Saturday Extra

The United States is the only advanced capitalist country without a Labor party.

In 1894 America came very close, but in the end they backed away from forming a Labor based party.

What difference has it made to their political system?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: The US Presidential nominations are certainly a great spectacle, and your responses to my interview last week with Michael Dukakis proved that there is a great deal of residual interest in this race here in Australia. It's an absorbing contest, between Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, but soon many of us will be swept up with the bigger race, that between the Democratic and the Republican parties.

Well for my first guest this hour, the Presidential race is always fascinating, in part because of what the US electoral system lacks, and that's a labour-based party.

The United States is the only advanced capitalist country without a labour party. Countries in Europe, New Zealand and Australia have robust labour parties. In Australia, our Labor Party was formed in the late 19th century, but in America, things turned out quite differently, even though they came very close indeed. In fact in a meeting held in Chicago in 1894, the American Unions came just shy of forming a labour-based party, the very same year that our nascent Labor politicians really began to step up.

Well Robin Archer is interested in why in the end, Americans backed away and what difference it's made to the resulting political system and community over the century. He's an expatriate Australian who now lectures at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, but he believes that Australia offers a near-perfect comparison country to the United States to examine this historic difference, and he's distilled all of his ideas in a book called 'Why is there no Labor party in the United States?' and I'm delighted to say he joins me now. Welcome to Saturday Extra.

Robin Archer: It's very nice to be here, thank you for having me.

Geraldine Doogue: Now you're very concerned in your book not to be accused of drawing unnecessary parallels between particularly Australia and the US, or US and elsewhere; why did that bother you so much?

Robin Archer: Well I don't think I was trying to avoid parallels, I think it was really a scholarly task; I mean the troubles for historians is that if you want to try and explain something, you can't do what natural scientists do, you can't just run an experiment. So what you have to do is try and find something that laboratory of history has provided. And in this case Australia helps to explain something about the United States, just because it is in many ways, quite similar to the United States.

Geraldine Doogue: OK, let's come to that decision now that was almost made. It was in 1894, when the Americans came the closest they would ever come to forming a labour-based party, and they didn't make that decision; compared with Australians, who did. Now why did the Americans come to that decision?

Robin Archer: There's no simple answer to any of these questions, but perhaps before I actually answer your question, I think one of the important things to point out is that there's been a 100-year-long debate about this, and almost all of the explanations have been built around pointing to differences between the United States and Europe, so they say things like 'Ah, the standard of living was very, very high', or they say, 'Ah, there was early suffrage for men.' Democracy was sort of precocious.

Geraldine Doogue: In America?

Robin Archer: In America. Or they say about America, 'Ah, there was all this worship of individual freedom, and that made it difficult for labour-type politics to get going. And I guess partly just because I come from Australia, I've always thought there was something funny about that, because all of those things were true of Australia in the late 19th century, and yet in Australia, even before in Britain, you get a labour party.

So one of the things I really wanted to do in this book was to take on this classic set of explanations, explanations which you'll find in pretty much any history book that American students read, and show that there's something problematic about them when you look at the Australian case.

Geraldine Doogue: As you say, that alone among Western countries, the US is the only one that did not develop a labour-based party. But they came so close, and it's so interesting why they didn't make the decision that just a couple of years earlier we decided to make.

Robin Archer: So what I do in the book is, having ruled out all these other explanations which are usually thought to be the ones that do the work, I end up pointing to just a couple of things, two or three things. The most important two are really to do with the way the State in the United States, polices industrial action, and in short, it does it very repressively, it squashes workers very heavily. And the second thing that comes out is really the role of religion, especially the role of religion in party politics in the United States.

Geraldine Doogue: And then the third thing was what you called 'socialist sectarianism'; that in fact there were incredibly intense debates among socialists coming from Europe, of the ideology came from Europe, that it was debated in America in a way that didn't occur to the same extent in Australia, so it's sort of counter-intuitive really.

Robin Archer: Yes, it's a very, very peculiar thing. I mean you think of the United States as not being a strong hotbed of socialism, but amongst activists in these unions, there was an extraordinary influence of Marxism and other German-influenced socialist ideologies and to a far greater extent than it ever was in Australia. It's not that there were no left-wing ideologies in Australia, on the contrary, some of those that emerged from the United States itself were very, very powerful in Australia. But these Marxian ones, and these German-influenced ones, often come in with exiles from the repression Germany itself to the United States. These people slogged it out with each other to such an extent that they rather feared what would happen if they tried to all get into one party.

