It's the Left's Victory!

If you’ve been following the recent events in the Ukraine, you will have heard a lot of talk about the Second World War. Kremlin apologists have been quick to seize upon the influence which the Ukraine’s far right exerted in the protests and in the new configuration of political power. Defenders of the Euromaidan protests have retorted by linking Putin’s anti-Western, illiberal, ‘Eurasianist’ political philosophy with Nazism. The folks who have taken over Crimea’s parliament and main airport have been reported as brandishing black and orange ribbons – the colours apparently commemorate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.

This sort of thing isn’t limited to the Russia-Ukraine dispute. Slobodan Milosevic was fond of reminding the West of Serbia’s support for the Allies, and of slandering his Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar opponents for the fact that some of their countrymen collaborated with the Axis. Israel and its defenders are always using the Holocaust to excuse or downplay the Zionist regime’s crimes, and some love to note the role that Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the then-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, played in raising Arab volunteers for the overseas divisions of the SS.

Yes, there were Ukrainian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Palestinian collaborators with the Axis – but every nation and ethnicity has its share of knuckle-dragging right-wing nutjobs. The more fundamental problem with the Nazi analogies is this: the fight against the Nazis was the Left’s.

It was we of the Left who fought the fascists on the battlefields of Spain. It was we of the Left who went underground to resist them. It was left-wing partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Warsaw Ghetto who fought the good fight when Washington and Whitehall would have been happy to make a separate peace with someone like Hess or Göring and use the Nazi state as a bulwark against the Soviets. It was our Revolution in 1917 and our economic policies which gave the Stalinist regime the industrial base and skilled workforce it needed to repel the German invasion – against Tsarist Russia, the Nazi war machine would have overrun Stalingrad and been in Vladivostok by lunchtime.

Every time a right-wing political actor, right-wing political movement, ethnic group, or capitalist state does something and justifies it by citing anti-Nazism, they are stealing the Left’s birthright. The fruits of victory belong not to this or that Eurotrash ethnic group, but to the Left and to the global working class.

Crimea has a Russian majority and its transfer to Ukraine in 1954 was a ridiculous idea. Its inhabitants ought to be able to secede and join Russia, and particular heed should be paid to the wishes of the Crimean Tatars, expelled in 1944 as part of Stalin’s genocidal deportation policies. The United States and its ‘post-racial’ president should also not be supporting the formation of a government backed by far-right demagogues like Svoboda and Right Sector.

But the allusions to the Second World War that are being thrown about by the pro-Russian side of Ukrainian politics are off-base. Fascism emerged as a response to the rise of the Left – a fascist regime is simply capitalism run by different people than the traditional bourgeoisie, like a Silicon Valley corporation in which straight-laced shareholders hand over day-to-day management to a Birkenstock-wearing CEO. There is nothing specifically ‘German’ about fascism, and Russians are not destined by fate to be its victims; indeed, some interesting historical research has been done about the key role played by White Russian émigrés in far-right circles in Munich during Hitler’s formative political years.

When Russian nationalists slag off the new Ukrainian government as a ‘Bandera regime’ (in reference to the wartime collaborationist Ukrainian leader) or evoke the spectre of ‘neo-fascism’ in response to the events in the Ukraine, they are doing the same thing that Israel did in 1961, when it indicted Adolf Eichmann for ‘crimes against the Jewish people’, or that a right-wing Polish leader did in the mid-2000s, when he argued that Poland should get more seats in the European Parliament to make up for all the extra Poles who would be alive if Germany hadn’t killed them all. That is, they are turning a universal ideological struggle into an ethnic bitch-fight, and seeking to monopolise the fruits of victory for their own ethnic group.

The Spanish Republicans, the Greek and Yugoslav partisans, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, and Sophie Scholl did not shed their blood for Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. The cause of anti-fascism was and is the Left’s, and the Left’s alone.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Five

Part Five: A Modern Syndicalism

In this series of posts, I have been sketching a common thread of left-wing thought which rejects both the state-socialist/communist tradition (for its authoritarianism and focus on the interests of the consumer over those of the producer) and the producer-only focus of anarcho-syndicalism, Wobblyism, and pre-war French syndicalism. In this post, I will bring together these different currents of thought (guild socialism, De Leonism, the post-war CGT, the Workers’ Opposition) and propose a synthesis based on the best ideas of each:

*The economy would be a mixed one, resembling Tito’s Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union under the New Economic Policy. The means of production would mostly be publicly owned, but workplaces and industries would be self-governing by the workers employed therein, subject to a degree of worker-consumer co-determination. Small businesses, sole traders, and private agriculture would continue to exist, and much of the retail and distribution sector would be taken over by consumers’ co-operatives.

*In the sectors of the economy in which the means of production are publicly owned, the relevant union would be charged with co-ordinating the activities of workplaces, by planning; procuring supplies and raw materials; organising distribution, branding, and marketing; and conducting research and development. In order to safeguard the interests of consumers, each industry will also have a state-appointed regulatory body, whose powers would be modelled on those historically exercised by the United States’ Interstate Commerce Commission with regards to preventing undue price rises and restrictions on output.

*Workers would keep all profits made, and workers in each workplace or industry would decide democratically how these would be split among them or re-invested. (If the new economic system comes about peacefully, a portion of the profits might be designated to compensating the former capitalist owners of the means of production.)

*The United States’ National Labor Relations Act would be adopted, in which a majority vote in a ‘bargaining unit’ is required to unionise the entire membership of the bargaining unit. By adopting bargaining units covering an entire industry, class-conscious industrial unions can secure compulsory unionism in their sector of the economy by majority vote. (The National Labor Relations Board did something like this in 1938, when it settled a jurisdictional dispute between the AFL and the CIO by placing all West Coast longshoremen, from San Diego to Anchorage, in a single bargaining unit.)

*The members of these unions would directly elect local, regional, and national officials of their union, as well as their union’s delegates to the All-Industrial Congress. The All-Industrial Congress would settle disputes between the unions, plan the national economy, arrange financing for new investment, and co-ordinate foreign trade. The unions, as well as militant minorities within them, would retain all rights to engage in industrial action.

*A number of consumers’ co-operatives, modelled on the British co-operative movement, would be set up with state aid. These would purchase products from the unions and agricultural marketing boards, and operate retail stores, returning their profits to their members through a ‘dividend’ weighted according to purchases made. Co-operative officers would be elected on a one-member-one-vote basis, and co-operatives would federate at local, regional, and national levels.

*To represent the interest of consumers of public utilities and public services, the nation would be covered in a patchwork of American-style special districts, dealing with subjects such as roads, railways, water, sewerage, electricity, gas, telecommunications, schools, health, and housing. These bodies would be elected for two-year terms of office by all residents of the relevant jurisdiction, and would act as consumers’ co-operatives, procuring goods or services from the relevant union(s).

