- Kim Carr, A Long March, Monash Uni Publishing, 2024;
- Frank Bongiorno and Nick Dyrenfurth, A Little History of the Australian Labor Party, 2nd edn, NewSouth Publishing,
- 2024; Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman, Twelve Rules for Strife, Scribe, 2024.
American political memoirists have all the luck. How many volumes over past decades have had some momentous meeting between political enemies, shadowy agents, secret informers and journalist take place on the National Mall at night, the Washington Monument towering over all, moonlight falling on the ice-white Dome of Congress? Kim Carr begins his account of a half-century in Labor politics with the evening Julia Gillard rolled Kevin Rudd in 2010. Labor’s Left was jubilant; one of their own was taking the premiership at last. Carr was not, believing it to be a portent of disaster for the party’s chances, and for its spirit and internal conduct. Cut out of the process until he was summoned to a celebratory party by a couple of allies who said it might be a good idea if he showed his face, he had spent most of the evening waiting it out in his flat in Holder. Holder! The Canberra suburb so devoid of life it makes Kingston look like Vienna of the Belle Epoque! It’s as if Watergate had happened at the Boronia shops! It’s…well, you get the idea. What was a genuinely historic moment, a political event, had occurred in the same way so much Australian history has occurred: with a couple of meetings in drab offices, and then the beers. Those who aspire for politics to be something rather more than the everyday run of life are brought down again and again by dun-coloured Australian political realism.
Kim Carr’s career—especially his three decades as a Senator—has played out against that backdrop, as laid out in this volume. Carr insists that it is not a memoir, and it certainly avoids the skip-to-chapter-four of innumerable dull accounts of catching yabbies and hearing about the Split on the bakelite in Anecdote, NSW in most such volumes. Indeed, we get too little of Carr’s background as the child of a restless boilermaker and a cluey homemaker mother, moving around Eastern Australia before landing in Melbourne’s north-western suburbs in the late 1960s when he was a teenager rapidly developing a political awareness, and an attachment to working-class and Labor politics both passionate and, from the start, thoughtful. Carr would go on to build the socialist Left into a powerhouse in Victoria in 1980s, as organiser and executive officer, and then, through three decades in the Senate, be the last major Labor figure to champion a social democratic politics of production focused on national industrial and knowledge development and synergy. His vast pinstriped frame, a sort of sinistra Soprano, became visual rhetoric for thinking big. We could have a car industry! It could be a high-tech synergy with renewable power in a virtuous circle! It was possible to have an impact, to change the status quo and the future status quo. But Carr failed to re-establish this within Labor, and the forces within that party, and within the Left, that hate him also hate any notion of a politics of production, and have for decades. In defenestrating Carr—no easy task—they were also casting out the last continuities with the Scullin-Curtin-Chifley-Whitlam determination that politics would be about what sort of nation we should be: how it should be constituted in its very basics.
A Long March (2024) is a record of that struggle, valuable for its weaving of the movement of policy into the passage of thirty years factional politics, and for its honesty about missteps and misjudgements—though presumably others who were in the rooms will have their own views about Carr’s take on history. Until they say so, this will stand as a record.
Chapters thus play through Carr’s rise from an already-legendary faction organiser in Wills—an early Herald profile showed him doing the numbers from the staffroom phone at Glenroy Tech—to the heart of the Cain government, an administration that wanted no one from the socialist Left in it at all. This despite the fact that Carr had helped Cain to power. Discontinuity is a common theme. Carr’s ‘this-sided’ politics made him enemies on the Left (who might have their own, alternative accounts of the mix of principle, strategy and self-interest at play here). He supported Keating against Hawke and was rewarded with the 1993 victory, and Shorten against Albanese, arguing that to be on the (non-SDA) Right in Victoria was being on the Left anywhere else, and that Shorten had a greater commitment to program, policy and productivist politics than his wholly tactical Sydney-sider rival. Carr’s argument about how and what he did is very much in the line of politics as a vocation. Patience and renunciation are essential capacities. Opposition is not dead time, simply different time. A useful value to hold, when, as Carr notes, you spend two thirds of your career there.
