During the referendum on the Voice to Parliament, starkly different positions were taken by prominent Indigenous figures. Thomas Mayo, a Torres Strait Islander man and trade unionist, saw the Voice as a unique opportunity that could open the way towards genuine reconciliation and the beginnings of self-determination. Indigenous Country Liberal Party Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price condemned the proposal as a part of a ‘virtue signalling agenda’ that would divide the nation and waste hundreds of millions of dollars. And criticism of the Voice amongst Indigenous people wasn’t confined to Trumpian right-wingers like Price. Several progressive Indigenous figures, most notably the independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, vigorously criticised the Voice as at best a distraction from the main issues confronting Indigenous people, and at worst a continuation of the racist assimilationist logic of the Australian state. Other progressive Indigenous activists criticised the Voice for its shortcomings but argued that Australians should vote Yes to forestall a victory for the racist Right.
These different positions weren’t simply a reflection of the diversity of views amongst Indigenous people on a complicated, multi-sided and racism-laden debate that seemed to spring out of nowhere into the centre of Australian political discourse. The levels of political diversity amongst Indigenous people were in themselves a reflection of a deeper, profound development in the complexities of class differentiation amongst Indigenous people in Australia during recent decades.
But it is precisely this aspect of contemporary Indigenous life that has been the most neglected by the progressive Left and social theory. Partially this is due to the longer-term intellectual weakness on the Australian Left that was widely recognised by the Marxist scene of the 1960s and 70s, when too often a reliance on Marxist studies abroad or general propaganda about the evils of capitalism were a substitute for a concrete analysis of class relations in Australia. As the editorial for the first issue of the revolutionary Marxist journal Intervention noted in 1972, the Australian Left ‘has still not developed a knowledge of the workings of Australian capitalism and its distinctive characteristics’. This weakness was also on display when the Left tried to analyse Indigenous issues.
Contrary to common misconceptions, the practical solidarity towards Indigenous rights displayed by the socialist Left and the workers’ movement was often well in advance of any theoretical analysis or specific political understanding of the questions raised by Indigenous struggles. In 1972, Garry Nicholls wrote in the Australian Left Review that the Communist Party has ‘effectively mirrored … changing demands in its changing policy on “aborigines” but too often this is where it has left the matter. The Party has not attempted a true class analysis of the Black movement’.
This is not to say there hasn’t been significant research into Indigenous history, culture and politics. In fact, this has boomed in recent decades, as a visit to any serious bookstore will show. But little of this research has explored the relationship between Indigenous people and the dynamics of social class and capitalism.
As the historian Andrew Markus has argued, despite the wealth of research into Aboriginal history in recent years, our understanding of the involvement of Aboriginal people in capitalist society is largely incomplete, and ‘the issues and perspectives which have engaged most historians over the last decade have not been conducive to the detailed, precise historical work which is necessary if we are to proceed beyond tentative generalisations’. It is precisely this kind of historical work that has fallen dramatically out of intellectual fashion over the last several decades.
The dominance that settler-colonial theory has achieved in framing Indigenous issues for the Australian Left in recent years has not solved these issues, and in many ways it has reinforced existing weaknesses and created new ones. This is not to discount some of the strengths of the writings of Patrick Wolfe and others in this stream. These have played an important role in critiquing the dominant liberal narratives around race and colonialism, correctly highlighting the importance of the non-class or extra-class aspects of Indigenous oppression and raising important questions about the differences between colonial projects, and in particular the franchise and settler-colonial models. The impact of such ideas on popularising support for the Palestinian struggle amongst young progressives is an obvious example of the positive influence of this current of intellectual opinion.
However, in regards to the relationship between class and contemporary Indigenous political life, some of the core arguments of settler-colonial theorists often obscure as much as they clarify. Settler-colonial theory conceptualises the roots of Indigenous oppression as lying in the colonial relationship between settler society and Indigenous people, in which the central dynamic of this colonialism is a logic of elimination that seeks to liquidate the Indigenous population by one means or another. The Indigenous people are bound together by this common experience of colonial dispossession, just as the non-Indigenous population is united by the privileges it gains from that dispossession.
This theoretical model rightfully draws attention to the initial invasion and dispossession of the continent as the original cause of the current shocking situation faced by Indigenous peoples. However, its usefulness beyond this is more limited than is currently acknowledged. To start with, by presenting the Indigenous population as not exploited, but rendered irrelevant by settler society, settler-colonial theorists can end up reinforcing the false impression that Indigenous people somehow stand outside of capitalist society, or at the very least avoid serious examination of what their relationship to it is.