*To deal with the remaining functions of the state (taxation, high politics, law and order, constitutional affairs), there would be established at local, regional, and national levels a series of soviets. On local soviets in each city, town, and shire, three-fifths of delegates would be elected by local union branches, while the remaining two-fifths would be split between delegates elected by local consumers’ co-operatives and appointees of special districts whose jurisdiction overlaps that of the soviet. Local soviets would send recallable delegates to regional Congresses of Soviets, which would in turn send recallable delegates to the national Congress of Soviets. All soviets would elect their executive committees, as well as regulatory bodies acting in the interest of consumers.

*Domestic purchasing power would be increased via the creation of extra scrip money, which loses value over time so as not to cause inflation (as proposed in the early twentieth century by the German-Argentine economist Silvio Gesell). This scrip would be put into the money supply so as to make up the shortfall between aggregate demand and aggregate output.

*Agricultural produce, both for domestic consumption and for export, would be purchased in bulk by grower-controlled marketing boards modelled on the Australian Wheat Board.

*International trade would be structured so as to allow developing countries the chance to industrialise. (In any case, increased domestic purchasing power resulting from the creation of the scrip will remove all countries’ need to dump their excess output in foreign markets.) Developing countries would practice import-substitution industrialisation, and would form OPEC-style cartels for various categories of agricultural produce and minerals.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Four

Part Four: Detroit and Donetsk

An early Soviet propaganda poster exhorted its readers:

Let’s take the torrent of the Russian revolution

Add the effectiveness of American technology

And construct socialism!

On a similar note, Bolshevik leader and former New York resident Nikolai Bukharin called for the party to “add Americanism to Marxism”. For them, and for many other leftists of their generation, the United States symbolised all that was modern and progressive.

In the first post in this series, I mentioned that the political base of Daniel De Leon and his Socialist Labor Party was in Detroit. In 1914, it was attempting to organise workers at Henry Ford’s automotive plant at River Rouge. To stave off the threat of unionisation and reduce staff turnover, Ford more than doubled the daily pay of his employees to the previously unthinkable five dollars, reducing the working day from nine hours to eight in the process. Thus, syndicalism – or the threat thereof – provoked one of the most important changes in the nature in capitalism.

Fordism was the practical implementation of the ‘scientific management’ theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer from Philadelphia who had become a household name in the United States in the early 1910s thanks to his work on rationalising the operations of firms. Aside from raising wages and lowering the prices of consumer goods, Fordism aimed at simplifying production methods so as to reduce the power of skilled workers, the base of the early American craft unions. Indeed, Fordism was opposed by the class-collaborationist leader of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gospers, and welcomed by the IWW, which fancied its chances of recruiting all the new unskilled workers created in the Detroit factories.

When these techniques spread across the Atlantic, they initially met with fierce resistance. As mentioned earlier, the quasi-syndicalist Workers’ Opposition arose in Russia and the Ukraine to resist the Taylorist policies of the Soviet leadership in the transport and metallurgy industries. In France, the then-syndicalist CGT said that the worker under the Taylorist regime was “reduced to a machine without a soul, producing intensely and excessively”. But after the War, much of the European Left came round to the position of a German writer who stated that Fordism was “the most powerful and welcome ally of socialism”. The new breed of CGT leaders such as Jouhaux and Merrheim became supporters of both Fordism and the consumerist economy which was the logical product of its proto-Keynesian stimulation of demand (which meshed nicely with their revision of pre-war producer-only syndicalism), while commentators inside and outside of the early Soviet Union hailed it as the world’s first Taylorist state.

In some ways, the CGT’s reconciliation with mass production was not an accident. There was a definite technocratic and productivist strand in left-wing French thought going back to Saint-Simon, the déclassé aristocrat and early nineteenth-century utopian socialist who proposed a new order based on industrial progress, full employment, class collaboration, and technocracy. It was Saint-Simon who first introduced the concept of the ‘government of men’ being replaced by the ‘administration of things’. CGT leaders and thinkers in the 1910s adapted some saint-simonien ideas, such as the central role of technology in economic history, and used them to reassess their own ideas. For example, the Marxist contention that capitalism was doomed by a falling rate of profits was held to be negated by mass production and mass consumption.

While the Left saw the emancipatory potential in Fordism, it was Europe’s reactionaries who defended the small workshop and craftsman of the nineteenth century against this new invasion. Rightists such as French electoral geographer and future Vichy collaborator André Siegfried bemoaned the homogenising and levelling social effects of consumerism; a fashionable Frenchwoman, Siegfried moaned, could no longer be the only lady in Paris wearing a particular type of hat if hats were being mass produced for an undifferentiated mass market. Unlike the twenty-first century, when so-called ‘leftists’ take up middle-class NIMBY concerns about development and growth and attack popular consumption habits, the Dieselpunk era was one in which the Left was the side of politics which hailed technological advance and consumerism.

With the economic climate of the New Economic Policy being open to the granting of concessions to foreign capitalists, Henry Ford took the opportunity to set up a plant at Nizhny Novgorod (later known until the fall of communism as Gorky) in 1929. The Soviet regime’s emulation of American industry went even further – when it established the planned iron and steel city of Magnitogorsk, the city was modelled on Gary, Indiana. Like many good things about early Soviet society, this flirtation with Americanism was cut short by Stalin’s accession to power.

The Soviet Union in the following years did, however, have its own version of Fordism-Taylorism. Named after Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner from the Donetsk region who supposedly hauled a ridiculous amount of coal in a short period of time, the Stakhanovite movement was the regime’s way of exhorting workers to higher productivity. Writers on the subject have suggested that Stakhanovism was less about increasing the authority of management, and was instead a way for the regime to harness the workers against their managers; nevertheless, Stakhanovism was only an incomplete adaptation of Fordism, lacking the high wages and consumerism of its American counterpart.

The impact of Ford’s new way of doing business was profound enough that the era from (approximately) the 1920s to the 1960s is referred to as the ‘Fordist’ period, and that Aldous Huxley portrayed his dystopian future society in Brave New World (1931) as worshipping Ford as a deity. While Ford was hostile to unions, many syndicalists saw his methods as beneficial to the material prosperity of the working class, while also providing a blueprint for a rationally governed post-capitalist economy.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Three

Part Three: Parallels with Syndicalism/Guild Socialism in Yugoslavia and Broken Hill

Although history furnishes no examples of syndicalist states as such, a (very partial) imitation was found in Yugoslavia under communist rule. After Marshal Tito’s early rift with Moscow, the Yugoslav regime wanted to differentiate itself ideologically from the Soviet Union, and fell back on an old idea common to syndicalism and libertarian forms of socialism – workers’ self-management. Reportedly, when presented with the idea by an advisor, Tito paced around the room and exclaimed: “[f]actories belonging to the workers – something that has never yet been achieved!”