That sense of politics as the slow and steady development of position and program leads to three reflective chapters at the end of the book, on the Voice, on Labor and on the Left and social democracy, and it is in the last two of those chapters that this writer begins to part company with Carr. Carr intends with these chapters to help Labor regain a clear focus on what it and politics are. His alliances in the Victorian SL sub-factions fell apart after 2019, and the Albanese leadership had him booted from a winnable Senate spot. The move represented the victory of neoliberal ‘distributionism’ (not distributism—the very opposite) in Labor: the idea that production was pretty much a black box, and you simply carved off some—less with each passing decade—of the surplus to attack inequality. A simplistic Rawlsianism has become the default setting for modern Labor parties; stratified power is unchangeable, and entrenched. Globalisation, technological advances and skilled immigration plug gaps, and you try and make things less worse for the poors from the proceeds. When such a fallback position becomes the core program in a left party, the core result is a fusion of cynicism, elitism, quiescence, a growing hatred of your on base and membership, and a creeping inability to be politically effective. Carr’s book was begun at the height of the Albanese honeymoon—the political one, not the oceanfront-property-buying-spree one—when there was some thought that Labor might be able to make itself the central party government. Carr has been prescient about how that would go.
But in promoting a path by which Labor can march back from this mess, my suggestion is that Carr makes two interrelated errors, seeing a historical continuity in Labor and labour, projected in both past and future. In the case of labour—the working class—it is an insufficient inquiry into what labour and class actually are, at a time when they are being utterly transformed. This insufficient examination leaves Carr’s solution reliant on a certain nostalgia.
Before expanding on that, it is worth noting that he is not alone in this. Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno’s new edition of their Little History of the Australian Labor Party (2024) shows something of the same attitude. It has a propagandistic side, suggesting that the Right of the party is its soul and true compass, and its Left a rabble—Dyrenfurth was of the party’s Left, and moved rightward, simultaneously abandoning internationalism for a fervent Zionism. Have at it, but this perspective is only gained by spending so little time on the battle of ideas within Labor over the past century as would make a neophyte reader wonder what the party was for. Thus it dutifully click-clacks through every eighteen-month state government, and constructs the White Australia Policy as a contingent aberration and not the race-bond which gave the party a pseudo-familial solidarity stronger than that of class. But above all it disappears the fights of the interwar years, when the Labor had a full socialist internal force, a residual Catholic ‘rerum novarum’ conservatism and a third focus on finance capital, which was given the name ‘the money power’. That socialist internal force—these all overlapped—was so powerful that its most prominent advocate, Frank Anstey, had a train station in Brunswick, Melbourne named after him (which is being decommissioned in the Skyrail program—possibly a neat way to handle Anstey’s explicit anti-Semitism). Was this a working-class party? Or was it an alliance of different class forces and interests, many of them asset-focused, with a working-class mythos? This would certainly explain Labor’s fatal embrace, in the 1990s, of prosperity via subsidised assets rather than by production development and universal service provision, and the bloated, clogged and, for progressives, booby-trapped economy we have now. One reason why Labor is in trouble, when it should be cruising onto an election to consolidate its power, is that too much reflection on it by its tame intellectuals is shallow flattery of whoever has the potential to confer power.
That is not Kim Carr’s vice. But nor can he free himself from a certain fixed idea of what Labor is. He came into Labor as a working-class kid, but his upbringing sounds a little more working-class bohemian—king-of-the-road Dad and Mum with a wandering urge, opinions and ideas—than that of much of the rank-and-file. His adulthood coincided with Labor consolidating as the party of an industrial working-class/progressive alliance, the latter drawn from what we call the ‘intellectually trained’—those whose training and work lifts them out of the process of class formation performed by routinised, Taylorised and trade-based labour. In the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, progressives understood themselves to be the junior partners in this coalition, and nudged and pushed progressive social policy—often readily agreed to, other times not—in the context of a deeply anchored working-class neighbour and family culture. It is worth recalling that, for example, Labor kept homosexuality illegal in NSW into the 1980s and yet could still retain progressive membership and activism—part of an understanding of where the gravitational centre of politics was.
