BY TOM O’LINCOLN
One of the great social forces of the twentieth century was Communism. In this country, the Communist Party Australia (CPA) brought together thousands of the finest working class fighters. It led them in massive struggles. Then it inflicted on them the bitterest of disappointments.
Communism had its roots in the early labour movements and the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, but as a global movement it took flight after the 1917 Russian revolution. The Russian leaders like Lenin and Trotsky didn't imagine they could build a classless, socialist society with the resources of their impoverished country. They saw their revolution as the first step in a global rising of the working class. For them, as Trotsky wrote, the world was "one single battle-field where various nations and social classes contend".
Belief in world revolution, not in
the sense of some "big bang" on a particular day, but as a growing
global mobilisation, was the cornerstone for the early CPA - a small
revolutionary organisation formed in
It wasn't an unrealistic prospect.
In addition to the Russian triumph, workers had seized power temporarily - or
had come close - in
There were organisational precedents, too. The CPA had been preceded by another impressive revolutionary organisation, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or "Wobblies"), who proclaimed:
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life."
State repression smashed the Wobblies when they dared to oppose World War I. But their tradition remained, and some of them went on to join in forming the CPA.
Communism's starting points were crisis and hope. And while the Australian party failed to grow in the 1920s, the same two themes re-emerged in the 1930s Depression.
The Depression brought working
class organisations crashing down, but it also created opportunities for
revolutionaries. Unemployment soared, generating a pool of angry people among
whom the Communist Party could recruit. At one point in
The crisis led to a hunger for explanations, and the Communists had answers. They called for workers' power, a planned economy, an international revolutionary movement - and thousands of workers were prepared to listen. The Soviet economic system, growing despite world depression, seemed to confirm all these hopes.
Workers also embraced the party's
angry militancy. The Communist-produced Working Woman took obvious
delight in reporting the actions of a woman picketer "jumping on the back
of a scab" and "bearing him to the ground, scratching and
screaming". When
If the CPA's first major successes
were among the unemployed, its biggest were in the
trade unions. Through a rank and file union network called the Minority
Movement (cheekily named after the "minority of troublemakers" which
right-wingers blamed for any and all unrest) they defied conservative union
officials and rebuilt militant trade unionism in the coalfields, the ports, the
railways and many other places. The MM led, and won, a famous coal strike in
Wonthaggi (Victoria). It also made a name for itself from the Yarra Falls Spinning
Mills in
Successes on the ground, in turn, meant a bigger working-class audience for the Communists. They were still a minority in the labour movement but their ideas had a wider following because, as an organisation of activists, they fought struggles that made the ideas come alive.
In these years the CPA was often "ultra-left". The party didn't know how to build alliances with non-revolutionaries. The Communists saw the opportunist side of the Labor Party, for example, but by simply denouncing Laborism and leaving it at that, they missed important opportunities to influence rank and file ALP supporters. For example, when ALP members formed leftist groupings called "socialisation units" and rallied behind sacked Labor Premier Jack Lang, the Communists largely stood aside from these mobilisations. That was a terrible waste.
But no sooner had the CPA moved
away from these mistakes than it fell into an opposite, equally damaging type
of error. After Hitler's rise to power in
There were few capitalists actually prepared to join hands with the Communists, but political degeneration could take other forms. Where the Minority Movement had kept its independence from bureaucratic union officials, the Communists now embraced them. Indeed there were more and more Communist union officials, who also began to think bureaucratically. The party's magazine for women shifted its attention from angry fighters on picket lines to middle-class readers interested in movie stars and household hints. The trouble was that while the CPA got no more than a few crumbs from respectable allies, it began to hold back its militant supporters for fear of alienating them.
Communists made these mistakes all
over the world, so it wasn't just a matter of the Australian reds going astray.
These disastrously mistaken tactics came from the
This became a critical issue with the approach of World War II. At one point, Stalin's foreign policy needs led him to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Stunned Communists, who had spent years campaigning against fascism, tried doggedly to defend this. But it didn't last long, and the party's wartime stance was more typically an extension of the "people's front". The war effort was the ultimate collaboration between Communists and the local capitalist ruling class. At its worst, this included racist portrayals of the enemy and calling for the mass firebombing of Japanese civilians. The party learned to scab on strikes - anything for the war effort. The legacy of these practices never entirely left the party during the post-war years.
Still, despite mad swings of line reflecting the Soviet domination, the CPA still attracted thousands of working class fighters. By the late 1930s it had become a notable force, not only in the labour movement but also in the anti-war and anti-fascist campaigns, as well as cultural movements.