The system in operation in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia resembled syndicalism and guild socialism in its broad outlines. Workers in state-owned firms elected works councils, managers, and delegates to federations of enterprises in each industry, and shared in the election of firm directors with the organs of state power. They procured parts and raw materials, and marketed the products of the labour autonomously, in a mixed economy more like the New Economic Policy than anything in the post-1928 Soviet Union (indeed, Yugoslavia’s public sector accounted for a lower share of the country’s workforce than in some ostensibly capitalist countries). In common with other communist regimes, however, it lacked a strong trade union movement independent of the state which could provide a solid basis for working-class power; otherwise, its system of worker-state co-determination was reminiscent of the ideas of the Lyon congress, the Plumb Plan, and the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain plan mentioned in earlier posts. At the height of the experiment, however, the system was working: in the 1950’s, Yugoslavia was the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Tito: the only communist leader to give ‘the factories to the workers’

Tito’s Yugoslavia also embraced, for a time, another aspect of syndicalism and guild socialism. Between 1956 and 1963, it operated a bicameral legislature with a lower house elected by territorial constituencies and a ‘Council of Producers’, in which voters selected representatives based on their economic function (with a touch of malapportionment favouring industry over agriculture). This feature, however, was later dropped – given Yugoslavia’s ethnic and national antagonisms, its leaders preferred to use the upper house of its legislature for the ‘senatorial’ function of equally representing its constituent republics. While it lasted, however, the Council of Producers could be seen as carrying on the tradition of the CGT, De Leon, Kollontai, and Cole, who argued for separate bodies to represent producing and consuming interests.

While there was no officially stated link between Titoism and syndicalism or guild socialism, orthodox communists were quick to draw the comparison, branding Tito with the tag of ‘syndicalist deviationist’ that they had bestowed on Kollontai in 1921. In addition, one of Tito’s chief economic advisors had studied in London and was familiar with the works of the guild socialists.

As described in two earlier posts, Broken Hill provided a good model of working-class rule in action during the middle chunk of the twentieth century, when it was Australia’s ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’. The Barrier Industrial Council functioned in the way the fin-de-siècle French syndicalists imagined their bourses du travail would operate. It enforced a virtual city-wide closed shop, negotiated with employers on behalf of its constituent unions, and regulated social conditions, prices, and labour markets in the Silver City.

Like the guild socialists’ proposed guilds, Broken Hill’s mining unions oversaw the supply of labour in their industry, limiting the mining companies’ ability to choose their employees to men born in the town or qualifying by a period of residency. Echoing Cole’s concept of ‘encroaching control’, they infringed upon the prerogatives of the capitalists, such as in the 1930s and 1940s when militant ‘job committees’ asserted their freedom to determine how their jobs were to be carried out. The Barrier Industrial Council functioned as a parallel legislature, taking away the initiative in much local economic decision-making from the city council and state and federal governments.

However, the unions at Broken Hill were never – aside from a short period of syndicalist agitation in the immediate aftermath of the First World War – ideologically committed to anti-capitalism. Their contribution to syndicalist/guild socialist theory resides in the practical example that they set: a city in which the working class holds the whip hand would look a lot like mid-twentieth-century Broken Hill.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Two

Part Two: Guild Socialism in Britain

Syndicalism spread to the British Isles, where it was strong among shipbuilders in the west of Scotland and coal miners in South Wales. James Connolly, one of the executed leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, was a syndicalist of the De Leonist variety. It was in Britain, however, that a group of young intellectuals ironed out some of the kinks in early Franco-American syndicalism and transformed it into guild socialism.

The name ‘guild socialism’ gives it a somewhat misleadingly medieval image. Although this was the intent of the first (in 1906) exponent of the guild idea, A. J. Penty, it was expanded upon in the next decade by S. G. Hobson and G. D. H. Cole, who adapted it to the needs of the modern, industrial economy. In the Middle Ages, guilds united the producers in a particular town or city who practiced the same craft. In addition to the trade union-like function of forming a ‘labour cartel’ to secure higher remuneration, they self-regulated their respective industries. They operated at a time when the state lacked the omnipotence it assumed in later centuries, and was instead one of a number of sovereign institutions in society, alongside the church, the guilds, and other voluntary groupings. Both of these aspects of medieval life (control of the economy by producers and the taming of state power) appealed to the guild socialists.

For the guild socialists, however, the ‘guilds’ of which they spoke were not citywide federations of individual artisans, but nationally-organised industrial unions. Like the unions in a syndicalist economy, the guilds would regulate the internal affairs of their industry, ensuring a supply of labour and raw materials and guaranteeing production of goods and services. The break with pre-war syndicalism came in guild socialism’s view of the state. At this time, Fabian socialists frankly admitted that their goal was to run the economy in the interest of consumers rather than producers, hence their use of the state as their preferred instrument. Guild socialists sought a middle path between anarcho-syndicalism and state socialism; for them, the state could not ‘wither away’ because some organisation was necessary to represent the interests of the consuming public, but neither could the state be entrusted with supreme power, as this would be used to oppress producers.

Different guild socialists had different solutions at various times, but the best exposition of the movement’s principles was Cole’s Guild Socialism Re-stated (1920). A post-capitalist society would have guilds to represent producers, who would self-regulate their industry or service. The ‘consumptive’ functions of the state would be hived off to councils elected on a geographical basis at local, regional, and national levels. There would be Co-operative Councils for regular goods and services, Collective Utilities Councils for public utilities, and Cultural Councils and Health Councils for education, health, and other public services. (Although Cole doesn’t make the connection, these bodies would be similar to the patchwork of special districts in American local government, and which, in the form of school boards and boards for administering the Poor Laws, still existed in Cole’s Britain.) Local, regional, and national ‘communes’, uniting producers’ and consumers’ bodies in equal measure, would carry out the remaining functions of the state: taxation, the police power, high politics, and demarcation of functions in the network of guilds and councils.

A further idea of the guild socialists was the doctrine of ‘encroaching control’. Rejecting both the parliamentary tactics of the official labour movement and blanquiste revolutionary methods of the communists (not to mention Sorel’s general strike), they developed a third way between the two. Instead of merely agitating for wage increases and security of tenure, unionists would seek to wrest managerial powers, such as the appointment of foremen and the supplying of labour, away from the capitalists. In this way, the capitalists would be transformed from dictators of the economy to constitutional monarchs, until they became superfluous.

During and after the war, guild socialism began to permeate the thinking of the labour movement. In 1919, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain proposed the public ownership of the mines, with national, regional, and local committees comprising an equal ratio of delegates elected by the workers and appointees of the state. Its influence could be seen in the French CGT’s 1919 proposals for tripartite worker-consumer-state co-determination of nationalised firms (mentioned in the previous post, and which Cole regarded as bearing a close resemblance to guild socialism), and in the Plumb Plan, a proposal for the nationalisation of American railways which assigned workers, management, and the state one-third of the members of national and regional boards to govern the industry.

