The Communist Party in Australian life

Essay

The Communist Party in Australian life

The Communist Party from its foundation to 1941

Thee Communist Party commenced as a socialist grouping in the then existing tradition of the Australian labour movement, and was a group made up mainly of proletarian autodidacts, who had been active in previous socialist groups and the IWW, along with a number of radicalised trade union officials, particularly in Sydney, the Trades Hall Reds, the whole group brought together by the enormous beacon of the Russian Revolution, the charisma of Lenin and Trotsky as proletarian leaders, and the possibility of successful socialist revolution embodied in the new Russian workers' state, “the first workers' state in history” as was often said at the time. The foundation members of the CPA included Jock Garden, the secretary of the Labor Council of NSW.

The founders of the CPA were free spirits, rebels and proletarian organisers, from the rank and file level up to and including a number of union officials, moving in and out of the Labour Party, depending on circumstances and tactical considerations. They were a healthy combination of experimenters, idealistic rebels, serious trade unionists and others. They were, in a real sense, the elite of the existing workers' movement, and they had the occupational hazards of that elite, ranging from opinionated sectarianism to embryonic labour movement careerism, such characteristics sometimes existing even in the one individual. Thee other major current in the dominant broad left of the labour movement after the Conscription Split of 1916-17, was a broad layer of radicalised Catholics, also usually proletarian autodidacts, with similar cultural characteristics to the founders of the CP, some of whom were among the founders of the CP.

During the relative boom of the 1920s there were still some sharp class struggles, but the revolutionary wave after the First World War receded as the decade rolled on, and the new Communist Party had considerable difficulty establishing itself as a major force in these changed conditions. Theere were splits and departures from the organisation. Towards the end of the 1920s the Stalinist counter-revolution in the Soviet Union began to have a catastrophic effect throughout the world Communist movement, including Australia, and the young communist parties globally were thrust, after 1929, into a Stalinist straitjacket, which had decisive effects on their development for the rest of the 20th century.

In Australia, as in many other countries, direct Stalinist intervention from the Soviet Union imposed on the CPA a rapidly completed process of “Bolshevisation”, which coincided with the imposition of the Theird Period line. Thee Theird Period rhetoric involved the “exposure” of the rest of the labour movement as “social fascists”. Theis was particularly damaging in Australia, where the onset of the world Depression produced a mass, populist movement of labour rebellion, at the head of which stood the NSW Premier, J.T. Lang. All through the mass mobilisation early in the Depression embodied in Langism, the CPA was on the sidelines “exposing” and denouncing it, rather than making realistic socialist demands on its leadership. Who can know what mass socialist current might have emerged in Australia had the CP adopted tactics more realistic than simple "exposure" towards the big Lang movement.

Thee “Bolshevisation” of the CP involved turning what had been a relatively democratic grouping into a ruthlessly centralised, bureaucratic formation organised around a newly invented, Stalinist formula of so-called “democratic centralism”. Theis gave the Political Committee of the party total control over political line, strategy, organisation and personnel, and in practice over time tended to eliminate any open inner-party argument, discussion and conflict.

Inevitably, continuing power struggles were forced underground in the organisation, and usually ever after consisted of contenders vying for the ear of, or influence on, anointed leaders such as J.B. Miles, Lance Sharkey, Richard Dixon, Sam Aarons, E.F. Hill, etc. Almost everybody who had been associated with the CP in the 1920s was eliminated from the organisation during the Stalinist “Bolshevisation”, and a process commenced in the broader labour movement of the CPA being surrounded with people who had once been in it or around it, who usually became its opponents because of the denunciations to which they were subjected, and who were often forced by circumstances to associate with forces opposed to the CP to survive in the labour movement.

As the Depression rolled on, the CPA recruited new forces, mainly young, radicalised by the Depression, to replace the rebellious spirits forced out of the party by the process of Stalinisation. Theese new recruits were indoctrinated in a rigidly Stalinist political culture and organisational style. After 1934 the People's Front strategy was progressively adopted, culminating in Dimitrov's Report to the 1935 Comintern Congress.

Theis turned out to be the last conference of the Comintern. Thee People's Front policy was a 100 per cent swing away from the Theird Period strategy, and involved a united front, not just embracing the left of the labour movement, but broadened to embrace the right wing of the workers' movement and whatever sections of the bourgeoisie could be inveigled into it.

