Working class support for One Nation (Part I): Towards an honest explanation
First published at Revitalising Labour. Read Part II here.
The rapid surge in support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has forced a question the Australian left has consistently avoided answering honestly: why do sections of the working class support a politics that appears to cut against their own material interests?
Recent Red Flag articles by Mick Armstrong and Tom Bramble offer the dominant far-left answer. Armstrong argues that One Nation’s base is primarily the small-town middle class, real estate agents, pharmacists, newsagents, dentists, bank managers rather than workers. He acknowledges that some conservative workers, particularly in rural areas, did vote One Nation in the 1990s, but insists that Hanson overwhelmingly attracted former Coalition voters, not Labor voters, and that unionised workers were the most hostile to her movement.
This account has a basic arithmetic problem. When Guardian polling shows that 58% of Australians are considering a vote for One Nation, the claim that its support base is primarily petty bourgeois becomes untenable. The petty bourgeoisie is simply not large enough as a proportion of the Australian population to produce a 58% consideration figure. Sections of the working class have to be in that number in significant proportions, because workers are the majority of the population. That is not an analytical claim, it is arithmetic.
Armstrong is not entirely wrong about the 1990s. The small-town middle class was indeed a significant component of One Nation’s early base. But using the 1990s class composition to deny what the current data shows is a different kind of error. The Samaras research on Australian dual populism documents a significant movement of outer suburban Gen X workers toward One Nation in the current period, not primarily the rural petty bourgeoisie of 1996 but workers in Werribee and Penrith and Logan experiencing the long-term consequences of deindustrialisation, wage erosion, housing unaffordability, and the breakdown of the post-war industrial settlement that provided their parents with a degree of economic security.
Howard’s battlers are the historical bridge that Armstrong’s analysis cannot accommodate. These were workers, outer suburban and regional working-class voters, who shifted from Labor to Howard and then to One Nation, and in some cases back again, over the past three decades. That movement is not the middle class being manipulated by ruling class ideology. It is sections of the working class navigating genuine material anxiety and making political choices that reflect, however distortedly, their actual situation.
The left’s inability to explain this, its insistence that workers who support One Nation are either not really workers or are simply deceived by ruling class propaganda, produces political practice that cannot address the actual terrain. You cannot win sections of the working class away from One Nation if you cannot account for why they went there in the first place, or you deny that it is occurring at all.
Theories as maps
Before developing the framework I think is more adequate, a methodological point is worth making. Theories are maps. Like all maps, they are useful simplifications of a complex reality, necessarily imperfect, necessarily selective, necessarily more useful for some terrains than others. A street map of Melbourne and a topographic map of Victoria are both accurate and both incomplete. Neither is wrong; they are designed for different purposes. The question is not which map is correct but which map you need for the task at hand.
This matters because a lot of the debate around the labour aristocracy thesis and whiteness studies operates at cross-purposes. Critics attack the frameworks for not doing things they were not designed to do, and defenders claim more than the frameworks can deliver. Both errors stem from treating theory as if it should be a perfect map of the entire territory rather than a useful simplification adequate to specific analytical tasks.
Finding aspects of reality that a theory cannot fully account for does not disprove the theory, unless that specific aspect is what the theory is designed to explain. The labour aristocracy thesis is designed to explain why sections of the working class in advanced capitalist countries develop a material and psychological basis for accommodation to capitalism and imperialism. Showing that well-paid workers can also be industrially militant does not refute this, it just demonstrates that industrial militancy and revolutionary political outlook are different things, which the theory never denied.
The labour aristocracy thesis
Marx and Engels first confronted the problem in relation to England. The most advanced capitalist economy, with one of the largest colonial empires, also had one of the least revolutionary labour movements in Europe. English workers showed significant levels of support for British imperialism’s colonial crimes, and most notably hostility toward Irish liberation. To account for this apparent contradiction, they developed the concept of the labour aristocracy, a relatively privileged section of the English working class that English capital could afford to pay higher wages, funded by the higher rates of profit extracted from colonial possessions. This relative privilege, they argued, provided the material basis for political accommodation to capitalism.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks revisited the concept in the wake of the great betrayal of 1914, when the majority of Second International parties supported their own governments’ war drives. Rather than the labour aristocracy contracting as other capitalist economies developed, as Marx and Engels had predicted, Lenin argued that it had expanded across all advanced capitalist countries with the emergence of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. The surplus extracted from the periphery enabled sections of capital to pay relatively higher wages to sections of workers in the imperial core, and this relative privilege provided the material basis for the opportunism of the social democratic parties and their working-class base.