Unfortunately, Cole wasn’t able to resist the lure of consumer-based socialism, and was more or less a card-carrying Fabian by the end of the 1920s (though at least he didn’t follow the trajectory of certain Fabians towards useful idiocy for Uncle Joe). The ideas that he developed as a young radical intellectual, however, serve as a guide to how the interests of producers and consumers can be reconciled in a post-capitalist society. Although the Cole of Guild Socialism Re-stated rejected syndicalism as the producer-centred mirror image of consumer-centred state socialism, it is clear that syndicalists such as Jouhaux and Merrheim, De Leon, and Kollontai were moving in his direction.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part One

It’s been a while since I set out my political philosophy on this blog, and my views have changed a little since then. This, therefore, is something of a manifesto in the form of a history lesson.

Part One: Syndicalism in France, the United States, and Russia

Syndicalism, derived from the French syndicat, meaning ‘trade union’, was described by the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica as “the most purely proletarian in origin” of all then-existing political ideologies. It was first espoused in France around the turn of the century, where it was associated with the publication Le Mouvement socialiste, edited by Hubert Lagardelle. Lagardelle promoted segregation of social classes (as a reaction to the middle-class domination of socialism), opposed parliamentarism and liberal democracy, and defended the right of a militant minority (similar yet different from the Leninist conception of the vanguard party) to act on behalf of the working class. The next major French syndicalist thinker to emerge was Georges Sorel, who published Reflections on Violence in 1908. This work gave the syndicalist movement the concept of the general strike, which would be used to bring down capitalism and the bourgeois state.

The key to understanding the rift between syndicalism and socialism is the question of whose interests a post-capitalist economic order ought to serve. Socialism, particularly in its Fabian and Leninist/Stalinist varieties, sees the administrative state as the agent which should control the economy in the interests of all. Syndicalists understood that the state’s function is to represent people in their capacity as consumers (of public utilities and public services), and thus sought to give to the workers in each workplace, firm, and industry a large degree of self-government. This necessarily entailed the disappearance of the state, and the management of the economy by producers organised in a nationwide federation of trade unions. (As we shall see, guild socialists and post-war syndicalists modified their views to provide some space for the expression of both consumers’ and producers’, interests.) Put simply, syndicalism puts its faith in the workers themselves, and in their self-created organisations (trade unions and co-operatives), rather than in the state or in majoritarian public opinion.

Syndicalism was at its most powerful and widespread in the first fifth of the twentieth century. It was the dominant ideology in the trade union movements of France, Italy, Spain, and Argentina. In France, it also inspired the formation of bourses du travail (‘exchanges of labour’; roughly equivalent to Australian Trades Halls), which syndicalists conceived of as the local governing bodies of their future society, which would regulate local economic conditions and the supply of labour.

Paris’s bourse du travail

France’s syndicalist-led union body, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was divided over the question of the First World War, and in the resulting convulsions the dominant anti-political strand of thought lost power to a new species of syndicalist. At its first post-war congress at Lyon in 1919, the CGT called for the socialisation of transportation, mining, electricity generation, and banking, but balked at putting the power to run these industries in the hands of the state. It also shied away from advocating control by the workers only; instead, it called for workers, organised consumers (co-operatives and industrial consumers), and the state to each elect one-third of the board of the socialised concerns, with the state’s quota to be further split between national, regional, and municipal government. Further proposed reforms included profit-sharing in the socialised industries, and a Conseil Economique du Travail (‘Economic Council of Labour’), which united the CGT with white-collar unions and co-operatives, and which was conceived as a replacement for the parliament. Anarcho-syndicalists have portrayed the Lyon congress as the victory of a reformist wing over the previously dominant radical wing of the CGT; a better explanation is that leaders such as Léon Jouhaux and Alphonse Merrheim took note of ideological developments in England, the United States, and Russia to craft a syndicalism fit for a modern, industrial, productivist economy.

Across the Atlantic, the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the ‘Wobblies’) was formed in Chicago in 1905, an attempt to create the industrial unionists’ ‘One Big Union’. The IWW rapidly gained a sizeable following, particularly among unskilled and/or immigrant workers, and its influence spread to Britain and Australia. After the war, it was one of the main targets of the First Red Scare. State legislatures passed ‘criminal syndicalism’ laws, criminalising the advocacy of syndicalist doctrines, and IWW members were lynched and assassinated by Pinkerton agents.

Daniel De Leon became a key figure in the Socialist Labor Party in 1890 and supported the foundation of the IWW in 1905. He split from the Wobblies in 1908, however, and his Detroit-based faction later rebadged itself as the Workers’ International Industrial Union. The cause of the split was the question of political action; the majority ‘Chicago faction’ followed the same anti-political line as the pre-war CGT, while De Leon saw the IWW and SLP as two pillars of a dual strategy by the working class to overthrow capitalism. If this goal were accomplished, however, he saw no further place for the SLP, arguing that it should have Congress “adjourn sine die” and leave the management of industry to the unions, which would be united in an All-Industrial Congress, meeting not in D.C. but in a Midwestern industrial centre such as Chicago, and governing the nation by finding “the statistics of the wealth needed, the wealth producible, and the work required”. De Leon had added the concept of political action to the economistic doctrines of the IWW and CGT, but shared their blanket condemnation of the state (although modern De Leonist groups often do provide for separate economic and political legislatures). It would be left to others to provide for the representation of consumers alongside producers.

Daniel De Leon: father of political syndicalism

Although most syndicalists around the world welcomed the October Revolution, it wasn’t long before they had buyers’ remorse when the Fabian instincts of the Bolshevik regime became clear to all. Syndicalist ideas motivated many of the leftist opponents of the Bolsheviks, and touched a raw nerve with the authoritarian state-socialists in the Kremlin, who slandered one such group, the Workers’ Opposition, as a “syndicalist and anarchist deviation” at the 1921 party congress. Trotsky, the slayer of the Kronstadt rebels, hysterically squealed that “[t]hey have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party”.

The public face of the Workers’ Opposition was Alexandra Kollontai, radical feminist, first People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, and first Soviet ambassador to Norway. The faction received its strongest support from workers in those industries – primarily metallurgy and transport – which had been most thoroughly revolutionised by Taylorist or Fordist production techniques. Although it didn’t cite any foreign influences, the ideology of the Workers’ Opposition closely resembles De Leonism. Kollontai called for management of the economy by the workers themselves, via trade unions uniting in a central body akin to De Leon’s All-Industrial Congress. She didn’t call for the abolition of the state, however, and proposed the leave the Bolshevik Party in charge in the ‘political’ sphere, giving it a role somewhat similar to De Leon’s SLP.

Alexandra Kollontai: ‘syndicalist deviant’

Thus, when we combine the ideas of the Lyon congress, De Leonism, and the pamphlets of the Workers’ Opposition, we have a type of syndicalism which conceives of two supreme bodies jointly controlling a society: on the one side, an economic governing body channelling the interests of producers, and on the other, a political governing body channelling the interests of citizen-consumers, as well as a two-pronged strategy – militant industrial unions and a party – for the working class to attain power.