Theis strategy was motivated primarily by the diplomatic and state interests of Stalin's bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and allowed little scope for Communist Parties having any perspective of socialist revolutions in their own country, as was demonstrated by Stalin's strangulation of the embryonic socialist revolution in Spain after 1936.

Thee CPA, by now thoroughly Stalinised, threw itself into the People's Front with enthusiasm, and intervened in the continuing crisis in the broader labour movement by forming a tactical alliance with the most right-wing force in the movement nationally, the federal bureaucracy of the Australian Workers Union, to bring down the decaying Langite machine, which still persisted in control of the Labour Party in NSW.

In this period the vicious tableau of the Show Trials in Moscow produced some defections from the CPA, and some anger among other socialists, who had difficulty believing that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Trotsky, and the other murdered Bolshevik leaders, were really “agents of Hitler”. At the same time, the melodrama of the Moscow Trials was used to harden up the cadres of the CPA, and to insulate them from anyone in the labour movement with whom they were in conflict for any reason. Theese people were easily dubbed “Trotsky fascists” and “agents of Hitler”.

As industry revived later in the 1930s, the CPA, grew a bit, mainly by recruiting young unemployed people who got jobs as employment revived. Once back at work, and thoroughly Stalinised, this younger layer rapidly became a powerful influence in the reviving trade unions. Thee previous generation of trade union officials, whose organisations had been smashed up by the Depression, were largely worn out by that experience and a number of them were fairly easily replaced by younger Stalinists who had received their initial political education in the Unemployed Workers' Movement.

Thee increased trade union influence of the CPA became a very important factor in labour movement politics from then on.

Thee enormous prestige of the Soviet Union, in the context of the Depression in the capitalist world, made quibbles about the Moscow Trials seem irrelevant to many, and the bloc with the federal AWU and ALP politicians on the outer with Lang, culminated in a spectacular success for the CP. In NSW an entry tactic in the Labour Party, which had commenced in 1935, culminated in the CP's capture of control of the ALP apparatus from the Langites at the Unity Conference in Newtown in 1939.

Another major benefit of the Labor Party entry tactic was the very substantial recruiting to the CP that took place in the ALLY (Australian Labor League of Youth), the Labor Party youth organisation. Hundreds of people recruited to the CP in the ALLY remained active in the CP for the next 20 or 30 years.

All of this came to a sharp end with the onset of the Second World War. The CPA underwent three major changes of line in two years. For the first couple of weeks, it briefly supported the war, before the line of opposition to the war, imposed by Stalin, became clear. During this brief period of support for the war, several leading members, such as Alf Bradley in the Bootmakers Union, his wife Win, and CPA old-hand Guido Baracchi, who couldn't stomach support for the war, broke with the CP and joined the small group of Trotskyists. Others such as Tony McGillick and the CP Sydney district organiser, George Bateman, broke with the party on the war question.

Two weeks later, following the Comintern directive, the CP opposed the war, and was shortly after declared illegal, along with the smaller Trotskyist group, which also opposed the war. Over the next two years, the underground CP recruited quite well because the effect of the antiwar line was that communists in industry prosecuted the class struggle with somewhat greater vigour than they had during the later period of the Popular Front, and this intersected with the attitudes of many working class militants, who resented excessive sacrifices, imposed primarily on the working class, for the war effort.

The CP prosecuted the antiwar line implacably, but tactically unwisely, in its entry work in the Labor Party, and the 1940 Easter Conference of the ALP adopted the Hands off Russia resolution, which implicitly opposed the war. This gave the dominant forces in the ALP, led by Prime Minister Curtin, NSW parliamentary leader William McKell and the federal AWU bureaucracy, which by now wanted to break the alliance with the CP, an excuse to step in and throw the CP out of the Labor Party in NSW.

During this crisis, several people in the CP leadership, most notably Lloyd Ross, the secretary of the powerful Australian Railways Union, and his sidekick, Jack Ferguson, fell out with the CP. (This Jack Ferguson became secretary of the ARU after Lloyd Ross went to the Department of Postwar Reconstruction and then became president of the ALP until 1952. He is not to be confused with the Jack Ferguson who later became deputy premier of NSW, who was no relation). Lloyd Ross and Jack Ferguson went along with the official Labour line on the war and broke with the CP, costing the CP control of the NSW branch of the Railways Union, which it never subsequently regained.

Taken as a whole, in most unions, CP influence was unimpaired in this period, however, and CP membership actually increased during the “illegal” period.

Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. The Australian Communist Party during the Second World War

In May 1941 the armies of the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, catching Stalin napping despite the warnings he had received from the heroic Soviet spy Richard Sorge and others, which Stalin refused to believe.

Immediately the CPA's again did an about-face on the war. The CPA became the most enthusiastic supporter of the war, vigorously opposing strikes and supporting speed-ups. This effectively put the CPA on the extreme right of the labour movement. The practical effects of this line were mixed. The new Curtin Labour government quickly restored the CP's legality.

The CPA, being a significant and powerful and knowledgable force in the labour movement, was consulted by the Labour Government on major matters. Key CP union leaders, such as Ernie Thornton in the Ironworkers, and Jim Healy in the Waterside Workers, were put on major industry boards to help the war effort go smoothly. CP organisers were given jobs in areas such as the movement raising war bonds, and patriotic activities too numerous to mention.

The CP recruited rapidly on the basis of the heroic Soviet war effort, which was real and obvious to the world. Anti-communism was very muted during the Second World War. The CP also recruited extensively in the army among younger soldiers radicalised by the Depression, many of middle-class origin.

During the war, the party organisation was largely run by tough, capable Stalinist women, such as June Mills, and many others, because most male Communists were in the armed services. By the end of the war the CP claimed that its membership had increased from 4000 to 16,000. While this figure is probably exaggerated, there was massive growth of Communist Party membership and influence. By the end of the war, approximately half the trade unions in Australia were under direct Communist Party influence.

The Communist Party in North Queensland

During the late 1930s the Communist Party had built up durable popular support in North Queensland, leading major strikes in the sugar industry against Weil's Disease, and strenuously defending the large settlement of Italian, Maltese and Spanish cane farmers and agricultural workers against racist attacks.

During the war the left-wing faction in the Labor Party in Townsville, led by Tom Aikens, split away from the right wing in Brisbane, and formed a united electoral front with the CP, which won control of Townsville Council. Among the communists elected to the council was the colourful Rhodes scholar Fred Paterson.

In 1944 Tom Aikens was elected as an independent left-wing Laborite for the Townsville seat of Mundingburra and Paterson was elected as the Communist candidate for the adjacent seat of Bowen, the only Communist ever to be elected to an Australian parliament. He held the seat in the 1947 state election, but a biased redistribution and a change in political climate contributed to his defeat in 1950.

Aikens and the dissident left-wing populist North Queensland Labor Party gradually shifted to the right in the 1950s, and Aikens held on to his seat until 1975 as a kind of conservative North Queensland populist independent and ended up being feted as the "father" of the Queensland Parliament.

These developments are well covered in Diane Menghetti's extremely useful book The Red North, in A Majority of One: Tom Aikens and Independent Politics in Townsville by Ian Moles (University of Queensland Press, 1979) and in Fred Paterson: The People's Champion by Ross Fitzgerald (University of Queensland Press, 1997).

Negative features of the CPA's role during the Second World War

The negative features of the wartime activity of the CPA were considerable. The CPA was even further Stalinised, if that is possible. A distinct high Stalinist political culture rapidly developed in the CP at this high point of its influence. Not all of this was bad.

For instance, autodidacts such as L. Harry Gould, Syd Mostyn, Steve Purdy and even E.W. Campbell, Lance Sharkey and J.B. Miles, had a certain interest in theory, literature and culture. The CPA in this period even independently published an unusual pamphlet by Maxim Gorky that treated some of the purged old figures of the Russian Revolution as human beings.

It also published, in very large editions, selections of Marx and Engels on literature, obviously made by someone like L. Harry Gould, a book by B. Hessen, who had been murdered in Stalin's purges, on the social and economic roots of Newton's Principia and another book by the renegade Karl Kautsky on slave society in imperial Rome. The wartime CP, while rigidly Stalinist at the political level, had a certain eclecticism in cultural and ideological matters.

Nevertheless, this was also the period of the indoctrination of the party in the texts and political culture of high Stalinism. Stalin's fantastic 1939 History of the CPSUB, with its extraordinary lies about the history of Bolshevism, arrived in Australia early in the war and became, ever after, the basis of party education. The CP also published an enormous run of a paperback abridgement of the notorious book The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, a bizarre cops-and-robbers account of the “Trotsky-Bukharin-Zinoviev-Hitler conspiracy” that was widely read by party members and supporters because of its accessible “global conspiracy” construction. Sayers and Kahn became another central text in party education.

