A prophet of globalisation: Ignatius Donnelly

.Before going to Paraguay William Lane publicised (and, apparently, plagiarised) Caesar’s Column and pastoral workers in Wagga were urged to buy copies. The Golden Bottle was enthusiastically reviewed and serialised in the Brisbane Worker. The Bulletin correctly identified Donnelly as one of the principal authors read by the Australian labour movement - many unionists were, or wished to be, small farmers as well. Henry Lawson wrote a sketch in which a slovenly farmer in western New South Wales is shown trying to keep abreast of "all the great social and political questions of the day" by reading Donnelly.

Donnelly’s lurid imagination appealed to working-class Australian readers but his actual political methods and the policy measures he advocated to curb plutocracy were, in marked contrast, utterly prosaic. He much preferred the ballot box to insurrection, monetary and credit reform to class warfare.

When the Labor Party emerged as a political force, Donnelly’s pervasive influence helped to consolidate its instinctive belief that its real foe in Australia was not capitalism in general but rather a clandestine band of financiers and bankers ("the Money Power") who were bent on exploiting manufacturers, small business people and farmers as well as factory hands. This populist mindset, along with other compatible non-Marxist influences, helped to ensure that from the outset Labor never pursued a comprehensive vision of socialism based on undiluted notions of class struggle.

Donnelly died on 1 January 1901 but his fears lived on in the young faraway nation that came into existence on the same day. A decade later, for example, his nightmares about financial cliques formed part of the background to Labor’s decision to establish the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

After the First World War, which saw a justified upsurge of concern about the power of international lenders, new editions of Caesar’s Column were published by Coles Book Arcade in Melbourne. Frank Anstey, a mentor of John Curtin’s, expressed similar fears in his wartime tract The Kingdom of Shylock.

Suspicion of bankers and prevailing credit arrangements, with its anti-semitic and Anglophobic trappings, long haunted the Labor imagination. During the Great Depression Labor’s obsession with the Money Power culminated in Jack Lang’s crusade against Otto Niemeyer and the Bank of England. It was not until the 1980s that Labor fully exorcised its phobia about the Money Power when the then Treasurer embraced financial deregulation.

Labor’s current crop of leaders are no longer haunted by Donnelly’s dystopic visions but the fears that their predecessors once stoked are far from dead, having now dramatically resurfaced at the grassroots level among people who are, or feel, menaced by big corporations and seemingly irreversible trends in the world economy.

Although his name means nothing to the average young anti-IMF or anti-WTO protester Donnelly in fact presented a late nineteenth-century formulation of the same fears that agitate supporters of the current anti-globalisation movement. A melodramatic novel, rather than the internet or visual media images, was used to popularise a similar message. Readers of Caesar’s Column were presented with a menacing picture of a growing gulf between plutocrats and the powerless as a "vast conspiracy against mankind … organised on two continents" sought "possession of the world". The clash between demonstrators and the police in Seattle and Prague or outside the Crown Casino in Melbourne would fit neatly into one of its opening chapters.

In the centenary of his death Ignatius Donnelly remains a strangely relevant figure. He was one of the many lonely prophets who have emerged from North America to influence other societies with aspirations to democracy, including Australia. He dramatised issues and concerns that will, in one recycled form or another, remain alive for as long as we confront impersonal forces which are always new and yet always the same.