Silver and Red: a history of working-class power in Broken Hill (part two)

In 1953, the Sydney Morning Herald published a series of three articles entitled ‘Broken Hill To-day’ (available here, here, and here). Written during a period when the conservative state Opposition was making a fuss about the Silver City’s culture of drinking and gambling, they provide an interesting glimpse of how the city’s unique social system was viewed by outsiders.

In the second article, it is noted that the city had thirty-nine hotels and nine licensed clubs serving a population of 32 000. There were also twelve thousand motor vehicle registrations there (roughly one per family), and Broken Hill reputedly had the highest bank savings per capita of any Australian city. This highlights the level of prosperity among ordinary people in Broken Hill. The city could also boast lower rates of drunkenness, crime, and juvenile delinquency than the state at large.

The articles also add to the picture of the BIC’s power: the writer labels the Council “the most remarkable feature of Broken Hill, apart from the line of lode itself”. The Council owned a greyhound racing track, which put on races “two Saturdays out of three” (and on the other Saturday, punters could attend the horse racing track, owned by the mining companies).

The third article describes in detail the lead bonus, which dated from a 1924 round of wage negotiations and had first kicked in when the price per ton of lead had hit £16 in 1934 – at the time of writing, it was £111, giving mine employees a bonus of £12 per week, almost one-half of which went into a superannuation account. The result of this was that miners actually earned more than the government-appointed mine inspectors.

The little workers’ utopia on the Barrier didn’t last, however. The bargaining power of workers in a mining town is very much dependent on the continuing high export prices of its commodities (in this case silver, lead, and zinc). Furthermore, the BIC’s conservative social policies would eventually bring it unstuck: its bar on married women working in unionised occupations eventually fell foul of anti-discrimination laws. After the mining companies managed to wriggle out of the six-decade-old wage negotiation arrangements in 1986, the mines’ workforce dropped to 1300 within the decade, and the city now depends on fads like eco-tourism. Macquarie Street’s nanny-statism also destroyed the city’s culture; its world-famous two-up school was closed in 1984.

Broken Hill’s exceptional system of industrial relations created an economic environment in which the city’s labour force was virtually entirely unionised, wages were high, prices were kept at reasonable levels, and BIC control of the labour market prevented capitalists from using the threat of unemployment to discipline workers. The BIC could have extended its power further: it could have established its planned network of co-operatives, or it could have used the superannuation fund created by the ‘lead bonus’ to purchase shares in the mining companies (à la the Meidner Plan, proposed by left-wing Swedish social democrats in the 1970s). Still, the working class of the Silver City achieved more freedom from capitalism than any other people in Australian history.

(Fun fact I learned while researching these posts: Srebrenica is also a silver-mining town; its name means ‘silver mine’.)

Silver and Red: a history of working-class power in Broken Hill (part one)

During the heyday of its mining industry, Broken Hill was arguably the most politically radical city in the Commonwealth. Its history provides us with a model of what an Australian model of socialism/social democracy looks like.

Following the First World War and a massive strike in 1919, the Amalgamated Miners Association, which organised the city’s miners, came under the influence of syndicalism and industrial unionism. In the spirit of the industrial unionist desire for ‘One Big Union’, it renamed itself the Barrier District of the Mining Division of the Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia, and sought to lure ‘surface workers’ (i.e. non-miners employed at the miners, such as engineers and train-drivers) away from their existing craft unions. By 1925, the city’s mines were entirely manned by union labour. In this era, the Silver City was a hotbed of left-wing radicalism. It elected to state Parliament the syndicalist sympathiser Percival Brookfield, and to federal Parliament Michael Considine, an unapologetic supporter of the Russian Revolution.

The WIUA played a key role in forming the Barrier Industrial Council in 1923. This represented a move away from its attempts to be the ‘One Big Union’ in the city’s mining industry, as it involved a truce with the unions who competed to organise the surface workers. The BIC also included the unions representing non-mine workers in the city. Such trade union peak bodies are common across Australia, but the BIC distinguished itself from most others in three main ways:

Firstly, it went to great lengths to mobilise workers to join its unions, and to similarly great lengths to enforce the closed shop in all workplaces where it organised. Four times a year, the Council would hold a ‘badge show day’, in which members of its affiliated unions were required to wear their membership badges to work, where a BIC official would inspect them, and all businesses in the town were required to show a sign in their window issued by the BIC to confirm that they only employed union labour. The Council’s efforts in this field were so successful that a 1953 report in the Sydney Morning Herald declared it “impossible…to employ non-union labour in Broken Hill for any length of time”.

Secondly, the Council as a whole, rather than its individual unions, negotiated with the mining companies, the city’s dominant group of employers. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the negotiations between the BIC and the mining companies took place, by mutual consent, outside the framework of the federal industrial relations system. One concession won during the 1920s, which bore fruit in later years, was the ‘lead bonus’, which tied workers’ wages to upward spikes in the price of Broken Hill’s lead on the London Metal Exchange, with just under one-half of the resulting bonus to be paid into a superannuation fund.

Thirdly, the Council used its power to influence the economic and social life of the city. It appointed a Prices Committee, which kept a watchful eye over the cost of living; for example, in 1941, the BIC responded to an increase in the price of beer at the city’s pubs and clubs by boycotting them. A resolution passed at a mass meeting declared that an “increase in the price of beer is a direct attack on our living standard”, and people were forced to journey to Menindee and Cockburn (over the South Australian border) to have a drink. In one of Australia’s most Catholic cities, the BIC also enforced a paternalistic labour market policy, ensuring that women found it impossible to continue working after marriage. It also usually limited work on the mines to those born or educated in Broken Hill, or married to a woman from the city.

The BIC’s original ambitions went even further, however. Its original name was the Barrier Industrial and Political Council, indicating its desire to usurp the functions of the local section of the ALP. It also planned to establish a series of co-operatives which would compete with private businesses in the city. On the other hand, it was successful in establishing its own newspaper, the Barrier Daily Truth, to counter the pro-mining company editorial line of the Barrier Miner.

What the BIC succeeded in creating was arguably the closest thing experienced in the Anglo-Saxon world to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The workers’ representatives on the Council enforced a city-wide closed shop, virtually dictated wages and prices, and were so powerful that Macquarie Street was unable to enforce six o’clock closing and other ‘blue laws’. Decisions on a variety of matters – from bread and butter wage claims to the question of supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War – were taken by mass meetings of workers rather than by union officials.

All this isn’t to say that the unions ruled Broken Hill without opposition. The mining companies were powerful, but hampered by the fact that their owners and directors didn’t live in the city. Non-Labor independents were a permanent feature on the city council, and the RSL encouraged the formation of yellow unions during and after the First World War. The BIC also faced down challenges from its left: communists at regular intervals, the unemployed movement during the Depression, and the (quasi-spontaneist) ‘job committee’ movement later in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the ‘Broken Hill model’ was, while it lasted, the most pro-worker socio-economic regime to have existed on this continent this side of 1788.