Prior to that alliance, high industrial capitalism had kept Labor’s primary vote close to 50 per cent, making it a party which when it got government, could unapologetically enforce a program for change. The postwar worker/progressive alliance (and the absence of proportional voting in the Lower House) kept that primary vote at that sort of level for another thirty years. Carr argues that Labor cannot be a party of change without restoring it. But that is absolutely not going to happen, and the reason is grounded in the second transformation that Carr has failed to factor in, or contemplate: the change in labour—in routinised work and its role in the economy—that has occurred, and the transformation of class with it.
Brevity is necessary here, ahead of a longer explanation in the future (and also contained in past pieces by Arena writers). Here’s a (trimmed) passage from Carr, about the period in which Labor has a 31 per cent primary vote and no real program for change, or even action:
many features of Australian life have changed. The cultural make-up of society is more diverse. Work arrangements have become more flexible. Female employment levels have exploded … the emphasis of the economy has tilted away from producing goods and towards providing services. Families have transformed … international travel … is not a rarity … our daily lives are overstuffed with information … year 12 schooling is normal … 35% tertiary degrees …
Good enough as a surface sketch. What Carr has missed is two major de-classing changes. The first is the rise of class-by-asset, as explored by Lisa Adkins and colleagues. In a society of privately invested compulsory super, negative gearing and a greatly enhanced wage divide between organised (construction, some trades, nursing, senior teaching) and precarious labour, the working class is divided in its fundamental interest as to how much of a state it wants. Superannuation as we do it has made millions of workers stock-market investors for their retirement. Whatever grasp of the details they’ve got, they know the gist. The old social democratic principle of incoming governments—let the current account take a hit to make change too big to reverse—simply doesn’t play. This divide is not merely that of the old labour aristocracy/proletariat divide. There are many interests that a two-high-income, super-getting, home-owning working-class family no longer has in common with intermittently or perpetually benefits-dependent precarious workers. What was called class is really one type of it: class-by-labour. It has been dominant for so long that it is hard to recognise that it is not the only way life habits, interests and imperatives might come into contradiction. That contradiction is now at the heart of the working class (by labour), and so it will remain.
How did the working class become, as the Italian autonomists say, ‘decomposed’? By the second process that has put electoral dominance beyond Labor’s grasp: the steady expansion of intellect, techno-science and the resulting automation and globalisation into the economy of a once-bounded society. This began in earnest after the Second World War, and grew the group of intellectual creators from miniscule to merely small. They became the early progressives (‘trendies’, in the term of the day), attaching themselves to Labor—other groupings had no prospect—and infusing it with the values that came from the flexibility and reflexivity of intellectual activity. These were what supercharged the demands of the new liberation movements: that for a certain social group, such things must happen. This was the distinctive form of social agent—inside classes, but outside them as well—that underlay the ‘progressive’ faction of post-Whitlam Labor. It is not simply a set of people self-selecting by voluntaristic values.
What has happened from the 1990s onwards is that this group has exploded in size, power and self-recognition. Globally the process has become the virtuous circle of intellect and industry that Carr wanted for Australia. Socially and politically, this has made the ‘intellectually trained’ a class of sorts in their own right. They do not accept the Labo(u)r compact Carr developed in, and see no reason why they should. They have manifested their own social class being politically, in Australia, in the Greens. The Greens, also, are not a party of self-selecting idealists. They are an organic representative of this new social group, which is why their vote is stable. They express not merely this new group’s ideas, but its sentiments and natural class habits. Their values are universalistic—and often cruel and disdainful in particular: they are not better than anyone else—because science and humanities are universal in practice. Thus issues such as borders, gender, multiculturalism, colonialism, history and so on are not identity add-ons to a core politics; they are material political considerations at the heart of their lives.