When exploring the initial impact of colonisation and dispossession on Indigenous peoples, this is not so much of a problem. Once Indigenous peoples’ control over the land was forcibly broken by the colonial forces, for the most part they were seen not as a source of exploitable cheap labour, but rather as a nuisance to be placed out of the way in missions. The main exception to this was in the north and northwest of the country, where a lack of non-Indigenous workers and a prohibition on convicts led to the creation of a highly exploited Indigenous workforce cemented in place by brutal racism.
However, even in the eastern states, some Indigenous people were drawn into the labour market, albeit often on its lowest and most exploited rungs, and so issues of labour and exploitation are not as irrelevant to colonial-era Indigenous history as is often assumed. One important example of the intersection of these issues was the involvement of hundreds of Aboriginal workers in the shearers’ strikes of the late 1800s.
The limits of the settler-colonial theory analysis become more striking, though, as we come closer to the present. Take the central idea of Patrick Wolfe: the ‘logic of elimination’. The appeal of this idea for progressives is obvious. It cuts through the racist propaganda that colonialism was actually positive for Indigenous peoples. But does it accurately capture the complexities of state power towards Indigenous people in the twenty-first century? Does it reveal both the continued features and the shifting dynamics of Indigenous politics, history and society?
This is not to say that the roots of Indigenous oppression don’t lie in the colonisation of the continent and the dispossession of the Indigenous population. This is of course an essential starting-point that casts a long shadow over current Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Australia. But to build a coherent theory for why anti-Indigenous racism continues, we have to explain why it has endured into the twenty-first century and what features of contemporary capitalist society reproduce it. After all, we can say that slavery lies at the historic roots of the oppression of African Americans without arguing that they still suffer under a system of slavery today. This is not out of any desire to downplay the reality of modern racism, but in order to accurately describe the machinery of contemporary oppression.
Exploring how changes in Australian capitalism have transformed aspects of Indigenous life is important in explaining some vital parts of contemporary Indigenous political life. The emergence of the postwar campaigns for civil rights, and later land rights and Black Power, were underpinned by important changes in the class and racial structures of Australian society. The collapse of postwar government policy in the face of Indigenous resistance to assimilation, the migration of thousands of Aboriginal people living in rural areas to urban centres, the concentration of Indigenous people still in rural areas around larger rural economic hubs and the integration of Indigenous people into the highly unionised and increasingly combative workforce form the background to the interpenetration between the workers’ movement and Indigenous issues during this period. The strikes of Aboriginal workers in the Pilbara and Darwin during the 40s and 50s, the struggle to desegregate the south coast of New South Wales by Ray Peckham and his communist trade union allies, the 1967 referendum campaign and later the radicalised movements around land rights and Black Power chart the uneven but clear trajectory of Indigenous people fighting, at first slowly and hesitantly and of course with great effort, for their rights and dignity.
Similarly, the defeat of the workers’ movement and the undoing of the postwar economic set-up was devastating for Indigenous people. Neoliberal economic measures pursued vigorously by both Labor and Liberal governments radically restructured rural industries, leading to massive job cuts in the face of casualisation and deregulation. As rural industry collapsed, thousands of Indigenous people were caught in a bind, either staying and scraping by on what was available or moving to the cities. In the urban centres, though, Indigenous people also faced grim prospects. The recessions of 1982 and 1991–92 and the neoliberal deconstruction of the postwar economic system were entrenching unemployment and inequality at previously unthought-of levels. Indigenous unemployment skyrocketed from 5 per cent in the 1950s to 35 per cent by 1986—four times the Australian average.
The neoliberal turn was an assault on workers from all backgrounds, but Indigenous people, often trapped on the bottom rungs of the labour market and facing entrenched racist discrimination, suffered all the more. With this economic model more embedded than ever, is it little wonder that Indigenous people find it so different to break the bonds of oppression and inequality?
None of this is to say that there is only an economic aspect to Indigenous oppression. This aspect is deeply intertwined with important extra-class racial aspects of Indigenous experiences in contemporary capitalism—experiences which also differ from those of other groups suffering from racial oppression. However, the economic dimensions of Indigenous oppression are often overlooked, or simply seen as subsidiary to a colonial experience rather than as an essential aspect of contemporary Indigenous political life which plays a vital role in reinforcing the racist structures that entrap most Indigenous people in inequality.
Another aspect of contemporary Indigenous political life is unexplainable without reference to the themes of class and capitalism: the formation of an Indigenous elite. While there have always been Indigenous individuals who have been co-opted into the establishment in one way or another, for most of Australian history these could have easily been dismissed as examples of individual moral bankruptcy and corruption. In the later years of the twentieth century, however, and increasingly in the twenty-first, a more developed form of class differentiation has emerged amongst Indigenous peoples in Australia.