This is a tendency, a pressure that operates on sections of the working class in specific directions, not a deterministic outcome. Lenin’s point was precisely that identifying the tendency as a tendency was the precondition for organising against it. You cannot fight what you cannot name. The labour aristocracy concept gives political practitioners a framework for understanding why sections of the working class resist socialist politics, which is necessary for developing strategies adequate to that resistance.
Whiteness studies and the psychological wage
Theodore Allen’s work on the invention of the white race provides a complementary framework developed from the specific conditions of the United States. Allen’s central argument is that whiteness was constructed as a political project, initially by the planter class in the colonial Chesapeake to divide Black and white servants after the threat of Bacon’s Rebellion, that delivered real if limited material privileges to white workers while dividing them from their potential allies and securing the conditions for racial slavery and, subsequently, racial capitalism. Allen developed this argument across two volumes, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (Verso, 1994) and Vol. 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Verso, 1997), with an accessible precursor available in his 1975 pamphlet held in the UMass Amherst digital collections, and his earlier 1967 article available via the Marxists Internet Archive.
Building on W.E.B. Du Bois’s observation that the Southern labour movement after the Civil War failed to grasp “the kernel and the meaning of the labor movement in the United States” by not building cross-racial solidarity, Allen traces how the category of whiteness was extended, maintained, and reproduced through specific legal, political, and institutional mechanisms that delivered differential access to employment, housing, legal protection, and social recognition.
David Roediger’s contribution, drawing on Du Bois’s concept of the psychological wage, provides the connecting mechanism between Allen’s historical materialism and Lenin’s labour aristocracy thesis. Roediger argues that the benefit of whiteness is not exclusively or even primarily monetary. White workers receive a psychological wage: public deference, a sense of social superiority, the daily affirmation of belonging to the dominant group rather than being identified with the most marginalised. This perceived benefit has a real grip precisely because it is psychological, it is somewhat robust to the contradiction between the perception and reality, and it generates a consistent orientation of political anxiety toward the threat of the non-white other. (David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed., Verso, 2007.)
The psychological wage explains something that neither Allen nor Lenin fully accounts for on their own: why accommodation to racial hierarchy persists through changing material conditions, why the grip of white supremacy survives even when the direct material benefits are diminishing, and why the political response to the erosion of that privilege takes cultural forms, anxiety about immigration, about demographic change, about the loss of a recognisable Australia, rather than the class forms that would more directly address the underlying material conditions.
Taken together, Allen, Lenin, and Roediger produce something more analytically useful than any of the three alone. Allen explains the construction of the privilege. Lenin explains its material basis in imperial accumulation. Roediger explains how it is reproduced through identity and psychological investment in ways that make it politically resilient even when the underlying material conditions change. The synthesis explains both why the accommodation persists and why contesting it requires more than either exposing ideology or waiting for class struggle to dissolve it.
The psychological wage within radicalism
The most authoritative available statement of this problem comes not from a European critic of the left but from Ho Chi Minh, writing in 1922 directly at the Section Française de l’Internationale Communiste, the French communist formation that had just formally committed to supporting colonial liberation as a condition of Comintern membership. Two years after that formal commitment, Ho Chi Minh found it necessary to point out that metropolitan proletarian indifference to the colonies remained the central practical obstacle to building the internationalism the commitment required. “There are many militants,” he wrote, “who still think that a colony is nothing but a country with plenty of sand underfoot and of sun overhead; a few green coconut palms and coloured folk, that is all. And they take not the slightest interest in the matter.”
The problem was not simply indifference but the specific form that engagement took when it did occur. French militants, Ho Chi Minh observed, looked upon colonial peoples as “an inferior and negligible human being, incapable of understanding and still less of taking action”, while colonial peoples in turn regarded all French people as exploiters. Imperialism, he noted, did not fail to take advantage of “this mutual suspicion and this artificial racial hierarchy to frustrate propaganda and divide forces which ought to unite.” The critique was not directed at the French right or at social democratic reformists who had never fully committed to anti-colonialism. It was directed at the revolutionary formation that had formally adopted that commitment and was still reproducing the racial assumptions of the society it claimed to be contesting.