And during the war the CPA was the force within the military that stood up for the rights of rank and file soldiers.
They built a sizeable organisation among the troops, with an extensive network of branches and co-ordinating structures. These existed both in Papua New Guinea - with a district committee based on Port Moresby and local groups holding Marxist economics classes - and in Australia. On the Atherton Tableland the party held a major conference assembling some 50 branch delegates. The CPA initiated a petition for a "battle bonus" which gathered 250,000 signatures, 50,000 of them from within the military.
Communists led the military rank and file in battles with the brass. As CPA veteran Ted Bacon recalled:
"Successful strikes without victimisation of leaders were far more common than might be imagined by those who may believe a military bureaucracy is practically unbeatable. Refusals to parade until food or conditions were improved occurred in almost all training camps... even the most anti-democratic commanders were compelled to move cautiously in their dealings with the rank and file."
The contradictory pattern of embracing militancy from below yet compromising it with top-down, opportunist manoeuvres characterised what became known as "Stalinism". In the post-war years the Communist movement was gradually pulled apart by this fatal flaw.
The CPA continued to base itself on
the militant working class. In the years following the war, this was in a state
of mobilisation. The radical mood was neatly captured by the Communist paper Tribune,
which reported that the Leichhardt Boy Scouts' Band in
A third big strike didn't end so
happily. In a mobilisation seen as a direct challenge to the federal Labor government, the CPA led the coalminers into battle. Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley sent in troops to
undermine the strike, but the miners were mainly defeated by their political
isolation. Two familiar Stalinist errors also contributed: the Communists'
periodic "ultra-left" tendency to adopt unrealistic, self-isolating
stances, and their top-down bureaucratic behaviour in the union leadership. The
influence of the
The coalminers' defeat opened up a new, difficult phase for the CPA. The Cold War was beginning, and leftists faced severe repression. The party's numbers shrank. But even in these hardest times, thousands of workers still followed the party's ideas and admired its actions. And there were many of these actions.
"It didn't matter what happened," a veteran Communist once told me, "if some school committee hit the headlines, you could bet your life there'd be some Communist Party member at the school and he'd be organising. I used to pick up the paper and I'd be amazed, I'd see all these issues and I knew someone who'd be running them."
When the Women's Liberation Movement exploded at the end of the sixties, it took up the celebration of International Women's Day. The activists didn't have to start from scratch though, because the Communist-led Union of Australian Women had kept IWD alive over the previous two decades.
But the party was in terminal
decline. Having reached a high of over 20,000 during World War II, membership
fell to around 16,000 at the war's end. This in itself proved little, given
that Communism was briefly fashionable while the
First, Stalin's successor
Khrushchev made a sensational speech revealing his predecessor's crimes - the
murders, the lies, the gulags. No sooner had the party begun to get over this
shock than the workers of
The CPA limped on as an
organisation, employing "unity tickets" (electoral pacts) with ALP
officials to garner positions in the union apparatus out of proportion to its
real political base. But it went from one political crisis to another.
Pro-Beijing followers of Mao Zedong broke away in 1963. Then in 1968, when
Soviet tanks crushed attempts to liberalise the Czechoslovak Stalinist state,
the seeds of further splits were sown. When the party leaders finally began to
take their distance from the crimes of the
The Communist Party was still
capable of making some memorable contributions to the Australian left. Its
union activists threw themselves into the 1969 strike wave that smashed the
anti-union Penal Powers legislation. Then at the start of the 1970s, Builders'
Labourers of both the CPA and pro-Beijing persuasions placed environmental
"green bans" that rescued historical landmarks across
The destruction of Stalinism was a historical necessity. You can't fight for workers' power with a party politically subordinated to anti-working class, bureaucratic dictatorships. The CPA had to go. At the same time, it was a tragedy, for the Communist Party had been a historic attempt by Australian workers to reach out for power - and since its demise, no left political force has been able to fill its shoes.
Mostly importantly, the story of the CPA is full of lessons. It shows how a revolutionary political movement based among worker militants can launch challenges to employers and governments. It demonstrates that when circumstances are right, revolutionaries can win thousands of people to their ideas. It shows that the key force for radical politics is the working class, and that within the labour movement the promise of radicalisation lies with the rank and file rather than the union bureaucracy or Labor politicians.
It was a flawed party, yet it achieved so much. Our task is to build on the best of the Communist tradition.