…that the 29th National Congress of the Communist Party of Australia decided that the CPA should cease functioning as a political party. This event occurred in the midst of the regime changes which were sweeping Eastern Europe at the time, ranging from the orderly reforming of communism out of existence in Hungary and Slovenia to the forcible overthrow of the ultra-Stalinist Ceaucescu dictatorship in Romania. Writing in Australian Left Review about the CPA’s historic decision, Mike Ticher noted that:
It might seem more than a little presumptuous to compare the events of the Twentieth (sic – it was the Twenty-Ninth) Congress of the Communist Party of Australia last December with some of the earth-shattering decisions taken by ruling parties in Eastern Europe over the past six months… Nevertheless, the recent cataclysms of Czechoslovakia and East Germany hung heavily over the proceedings in Sydney… However, the atmosphere was, perhaps surprisingly, less one of a wake for the CP than one of rejuvenation and even relief
The convening of the CPA’s 29th Congress against the backdrop of the Fall of the Wall was at one level an accident, but an elegant one, since at a deeper level the events were of course part of the same historical process.
Wikipedia provides a reasonable (but not entirely error-free) basis account of the CPA’s formation and history; those looking for a deeper picture are referred to the reading list at the end of this post. Whilst Wiki is correct that the CPA was a Stalinist party from the time of the Comintern intervention in 1930 until the break with the Soviet Communist Party in the late 1960s, what it does not say is that in some respects the CPA leadership in this period was more Stalinist than average. The accounts in the recommended reading by Eric Aarons, Carole Ferrier, Joyce Stevens, Denis Freney and Frank Hardy – and, for me, the anecdotal accounts of older party members who lived through this period – give some idea both of the self-marginalising political consequences of the CPA’s Stalinist sectarianism and of the oppressiveness of the internal regime imposed by the bully-boys Lance Sharkey and J. B. Miles. They also provide accounts of the backwardness of the CPA leadership’s response to Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956 (including expelling and otherwise persecuting party members who distributed and discussed it) and the infatuation of some CPA leaders with Mao’s China at this time. To mention these things is not to deny either the achievements in the labour and social movements with which Australian communists are credited in this period, or the courage and selflessness of individual CPA members, but rather to point out that Australian communists often achieved these things despite, rather than because of, the party and the international movement of which they were members.
From being one of the most Stalinist of the world’s Communist parties, the CPA went further than most of the parties which adopted a Eurocommunist direction from the late 1960s onwards. The pro-Soviet minority who eventually split to form the Socialist Party of Australia were not only aggrieved by the new CPA leadership’s criticism of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the treatment of Soviet dissidents and the party’s characterisation of the USSR and its satellites as “socialist-based” rather than socialist. They were also deeply uncomfortable with the CPA’s embrace of second wave feminism (including within the internal culture and organisation of the party), gay liberation (thus “abandoning normal relations between men and women”), the radical student movement (the “drug sub-culture”) and radical trends in the labour movement such as the workers’ control movement and the Green Bans movement (“ultra-leftist”). About one-third of the CPA’s membership went with the Moscow liners after they were comprehensively defeated at the 1970 CPA National Congress. The CPA’s internal organisation and culture became remarkably liberal and open to all kinds of exotica during the 1970s, although in Queensland and Victoria the State party leaderships remained rather strait-laced and resistant to the entry of “bohemian”, “ultra-leftist” and/or “revisionist” elements. The CPA’s Program was extensively rewritten between 1967 and 1979, culminating in a 1979 Program Towards Socialism in Australia which effectively renounced all the fundamental differences of principle by which Leninist Communism differentiated itself from democratic socialism from 1921 onwards. By the 1980s the name, the historical associations and the dusty, tarnishing trinkets bearing Lenin’s image were really all that remained specifically Communist about the CPA.
From the mid-1970s onwards the CPA’s labour movement activity and economic policy perspectives increasingly came to be framed within a left reformist strategy for democratic socialism under the catch-phrase of “interventionism”. According to this strategy, the labour movement and progressive social movements should intervene in struggles around current political and public policy issues in order to promote positions and arguments “that deal with current problems and yet challenge capitalist power and help to develop socialist consciousness” (CPA Program, 1979). The strategy also called for intervention in policy-making processes and issues which have hitherto been regarded as the prerogative of business and the state, thereby challenging the authority structures of capitalism, patriarchy and other systems of domination (CPA Program, 1979). The CPA developed and promoted its interventionist strategy at a time when left intellectuals and union researchers were focusing on notions of “political unionism” and “democratic class struggle” developed in Sweden, adapting them from the Swedish experience and promoting them in the Australian labour movement. These trends converged in the critical support by sections of the left (including the CPA) of the ACTU-ALP Accord on the basis that the Accord opened opportunities for socialist and radical interventions in policy debates and processes under the Hawke Labor government. Such hopes were not borne out.
Nor, more generally, were other hopes that might have been held for the CPA. After its membership peaked at some 23,000 in 1943, largely on the strength of the CPA’s enthusiastic support for the Curtin Government’s Second World War effort and the temporary wartime kudos of the Soviet Union, it declined sharply and continuously for the rest of the CPA’s existence. The de-Stalinisation and adoption of a democratic socialist direction from 1967 onwards, whatever its intrinsic merits, was not rewarded by a reversal of the decline in party membership and in the capacities of the party organisation. In the late 1970s, more perceptive CPA members could not avoid observing that the party was continuing to shrink in a context – community outrage over the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 and the sharpening of industrial conflict under the Fraser Coalition government – in which, according to the Party’s theory – it should be experiencing growth. In a report to the CPA National Committee in 1979, the then National Secretary Eric Aarons endorsed another NC member’s framing of the question of the party’s future in the words “are we a mini-mass party or a large sect?”, answered that the CPA was still a mini-mass party “but only just” and warned that substantial change for the better could not be expected.
In 1982, as the Party’s decline continued, the CPA National Committee initiated a party-wide debate on “The Prospects for Socialist Growth in Australia” which quickly became a debate on the prospects, if any, for the CPA. The debate crystallised around three main positions:
* That the CPA should continue to be, or to be part of, a “revolutionary marxist party” in the communist tradition. INsofar as proponents of this position were critical of the status quo in the CPA, or acknowledged the party’s weaknesses, this was framed in terms of a critique of the party’s departure from revolutionary marxism and a call for a return to a more disciplined and authentically Marxist praxis.
* That the CPA should explore, with others, the possibility of creating a reformed socialist party in Australia which, broadly speaking, would represent a further development of the left-reformist democratic socialist direction which had produced the 1979 program and the interventionist strategy, and a furthering of the engagement with the new social movements such as feminism and environmentalism to the extent of calling into question the “centrality of class” in the socialist project.
* That there were no serious prospects for a viable and influential political party in Australia to the left of the ALP, and that the CPA’s best option was to contribute to the creation of a non-party socialist organisation along with non-party socialists and ALP members, with the proposed role of such a socialist organisation never definitively outlined, but probably being mainly as a source of ideas and analysis and a forum for discussion which could then feed into the labour movement, social movements and the ALP.