The project over the past two decades, as exemplified by journals such as Jacobin, has been to train an activist class to break down the cultural divisions between the intellectually trained and routine-labour workers, on the grounds that they have interests in common below the distracting differences. That is very much the approach of 12 Rules of Strife (2024), which presents a mini-manual for activists of post-Trotskyist Jeff Sparrow’s arguments for strategy through the art of Sam Wallman. The latter’s unique style, drawing on everything from Counihan to Keith Haring, gives it a multiplied force that might otherwise be lacking in Sparrow’s argument for the imperative of talking radical young potential-activists out of two vices: ‘delegated politics’ and ‘smug politics’. ‘Delegated politics’—a poorly chosen term—is really the politics of symbolic representation, whether by cheering on or arguing over celebrity positions and actions on Gaza, X/Twitter flags, wrist bands etc. etc., all of which are seen as a contemporary occlusion of people’s realisation of the need for ‘direct politics’: marching, organising and so on. ‘Smug politics’ is the self-satisfied denunication on social media or in real life of minor or careless expressions of sexist, racist or other sentiments, as opposed to starting a non-judgemental dialogue with said mendicant about the attitudes behind such thoughts. Wallman’s illustration of this has the hearts of normie workers and Brunswick desperadoes connecting up, like some Cronenberg film. Hard to disagree with, except that it simply carries over the Trotskyite habit (or Cliffite habit—the extreme moralism of Tony Cliff-descended parties such as Socialist Alternative, which Sparrow co-founded) of presuming a set of abstract values drawn from the extreme cosmopolitanism of the intelligentsia and projecting them onto a working class that may have become more politically liberal over decades, but has never lost a relative cultural conservatism. ‘If someone says something sexist, racist or transphobic’, the section on ‘smug politics’ begins. But who decides what is ‘sexist’, and what is, say, a mainstream preference for mildly more traditional sex role differentiation in public and private life than applies in Brunswick?
Where once working people substantially welcomed some of the liberatory character of such progressivism, there is increasing suspicion of and opposition to this new group, and a belief that its universalism is ‘off the leash’: that it demands that they conform all social values to their own. That is doubled by an understanding that the job of techno-science is now not to improve productivity, but to replace routinised labour altogether, leaving what was once the working class marginalised in the accumulation of value, and exiting history. The Marxist and labourist answer is that a new working class will replace them, as the industrial replaced the rural proletariat. Therein lies an enormous argument. The core critical point against that ‘continuity’ argument is that the transferring of the idea of ‘labour’ from routinised, intentional bodily action to reality-transforming intellectual creation is, at its core, an analogy. Economically accurate enough in high capitalism, its continuation into this new period is a fatal confusion.
From this historical process, Kim Carr and his enemies in Labor took opposite lessons. Implicitly, Carr believes that a national plan connecting intellect, industry, education and social mobility could serve as a virtuous circle, of renewed trust and a reunified Labor base. Well, maybe—but he has not fully recognised how hollowed-out and powerless the ‘asset-poor routinised-labour group’—that is, the working class classic—is being made by the global march of techno-science. In a rat-cunning way, neoliberal Labor has. They see Labor as a party of capital, dependent on gaining client status with certain of its sectors, redistributing a paltry amount and getting out of the way of the directionless growth machine of the market. There have been variants of the Carr approach at state level, such as the Andrews government, but the Allan government’s predicament shows what a difficult manoeuvre this is to pull off.
The real dilemma for Labor is that while the asset split runs down the middle of the working class, the intellect-value split runs between Labor’s leadership and its base. Labor’s cosmopolitan leaders cannot or will not recognise that what I’m calling the different ‘habit-values’ of their base—how families are defined, how communities are culturally constituted and so on—are real to them as issues, and not simply deflected economic hardship. They have not seen that sectional cultural concerns have come to the centre of social life, and that class, as a category, is being decomposed. Carr is looking for a way to restore the trust relation between party and base, that a base could have faith would be enacted. The trouble is that the party no longer believes in its base, not vice versa. It has vanished in a way that conventional left activists and thinkers will have to think about more deeply in order to develop new mass strategies. Carr’s story is a readable and invaluable record of a man who has served and loved Labor and labour for half a century. Far from the cosmopolis, in the mean streets of Merlynston, what is asked of such people now is an unsparing assessment of what remains of the thing they fought for, and what is to come.