmeu.org/news/vale-benny-carslake-comrade-and-union-stalwart
[18] This is evident with the anti-vax protests taken up by union members in 2020: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/inside-the-insurrection-why-construction-workers-took-to-the-street-20210921-p58tiy.html
[19] https://web.archive.org/web/20231217090844/https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/inside-the-union-factions-that-rule-the-alp-conference-20181216-h19692
[20] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-12/vic-cfmeu-secretary-john-setka-steps-down/104093024
[21] https://www.9news.com.au/videos/national/john-setkas-wife-says-she-wont-cover-for-him-any-longer/ckz6ndjt4000a0ommkgb47gvq
[22] Both the Dutch-German and British Communist left cited this as a reason for no longer wanting to organise within the unions against the 3rd International’s growing opportunism. Anton Pannekoek stated in his World Revolution and Communist Tactics, which Herman Gorter quotes extensively in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin:
“Their counter-revolutionary power cannot be destroyed or weakened through a change of staff, through the replacing of reactionary leaders by radical or revolutionary elements.”
[23] The Unions Against Revolution by Grandizo Munis and Benjamin Peret
https://internationalistcommunists.org/2024/08/17/the-unions-against-revolution-grandizo-munis-and-benjamin-peret/
League of Internationalist Communists 