Support for the latter position was quite strong in and around the Victorian and Queensland State leaderships of the party. The Victorian State leadership, whilst going along with the Eurocommunist direction post-1968, had never been as enthusiastic as other tendencies in the CPA about the embrace of the new social movements (which they saw as a source of “ultra-leftist” infestation) and had also advocated a more conciliatory approach towards the ruling CPs of the Soviet bloc and their supporters in Australia. Both the Victorian and Queensland State leaderships were notably less liberal in their running of their party organisations than were other tendencies in the party. During the Prospects Discussion this groups’ advocacy of the “socialist organisation” option was laced with complaints about manifestations of “ultra-leftism” in the CPA including what was argued to be an unduly critical approach to the ALP and the Accord. Another alleged manifestation of “ultra-leftism” was the decision of the 1982 National Congress to establish a sexual harassment grievance procedure within the Party, which gives some indication of the essential conservatism of this group. By the start of 1984, and possibly earlier, it was clear that this group was not going to prevail in the Prospects Debate, and one night in April 1984 23 members of this group in Victoria and 11 in Queensland (including a majority of the respective State Committees and several National Committee members) resigned en masse, very publicly, and in such a way as to maximise the disruptive impact on the Party. The Victorians subsequently went on, along with like-minded members of the ALP, to form the Socialist Forum organisation which soon became the most conservative sub-faction of the Victorian ALP Left, whilst the Queenslanders, led by Lee Bermingham, went on to join the AWU faction of the Queensland ALP, and to figure prominently in the events which were the subject of the Shepherdson Inquiry.
[As an aside, the mass resignations occurred also exactly on the same day I was admitted to the CPA, having decided to join it on the strength of having read an internal party discussion document containing the main Prospects Debates proposals and deciding that I liked the "reformed socialist party" option and want to help it get up. As much as I would like to claim otherwise, there was no causal connection between my joining and the Taft/Bermingham forces leaving.]
The mass resignations of the “socialist organisation” camp simplifed the contours of the Prospects Debate, and were also seen by the remaining CPA leadership to require a decisive response. Hence the 27th National Congress of the CPA was brought forward to December 1984, and at the Congress itself the views of the “reformed socialist party” tendency broadly prevailed. The major resolution committed the party to a process of “Socialist Renewal” which would involve discussions and joint activities with a range of left-wing forces on cooperative ways forward for a stronger, more relevant and more unified left, including the option of a new socialist party. There was no shortage of potential partners in this venture, as the idea of forming a new left party arose in a number of other quarters in the Australian left in the 1980s, and was one of a number of Australian initiatives in that period intended to create a new or reformed political formation in the space generally referred to as “to the left of Labor”. These processes had their counterparts in many Western capitalist democracies from the 1970s onwards. As a generalisation, these initiatives were driven by a combination of:
• The desire to give party-political expression to the politics of the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s.
• A perception of the inadequacies of the parties of the social democratic and communist left. The former were perceived to be abandoning their traditional emancipatory goals, the latter were stained by association with totalitarian regimes, and both were perceived to be insufficiently responsive to new social movement values and suffering from a democratic deficit. In Australia an important driver was the perceived rightward shift and “betrayal of Labor principles” by the Hawke Government.
• The need for the left to respond intelligently to developments of the late 20th century including ecological crisis, technological change and its social consequences, sociocultural and economic change within capitalist societies, the existence of extremes of wealth and poverty on a global scale, and so on.
Thoughtful people within social democratic and communist parties (and thoughtful communist parties such as the CPA) also attempted to engage with the desire for a new politics through initiatives aimed at renewing the left.
In many countries the outcome of these initiatives was the formation of parties of the “new politics”. In a majority of cases these were Green parties, but in some countries (notably Denmark and Sweden) they were what German political scientist Herbert Kitschelt has called “left libertarian” parties. The Dutch Green Left Party is a hybrid of the two types. In some countries such parties were not created de novo but evolved from progressive and democratic sections of the communist left, similar to the CPA after 1968.
Not all initiatives for new left formations in Australia accepted the need for a fundamental political renewal. Some aimed at organisational renewal of a more or less traditional conception of labourist or communist politics, for instance through creating new “real” labour parties (e.g. the Progressive Labour Party, Bill Hartley’s Industrial Labour Party), or through regrouping and/or fusion of existing Marxist-Leninist and/or Trotskyist parties (the Socialist Alliance is the best-known recent example). The CPA, however, took care to distinguish its Socialist Renewal project from such exercises throughout the 1980s; the themes of political renewal as enumerated above were all present in the key CPA National Congress resolutions of 1984, 1987, 1989 and 1991.
In Australia, the attempt to enflesh the “new politics” ran in two parallel streams. One was the various proto-Green initiatives – including the Nuclear Disarmament Party, the Getting Together Conference, the Rainbow Alliance, the creation of numerous local and regional Green parties and alliances, electoral interventions by Green independents, and various specific collaborations and alliances of new social movement participants – from which it was eventually possible to pull together State-based Green parties which federated to form the Australian Greens in 1992. The other stream was the movement to form a new or reformed party of the left which developed around the CPA’s Socialist Renewal initiatives, and culminated in the launching of the New Left Party in 1989 and its founding the following year.
Three important developments concentrated the minds of the CPA National Committee, and almost everyone in the CPA, during 1989.
• A party seemed to be emerging in the NLP which could be an effective successor to the CPA.
• The long-drawn-out organisational and membership decline of the CPA itself had arguably passed beyond the point of no return by 1989.
• The 1989 National Congress and preliminary gatherings took place against the backdrop of the collapse of Eastern European communism and far-reaching changes within the Soviet Union, and less than six months after the Beijing Massacre.
Hence it was not surprising that the National Committee and, eventually, a large majority of the 1989 CPA National Congress decided that the CPA should suspend its operations as a political party to enable CPA members to give their fullest commitment to helping to build the NLP.
I was at the CPA’s 29th National Congress, and at the Queensland State Conference which preceded it by three weeks and endorsed its main proposals. Indeed, I had a hand in organising both gatherings. I can therefore vouch for Mike Ticher’s observation that “the atmosphere was, perhaps surprisingly, less one of a wake for the CP than one of rejuvenation and even relief at being able to direct all energies into the NLP”. This, however, was not a unanimous sentiment. The Congress decisions were opposed by a minority (about one-fifth) who argued, against all the evidence, that the CPA still had a future as a political party, and who combined this extreme optimism of the will about the CPA with extreme (if not wholly unjustified) pessimism of the intellect about the prospects of the NLP. One North Queensland delegate’s accustomed equanimity gave way to a ranting speech against the “betrayal” committed by the Congress followed by a walkout. Other evidence of unhappiness came in letters from old comrades and relayed reports of conversations in which sadness was expressed at the loss of “all we worked and suffered for”. A well-known ALP parliamentary staffer in Brisbane was said to have been in tears over the Congress decision.
Be that as it may, the mood of the majority was much as Mike Ticher described. The defeat of Australia’s most staunchly anti-communist government in the Queensland State election held on the same weekend as the Congress was greeted with delight – not least by the many expatriate Queenslanders who had fled to the southern States in the preceding couple of decades. There were real and non-trivial grounds to hope that the NLP would succeed – or, at the very least, do better than the CPA had been able to. Further, every report of regime change in Eastern Europe, or of progress in glasnost and perstroika in the USSR, would be met with elation, sometimes accompanied with unrestrained laughter at the expense of local Stalinists who were, so the punchlines went, planning one-person invasions of this or that Eastern European state to defeat counterrevolution. What was there to be elated about? There was the righting of a great historical wrong which Australian Communists were, if not implicated in, certainly associated with in many minds. There was also the hope (justified by the statements of some of the leaders of the democratic opposition movements, and many of the figures at the cutting edge of glasnost) that the success of the democratic movements in Eastern Europe would usher in a real socialism – democratic, humanistic and ecological – in place of Stalinism. Most of us had a merry Christmas and a happy new year in the summer of 1989-90.