Ovens and Murray Grand Final 2013 review: Albury v. Yarrawonga at Lavington

September on the Border means two things: the world-famous Henty Field Days and an Albury-Yarrawonga grand final. For the fifth consecutive year, the Tigers and the Pigeons met at the Lavington Panthers Oval on the penultimate Sunday in September for de facto supremacy in country Victorian football.

After the eighteen-game regular season (punctuated by the league’s representative selection losing to the Mornington Peninsula League at Cardboard Oval Princes Park), Albury emerged as minor premiers; the Big Two had traded home wins in their two encounters, but Yarrawonga had dropped a further four points at Lavington in Round 15. The finals series, conducted according to the bog-standard McIntyre Final Five format and played entirely at neutral venues, then ensued, with Lavington, Wangaratta Rovers, and North Albury (captain-coached by some guy who was in the AFL once) falling by the wayside. The region’s two strongest clubs were left standing to fight it out on the second-last Sunday in September.

The Lavington Sports Club Oval Panthers Oval sits on land on the urban fringe that was once part of Hume Shire, a product of the era when virgin outer suburban land was the fashionable place to build stadiums, leading football administrators to concoct brilliant schemes likes Waverley Park. Under its former name, it hosted two NSWRL pre-season competition finals, one NSW-Victoria Sheffield Shield match, and one match at the 1992 cricket World Cup, in which Zimbabwe, newly ennobled to test status, dismissed Graham Gooch for a duck and held Ian Botham to eighteen to upset England by nine runs. It was to this Hallowed Turf that your humble correspondent would journey to witness the annual titanic struggle between two of the finest eighteens ever assembled in country football.

Earlier in the season, your humble correspondent observed Albury’s thumping victory against cross-town rivals North Albury in the Anzac Day blockbuster, noting that the Tigers’ strength derived from the combination of a strong defence, Chris Hyde’s dominance of the forward line, and the willingness of 2012 Morris Medallist Joel Mackie to Get Stuck In™. The form shown on that day, when the homeboys outclassed the mid-table mediocrity of Akermanis and Friends, evidently continued throughout the season, and the eighteen-time premiers racked up seventeen wins, the minor premiership, and a free pass to the second week of Professor McIntyre’s famous finals format.

In addition to their star recruit being relieved of Dancing With The Stars duties this season, Yarrawonga added to its ranks another ex-AFL player: Brad Ottens, late of the Cattery. The Pigeons were undefeated for most of the year, until they lost two of their last four on away trips to the Queen City of the South. They redeemed themselves by opening up an almighty can of Whoop-Ass on Lavington in the qualifying final at West Wodonga, winning by sixty-four points. Then came the second semi-final at North Albury, and an unexpected thirty-two-point Pigeons victory, spurred by an eight-goal haul by That Man Fev. Banished to the preliminary final, the Tigers travelled to Wangaratta for a derby against Lavington. In a pulsating encounter in which both sides gave 110%, went in hard, put their bodies on the line, and various other clichés of sports journalism, the Tigers came from twenty points behind in the final term to prevail by one point, and booked themselves a spot in the Big Game at the End of the Season.

Going into the match, i gialloneri were without Matt Fowler, the last survivor of their 1990s premiership hat-trick. For the men from Moira Shire, Big Fev needed ten goals to beat the goal-scoring record for an O&M finals series, and eleven to beat the record in a grand final. Brad Ottens was absent for what would have been his fourth game of the season, owing to his commitments with the Geelong VFL team in their grand final against Box Hill. A crowd of eleven thousand (one-fifth of that which patronised the world-famous Henty Field Days) filed into the Lavington Something Something Oval on a bright September-y day, including your humble correspondent, who decided to Bring Tha Noise every time Albury scored a goal by banging on the advertising signs at the far end of the field.

Pre-match entertainment was provided by some guy who was on Australia’s Got Factor or The X-Talent or some such, who regaled the crowd with his Amateur Hour version of Stereophonics’ ‘Dakota’. Topping last year’s act (man-about-television Brian Mannix belting out ‘We Can Be Heroes’ from the back of a Holden ute) evidently proved impossible for the organisers. After said Holden utes paraded local AFL identities, hall of fame inductees, and under-14s best and fairest joint second runners-up around the paddock, we were ready for some action.

The first quarter saw action at both ends. Drew Barnes opened the scoring for the out-of-towners, but Albury led by nine points at the break. Yarrawonga’s star forward began to personify his team’s frustration when he began to engage his opponents in some argy-bargy of the knee-in-stomach variety. Early in the second quarter, the Tigers hit their highest lead for the match – sixteen points – and your humble correspondent was quietly confident about their chances when they led by seven at the half.

Albury’s brilliant idea in the first half was to flood Yarrawonga’s forward line, leaving their own attacking fifty-metre arc as empty as Henty after the world-famous Field Days has left town. This didn’t net them much of a lead, and when the Tigers players began to tire in the second half, and their other brilliant tactical manoeuvre (having two defenders chaperone Fevola) failed, It All Went Pete Tong for the eighteen-time premiers.

In the third quarter, Yarrawonga started playing that High Pressure Football that turned the entire nation purple when the Dockers played it against Sydney the night before. Indeed, the stadium seemed to turn more blue and white, as the entire population of the Yarrawonga-Mulwala conurbation, who were in attendance, got rowdier. Albury ended the quarter in the red, trailing by fifteen points at lemon time.

The ‘money quarter’, as our brothers across the Pacific call it, also witnessed some action of the non-Sherrin-chasing kind. There was the usual handbags-at-twenty-paces stuff between Fevola and however many Albury defenders he wanted to take on, then a nice old brawl in the Yarrawonga forward line which would have had Mr. Demetriou and the other members of the PC Brigade frothing in their Collins Street skinny decaf lattés. To top it off, Tigers enforcer Joel Mackie gave his opposite number the kind of whack on the chin that you just don’t see nowadays outside of Greek parliamentary debates.

For the last three-eighths of the match, Yarrawonga piled on goal after goal while denying Albury any such privilege; the Tigers’ last was at the six-minute mark of the third quarter. Albury’s defence restricted Fevola to four goals, but the rest of the Yarrawonga side picked up the slack.

The Magnificent Moira-gyars were…well, magnificent, combining Fremantlesque pressure in defence with an ability to slot them through from all points in the forward fifty and beyond. Their fifteen-point lead extrapolated itself to thirty-six in the final quarter, and the Pigeons sealed back-to-back premierships. Yarrawonga’s Drew Barnes, playing in his tenth grand final in as many seasons (five for Nathalia and five for Yarrawonga), was awarded the Did Simpson Medal as best on ground, after a Toyota Magic Moments Ad-worthy performance, while Fevola cleared up any doubts about his future within days of the match by committing himself to another two seasons at the J. C. Lowe Oval.

The final score: Yarrawonga 13.12.90 defeated Albury 8.6.54.

And thus ends another season of the world’s finest provincial football league. By winning three of the four encounters between the Big Two (and two from three against the duopoly’s closest challenger, Lavington), the mob from down the river proved themselves worthy premiers.