The war period was when the frequently impressionable middle-class recruits to the CP were indoctrinated in all these falsifications of history, and domesticated to the political practices of a totally centralised, completely undemocratic party apparatus. In Australia the political culture of high Stalinism as a mass phenomenon was really born during the Second World War in the context of natural enthusiasm for the wartime ally, the gallant Soviet people and army, and their pipe-smoking leader, Uncle Joe, who became a kind of global folk hero, along with Churchill and Roosevelt.

The consequences of the enthusiasm of the CP for the war effort had mixed results in the labour movement. Workers in a number of industries, while in a general way supporting the war, still prosecuted the class struggle in their traditional way, although their tactics were necessarily modified by war conditions.

Many miners resisted exaggerated speed-ups, generally quite successfully. The CP weekly newspaper, Tribune, contained repeated exposures of non-existent “Trotskyites among the southern miners”, based, apparently, on the resistance of many miners to speed-ups.

The old socialist, Muriel Heagney, who held a position of importance around the Melbourne Trades Hall, tried to use her industrial influence to fight for a rapid increase in the female rate towards the male rate of pay. In Heagney's view, the crisis of the war created favourable conditions to press hard for equal pay.

CP-influenced unions bitterly opposed Heagney on this question, and the opportunity to push rapidly in the direction of equal pay for women during the war was lost, mainly because of CP intervention against it.

Throughout war industries women workers, brought in to replace men who were at the war, were often to the fore in struggling for hitherto unsatisfied, or even previously unrecognised, demands. Spontaneous strikes broke out in Sydney among women textile workers and clothing workers pressing for more pay and better conditions in the factories.

The union bureaucrats of the textile union tried fairly unsuccessfully to oppose these strikes. So, also, did the Communist Party industrial branches in several textile factories, and their intervention against the strikes was rather more successful than the intervention of the textile union bureaucrats.

It is painful and moving to read the article A stitch in time: experiences in the rag trade about this textile upheaval, written by Betty Reilly, nearly 40 years later for Australian Left Review in 1982, in which she describes with pain and shame her own intervention, along with that of other women Communists in the textile industry, against this mass struggle of working women. Their stand was made out of blind loyalty to the party and the Soviet Union.

The Balmain ironworkers' struggle

The highest point of resistance to the right-wing industrial policy of the CP during the war was the struggle of the Balmain ironworkers between 1943 and 1946. This struggle was described by Daphne Gollan in two articles published in Labour History magazine in May and September 1972.

A small group of Trotskyists, in alliance with Lang Laborites, resisted excessive speed-up in the ship repair and ship building industry around Sydney Harbour. To head off rising discontent, the Stalinists in control of the federal office of the union rigged the ballot in the Balmain Branch to take control of the branch from a group of Langites who had been hesitant to fully back the industrial betrayals of the CP.

Two notable Trotskyists, Nick Origlass and Laurie Short, rapidly emerged as the leaders of the Balmain ironworkers in their resistance to excessive industrial demands of the employers. As this struggle unfolded, the Stalinist leadership of the union bureaucratically removed Origlass as a job delegate.

This action precipitated an unprecedented six-week general strike of all metalworkers, totalling about 4000, on the Sydney waterfront against the bureaucracy of the Ironworkers Union.

During this struggle the Balmain ironworkers seized back control of the branch by shrewd legal tactics at a union general meeting, which was later ratified by the Industrial Commission. Eventually the strike was settled, the Stalinists were defeated, Origlass was reinstated as delegate and the rebels re-established control of the Balmain Branch.

The 40-hour week struggle

In 1944, female printers, a very poorly paid group at Sydney's newspapers, went on strike for shorter hours, under the inspired generalship of the then Trotskyist Gil Roper, a member of the powerful delegates' board of the Printing and Kindred Industries Union.

The Communist Party was initially suspicious of the strike, but as the war was winding down and the strike was an official strike of the PKIU, the CP opposition to it was rapidly modified, and it eventually swung around to support for the action.

The CPA was prodded in this by a small group of Trotskyists led by Allan Thistlethwaite, a leader of industrial action for the 40-hour week at Bunnerong Powerhouse. As the war came to an end the Stalinists gradually began to relax their anti-strike policy, and the industrial juggernaut of the 40-hour week got rolling in Sydney from that point on. The 40-hour week was achieved finally in 1947.

Balance sheet on the Communist Party and the war

The Communist Party came out of the Second World War very much larger and with much broader social and cultural influence in Australian society. On the other hand, it had a special and rigid high-Stalinist culture, which despite good features such as an interest in culture and literature, tended to cut it off from the rest of society, particularly anyone on the left who didn't go along with Stalinism.

