Between 1775 and 1930 Anglo-American and Australian worker politics were centred on the belief that working people endured economic inequality through the unfair social division of wealth. Regardless of political affiliation, contemporary working-class radicals saw the solution to what was variously described as ‘the labour problem’, ‘the economic problem’, or ‘the social problem’ as the return of most or all of a nation’s wealth from those who had accumulated it to those that had originally produced it—a perspective described by North American historians as producerism. Following sections on precursors in British and American sources, the study looks at producerism at two important junctures in the political and economic history of New South Wales: the 1840s, and the period 1890-1930. Both were times of severe or fluctuating economic conditions and political mobilisation. The first period witnessed a middle-class challenge for control of the state. It utilised a constitutional radicalism that enlisted the working classes through cautious use of producerist argument. These producerist references tended to be oblique and muted but nevertheless offer proof of its existence in the colony. The second was one of direct working-class challenge for state power, where producerism’s presence as the guiding force of worker politics was more obvious. Beginning in the depression of the 1890s it looks at how the radical literature associated with Australian socialism, syndicalism and labourism built cases for economic and social justice on producerist foundations. In this way it underlined worker politics until a precipitous post-1930 decline. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/181783 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Cole, Harry, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds