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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.