When his team were eliminated in the elimination final, highly-paid import Jason ‘Aker the Wacker’ blasted Albury for ‘ruining the league’ with its all-star line-up. The facts on the ground, however, indicate that the good burghers of the 060 area code area aren’t at all sick of playing host to one of the biggest superclásicos in Australian sport. Your humble correspondent wouldn’t be alone in wishing for a sixth Albury-Yarrawonga decider in 2014…

The Pivotonians

Recent discussion on United States foreign policy has been focused on the idea of a ‘pivot’, i.e. the Obama Administration shifting Washington’s attention away from Europe and the Middle East and towards Asia (and ‘Asia’ in this context usually means ‘China’). This ‘pivot’ is usually presented as a Good Thing; apparently, the Middle East is doing just fine, Latin America and Africa don’t merit America’s attention, and China’s human rights record and imperialism in Africa pose no barriers to America working with it to solve whatever it is they’re supposed to be solving at these no-tie summits. An Australian scholar, Michael Fullilove, has a piece in the Los Angeles Times which serves as a good study of the mindset of the ‘pivot lobby’.

Opponents often mock neoconservative foreign policy thinkers for believing that ‘it’s always 1938 somewhere’. It’s not just the neocons, however. For anyone with an idea of what American should do and to whom it should do it, the isolationist political climate of the 1930s is always a convenient punching bag.

Fullilove wants Obama to follow in the footsteps of – guess who – FDR, who undertook “the last successful pivot” between the start of World War II and Pearl Harbor. We’ve heard this story a million times: Dieselpunk-era America was rejecting multilateralism, restricting immigration, and building tariff barriers until ‘That Man’ led the nation into a glorious future of peace, security, and progress. Fullilove’s unique take on this narrative is to focus on the work of Roosevelt’s confidants and advisors, but it still combines the Great Man Theory of history with the Green Lantern Theory of the presidency.

The first thing I took issue with in the piece is the idea that isolationism was defeated through FDR’s speechmaking, powers of persuasion, and “subtle diplomacy”. But the story of America in 1939-1941 can’t be told without mentioning the Brown Scare, a smear campaign which ruined more careers and reputations than that of Joe McCarthy. It also ignores domestic political considerations: Roosevelt’s hawkishness and anglophilia lost him votes among German-Americans and Irish-Americans, but those losses were offset by increased support among newer ethnic groups such as Jews, Poles, Czechs, and Serbs, who were registering and voting in greater numbers. Isolationism didn’t lose the battle of ideas – even before Pearl Harbor it was hounded out of the public sphere and its demographic base declined in importance.

What does this have to do with Obama and Asia? Fullilove wants to make an analogy between FDR’s ‘pivot’ and Obama’s tilt towards Asia. But he ends by reminding us that China’s rise “is in no way analogous to the rise of the Axis regimes”. Of course it isn’t: FDR made war against Germany and Japan; today’s Western leaders want to appease China. Raising the spectre of 1939 and 1941 is a rhetorical trick designed to equate opponents of China with Charles Lindbergh.

The regime in Beijing kills dissidents, uses state power to prevent its workers from organising, employs smokestack-chasing economic policies to steal industry from the West, marginalises its racial and ethnic minorities, and is presently trying to outdo Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold II in its efforts to turn Africa into one giant raubwirtschaft. Let’s save the pivoting until after there’s been some regime change in Beijing.

Voting Rights and Wrongs

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, in which a 5-4 majority comprising the usual suspects effectively neutered Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Enacted in 1965, Section 5 requires certain jurisdictions (including Texas, the Deep South, Alaska, Arizona, and three New York boroughs) to obtain ‘preclearance’ from the Justice Department or federal judges in D.C. before making any changes to election law; such proposed changes have been vetoed 2400 times in the last four redistricting cycles. While the Court’s ruling didn’t strike down Section 5, it nullified another section of the law, rendering Section 5 void until Congress passes fresh legislation determining which jurisdictions will be covered, legislation which most observers consider unlikely to pass at all for some time.

The case originated from a 2008 municipal election in the city of Caldera, Alabama, held using district lines not precleared by the Justice Department, and which resulted in the city’s only black councilman losing his seat. Backed by the conservative Project for Fair Representation (the same group behind the recent challenge to the University of Texas’ affirmative action policies), the county, which has had 200 proposed voting changes rejected, sued to extricate itself from the provisions of the Act.

In gutting the Act, the GOP-appointed Justices and the conservative activists pushing the case may have done the Democratic Party a huge favour.

The best-known consequence of Section 5, and the one at issue in the case, is the creation of majority-minority districts. In the early 1990s, the (First) Bush Administration consciously used the preclearance power to its partisan advantage by disapproving congressional district maps lacking the requisite proportion of black-majority seats. The creation of such heavily Democratic (and often oddly-shaped) districts meant that surrounding districts were purged of African-American voters.

When elections were held using the new maps, the Congressional Black Caucus (and its Hispanic counterpart) saw its numbers swell, but the dramatic reduction of southern seats winnable by white Democrats helped the GOP sweep to majority status in the region and the nation in 1994. Today, Democrats hold 40 House seats in the eleven Confederate states, down from 67 in 1991, and similar reductions were seen at state and local level. With the Republicans benefiting from it, and the Democrats unable to risk the seats of minority congresspeople and legislators by challenging it, racial gerrymandering has become entrenched, and ensures that the redistricting process in most of the South is structurally biased in favour of the GOP.

As long as Section 5 remains inoperative, legislatures can still be forced to create majority-minority districts, but through a more time-consuming legal process. Democratic legislators in states covered by the Act can use their influence to draw districts favourable to their party, without being forced to pack super-majorities of Democrats into majority-minority districts. Without the preclearance weapon, a Republican Attorney-General appointed in 2020 won’t be able to shape the new decade’s congressional maps in the way his predecessors did.

Much of the media coverage surrounding the ruling has focused on the potential for states to enact a new wave of voter ID laws. This focus ignores the facts that the vast majority of preclearance decisions under Section 5 concern redistricting rather than laws on voter registration and identification, and that last year’s push by Republican legislators to suppress voter turnout was concentrated in presidential swing states mostly outside Section 5’s reach.

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he is said to have remarked that he was ‘signing away the South for a generation’. By putting the redistricting process in the region back on a level playing field, the Supreme Court may have put an end to the GOP’s takeover of Dixie.

Match review: Albury v. North Albury at Albury

For much of Australian history, the RSL and its allies in the anglophile Tory establishment conspired to make Anzac Day the most boring day of the year. No sport, no shopping, just standing around unquestioningly honouring Australian deaths fighting Other Countries’ Wars. The only consolation was that two-up was legal – which wasn’t much of a consolation because no-one plays two-up the other 364 days of the year, nor knows how to play it, nor remembers why it’s illegal in the first place. Since the mid-1990s, however, Anzac Day has become the occasion for the annual grudge match between two of the fiercest cross-town rivals in Australian sport – Essendon and Collingwood Albury and North Albury.