This is Roediger’s psychological wage operating within radicalism at its most precisely documented. The SFIC militants Ho Chi Minh was addressing were not consciously racist in the sense of defending colonial rule, they were people who had made the theoretical and political break with European chauvinism that most of their contemporaries had not. And they still related to colonial peoples through a framework shaped by assumptions of European centrality and agency that the formal commitment to anti-colonialism had not dissolved. The formal commitment changed the political position; it did not automatically change the psychological formation that made metropolitan workers treat colonial peoples as objects of solidarity rather than as equal political agents.
Ho Chi Minh’s five articles published in L’Humanité and Le Paria between May and July 1922 — “Some Considerations on the Colonial Question”, “In a ‘High Civilization’”, “Equality!”, “The Civilizers”, and “Racial Hatred”, document both the theoretical problem and its material foundation. The latter four pieces record in direct terms the specific forms of colonial violence and racial economic discrimination that constituted the material basis for the psychological wage’s operation across the empire. Together they represent the most complete available contemporary account of how the psychological wage of European racial identity operated within the revolutionary left at the moment when that left had formally committed to contesting it.
The post-war compromise and its breakdown
The post-war settlement in Australia, rising real wages, the social wage of public education and housing support, the centralised arbitration system that delivered consistent real wage growth, was not capital’s gift to labour. It was forced by the specific balance of forces of the period: strong union density, the militant shop floor traditions of key industries, and critically, the leverage created by the communist threat that made capital willing to make concessions it would otherwise have resisted. The threat of a more radical alternative made the managed accommodation of labour’s immediate interests the rational choice for Australian capital. The political economy of that breakdown, the specific mechanisms through which the post-war boom contained the seeds of its own demise, and the neoliberal response that converted the crisis of capitalist accumulation into a sustained assault on working class institutional power, is developed in more detail elsewhere. What matters for the current argument is the specific consequence for the labour aristocracy’s material and psychological position.
Understanding that settlement requires acknowledging something the standard application of Lenin’s imperialism framework tends to obscure: Australia as a settler colonial state occupied a different position in the imperial hierarchy than the colonies whose extraction Lenin was primarily analysing. As a direct extension of British empire populated primarily by British settlers, Australia was developed as an extension of the imperial core rather than as a site of pure extraction, allowed to retain much of the profit generated within its economy, permitted to develop manufacturing behind tariff walls, and subject to a more even development of productive capacity across sectors than the extractive colonial model produced elsewhere. Protectionism was central to this, redistributing the surplus of the extractive pastoral and mining sectors into manufacturing and secondary industry, providing the industrial base that made the centralised arbitration system and the living wage politically achievable, and simultaneously managing the tensions between competing capital fractions by giving manufacturing capital a stake in the national settlement. The result was a labour aristocracy whose material basis was distinctively Australian, produced not just by imperial accumulation but by the specific institutional architecture of a settler colonial state that retained and redistributed a significant share of the surplus it generated.
The Accord of the 1980s reflected the attempt to preserve the terms of that settlement in changed conditions, with limited decline in union density prior to the Accord, the collapse of the post-war boom, and the shifting global balance of forces. The role of the mining industry in accelerating capital’s international restructuring away from manufacturing, leaving the protected industrial base that had sustained the arbitration settlement increasingly exposed, is a critical part of this story that the Accord’s architects were working against rather than with. The early Accord period delivered real social wage gains, but real wages fell relative to productivity across the Accord years as a whole, and the enterprise bargaining system it produced did not contain the seeds of erosion, it was the erosion, restructuring industrial relations in ways that systematically weakened the position of workers in less organised workplaces and created the conditions for the Howard government’s assault on union power. Decentralising wage determination to the enterprise level weakened the cross-sector redistribution that the centralised arbitration system had provided, progressively detaching the gains of the most organised workers from the outcomes for the least organised.
The outer suburban Gen X worker that Samaras documents, working in retail, logistics, or construction on variable hours, with no clear path upward and no family wealth to fall back on, is experiencing the long tail of that breakdown. The psychological wage of whiteness and Australianness that his parents’ generation received as part of the post-war settlement, the sense of belonging to a society that was improving, that had a stake in its future, that rewarded work with dignity and security, has been progressively devalued by three decades of wage stagnation, housing unaffordability, and the erosion of the institutional protections that made working class life stable.
