At Mount Panorama, working-class culture and political disillusionment are on full display. If the left wants to rebuild its influence David Clarke says it needs to stop looking down on the people it claims to represent.
Are you allowed to enjoy the Bathurst 1000 and still want to overthrow capitalism? Of course you are. In fact, if you want to change this country, you’d better be there.
I spent the weekend at Mount Panorama last month, and what struck me first wasn’t the noise or the beer or the smell of race fuel. It was the class character of the place, overwhelmingly a blue-collar crowd. Working-class rock and roll on the speakers, car shirts everywhere, rugby league jerseys in between. And scattered through it all, the occasional CFMEU and ETU shirt. Petrolheads might skew male but look around and you’ll see plenty of women, too: in the team colours or behind the wheel of the ute in the car park. Cars and Bathurst is not a boys’ club.
The left, or at least a certain strand of it, has a reflex response to all this. Fossil fuels! Individualism! Consumerism! The sneer arrives before the curiosity. We should be honest about what that sneer is. It is not a political position. It is a middle-class position, and it belongs to people who have never had to bolt together a Saturday out of a work week that took everything else.
The esky tells a story
Every esky at the campsite is covered in stickers. Yes, on nearly every one there is an Australian flag. Camps fly Union Jacks, Australian flags, and the car flags that declare which car marque you barrack for. A lot of it is bogan and proud. But look closer. Between the flags there are ETU stickers. I counted only one Confederate flag.
That matters. It tells you what this crowd is made of, rather than what the caricature says.
Over the weekend I had good conversations with separate groups of comrades, CFMEU and ETU members, among other blue-collar workers who spend this weekend on the mountain at Bathurst. Whatever Australiana paraphernalia was draped around their campsites, every one of them was passionate about working-class conditions. The flag didn’t cancel out the class instinct. It sat right alongside it, showing the promise and the challenge for the working-class socialist left.
Charity is not solidarity
Here’s something worth being clear about. Humans in general help each other. That is not a socialist discovery. Plenty of right-wing people look after their mates, pass the hat around for a family doing it tough, assist those they consider less fortunate. At a site like Bathurst, you’ll see it everywhere: spare ice, a lend of a generator, a feed for the family next door.
But this is not solidarity. It is closer to charity, and in some ways it is the opposite. Charity is a relationship between those who have and those who have less, and it leaves that arrangement intact. Solidarity is the recognition that our interests are bound together, and that the only durable answer to hardship is collective power. Socialism is the project of universalising that instinct to help each other, of taking the decency that already exists in working-class culture and extending it beyond the neighbours at the next campsite to the whole class, across every line the ruling class has drawn through us.
There is overlap between the two, no doubt, and that overlap is where we do our best work. But we should know which one we’re building.
What people are angry about
The big talking point on the mountain was the price of petrol. Yes, in the abstract, often removed from the geopolitics driving it. But it’s a window into how the cost of living lands on these people. When you drive to work because there’s no train, because the job is 40 kilometres from the only house you could afford, petrol isn’t a lifestyle issue. It’s your wage.
Now imagine a left that spoke directly to that, instead of correcting people’s language and lecturing them on their emissions. You can hear the ordinary complaints about the “woke green agenda” at Bathurst, sure. But here’s what I found when I actually talked with people about the material conditions behind their situation.
Start with why so many families are under the pump. Talk about why domestic violence is rising, and why it is perpetuated by men of every background, not just the Muslim men from Africa or the Middle East that the shock jocks like to point at. There is an economic root to it as well as a social one.
Insecure work, rising rents and mortgage stress, the slow decline in living conditions for the many, the obscene concentration of wealth among the few, and the collapse of union power that once gave working people security and a collective voice.
Pressure like that gets taken out on the people closest to us. That isn’t an excuse, but we have to understand root causes. We also have to name the continued dominance of a culture of male entitlement, the emergence of the manosphere and its grifters, who prey on men who feel dispossessed and hand them someone to blame and a licence to control. That is an ideology, and it is a ruling class gift: it turns working men against working women and keeps both from looking up. Most of the people I spoke to agreed with the analysis. Not grudgingly. Readily.
Workers don’t need a vocabulary lesson. We need a movement that takes our lives seriously.
Burn it down
A lot of the people on that mountain would once have been rusted-on Labor voters. They are sick of the same promises being thrown on the scrap heap, election after election, while their conditions slide. Can anyone really blame them for wanting to punish the party that does little for them? For wanting to watch the system burn, and reaching for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to light the match?
We can understand why people want to use One Nation to attack the liberal establishment. But we can’t let people off the hook that easily either.
Racism and xenophobia are real in some corners of this culture, and pretending otherwise helps no one. This needs to be challenged, directly and patiently, by people who are in the room rather than shouting from outside it. And the left carries its fair share of blame here. Too often we mirror the preachy liberalism of the very establishment One Nation says it stands against: the lecturing tone, the moral superiority, the purity tests, the contempt for anyone who hasn’t yet said the right words. We hand Hanson her best material and then act surprised when people who feel talked down to go looking for someone who at least pretends to listen.
One Nation offers them a scapegoat and a protest vote. It offers nothing on wages, nothing on housing, nothing on union rights. But it is there, and it is speaking to them, while too much of the left is busy not showing up. That is a failure of organising, not a failure of the working class.
Learn from it
The demographics at Bathurst are overwhelmingly Anglo, with a sprinkling of people of Asian heritage and a handful of Aboriginal shirts and flags. That’s worth clearly pointing out. It is not a reason to write the crowd off. It is a reason to be there, to build across those lines, and to remember that no single racial or cultural identity owns the working class.
The old cliche about German social democracy is a cliche because it’s true. A mass party built gym clubs, cycling clubs and walking clubs, and it did so because culture and social connectedness is where people actually live out their daily lives. So why not socialist car clubs? Why not gun clubs? Most of the existing left would sneer at both, but we shouldn’t. Working-class culture is not a problem to be managed. It is a terrain to be won, and it is one we will never win from the outside, looking down.
This is a culture the materialist left needs to understand and relate to. Not to copy its worst habits, and not to flatter it either, but to meet people where they are, listen to what they’re angry about, and offer a way to turn that anger into something that builds power instead of burning out.
So yes, go to Bathurst. Have a beer and admire the cars if that’s your thing. Talk to the ETU crew about their next enterprise agreement. And then ask what it would take to build the kind of movement that these people could look at and recognise as their own.
Not because a marketing department has discovered the blue-collar vote. But because the best of working-class culture, its mateship, its stubbornness, its refusal to be talked down to, is already halfway to solidarity. Our job is to finish the walk.
David Clarke is a member of the NSW Teachers Federation, NSW Socialists and an unashamed lover of the mountain.