Geraldine Doogue: So did anybody seriously try to establish a labour-based party in the US?

Robin Archer: Well this meeting that you referred to in the beginning, was a meeting of the union federation of all of the United States, and it happened in the middle of the biggest depression of the 19th century, the depression which also struck Australia, Britain and most of the industrialised world. And in that context, there was a series of massive strikes, and in all of these strikes, the government sided with the employers and squashed the unions. And it was in that context that in both Australia and in the United States, discussion started up as to whether to abandon the traditional apolitical approach and to actually form a party to, if you like, get the State off the unions' backs. And in the US case they had this discussion, they very narrowly decided not to, and then that became the sort of entrenched position thereafter, year after year, they just kept endorsing it.

Whilst in the Australian case, they overturned the traditional apolitical position and went down the road has led the Australian Labor Party to exist ever since.

Geraldine Doogue: My guest on Saturday Extra is Robin Archer, who's written a very interesting book called 'Why is there no Labor party in the United States?'.

You do make the debate sound incredibly intense in the US, very partisan, religion absolutely front and centre, and in a way you say we here in Australia can thank the dry subject of economics for the fact that we pulled back much more to basic issues, didn't we?

Robin Archer: Well I mean all of these are basic issues, but they have very different consequences, and I think people who are concerned about social justice and are concerned about distribution of economic resources, often find it difficult to be in a political environment where the agenda is set by religious type of issues, and in Australia those religious issues did loom from time to time, and certainly in the 20th century, became quite important in the middle of the 20th century. Still overall, they've been far less important than in the United States, and that was particularly true of this time that we're talking about.

Geraldine Doogue: So let's look at what you think that's meant for the two countries, in terms of the political climates that have emerged as a result. Has it made a profound difference that the US did not ever develop a labour-based party, and we did?

Robin Archer: You can say with great confidence that if there had been a labour party in the United States, it's extremely likely that the distribution of income would have been less unequal in that country, that business interests would have had less power in determining policy outcomes, and in particular, and on this there's an enormous scholarship now of 20 or 30 years, that the welfare state, which is so very under-developed in the United States, would have been far more developed. So in these kinds of ways, the US would certainly have been different.

Geraldine Doogue: It's also true, isn't it, that somehow it seems to me, reading your book, because the Australian unions, as they were developing, stressed the worker, they were absolutely obsessed with the worker and the worker's rights, not this socialist ideology that was all very passionate, or not religion; you also got a focus, well maybe more of an emphasis on egalitarianism. Is that possible to draw that conclusion?

Robin Archer: There's no doubt that Australia has a strong egalitarian current, so too does the United States. When Toqueville, the American (sic) aristocrat, goes to the United States in the early 19th century, he's struck above all else by what he calls the equality of manners. By that he means an egalitarianism of social status. It's not an equality of distribution of resources, but an equality of social status. And that too is a very powerful thing in Australia.

Geraldine Doogue: Robin, one last question. How does all this pertain to the incredible build-up to the US Presidential election this year? Is there any sort of long-tail impact of the formation of politics at the end of the 19th century in America, that you think is worth commenting on?

Robin Archer: There are many, many points you could make, but two are perhaps worth emphasising. One is that the enduring importance of religion in defining the meaning of the two main parties, continues on into the 21st century. So you could summarise that by saying that evangelical activists are more important to the Republican party than unionists are to the Democratic party. And the other thing I would say is that liberal ideas, and in particular the idea of individual freedom, which has been given a sort of rough ride by the unsophisticated hands of George W. Bush, has in American history changed, the control of that idea has changed over time, and it's perfectly possible that we could see it changing again, taking it from the hands of people who want to use it for their foreign policy objectives, and taking it back to people who are critical of the United States, but within the United States itself. And the period we're talking about a hundred years ago, was one in which it was labour unions that controlled that language. So the ideas of freedom and the ideas of religion, they both permeate American politics still.

Geraldine Doogue: Robin Archer, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Robin Archer: Thank you.

Geraldine Doogue: And Robin's book is called 'Why is there no Labor party in the United States?' It's published by Princeton University Press. He's now teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences.

Guests

Robin Archer
London School of Economic and Political Sciences

Publications

Title: Why is there no Labor Party in the United States?
Author: Robin Archer
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Story Researcher and Producer

Julie Browning