Then reality intruded.
Throughout 1990, the first democratic elections in Eastern Europe generally were won, not by parties of the democratic left, not by the people who had been the spokespersons of the democratic movements of 1989, but by parties which generally represented the most extreme repudiation of the old regime – parties of naive “shock therapy” neo-liberalism, extreme nationalism and/or religious conservatism. It is clear enough in hindsight to see why this was always likely to be the case, and it is worth noting that the peoples of those countries have used their votes to make sensible corrections in subsequent elections. But at the time its effect on people in and around the CPA/NLP milieu, and no doubt elsewhere on the left, was demoralising and disorienting – one response was a kind of soft Stalinist backsliding under the slogan “they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater!”, another was political disengagement, yet another (and this was true of yours truly) was dogged but largely joyless persistence, ambergrised in my case by an historically imaginative attempt to see things from the angle of newly enfranchised Czechs and Hungarians. Over the next few years we were then served up the apparent stalling of perestroika as the centre was unable to hold between the irresponsible poles of Stalinist conservatism and impatient radicalism, followed by the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev and the subsequent passing of the initiative to Yeltsin and their supporters who, whilst they deserve a full measure of credit for their role in opposing the coup, subsequently morphed from Jacobins of perestroika to shills for and enforcers of neo-liberal shock therapy, eventually leading to the reversal of Russian democratisation from the mid-90s onwards.
Closer to home, things were not working out as hoped in the New Left Party. The 1989 Launching Conference and the 1990 Founding Conference of the NLP were very successful events, but once we all went back to our regional centres it provied difficult to translate the success of these conferences into activity on the ground. By the middle of 1991 it was clear that the organisational goals set in the Action Plan adopted by the Founding Conference would not be met, and whilst the 1992 National Conference of the NLP tried to put a brave face on things, by 1993 there was no avoiding the fact that the NLP was not going to make it. It was downgraded from a political party to an entity called Left Connection which in turn only lasted a couple of years before folding. Whilst this was going on the Broadside newspaper, an attempt to establish a successor to the CPA paper Tribune, failed, and Australian Left Review closed down under acrimonious circumstances without leaving a successor (pace Guy Rundle, I don’t believe it is entirely true or fair to hold David Burchell solely responsible for this outcome). Why the NLP eventually failed is a subject for another time, but for at least some NLP supporters such as myself the success of the Greens in the political space which the NLP had been intended to fill is suitable compensation for lost dreams and a partial vindication of our judgement in supporting the NLP option in the first place, although once again this is not a unanimous view.
Fortunately, the CPA had provided well for its several millions of dollars worth of assets, having decided to transfer them to a foundation for safekeeping. By 1992 the SEARCH Foundation had been established and the process of asset transfer got under way. Contrary to the Wikipedia article, the decision to establish SEARCH was not prompted by the failure of the New Left Party, and was in fact a resolution of the 1989 CPA National Congress. The CPA’s assets were the subject of abundant and highly creative speculation, rumours and conspiracy theories throughout my time in the party and beforehand, and no doubt still are. Nothing I have ever had to say on this matter has ever been able to bank the fires of anyone’s imagination, and so I have nothing more to add on the matter on this occasion.
So what was it all for? George Orwell was able, in The Road To Wigan Pier, in Homage To Catalonia and (by implication) in 1984, to praise the courage, selflessness and basic decency of rank and file communists in Britain and elsewhere whilst nailing the commissars and party leaders (“half gramophone, half gangster”) and the system for which they were shills (“there is something wrong with a regime that needs a pyramid of corpses every few years”). Something like this is the best approach to evaluating the CPA and similar western communist parties, where one basically has to weigh two huge and apparently contradictory facts. On the one hand, the women and men who made up the CPA membership contributed much, over seven decades, to making Australia a better and fairer place. To give one example, visitors to Sydney’s Centennial Park have the Communist union leaders Jack Mundey and Joe Owens to thank for the fact that Centennial Park is the jewel that it is rather than being concreted over to make a football stadium and car park. On the other hand, it must be recognised that Australian Communism was associated with one of the most extensive systems of injustice and inhumanity ever seen, that between 1930 and 1968 this association was one of enthusiastic admiration and unquestioning obedience, that Stalinist Party leaders such as Sharkey and Miles emulated their hero Koba in a small, mean way during their time in charge of the party, and that at least some individuals (Wilfred Burchett comes to mind) were knowingly and wilflly complicit in the crimes of Stalinist regimes.
It is also useless to attempt to deny that the horrors of Stalinism were enabled by factors which were fundamental to the Leninist project and to the key differences between Leninist Communism and democratic socialism. With the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that such historical developments as the emergence of Eurocommunism, the CPA’s embrace of “socialist renewal” and its eventual dissolution in favour of the NLP, and events in the world of “actually existing socialism” such as the Prague Spring and glasnost and perestroika, constituted a long march by the better elements of the communist movement to the conclusion that on all the key points of difference between them, the democratic socialists had been right and the communists tragically wrong. Mikhail Gorbachev now identifies as a social democrat, whilst former CPA National Organiser Brian Aarons, writing in Australian Left Review immediately after the 1989 National Congress, observed that:
“Democratic socialism” much better describes the political system and values which progressive communist parties East and West now stand for, and it is a term many of them now use. Several are changing their names or joining in new political formations as a clear public statement of their rejection of stalinism.
It is not inappropriate, I think, to end by acknowledging the positive political, social and cultural contribution made by the great majority of Australian Communists whilst at the same time asking how much more positive that contribution might have been had those same women and men spent their political lives as part of a stronger Labor Left or as part of a more radical party within the democratic socialist tradition rather than one in the Leninist-Stalinist mould.
Further reading:
Eric Aarons (1993), What’s Left? Memoirs of an Australian Communist, Penguin: Ringwood
Denis Freney (1991), A Map of Days: Life on the Left, William Heinemann: Port Melbourne
Joyce Stevens (1987), Taking the Revolution Home: Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia 1920-1945, Sybylla Cooperative: Fitzroy
Carole Ferrier (1999), Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary, Melbourne University Press: Carlton
Frank Hardy (1975), But the Dead Are Many, Triad Panther: St Albans (nominally fiction, but based heavily on actual events and personalities in the history of the CPA and the USSR..
Interesting piece. The question at the end, about ‘how much more positive a contribution’ might have been made got me thinking: what was it that drew people to leninist/stalinist communism over other forms of left politics that might have been healthier. I wonder what the ‘psychology’ of it was. I’m afraid my own thoughts on this might be based on superficial observations and not very well informed, but I wonder if there is a very human explanation. I mean, behaviour of ‘outsider’ groups, how they position themselves in relation to mainstream, and how they might become inured to criticism because they are so used to being demonised by the ‘deluded’ mainstream, so a bit like religions which have in-built explanations to counter ‘doubt’ and warnings of the dangers of loss of faith. Internalised reflexive response to doubt (e.g. beware of bourgeouis idealism etc).
Some might have enjoyed the prestige backing of sovereign states which I presume would have contributed funds or at least opportunities to participate in various activities. What a laugh that Australia should produce communists more stalinist than the average! As a young student in the 1980s I remember going to have lunch with a fellow student from Singapore who was boarding with an old guard communist (SPA I think). I met him, a leathery skinned, flint-eyed character. My young friend from Singapore, flirting with danger as a citizen of that country, was quite enchanted with the politics of his new mentor as an accompaniment to our reading of Emile Zola’s ‘Germinal’ back at uni. Perhaps living in a straightlaced society sends some of us into the arms of similarly straightlaced rebels.
I suspect Stalinist communism’s appeal to many people in the 1930s and 1940s was paradoxically its conservatism. Internationally many of the Stalinist leaders who threw out the ‘Trotskyites’ or ‘deviationists’ had working class backgrounds (E.g Thalemann in Germany or Foster in the US). They had seen how the instability of pre-keynesian capitalism could cause mass human misery through unemployment. So a state that ensured everyone had a job, and planned to keep economic growth going ever upwards looked pretty appealing. The loss of the bourgeois talking shop of parliament seemed an easy price to pay to bring stability to your local community.
Very quick question Paul, I assume this is your writing?
Thanks Paul for a really interesting article spoiled unfortunately for me by the idea that Stalinism is somehow the logical consequence of Bolshevism (or Leninism as you call it.) I think this ignores the actual situation the democratic revolutionary forces found themselves in from 1918 onwards. I’m with Trotsky on this one – that Stalin was the gravedigger of the revolution. I’m also with Tony Cliff about the USSR and the satellite states – that under Stalin the USSR became a state capitalist regime. To me that explains a lot about its development from 1930 till its demise.
Long post.
My father was a member until about 1980. He then quit and joined what I think was called “The socialist workers party”.
An angry young man in his youth, constantly involved in industrial disputes. He is now an angry, crotchety old man – still a firm believer in socialism.
Paul, I think the rise and fall of the CPA as an independently significant force between the Great Depression and the nineteen-fifties is the Rosetta Stone of understanding revolutionary Leftism in Oz. Going from being a force in the general public to being a junior member of a broad Left coalition in the unions and at Labor conference (and something of an embarrasment for their non-communist allies in that latter environment, IMO) must have had a truly demoralising effect on true believers. Remember the old saw about academic fights: they’re so vicious because the stakes are so small. I think the postwar CPA was constantly moving towards smaller stakes, even as the militant anti-communists in the Labor Movement appeared to have been bested by the broader Left.
I was reading Robin Gollan’s Revolutionaries & Reformists: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Australia, 1920-1955 and I was amazed by the extent to which it was a muddledheaded piece of not-quite-Stalinist-apologia, not-quite-nostalgia-for-a-lost-era, which pays no attention to the New Left & anti-Stalinist tedencies that you list above (though obviously those movements mostly arose after 1955, ‘Revolutionaries & Reformists’ reads like a piece of instant history written during the mid fifties, a pamphlet in book length—not a serious work published two decades after the last of the events depicted.)
Of course Golan was in the ALP after the secret speech (I suppose he was one of the famous ‘crypto-communists’ who went into that party once Evatt unleased the forces of hell on the Catholic Right), but I think you’ll agree that he was a pretty orthodox anti-New-Leftist.
I did not know this. We’re these people motivated by the fact that the old Egerton Left faction had morphed into the other big Right faction in Queensland?
All in all a very interesting subject, and one I’m afraid has only become possible to understand since the end of the Cold War.
There is a rapidly growing consensus among historians that Stalinism was simply ramped-up Leninism. This is very good to see after all the lame excuses made for him and now I hope more work is done on exposing the left-fascist links between Lenin and Marx. Lenin did not fall from the sky and Marx was a terrible dictatorship-loving fascist ( Sear ‘ Marx and friends’ website )
Telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Very interesting piece Paul, many thanks for it. Looking back at the article you quote, I said that Oz left review, ‘died beneath’ Burchell. As I understand it, the board running it told Burchell and other staff they could only guarantee the magazine’s continuity 2 months at a time, and DB and others decided that that was insufficient job security. Fair enough, i guess, though the fact that people weren’t willing to take on that uncertainty for a political project indicate how dead the project was. I dont think Burchell killed ALR – but another type of editor would have made a go of it, and then drawn in new backers.
However Burchell seems to have already begun his trek towards whatever existential spittoon he now inhabits. For anyone who remembers ALR and the amount of Cuban tourism advertising that it relied upon (‘come pick coffee and teach maths in the Sierra Madre!’), his current denunciations of Stalinism are hilarious.
“So what was it all for? George Orwell was able, in The Road To Wigan Pier, in Homage To Catalonia and (by implication) in 1984, to praise the courage, selflessness and basic decency of rank and file communists in Britain and elsewhere whilst nailing the commissars and party leaders (”half gramophone, half gangster”)…”
When George Orwell wrote the rank and file could be excused because the full horrors of left facism were not at the time well known. But when you joined the CPA the pyramids of corpses were everywhere to be seen. In my younger days I had many mates active in far left political groups. Almost all of them excused the crimes committed elsewhere by those affiliated with their ideology to some extent, and came out with lines like “but isn’t that young Fidel Castro such a nice bloke.” Almost all of them were willing to see blood shed on Australian soil to acheive their version of paradise.
Paul, you were a willing party to the banality of evil. Own up to it mate, apologize and move on.
Salient, your comment is an example of the banality of banality.
unless you subscribe to one of the karmic religions, you cannot seriously suggest that I could have been a willing party to things the CPA did or supported before I was born and which it had renounced by the time I joined in 1984.
If you want to call people willing parties to the banality of evil over positions or affiliations they held in the 1980s, try starting with those who were members of either the ALP or the Coalition at this time, when both were knowingly and wilfully complicit in the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor which, in per capita terms, was as bad as anything the Stalinists got up to. I exempt from this those ALP members, mainly from the Left, who campaigned both inside and outside the ALP for East Timorese independence.
E-petition: Call for immediate resignation of the Queensland government and new elections
Queensland citizens draws to the attention of the House the Queensland public, the rightful owners of $15 billion worth of assets which are to be sold, were denied any say over this because of the failure of the Queensland government to reveal those plans during the course of the elections. We consider the stated intention of the government to proceed with the sale in the face of opinion polls, which show at least 80% public opposition, to be amongst the most serious breaches of public trust imaginable.
Your petitioners, therefore, request the House to call upon the Queensland government to resign immediately to give the Queensland public a chance to elect a new Government which can gain its trust. Your petitioners also warn any private investors considering buying the assets, not to do so and call upon a future State government which does enjoy the trust and confidence of the Queensland people not to honour any such contracts for the sale of assets.
Daggett, I’m sure there’s more than one argument connecting the topic of this thread to the subject matter of your post, but can we try to avoid thread drift, please? Thanks.
Too late. Should have been written at least 15-20 years ago.
Sorry to be so facile, but this reads like an extended version of the ‘Judean peoples front/Peoples front of Judea’ scene from the Life of Brian. I don’t mean to critise the article, just the events. Sure I’m probably young and naive (I wasn’t born when most of the events described occured) but why is there so much emphasis in doctrinal hair-splitting among the self described left (as opposed to roughly left leaning groups like the ALP scared of using the term directly)?
Even today, in my recent University days I observed that the various leftist groups in student politics expended most of their energy attacking and fighting each other about who was or wasn’t true to this or that label. It seemed absurd to me, I was involved in a student Union election for a position that essentially gave control over food and support services on campus, yet what seemed to matter was whether a group was really Bolshevik even though they claimed to be Trotskyist (I may have my labels confused, it was all a blur to me). Would these issues really make a difference about how much you’d decide to charge students for a cup of coffee, or how much money to subsidise the Engo students end of year BBQ with?
Just to clarify, while I wasn’t involved with the left groups, I wasn’t from the right or any other politcal group, but rather a genuinely non-political candidate for a service delivery position. I have my own broader political views, but couldn’t see why they would be relevant in that position so didn’t campaign based on them.
Scaling this up to ‘real’ politics though, do these kind of intricate theoretical differences take up most of the debate within ‘the left’ (ALP aside) these days? On the surface, the Greens seems reasonably united, though perhaps I’m being naive once again.
Paul, a great post. Could I suggest something to complement it, perhaps in a new post or in comments. You’ve given us a great top-down portrait, but what about the picture from the bottom up?
What was it actually like, in terms of ordinary lived experience, to be a Party member in the last years of the CPA? Did the Party organise parties? Or Saturday arvo BBQs? Did it try to exercise control over its members’ social lives? Did it look askance at members having friends or partners who weren’t Party members or sympathisers? What was the gender mix?
How often did you meet? Were the meetings full of debate on big theoretical topics, or mundane practical stuff? Were you required to accept the political rulings from the heirarchy, or was dissent tolerated?
Was being a Party member a very time-consuming commitment? Were you required to proselytise and recruit new members? Was there much paranoia about infiltration or surveillance by ASIO? Was it easy to join, or did they vet you first?
I’m not saying you have to answer all these questions!
But any detail or anecdotes you could provide would be very interesting.
Interesting and all, but it reminds me all over again why I ran away to join the Psychedelic Left after about two meetings of Students for Democratic Action.
Who the fuck was Gramsci, anyway?
Bit Pipesian there prof rat, but maybe you’re right. Certainly, many anarchists think so.
Would you agree with John Podhoretz, Salient, who reckoned that if Orwell were alive today, he’d be standing with the neo-conservatives and against the Left?
Paul Norton,
I was in a hurry and so hadn’t properly looked at the article. I truly thought the article was about the twentieth anniversary of the election of the Goss Queensland state Labor Government and not about the 20th anniversary of the dissolution of the Communist Party of Australia. It was not my intention to take this forum discussion so far off topic. Nevertheless, now that I have, could I ask that people here consider signing the petition?
My two cents here is:
I once thought Marxism, in its relatively uncorrupted pre-Stalinist, post-Social-Democratic form, had about 95%-98% of the answers to humankind’s problems. Now, I would put that figure, at a guess, at roughly 30%. A good article, about the gravely serious shortcomings of the Socialist movement towards environmental questions, which the Communist Party of Australia shares, is Sandy Irvine’s “Trotsky’s Biggest Blindspot” (which is roughly the size of 20 printed pages).
Another staggering ommission from the platform of the Communist Party of Australia, the Trotskyist Parties and just about all left and far left parties is any acknowledgement that the whole international private banking system is a needless rort that has caused nearly every major economic crisis in the last 200 years. In all that time, it has been left to other political parties, nominally further to the right, to take up the fight against the banking system. Much of this is covered in Ellen Brown’s “The Web of Debt”, which, nothwithstanding a few points of disagreement, I thoroughly recommend.
Matt #14 and Paulus #15, you’ve given me a lot to think and write about, and they’re all fair points. One thing I would say (and this is more in response to Paulus than to Matt) is that by the 1980s (and, from anecdotes, the 1970s) the CPA’s internal life was far more diverse than outsiders might think, and was heavily influenced by local, regional, occupational, demographic, cultural, sub-cultural, etc., factors surrounding particular party organisations and branches. For example, in 1988 I’d estimate that slightly over half the Tribune newspaper staff in Sydney were in same sex relationships, and this was such an easy, natural part of the Party’s internal life in inner-city Sydney that it was hardly noticed, much less commented on. The next year, when I moved to Brisbane and asked the Queensland State Committee to consider whether or not to support a candidate running on a queer rights platform, I had a real “welcome to pre-Goss Queensland” moment with some of the expressions of hesitation and discomfort (although not outright opposition) which I encountered. This difference, it should be noted, was between two groups of people who were broadly on the same page about what they thought the party’s direction should be.
“In all that time, it has been left to other political parties, nominally further to the right, to take up the fight against the banking system. Much of this is covered in Ellen Brown’s “The Web of Debt”, which, nothwithstanding a few points of disagreement, I thoroughly recommend.”
You mean like the LaRouchite’s and their railing against the ‘money power’ and the ’synarchy’ (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)?
Yes, Chav, the “LaRouchite’s” are one group that have a lot to say about the banking system which makes sense.
I strongly disagree with a lot of their views on other issues, in particular, their support for population growth, however, I believe in giving credit where credit is due. I have written of this in my article “About the Citizens Electoral Council”, which is based on a post to johnquiggin.com. The article has generated some discussion including from some CEC supporters.
That the left has universally failed to adopt a sensible policy against the scam of the private banking system is a source of great bewilderment to me.
Paul, why have you nothing to say about the other great split in the CPA, when the Maoists left to form the CPA-Marxist Leninist?
Paulus #15:
What was it actually like, in terms of ordinary lived experience, to be a Party member in the last years of the CPA? Did the Party organise parties? Or Saturday arvo BBQs?
Yes, the Party organised parties, afternoon barbecues, evening dinners, social weekends, etc., but for the most part these tended to be done by party branches and collectives and reflected the idiosyncrasies of each party unit.
At the party’s Sydney (and National) HQ there was a weekly band night called “Behind Enemy Lines” in the 1980s which was largely organised by the younger members in the iner-city branches and had a rather punky edge to them. Outside the Party, the young people involved were also heavily into Sydney’s inner-city rock and artistic post-punk scene.
Events organised by or for State/District organisations, the National Organisation and/or Tribune tended to be more musically mixed with a strong folky element. The Queeensland State organisation hosted a monthly Folk Club gathering at the Brisbane Party HQ, frequented by both party and non-party members. Some of the people involved in this were (and I think are) strongly involved in the Woodford-Maleny Folk Festival.
As you might expect, the younger members, and party organisations in which younger members predominated tended to party more often and harder than the older comrades, although the latter could show us a thing or two at May Day parties held after the official rally and march.
Two anecdotes:
1. When I convened my first meeting of the Sydney Tertiary Branch in February 1985, I had prepared for the meeting in the normal, orderly way in which Branch Secretaries are supposed to prepare. Only one other member had prepared similarly. ALl the other members of the Branch had, like myself, been at a going-away dinner for a comrade the previous night, and after said dinner had spent the subsequent evening, morning and afternoon partying on with a very popular non-Party activist. At some point in the carousing the comrades had decided to nominate said activist for Branch membership, and she enthusiastically accepted, and they all turned up to the meeting thoroughly bedewed and thoroughly satisfied that her admission to membership was a done deal. My term as Branch Secretary was marked by constant disagreement between myself and the rest of the Branch, and I can’t help wondering whether this began with my insistence that proper democratic process required that the decision on admitting a new member should be made by the entire Branch through orderly discoussion at a properly convened meeting rather than through an impromptu decision by those with the stamina to piss on for 36 hours straight.
2. One Saturday afternoon barbecue was famously held by the self-described “Socialist Rank and File” faction withn the Party at a Party member’s address in Annandale, in inner-city Sydney, three doors down from the home of the National Organiser. If you know Annandale you will know that “three doors down” is not very far at all, and as the National Organiser was pottering about in his back yard he smelt the snags sizzling and heard frequent vehement references to the “f***ing reformist leadership” and similer references to himself. He decided to go for a short walk to the park across the road (in the process saying Hello to a comrade from Canberra with whom he got on well despite their differences, and who was going to the barbecue) and observing a steady stream of CPA members as well as members of some of the smaller Trot groups entering the premises where his name was being devoured as greedily as the chops and steaks. This episode precipitated some three months of robust discussion along the lines of whether Party rules required that, if such barbecues were organised by Party members with a shared political perspective, they had to invite everyone else in the Party to partake in the snags, the beer and any political discussion reasonably incidental to the barbie.
Sam #22, if I were writing a more comprehensive history I would certainly address the 1963 split which gave rise to the CPA (M-L). As it is:
* For the purposes of this post I thought the Wikipedia article I linked to, and some of the books I listed, would be sufficient basic information on the 1963 split.
* Personally I know less about the 1963 split and have thought less about it than subsequent events in the CPA’s history.
* In terms of the overt framework of the debate at the time, the 1963 split was bsaically a split between different understandings of Marxism-Leninism and between loyalty to different centres of world communism. The split of 1967-70 was more fundamental, entailing both a rejection of Marxism-Laninism and an assertion of the right of national communist parties, whether ruling (as in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring) or in opposition (as in Australia) to determine their own policy and strategies rather than being “guided” by one or other purported centre of world communism. It represented a break with Stalinism which the 1963 split did not, at least overtly.
OK, those people who want to debate banking and finance now have an open thread of their own for this purpose.
Actually I don’t want, at this point in time, to get into along and time-consuming debate over banking and finance, Paul Norton. I didn’t even particularly want to debate 9/11.
Nevertheless, I remain mystified that the entire left, including the CPA, has failed to address this question coherently and one day, I would like to find out why.
PN @ 25,
I salute you. Just sayin’.
“Nevertheless, I remain mystified that the entire left, including the CPA, has failed to address this question coherently and one day, I would like to find out why.”
Daggett, the Left generally has addressed this question coherently, its just that we don’t share the assumptions/conclusions of the CEC and other far-right groups, i.e. that the Jews control the world financial system.
Once you start talking about “scam’s” you are venturing into conspiracy-theory territory (note the 9/11 Truth page on the website you linked to) which is always fertile ground for anti-semitism. The global financial and banking systems don’t have to be a ’scam’, they can be undemocratic, unaccountable, corrupt and incredibly destructive just like any other aspect of capitalism.
Obviously you haven’t been reading the “Truth is out there!” edition of Saturday Salon! Dags hasn’t just ventured into conspiracy theory territory; he’s settled it, proclaimed its independence, and run its economy into the ground.
I do read some Pipes, Conquest and Service type histories – but I certainly don’t rely on them. Far better to use socialist sources and eye-witness accounts.
G. Maximoff, Voline and Arshinov are excellent for eye-witness accounts with bourgeois historians like P.Avrich and O.Figes also providing some useful POVs at times. I regard Anne Appelbaum as a neocon for her recent whitewash of Lenin and Trotsky.
And now the spadework has been done on Lenin can we please move on to deconstructing Marx?
The Poles seem to have an excellent plan to ban the red-fascist swastika – we whould do that here. Left fascism killed more people in worse ways than the Nazis over the last 91 years, lest we forget.
Daggett,
With respect, if you think that the broad Marxist left has been historically unconcerned with the rampages of the banking system, you are not very well read in the literature. To put it more bluntly, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Criticism of the destabilising role of financial capital goes back to Marx’s Capital, where he denounced “the roving cavaliers of credit” (link to good summary by Steve Keen). Lenin discusses the tendency of financial capital to dominate industrial capital and drive imperial expansion as a way to open new markets (“Shock Doctrine”, anyone?) in Imperialism, the highest form of capitalism. Baran and Sweezy’s ‘Monopoly Capital’, which was in many ways the standard western or non-soviet Marxist text of the Keynesian era deals extensively with the problems of overaccumulation of financial capital and how states and financial entities become intertwined. In the late 70s and 80s Mandel put forward an alternative theory of the domination of financial capital as a driver of what is now called globalization in Late Capitalism. Post the 1980s, the marxists have dissolved into the broader countercultural socdem left as Paul chronicles, and the evils of the World Bank, IMF, and Milton Friedman is almost all they ever talk about.
Next batch of questions from Paulus #15:
Did it [the CPA] try to exercise control over its members’ social lives? Did it look askance at members having friends or partners who weren’t Party members or sympathisers? What was the gender mix?
It certainly didn’t try to exercise control over its members’ social lives or relationships during my time, although if you look at the suggested reading by Joyce Stevens and Jean Devanny you’ll see that the CPA did try to micromanage its members’ social and private lives during its Stalinist period. The main formal mechanisms established for achieving this end (the Control Commissions) had, AFAIK, been wound up by the end of the 1960s. As a generalisation I would say that from around 1970 onwards the membership wouldn’t have copped attempts by the pary to have exercised such control, the Party no longer had the mechanisms to attempt to exercise such control, and it couldn’t afford to lose members which is what the upshot of such attempts would have been.
This raises the important issue of exactly how a political party or faction maintains control over its membership, which I’ll address a few comments further on.
The gender balance amongst the membership was, by the early 1980s, around 42 per cent female to 58 per cent male. At the 1982 National Congress the CPA adopted a rule stating that the percentage of women elected to party committees had to be at least equal to the percentage of women amongst the party membership, and when the sums were done a figure of 42 per cent was arrived at. Once again, of course, the picture varied greatly between different party units. Some of the blue-collar industrial branches would be all male, whereas there was one locality branch in Sydney which was all female.
Finally, to Paulus #15:
Depends on the party unit. Party branches (which could be based on locality, on occupation/industry, or on some other shared interest) usually met monthly if they were active. State and District Committees met monthly. State and District Conferences met roughyl annually. National Congress convened roughly once every three years. The National Committee met about three times a year, the National Executive slightly more often. Collectives (of members with a shared interest in an issue) met less often than monthly but this varied from one to the other.
Short answer: both, but it depended a lot on the party unit concerned and who was involved in it. I certainly recall that National Committee meetings were run in such a way that free-ranging discussion on the big issues could be had for at least a couple of hours before people got around to formulating more specific resolutions. What would happen is that one of the National Organisers or another National Executive member would present a political report on the topic under discussion, which would then be followed by a discussion period in which members could contribute a general view on the issue, report on developments on the issue from their union or area of activity, report in the views of their State or District Organisation, etc., and often a small sub-group of the National Committee would go away, prepare a resolution which attempted to encapsulate the discussion and present it to a further session of the National Committee where people had a further chance to register objections, propose amendments, etc., until finally a resolution was adopted which, if not a consensus, was certainly reflective of a clear majority view of the meeting. Sometimes, if the National Executive thought that something more structured needed to be presented as a focus for debate, it would formulate a resolution itself and then submitted to the full National Committee to be chewed over and kicked into shape.
Most of my Branch meetings were spent in a Branch where I was in a minority of one defending National Committee positions!