One Nation offers the psychological wage in a different form, the identification with a politics that treats his anxiety as real, that names the loss of belonging he has experienced, that provides a community of people who share his sense that something has been taken from him. That the politics misdirects his anxiety toward immigration and cultural change rather than toward the structural conditions that actually produced his situation does not make the anxiety less real or the appeal less comprehensible.
The German case
The German case provides the most developed contemporary illustration of the tendency being actively contested. The deindustrialisation of the former East Germany following reunification produced material and psychological conditions that the labour aristocracy thesis would predict as fertile ground for the accommodation tendency, the specific forms of economic dispossession, the sense of second-class citizenship within a unified Germany, the erosion of the institutional protections that had structured working class life in the German Democratic Republic. The AfD has successfully captured sections of this constituency through exactly the cultural nationalist politics the thesis predicts. But the contest is not over. The ninth trend study “Youth in Germany 2026”, a representative survey of 2,012 young people aged 14 to 29 conducted in early 2026, documents the material conditions producing this polarisation: 23% of young people in debt, one in five concretely planning to emigrate, growing doubt that performance still pays off in Germany, and psychological stress at a new high of 29%. In Sunday polling, Die Linke leads among this age group at 25%, with the AfD in second position at 20%, CDU/CSU at 14%, the Greens at 13%, the SPD at 10%, and BSW at 5%. The same material conditions producing the accommodation tendency toward the AfD are simultaneously producing a substantial constituency for a politics that takes those conditions seriously without the racial and nationalist misdirection. The specific political work of contesting the tendency rather than accommodating to it determines which direction sections of the working class move. The tendency is real; the outcome is not predetermined.
The Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht) is a party formed in 2024 following a split from Die Linke led by its former parliamentary leader Sahra Wagenknecht. BSW combines left economic demands, opposition to austerity, support for public services, scepticism of NATO policy, with cultural conservatism on migration and a nationalist framing of Germany’s economic interests that Die Linke’s mainstream rejected as accommodation to the right. It represents the most developed contemporary expression of the red-brown tendency, the political formation that attempts to capture working class anxiety about economic dispossession through a combination of material demands and cultural nationalist misdirection rather than contesting the misdirection directly. BSW’s 5% among young voters, compared to the AfD’s 20%, suggests something analytically important: among younger voters at least, the accommodation toward cultural nationalism is more successful when it dispenses with the left economic framing than when it attempts to combine them. The straight nationalist right outperforms the red-brown synthesis in this demographic, which complicates any argument that left economic demands alone can capture the cultural nationalist constituency without contesting the misdirection toward racial and cultural targets.
The Australian case
The White Australia Policy is the foundational Australian illustration of the labour aristocracy thesis and the psychological wage operating together in the specific conditions of a settler colonial society. The policy was substantially a labour movement project, not merely accepted by the early union movement but actively championed by it. The early Labor Party’s platform included immigration restriction as a core demand. The argument for excluding Chinese and other non-European workers was framed as protecting Australian workers’ wages and conditions from cheap labour competition. A framing that contained a genuine element of material interest while simultaneously delivering the psychological benefits of belonging to the dominant racial category in a society organised around racial hierarchy.
The White Australia Policy was not an isolated Australian peculiarity but an expression of a general tendency operating across different national contexts through different specific mechanisms. The colour bars maintained by craft unions in the United States, the explicit exclusion of Black workers from skilled trades, the separate locals, the apprenticeship restrictions that maintained racial job classifications, reflect the same underlying dynamic. So do the broader craft union efforts across the advanced capitalist world to limit the number of workers in their trade through apprenticeship restrictions, closed shops, and licensing requirements. All are expressions of sections of the working-class using exclusion to defend their relative labour market position, not simply as racial prejudice, but as a mechanism for maintaining the scarcity of skilled labour that gave those sections their bargaining power.
The employer dimension adds further analytical precision. Employers frequently attempted to break down the skilled labour divide precisely because craft union control over access to the trade gave workers leverage that employers wanted to undermine, through the introduction of machinery, the subdivision of tasks, the employment of less skilled workers at lower rates. The craft union’s exclusionary practices were therefore directed simultaneously against less organised workers whose inclusion would dilute the privilege and against employer attempts to dilute the skilled labour category from above. That dual direction of the exclusionary practice reveals its genuine character, it was about the defence of relative labour market position against pressure from both directions, with racial and gender exclusion serving as the available mechanisms in the specific historical conditions of each national context. This is the labour aristocracy tendency in its most active and most organised form. Simultaneously militant in its defence of the craft boundary and accommodating to capitalism as a system, because the defence of relative privilege within capitalism presupposes and reproduces the system that makes that privilege possible.
The consequences of that accommodation were not abstract. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and its constituent formations including DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, emerged in Detroit in the late 1960s in direct response to the experience of racism from co-workers on the shop floor and the UAW’s consistent failure to contest it. The union that had been built through some of the most significant industrial organising in American history, and that maintained a formally progressive political identity, reproduced racial hierarchy in its day-to-day institutional practice, in whose grievances were pursued, whose complaints were taken seriously, who received the solidarity the union formally committed to providing. The LRBW’s formation was not a response to a different employer or a different industry. It was a response to the specific behaviour of white co-workers and the union apparatus that reflected and accommodated that behaviour. It is the most precise available illustration of the labour aristocracy tendency operating not at the level of policy or formal position but at the level of daily working-class practice, and of the political formations that emerge when that tendency is contested rather than accommodated.
The more honest historical account of the Australian case, which the IST (the International Socialist Tendency, the global current whose Australian expressions include Solidarity and, in a more contested relationship with the tradition, Socialist Alternative) tradition’s Australian formations have consistently resisted, is that workers and unions were central drivers of the anti-Chinese racism and violence of the colonial period, not passive recipients of ruling class ideology. The Lambing Flat riots of 1861 were not organised by mining company managers. The colour bar in Australian unions was not simply imposed from above. The labour movement’s racial exclusionism was organic, generated from within the specific material and psychological conditions of working-class life in a settler colonial society, and therefore more durable and more politically significant than any top-down imposition of ruling class ideology could have been.
The Eureka Stockade of 1854 is the foundational Australian labour movement mythology. The armed uprising of gold miners against colonial authority, the Southern Cross flag, the democratic demands for manhood suffrage and the abolition of the licence fee. It is claimed by the Australian left as the origin of radical democratic tradition and by the far-right as the origin of nationalist resistance to state power. Both claims have some basis, which is precisely what makes it analytically revealing rather than simply historically complex.
The Eureka rebellion was simultaneously a genuinely radical democratic uprising against colonial authority and a movement substantially animated by hostility to Chinese miners on the goldfields. The democratic demands its participants raised were understood by many of them as democracy for white men rather than as universal democratic rights. The militancy and the racial exclusion were not contradictions in the experience of the participants, they were both expressions of the same underlying sense of entitlement to the benefits of the colonial economy as white male workers, the psychological wage of whiteness operating within radicalism at the foundational moment of Australian labour movement mythology. As Matthew Allanby documents, imagery of the Southern Cross was used at the anti-Chinese Lambing Flat riots of 1860 and 1861, the same symbol flown at Eureka deployed six years later against Chinese miners on the NSW goldfields. (Matthew Allanby, “Who ‘Owns’ the Eureka Flag?” Agora 57:3 (2022), 6–10.)
The contestation over Eureka’s meaning, the left managing the anti-Chinese dimension, the far-right managing the democratic and anti-colonial dimensions, reflects the same selective engagement with historical evidence that the broader debate has been identifying throughout. Both are using Eureka as an identity marker rather than engaging honestly with what the historical record shows: that the labour aristocracy tendency and the psychological wage were present from the beginning of organised working class politics in Australia, and that the radical democratic tradition the left rightly claims was constituted through the racial exclusion the far-right conveniently ignores.
The militant waterfront workers who refused to load pig iron for Japan in 1938, documented in Mike Donaldson and Nick Southall’s account of the Dalfram dispute, or who supported Indonesian independence through the Black Armada dispute, demonstrate that cross-racial solidarity and political anti-imperialism were possible within the same tradition. But even in those cases, and this is important, the solidarity was extended from above rather than developed between equals. The paternalism toward Indonesian and Chinese workers that inflected even the most principled acts of international solidarity reflects the psychological wage operating within radicalism rather than being dissolved by it.
The practical consequences of failing to understand this are most visible at the level of concrete union organising. If racism within the working class is primarily false consciousness imported from the ruling class rather than organically generated within specific material and psychological conditions, then the appropriate response when racist frames emerge in union contexts is consciousness-raising, explaining that workers have been deceived, that their real interests lie in solidarity rather than racial identification. That response is both analytically wrong and practically inadequate.
What is actually happening when racist frames are deployed in union contexts is more accurately understood as the reflexive articulation of ideas with a long history within the working class itself, ideas that are available precisely because they have been organically generated and reproduced within working class culture over generations, and that are reached for in specific moments because they serve specific immediate purposes more efficiently than the harder work of building united action. The union official who deploys a racist frame in a factional dispute, the shop steward who frames a workplace grievance in racial terms, the meeting that allows a racist argument to pass without challenge, these are not primarily episodes of false consciousness requiring correction. They are expressions of a long historical sedimentation of racist ideas within working class culture, ideas whose grip is maintained by the psychological wage Roediger identifies and whose reflexive availability makes them a consistently easier path than the sustained political work of cross-racial solidarity.
Understanding this distinction matters practically. A framework adequate to contesting racist frames in union contexts requires understanding why those frames are available and useful in specific moments. What material and psychological conditions make the reflexive articulation more accessible than united action, what the specific political work is that makes cross-racial solidarity a more available response over time. The IST’s false consciousness framework cannot ask these questions because it cannot acknowledge the organic roots of the racism it is trying to contest. The result is a left that is consistently surprised when racist ideas emerge within the labour movement, consistently inadequate in its response, and consistently unable to develop the sustained political work that would actually reduce the reflexive availability of those ideas over time.
The contemporary expression of the psychological wage is visible in how progressive patriotism discourse operates: cultural markers make you suspect until you prove yourself white in cultural terms, while One Nation voters are welcomed by the political mainstream despite explicitly rejecting the stated values of Australian civic life. Palestinian protesters are treated as threats to social cohesion while expressing values that Australia’s own Values Statement endorses. The same structure of conditional belonging that the White Australia Policy institutionalised has been reproduced in modified form, not as explicit racial exclusion but as the selective naturalisation of some diaspora attachments and the treatment of others as inherently threatening.
The Minneapolis illustration
The Minneapolis Teamsters organising is often presented as the straightforward application of sound revolutionary leadership to a militant workforce. The reality is more analytically interesting. As Farrell Dobbs documents in his account of the 1934 strikes, the Minneapolis city cartage drivers of Local 574 were not, prior to the organising campaign, straightforwardly a labour aristocracy in the way that established AFL craft unions were, trucking companies paid as little as ten dollars for a work week of up to ninety hours, with workers often needing supplementary public assistance to support a family. They lacked the institutional protections, the craft traditions, and the established relative privilege that the labour aristocracy thesis identifies as the material basis for accommodation to capitalism. They had the potential to develop in that direction as the union consolidated, or they could be organised in ways that pushed against that potential.
The decision to push for industrial unionism within an AFL craft structure was precisely this kind of political choice. As Dobbs records, “Local 574 also passed beyond the IBT norm of confining its membership more or less to truck drivers and helpers. Wherever possible workers whose jobs were in any way related to trucking, in shipping rooms, warehouses, etc., were brought into the local. A shift was being made from the narrow craft form toward the broader industrial form of organization.” Organising inside workers alongside drivers, building alliances with unemployed workers and farmers, refusing the craft boundary that would have delivered relative privilege to a narrow section while leaving the broader workforce unorganised, all were interventions against the tendency toward labour aristocracy accommodation rather than simply good organising practice. The Local 574 leadership was building the union in ways that contested the accommodation tendency rather than reproducing it.
What this framework makes possible
The labour aristocracy thesis, Allen’s historical materialism, and Roediger’s psychological wage together do something that the IST’s ruling class project account cannot: they explain working class racism and right-wing populism as the product of specific material and psychological conditions that have a real, if distorted and ultimately self-defeating, logic, without either naturalising it as inevitable or dismissing it as false consciousness that class struggle will automatically dissolve.
