Coolies or comrades? Labor socialism and the contradictions of internationalism, 1909-22

Abstract

In the first decades after Federation, Australian Labor Socialist intellectuals warned that capitalists desired to reduce Australian labour's working conditions to the "coolie standard." Such dire predictions replicated the derogatory and racialised discourse that defined the white Australian labour standard against that of the indentured "coolie." Yet, alongside this, these movement intellectuals explicitly argued that white labour needed to unite with non-white workers in the region to resist the capitalists' designs. They did so while maintaining faith in White Australia and racial exclusion. This article explores this tortured form of internationalism, and how the concept of the "coolie"..