The formal rule was that members had full rights to contribute to debate in various ways, express opinions and make proposals prior to and at National Congresses, but that once National Congress had made its decisions people should carry out the Congress decisions, or at least not hinder the carrying out of Congress decisions, whilst maintaining their right to dissent and seek to have the policy changed within Party processes. In practice things were far more liberal than this. Dissenting CPA members who took their dissent outside Party channels, or expressed it very unconstructively within Party channels, were able to get away scot free, or very lightly, with what would have been expellable offences in the Labor factions or the smaller Marxist parties. The members of my Branch in Sydney made a habit of coming to District Committee and National Committee meetings and telling the “hierarchy” how wrong they were.
If you were an active member, it was more so than being a Labor Party or Liberal Party member, less so than the smaller Marxist groups, or the CPA itself in the middle of the C20. In my time there was no formal requirement for a minimum number e.g. of hours spent on party activity and there were some very high-profile individual members who just paid dues and remained on the distribution list for newsletters. A lot depended on individual members, and many of the older members volunteered large amounts of their time way over and above anything that could have been expected of them. I’m not sure to what extent this reflected personal commitment and to what extent it was a continuation of old habits.
Whilst this was always regarded as a desirable thing to do, it was not a formal requirement of membership in my time.
Party security was always something people thought about, and there was a fair bit of soul-searching in my time about how to reconcile the desirability of open and democratic communications through various media with the need to maintain security of sensitive information. Some things weren’t committed to writing, some things were only spoken about in secure locations, some things were spoken or written about in code, some information was shared on a “need to know” basis. This is a complex topic and there was more to it than concern about ASIO.
The formal requirement was that a prospective member had to read the Party Programme and Rules, then have a discussion with a Party official (usually a Branch Secretary but sometimes a State or Distrct Organiser) about their attitude towards the Party Programme and Rules and how they wanted to contribute to the Party, then a recommendation would be made to the relevant Branch that X be accepted as a party member, and the Branch would discuss the membership application and decide whether to accept the new member. Once again, how different Party units interpreted and applied this requirement in practice varied greatly. Some were extremely open to new members and if an applicant was on good personal terms with Branch members, had impressed them with their work as an activist, etc., they weren’t even given the first degree, let alone the third degree, on their understanding of the Party Programme. Others were more demanding (the student collective at Sydney University was notorious in this regard in the 1970s).
I loved reading this. Very interesting, thanks for sharing it – glad I wasn’t there though!
I was specifically referring to Russian Revolution (1990) by Richard Pipes, prof. It posits Lenin as a power-hungry, opportunistic psychopath who seized Russia through a coup d’etat.
Your comment regarding Applebaum intrigues me. “Whitewash”, you say? Could you perhaps cite the work where this is so? I’d like to read it. Is the code for what you are saying that she is a closet Trot, perhaps?
One more thing – re the Poles’ plan… (to expand Article 256 of the Criminal Code) this rather illibral scheme to ban red stars, swastistkas, Che T-shirts, and a thousand items besides, is not going to fly. It was an idea floated by Elzbieta Radziszewska an MP and plenipotentiary to the EU for equal-treatment status. She is not an MP of the party ocurrently in power, the government of Donald Tusk, she is a member of the Citizens Platform party, which was in power previous to Tusk’s coalition. So she is not in a position to do anything except by some form of moral suasion and appeals to vague exhortations to the fact that Poland is a signatory to international treaties. She also claimed she is going to outlaw all manifestations of sexism, sexism as defined by herself.
Professor Scumbag, if the Poles ban red flags as well as swastika’s the result will be the same as in Germany, Nazi’s march protected by police under the Imperial battle flag while anti-fascist counter-demonstrator’s receive the baton, boot and water-cannon treatment.
Meanwhile European troops contribute to actual, real slaughter in Afghanistan under the banner of liberal democracy.
Excuse the plug, but readers might find some these articles on the CPA of interest, collected at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal at http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/293
That’s quite a good summation of CPA history and dénouement. It misses however some of the manoevre-ings that did occur during the eighties from .It also lets the CPA off the hook on the question of the Prices and Incomes Accord as the CPA, as far as I know , especially through figures like Mark Taft and Laurie Carmichael, were the orchestrators and chief left sponsors of the Accord such that the whole Broad Left exercise — was engineered as a manoevre formatted under Accord endorsement.To miss this point is to miss the whole trajectory of the CPA from the Metal Trades Campaign of 1981 to the election of Hawke in 1983 and the dissolution of the party in 1989.
While it may be correct to read CPA history in the context of world Stalinism — it is also a mistake not to note its increasing integration with the ALP left — a process that quickened in the eighties as a true partnership was struck with the Accord and the dissolution was, in effect, a trade off engineered to ensure that the NLP wouldn’t be so left that neither the CPA leadership or Pat Clancy’s (BWIU/MUA based )grouping would be embarrassed by its freedom to move leftward.
Whatever remained active of the NLP tended to merge with the new Greens party branches or in the case of the Newcastle Trades Hall Reds, explored the Bob Leach articulated option of the New Labor Party.So the 1989 dissolution was part of process that ran its course through the nineties with nothing to show for all the politicking. It effect the CPA spent its self and its assets, — members and real estate; skills and organisation — accumulated over decades on nothing that was meant to last for very long.
Despite only bothering to skim over the above article i can confidently assert that it is nothing more than a great lot of almost meaningless twaddle. The reality is that the CPA was hijacked by petty bourgeois ideologues who abandoned marxism – namely international working class solidarity and also the concept that it is the workers who are the most likely class to play the leading role in building socialism. The Aarons leadership embarked on a path of following the latest radical trends such student radicalism. Those in the CPA who resisted the abandonment of marxism formed the SPA which is essentially a direct continuation of the original CPA and it adopted the CPA name in 1996 after the old CPA was liquidated. It is absolute rubbish to suggest that those who remained marxists were somehow un-feminist, anti-student or anti-gay. Ultimately the question of who was correct is answered by the fact that the CPA is alive and growing while the Aarons group totally abandoned any semblance of marxism or support for socialism. The CPA remains a part of the growing world Communist movement while the Search foundation is still searching for something to do. The Search foundation should do the only decent thing it can do and dissolve itself by returning the assets it hijacked – back to the Communist Party of Australia.
As a late entry to this dialogue I’ll address some of the reasons why CPA membership was, from a new left perspective, a viable option. Joined in the period of the sacking because of deep discontent with the virtually moribund branch structures of the ALP and because, through analysis provided in discussion with communists, the links between American imperial activity in Vietnam and global ecological destruction were being drawn out.
As a teenager I spent a lot of time watching black and white footage of B52’s spraying Agent Orange defoliant over the jungles of Vietnam. Remember, this was a strategy designed to rob the Viet Cong of cover in which to operate. Even then, as something of a wilderness freak before the notion of wilderness had much currency in Australia, it was apparent that there were deeply significant convergences between an imperial war on humanity and the war on nature that is the bedrock of industrial (capitalist or socialist) economic activity. The hippies were intereasting in the 70’s but they lacked the critical political analysis that the left was developing.
In regional NSW the party was full of the most extraordinary, independent minded people. Some elements of the Stalinist party were dismissive of new left liberatarianism or disapproving. But it was disapprroval born of not understanding. Beyond that there was an easy acceptance that working class rebelliousness takes different forms; there was ready acceptance of divergant views, ‘lifestyles’ and attitudes. At the same time, as Rundle recently noted elsewhere, there was a rennaiscance of Australian culture from the bottom up especially around the performing arts. The New Theatre was significant as were the folkies and poets who did not approach working class culture as an obscure object of discursive investigation but represented our classed life experiences in their own words, music and art. Through the party I commenced an immersion in independent minded Australian culture from the Jindyworoback poets (Roland robinson, party member and ballet critic for the SMH used to come to party parties with his pet dingo in tow) to the plays and poetry of Dorothy Hewett and many more. It was a rich cultural mix and working class cultural expression was given local emphasis through, among other things, the wonderously named ‘Workers’ Cultural Action Committee’.