Football has been played in Albury since 1824, when a lack of Qantas flights forced Hume and Hovell to walk to Melbourne for the Grand Final. Since then, the Queen City of the South has been a veritable footballing mecca, producing two of the five New South Welsh Brownlow medallists and being the fulcrum of the finest league in country Victoria – the Ovens and Murray and Football League, or ‘O&M’ as she is known locally.

In the early days, football in Albury was a sectarian affair, as the city’s two O&M clubs were aligned along religious lines. The rivalry between (Protestant) Albury and (Catholic) St. Patrick’s ensured a bi-annual Old Firm Derby Down Under. By 1929, we had all melded into one big shiny, happy ethnic group called Anglo-Celtics, so Mayor Cleaver Bunton arranged for the two clubs to be replaced by geographical ones, West Albury and East Albury, who then merged four years later to create the present Albury Football Club. As Albury expanded northwards, there was a market for a second local club, and North Albury joined the league in 1947. In 1962, the city annexed itself some lebensraum from Hume Shire called the Black Range, renamed it Lavington, and watched it fill up with people after Mr. Whitlam designated the hyphenated metropolis as one of his growth areas. Lavington’s football team joined Albury and North Albury in the league in 1979, but not before a bare-knuckled fight between the VCFL (which supported Lavington) and the Victorian O&M clubs (who resented the adhesion of another club from the State of Pokies).

In recent years, the O&M has served as a retirement home for aging ex-AFL players who find that country footy is good for keeping fit in between episodes of Dancing with the Stars. Yarrawonga waltzed away with last year’s premiership with the help of former Carlton and Brisbane forward Brendan Fevola. Wangaratta Rovers are home to Big Bad Bustling Barry Hall, Albury enjoyed a brief visit from the only man in history to hold aloft both the AFL premiership cup and the Sam Maguire Cup (Tadhg Kennelly), and North Albury have this year secured the services of 2001 Brownlow medallist Jason Akermanis as playing coach.

Your humble correspondent trekked to the hallowed turf of the Albury Sports Ground, a poorly-drained, picket-fenced venue nestled between the Riverina Highway and the municipal pool, to take in this year’s event. Albury (the Tigers) had won three premierships in a row before succumbing to Fevola’s Pigeons by two goals in 2012, and had made a good start to the season, defeating Lavington, Corowa, and Wodonga. North (the Hoppers) finished last in 2012, but had won two of their first three matches, including a 117-point routing of Wangaratta the previous Saturday. Entry to the only venue in country NSW to have hosted a VFL/AFL home-and-away game (North Melbourne v. South Melbourne, 1952) was twelve dollars, and a crowd of approximately five thousand settled in for a cracking contest on the sunshine-bathed oval.

The match began in the usual fashion with the Last Post, a minute’s silence, and some local performer murdering the national anthem. Neither side wore its traditional guernsey – North’s bottle green has been replaced by peppermint and Albury were decked out in some monstrous grey and white number. Albury began the match strongly, piling on a 23-point lead by the first change. They extended their lead to thirty-three at half-time. The first two terms were marked by Albury’s dominance in the midfield, North’s reliance on their star recruit, and the mismatch between North’s forwards and Albury’s backs – themes which would be apparent for most of the match.

Then came half-time and one of the weirdest things witnessed at a country footy ground. In order to determine a winner for its raffle, the Albury Football Club in its infinite wisdom hired a helicopter to circle the Hallowed Turf late in the second quarter. After landing in the centre square to collect a box of golf balls, it returned to the skies to drop the balls onto the field; the entrant whose ticket number was on the ball nearest a flag deposited in the centre circle won the raffle. If there was a point to it all, the announcer’s explanation was drowned out by the helicopter’s blades.

Normal service resumed when the two sides returned to the field and continued much as they had in the first half. The Tigers steadily built up a lead which briefly erred on the side of ten goals mid-way through the third quarter. There then followed a purple patch for the men in peppermint. Albury’s lead was quickly reduced to thirty-five, as North kicked five straight goals, two of them scored by the Lithuanian Marvel resting in the forward line. At one stage, North got within twenty-eight points of the home side, and the Hoppers faithful started dreaming of a comeback of North Melbourne-Essendon-2001 proportions.

It wasn’t to be, and the number of visiting fans dwindled in the final quarter as they packed up their fold-out Bunnings chairs and headed home to avoid the tinny strains of ‘Yellow and Black!’ coming from the speakers. (Albury takes its club song from Richmond, not from those other Tigers downstream [Glenelg], who once celebrated victories to the refrain of ‘we’re dashing, we’re gay / we’re the pride of the bay’, until the language of Shakespeare had so evolved that ‘gay’ had come to mean something else entirely.)

A post-siren behind by Matt Fowler, the only surviving veteran of the Tigers’ mid-90s threepeat, gave Albury the win by a margin of forty-three points, 19.15.129 to 13.8.86. Thus concluded an enjoyable if mostly one-sided spectacle, and a much better way to spend Anzac Day than tossing coins in the air and filling Bruce Ruxton’s coffers. It was a commanding performance from the home side, who look Premiership Material™ after only four rounds. Boosted by reigning Morris Medallist and connoisseur of that sorely-lacking ingredient in modern football – The Biff – Joel Mackie, and lifted by a best-on-ground performance from Chris Hyde (ex-Richmond), the Tigers simply had North’s measure. As the Border Mail put it, “[t]he Tigers just don’t lose when it counts.”

For North, Akermanis was certainly one of the best players on ground. Unlike a certain other ex-AFL player in the O&M who stands in the goal square and expects the ball to be delivered to him on a silver platter, Aker gets stuck in. Jason Gram (ex-St. Kilda) went into the game with an injury and scored nothing at full-forward, Kane Godde was the match’s top scorer with five goals, while the Hoppers’ Territorian goalsneak Jethro Calma-Holt, not content simply with having the coolest name since Che Cockatoo-Collins, showed flashes of brilliance in a losing cause. The coach has attacked unnamed teammates, suggesting that the Hoppers have only four players who performed – himself, Godde, Calma-Holt, and the other one, as Lord Palmerston said of the third person besides a dead man and a madman who understood the Schleswig-Holstein Question, I’ve forgotten.

The win puts Albury second on the ladder and equal on points with Fevola-wonga, who won their Downstream Derby against Corowa by 134 points on Saturday. North, who fancied themselves after last week’s demolition of the Magpies, were brought down to earth in a big way and sit fifth, with Lavington and Wangaratta Rovers filling the places in between. The smart money would be on a fifth consecutive Albury-Yarrawonga grand final pairing, but North, Lavington, and Rovers are also contenders.

This, Mr. Demetriou, is what footy is about – twelve dollars for admission, manual scoreboards, golf balls raining down like hailstones on the centre square, drunkards yelling ‘Go Hoppers, Go, Go, Go!’, and not a calf’s blood injection in sight.