The political implication is not that sections of the working class are irredeemably racist or that One Nation voters cannot be won to a different politics. It is that winning them requires understanding why the current politics makes sense to them from within their actual experience and material situation, and developing the specific political work that addresses the material conditions producing the anxiety while contesting the misdirection of that anxiety toward cultural and racial targets.
Roediger’s contribution is most important here. The psychological wage framework is not just a diagnostic tool. It points toward the specific political work that can contest it. If the psychological benefits of whiteness derive from the sense that relative privilege reflects racial characteristics rather than the specific historical and political conditions that produced it, then contesting the psychological wage requires reattributing the source of those benefits. The gains that sections of the working class have won, the real gains, the wages, the conditions, the social wage, are products of collective struggle, not racial characteristics. Making that reattribution visible and credible, building cross-racial solidarity that demonstrates collective power as the source of working class gains rather than racial solidarity, is the political work that the framework points toward. The AMWU’s hot shop strategy, concentrating organising effort and militancy in the most strategically placed workplaces to maximise leverage across an industry, is one of the clearest available Australian illustrations of what this kind of political work looked like in practice within a skilled trades union.
What this looks like in current practice is visible in the contrast between two responses to One Nation’s surge. One approach explains One Nation’s support as primarily the product of billionaire funding and media amplification, Murdoch, Stokes, the algorithm, and calls for protests to demonstrate that opposition is larger than support. The other, exemplified by the ACTU’s recent video on One Nation’s parliamentary voting record, does something different: it occupies the terrain where One Nation is winning, accepts the claim that workers deserve a fair go, and then contests One Nation’s claim to represent that value vote by vote. Penalty rates opposed. Labour hire pay parity opposed. Casual conversion rights opposed. Wage theft criminalisation opposed. Industrial manslaughter liability opposed. Silica dust bans opposed. Not once, across its entire parliamentary history, has One Nation voted in favour of workers’ rights at work.
That approach is doing the reattribution work Roediger’s framework points toward, demonstrating that the source of workers’ gains is collective institutional struggle, not One Nation’s advocacy, and that One Nation’s actual practice contradicts its populist claim at every point where it matters. It is more likely to reach the constituency the left needs to reach than protest at branch meetings, because it contests the psychological investment in One Nation on its own terrain rather than from outside it.
But the approach has a limit worth naming honestly. When McManus names the general principle, workers deserve a fair go, workers have rights at work, the language is inclusive. But when she names who One Nation has failed, the framing contracts: it becomes “Aussie workers” and “Aussie battlers.” That narrowing at the moment of naming the harm is precisely where the exclusionary logic operates. The workers most exposed to the specific harms One Nation has voted against, migrant workers in construction breathing silica dust, labour hire workers on temporary visas being paid below award rates, workers in horticulture and hospitality subject to systematic wage theft, are the workers least naturalised within the “Aussie” frame. “Workers” would have implied the same audience while not explicitly excluding anyone. “Aussie workers” answers the question of whose silica dust death counts as a political claim in the negative, by not asking it. Do we not care if a migrant worker dies on the job?
This is the psychological wage operating within the labour movement’s own political communication, not as conscious exclusion but as the unreflective reproduction of the available political language, which is itself shaped by the long history the pieces have been tracing. Contesting it requires the patient work of building cross-racial solidarity that makes a different political language available over time, one in which “workers” means workers, without the national qualifier that has always done exclusionary work within the Australian labour movement tradition.
This is the psychological wage operating within the labour movement’s own political communication, not as conscious exclusion but as the unreflective reproduction of the available political language, which is itself shaped by the long history the pieces have been tracing. Contesting it requires the patient work of building cross-racial solidarity that makes a different political language available over time, one in which “workers” means workers, without the national qualifier that has always done exclusionary work within the Australian labour movement tradition.
This is not a comfortable analysis for the Australian left. It requires taking seriously that sections of the working class have genuine, if ultimately self-defeating, material and psychological reasons for the political positions they hold, rather than explaining those positions as the product of external manipulation. It requires engaging with the actual terrain of working-class politics rather than the terrain the theory says should exist. And it requires developing the patient, sustained political work of building cross-racial solidarity and making the structural conditions producing working class anxiety both visible and contestable, rather than simply denouncing One Nation or waiting for class struggle to dissolve the racial divisions it consistently reproduces.
The most radical thing is to bring people into motion. The analysis that makes that possible is the one that starts from where people actually are.