This is underpinned by several factors. There is the emergence of what Tim Rowse calls the ‘Indigenous Estate’—a network of land councils and Indigenous organisations created through native title legislation, to which we can add the myriad of urban-based Indigenous businesses, consultancy firms, NGOs and community organisations. This is further reinforced by the expansion in the employment of Indigenous people in academic, legal, media, public service and cultural jobs.
The emergence of this middle class, and even a small capitalist class layer, of Indigenous people has been a joint project of private capital and the Australian state. The federal government’s Indigenous Procurement Policy has seen contracts worth billions steered towards hundreds of Indigenous-owned businesses since it was established. This has been supplemented by various schemes by private capital, including the Business Council of Australia’s Raise the Bar initiative, which commits businesses to collectively spending $3 billion on contracts with Indigenous businesses. Ironically, it is the mining industry that has played a key role here. Fortescue Metals Group spent only $20 million on contracts with Indigenous businesses in 2011; this has risen to over $3 billion today.
It is notable that despite their political opposition to issues like changing the date of Invasion Day, successive Liberal governments supported this project. Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison was a key architect of the Indigenous Procurement Policy and oversaw a significant increase in its funding.
This has been important because, unlike Indigenous peoples in New Zealand or the Americas, pre-colonial Indigenous societies in Australia did not have social classes or forms of individualised property, and the thoroughgoing nature of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Australia cut them off from the means of developing an independent economic base within Australian capitalist society. So support from the state and private capital has been vital to creating the space for an Indigenous elite to emerge.
This also means that this elite has been highly dependent upon such support. This has produced varied political responses, however. The more conservative sections of the Indigenous elite, epitomised by Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, revel in their connections to big businesses and argue that the way forward for Indigenous people is an open and unabashed embrace of the market economy. More centrist and Labor-oriented Indigenous figures are more likely to emphasise the need for this to be combined with greater political and cultural representation for Indigenous people, and some modest reforms to the socioeconomic system. Lidia Thorpe and other prominent progressive Indigenous figures take a different response again, chafing against the dependency upon non-Indigenous states and capital that this situation produces. Despite their differences, though, all of these currents are responding to the same basic underlying relationship between the structures of Australian capitalist and state power and the fledgling Indigenous middle class.
None of this is to say that Indigenous people have somehow overcome racism and oppression just because an elite layer has emerged amongst them. Such layers have long existed amongst other racially oppressed sections of societies, most notably African Americans and Indigenous groups overseas—often alongside an increase in inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples overall. This layer is also still reasonably small, comprising a few thousand Indigenous business owners buttressed by a broader, but still modestly sized, layer of tens of thousands of Indigenous managers, bureaucrats and professionals.
Recognising the development of this elite Indigenous layer is important, though, for unpacking some of the dynamics of modern Indigenous politics. By placing the issue of colonialism at the heart of non-Indigenous and Indigenous relations settler-colonial theory has focused political debate on the appalling treatment Indigenous people have suffered from in the past and today. But as an actual analysis of the dynamics of current Indigenous oppression, it falls short. By framing the relationship as one of colonialism it creates a picture of homogenous Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, in which non-Indigenous capitalists and workers jointly benefit from the colonial exploitation of a similarly united Indigenous community. This distorts the class structures within each group, potentially cutting off anti-racist radicals from possible alliances with radicalising non-Indigenous workers and obscuring the dangers that arise from the emergence of an elite Indigenous class whose narrow interests are projected as being those of Indigenous peoples as a whole.
The defeat of the Voice has emboldened the racist Right and further weakened the shallow symbolism of the liberal centre. In the face of this, a renewed and deeper struggle for Indigenous liberation is more evident than ever. One way in which theory can contribute to such a struggle is with a sharper and bolder analysis of the relationship between Indigenous people and capitalist society than has so far been on offer. This is not to say that the Marxist tradition in Australia has all the answers—quite the contrary. Reflecting the general theoretical weaknesses of the socialist Left in this country, there has not been the same rich debate on race and class within the Marxist tradition here that we have seen in the United States and elsewhere.
What I’ve outlined in this article is a very schematic and partial look at some aspects of contemporary Indigenous socioeconomic and political life, and so definitely doesn’t live up to Andrew Markus’s desire for ‘detailed, precise historical work’, but hopefully it gives a bit of idea of what is needed.
Key to overcoming this absence is an intellectual reorientation towards researching the particularities of Australian capitalism, and the specificities and variations of Indigenous experience within it. In this way, social theory can hopefully aid in pushing back the reactionary tide.