Bodies on the waterfront: and consultants in the dock.

There is nothing quite so enlivening as standing with others in common purpose. Over the last few weeks the press of bodies, the linking of arms, the passionate mutuality of strangers unself-consciously change simple rhyming slogans, MUA, here to stay, MUA here to stay', all contributed to the spirit of solidarity in a way that the media could never convey.

Lots of us will never forget one of the key moments of the waterfront confrontation. Nobody had slept that night. For hours we stood tightly and immovably together outside the main gates at East Swanson Dock in Melbourne. Forewarned by television reports that this was the night that the picket would be broken, three thousand demonstrators faced a formation of advancing police officers. From the middle of the demonstration crowd, I could see the silhouettes of the mounted police, but it was hard to tell how many. The loud hailer telling us that lawyers were standing by to take us through any custody problems only added to the tension. `We don't want any heroes,' shouted Mick Cottrell, MUA branch organiser. `If you want to throw your weight around, if you want to wreck all that we've achieved over the last eighty-one days, then go down the back with the other lads.'

It was pre-dawn cold. The mood was disciplined. The morning was moonless dark. The barricaded street was lit by the searchlights of a helicopter whirring close overhead, and by the distant civil glow of the city corporate offices off to the east. Fires which earlier had been blazing to keep people warm had been put out in anticipation of the danger they might cause if the chaos of bodies being dragged away evenmated. Thick white smoke from the dying fires was fanned down by the helicopter and hung over us giving the search beams a war-zone intensity.

A few more hours passed. The police moved back a little, formation lines were shuffled, and over the loudspeaker someone shouted that another thousand people were heading towards the docks--building workers arriving for their morning shift were leaving worksites in the city to join us. It felt like the cavalry were coming. The police moved back further as dawn broke over the dockyards. Tension eased, demonstrators broke ranks and wandered through the police lines. It seemed as if the night had marked the turning point in the whole dispute, and in some ways perhaps that was true. However, in the days that followed, the locus of attention moved to Federal and High Courts, to the role of the administrators of the insolvent Patrick's subsidiaries, and to shadowy figures skulking in airport lounges. The pickets continued on, but for most Australians they were no more than a dramatic mediated backdrop to the unfolding court-room drama and a growing intrigue over high-level conspiracy.

Let me start again at the beginning, but this time by asking some questions with the benefit of hindsight. Is it possible to properly convey the depth, the reality, the importance of direct action, and then to say in the same breath that such solidarity can all too easily be reduced to a politics of the moment---or worse? Is it possible to celebrate with the dockworkers in their historical moment of victory when the lockout ended at 6.15 p.m., 7 May 1998, and then say that in the long run unless their approach changes they will almost inevitably be ruthlessly swallowed up by late capitalism? I don't want to diminish the fundamental importance of face-to-face relations in developing an alternative politics--quite the opposite. It is an enrichment of such relations that would form the basis of any self-sustained instituting of intermeshing communities. Even as `accountable' bodies on the waterfront, the picket was a necessary condition of the successful legal challenge that followed. It was profoundly politicising to compare the intense faces of the anonymous waterfront picketers with the slimy fire-side visage of the Minister for Workplace Relations. The more Peter Reith used the phrase `quite frankly' to begin his sentences, the more he subverted his own intention of portraying intimate honesty.

With all that being confirmed, it still needs to be said that direct action in the form of occasional reaction to instances of gross injustice will not in itself stop the tidal wave of global change that is drowning us all in world's best practice. Even the direct action that kept those stalwarts amongst us going back to the picket lines night after night is not enough in itself. Unless it is connected to a more thorough-going practice of embodied politics, direct action is an activity that enervates into empty slogans and Victoria Bitter or caffe latte post-mortems. It is displaced into court-room proceedings and battles over fine points of law. It is swallowed up in the rhetorical support from the leader of the Labor Party while he refrains from criticising the acts of parliament that gave Chris Corrigan and his accountants such vainglorious hopes in the first place.

It is indicative of the problem that throughout the dispute the Maritime Union of Australia did little to make substantial contact with the rest of the community except on its own terms. The Victorian Trades Hall made a valiant attempt to go beyond this in a demonstration that attracted 100,000 people, but this was not sustained. Going back to that night at East Swanson dock, during the hours and hours of briefings over the loud hailer none of the speakers mentioned issues that went beyond the immediate. There was nothing about the restructuring of the economy that is intensifying work for those who have it, nothing about the drive for efficiency, productivity and import-driving consumerism that frames the lives of all of us, and nothing about the dark side of a technological revolution that is making a significant proportion of the population economically unnecessary and socially forgotten.

Similarly, throughout most of the dispute the best that union leaders could manage was to point out that if Patrick Stevedores gets away with sacking the 1400 dockworkers no job will be safe from comparable deviousness. No fuss was made, for example, of a quiet test case in February, when the United States food transnational Simplot sacked all the workers at its Echuca Leggos plant, offering to re-employ them on contract through Manpower Ltd, a US-based labour supply company. And the union movement continue to be strangely silent on the probability that, having ostensibly won the dispute, up to a half of the jobs they saved will be lost over the next couple of years in negotiated restructuring.

It is not a matter of simply laying the blame for this on the MUA--they were fighting for their working lives. The problem runs much deeper. The organised Left in Australia is now institutionalised into peak bodies with little more sense of how to generate community solidarity than a public relations firm. When Hazel Hawke was drown into a television advertising campaign to support the wharfies, and when the ACTU followed the ALP into commissioning market research to tell it how best to develop and manage its views in the public sphere, the organised Left fell into a ghastly shadowing of the Liberal Party Both are reduced to following the recommendations of spin doctors. In the past Hazel's ex-husband--currently better known as BI from the white dressing-gown brigade--would have been brought out to negotiate some sort of settlement. Now the game is even tougher. This time it is soft sell on hard issues with caricatured content. One side talked of guard dogs and mace while the other cynically played and replayed upon the images of distressed young children used by `self-interested labour aristocrats' to bolster their picket line. Each side was playing the game of image politics.

If there ever was a time in Australian history when the Left has had a chance to talk deeply and seriously about the necessity of developing new principles of social life and social organisation this must be one of them. One way of doing this is to see the dispute in historical context. The `victory' on the waterfront coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the May 1968 demonstrations, extraordinary events that at the time suggested a revolutionary aversion to the excesses of modernity. Remembering that only months after that period of ferment the cold Right of Gaullist France resumed power, we can only conclude that thoroughgoing change will take a long revolution conducted across all level's of politics. It should go without saying that this will not satisfactorily be achieved through Women's Weekly advertising campaigns, or through enlisting better consultants and cleverer lawyers (though unfortunately it seems that they are becoming a background necessity just to protect against legal subterfuge). It will not be achieved through the industrial negotiation of closed-shop areas of relative privilege. And it will certainly not be achieved by proclaiming unqualified victory at a time when most of the workers still stand to lose. In the end, those people who linked arms at the various docks around Australia deserve better than that.