Real political intervention was undertaken and party members made significant contributions to the beginnings of a vigorous class movement to improve occupational health and safety, to independence for East Timor and around numerous environmental struggles. This sort of activism is often neglected in the type of discussions on this thread: old copies of Trib would illustrate the breadth of party engagement.
At the same time our reading was broad from Marx and Stalin (the party room actually had the complete works of Stalin for sale in the bookshop; never sold, unsurprisingly) to Marcuse, second wave feminism, Reich’s Greening of America and Thoreau.
I could go on. Sometimes I think of that political heritage as as the armed wing of the hippy movement. The transition since then has, as it would for any decent person, included understanding the failures, in Bahro’s words, of actually existing socialism. I won’t apologise for socialism or party membership. Manne has written that the Australian left took far too long to recognise the horrors of Stalinism and he is correct. However, in provincial NSW the party was the only source of critical thought and action. It encouraged a form of revolutionary praxis that entrenched a capacity for independent thinking and living in a lot of people. We were able to locate ourselves within an Australian tradition of rebelliousness and rejection of authority. Most importantly we were able to lay claim to a an Australian heritage of standing up for what you think is right no matter what are the odds against you.
Actually, rose, the psychedelic left had the enviro thing covered as well (although our political analysis was probably, generally, shallow).
Dave Riley #38, my take on the Accord and related issues is contained in my Doctoral thesis, in particular Chapter 5 and, to a lesser extent, Chapter 6. The only brief response I can make to your comment is that what can be broadly termed the pro-Accord left was not as united or as single-minded in purpose as you suggest, that CPA members’ positions on the Accord were more diverse and the CPA majority position as of 1984 was less uncritical than one might conclude from your post, that the process of formation of the New Left Party was far from being “engineered”, and that Laurie Carmichael’s stances on industrial and economic issues as the 1980s wore on increasingly bore, at best, an incidental resemblance to the positions of the CPA.
Firelech #39, if you can provide a breakdown of the class background of delegates to the 1967 and 1970 CPA Congresses and of the CPA Central Committee (as it then was) which presided between these Congresses, correlated with a breakdown of voting patterns on issues germane to the distinction between, in your words, “petty bourgois ideologues” and “marxists”, so as to provide a social-scientific substantiation of your claims of “petty-bourgeois” “hijacking” of the CPA in this period, I might consider taking such claims seriously. As for the SEARCH Foundation’s ownership of CPA assets, this was a matter democratically decided by the 29th and 30th Congresses of the CPA (both of which I attended and had some hand in organising).
Thanks for the thread Paul Norton. It is useful to revisit some of thse times. To do so without sentimentalism: Riley @ 38 is correct to nominate the ALP/ACTU accord as a preoblem. It was, in fact, a total disaster. Unions trase away a strong capacity to advance member’s interests in returmn for a social wage that was never paid up. The idea was to move away from labourism’s focus on immediate conditons and wages to a form of political unionism. The single most important factor in the collapse of union membership in Australia is the institutional quiessence imposed on unions by the Accord.
Unfortunately left advocates misunderstood the social conditons that gave rise to the Swedish model of tripartite decision making within a corporatist model. They didn’t notice that Sweden is virtually culturally homogenous compared to Australia and that there was a heritage which social democracy had taken Sweden from a primary producing European backwater to a modern industrialised democracy in the post war period. The ALP, notwithstanding Rudd’s essays, is not a party of specifically *social* democracy and the sort of social cohesion that informs life in Sweden does not exist here. On top of that it appears to me that Australian unions lacked the capacity to carry the project forward because of intellectual poverty in leadership ranks and no genuine interest or ability to engage with and entrench democratic principles within unions.
In short the CPA mistook itself for the working class and its institutions. An old trap.
Professor Scumbag, if the Poles ban red flags as well as swastika’s the result will be the same as in Germany, Nazi’s march protected by police under the Imperial battle flag while anti-fascist counter-demonstrator’s receive the baton, boot and water-cannon treatment.
Chav,
Re: swastika’s.
Please desist from using apostrophes to denote plurality. Apostrophes are NEVER used to denote plurality. Correct usage: swastikas.
Re: Nazi’s.
When indicating the plural possessive, ALWAYS situate the apostrophe AFTER the letter ’s’ that denotes plurality. Correct usage: Nazis’.
Here endeth the lesson.
a rose #43, you raise a number of interesting and important issues, and I currently don’t have time to respond to them all, beyond reiterating that many of them are addressed in the chapters of my Doctoral thesis to which I’ve linked above.
One important point you make is that the conditions in Australia in the 1980s, and the nature of the Australian labour movement, mitigated against the replication in Australia of a Swedish-style strategy of political unionism. As I point out in my thesis, these limitations of the Australian labour movement were partially recognised at the time by some individuals on the pro-Accord Left such as Winton Higgins and John Mathews, and what we saw during the 1980s was the union movement embarking on the Accord enterprise on an organisational foundation (300+ mainly small and craft-based unions with limited capacities of all kinds) utterly incapable of supporting a political unionism project, then by 1987 commencing the attempt to retrofit Australian union organisation to the political unionism project (via Australia Recsontructed) at a time when the renegotiations downward of the Accord and the prevailing policy winds of neoliberalism had largely closed the window of opportunity for such a project, with by 1989 the union reorganisation embarked upon at the 1987 ACTU Congress, and being framed by AR and Future Strategies as the basis of a proactive strategy by the union movement, being reframed as largely about union survival at the 1989 ACTU Congress.
In short, the Australian labour movement got the whole political unionism thing arse-about during the 1980s.
Thanks for your detailed account, Paul Norton.
Just one question. Near the end you wrote:
Communism was associated with one of the most extensive systems of injustice and inhumanity ever seen, that between 1930 and 1968 this association was one of enthusiastic admiration and unquestioning obedience, that Stalinist Party leaders such as Sharkey and Miles emulated their hero Koba in a small, mean way during their time in charge of the party, and that at least some individuals (Wilfred Burchett comes to mind) were knowingly and wilflly complicit in the crimes of Stalinist regimes.
Yet Wilfred Burchett during his life, and his heirs & successors in recent books, claim(ed) he was an independent journalist.
Others claim he was a secret member of the Australian CP. It’s only an historical footnote, but what think you?
Ambigulous #46, this article by Mark Aarons probably comes as close as anything to answering your question. Mark Aarons, be it noted, is a scion of the famous Aarons family (son of Laurie, brother of Brian, nephew of Eric and grandson of Sam), and was himself for ten years a CPA member.
Quite apart from whether Burchett was formally a member of the CPA, it is a regrettable fact that in the late 1940s he deployed his journalistic skills in defence of the newly installed Eastern European Stalinist regimes’ show trials of left-wing opponents and potential opponents, and in the early 1950s he rendered aid and comfort to the Kim Il-Sung regime in North Korea.
FWIW during my time in the CPA I never sighted anything which either confirmed or refuted claims that Burchett was a member, and never heard anything said by other comrades one way or another about the matter. I’m prepared to accept Mark Aarons’ conclusions in the linked article.
Thanks, Paul.
Much obliged; and a very enlightening, detailed account it is too.