During the war the Catholic Action Industrial Groups got going, as a kind of counter-movement to the CP, modelled on the centralised, combative Stalinist CP, sharing to some extent the radical political and economic sentiments common to just about everybody in the workers' movement in 1946, but competing directly for hegemony with the CP in the labour movement.

If you'd taken a slice of Australian society in 1946, the CP would have had maybe 12,000 real members, and the Grouper Catholic Action Movement about 6000. Both group had quite a few union officials among their members and adherents.

Both groups had dedicated and active memberships. Both groups were comparatively young. The Grouper movement, as it developed, began to exploit antagonism to the Communist Party among groups such as the Balmain waterfront metalworkers, who had been in conflict with the CP during the war.

This conflict was exacerbated when, towards the end of 1947, the CP swung for a couple of years into to a an orgy of ultraleftism in industrial matters.

The beginnings of the Cold War

In 1946 the Cold War was inaugurated by Churchill's anti-Soviet speech at Fulton, Missouri. From then on, the contest between the Communist Party and the Santamaria Catholic Action Movement for hegemony in the labour movement proceeded in the context of the Cold War.

Everybody in the labour movement, right, left and centre, wanted a new order, not the old order of depression and war, produced by the capitalist system.

The leadership, and many of the members, of the CP believed their party would be at the centre of an Australian socialist revolution, which would happen very rapidly, and which would impose on Australian society a set-up modelled on Stalin's Soviet Union and, indeed, on the authoritarian set-up in their own party.

The Catholic Groupers also thought this a likely possibility, and devoted all their energies to defeating the CP. From the hindsight of our experience of the expansionist boom of postwar capitalism, both these sets of beliefs may appear quixotic, but they were held with deadly seriousness by most of the participants in the social and political battles in Australia in the 1940s and the 1950s.

World capitalism responded to the “Communist threat” by making major tactical retreats in the face of the desire of the masses of the world for a new order. Social Democratic and Labour governments in western Europe, Britain and Australia made major social changes, which embodied many of the social aspirations of the working class.

These reforms were all a product of, in the final analysis, the very substantial movement of the working class. There were strike waves in the United States and Western Europe. The masses of the Third World rose up and tore down most of the colonial empires of European imperialist powers, bringing independence to many former colonies.

This had considerable impact in Australia because of our location in the Asian region, and to its considerable credit the Communist Party of Australia supported struggles for colonial independence generously and with considerable ingenuity.

The CP Political Committee had enormous influence in the political strikes organised by a number of Australian waterfront unions in support of Indonesian independence, and these industrial struggles in solidarity with Indonesian independence in Australia had major influence on the successful outcome of the Indonesian independence struggle.

In the trade unions, the left turn of the Communist Party was pretty popular from 1946 to 1948. Ingenious CP militants such as Ted Rowe in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, Bill Bird among the Seamen, Stan Moran on the Sydney waterfront, and many, many others, including many senior CP union officials, threw themselves with very practical enthusiasm into the industrial upsurge that began the major process of incremental improvements for Australian trade unionists, which we can now see, with hindsight, was unfolding in the context of what later became the “postwar settlement”.

During the long period of the Menzies government, the complex network of social, political and industrial arrangements that developed was ultimately presided over by "Black" Jack McEwan, the Country Party leader.

The Grouper faction in the labour movement did not basically disagree with the struggle for most working-class demands, spearheaded by the left. Disputes between the Groupers and the Communists in unions were over tempo, strategy and which faction was going to have industrial and political hegemony.

No one disputed that the job of trade unions was to achieve steady, incremental improvements for the working class.

The CPA's sharp and bureaucratic “left turn” in 1948

It has always seemed to me that the Australian Communist Party was more at ease and more vigorous in its prosecution of “leftist” tactics and even ultraleftist tactics.

In the immediate postwar period the Stalinist international centre in the Soviet Union began to encourage a more leftist posture towards Social Democracy, and this fitted quite well in Australia with the need to accommodate the CPA's primary constituency, trade union militants demanding rapid improvements -- a “new order”.

Ernie Thornton's ephemeral romance with “Browderism” (which was the idea of Earl Browder, the American Communist leader, that the wartime “class peace” should continue into the postwar period) was rapidly ditched and a sharp left turn prevailed from 1946 to 1951.

Unfortunately, Stalinist habits of leadership prevailed in this left turn, and Communist union leaders often behaved as if it was possible to turn industrial struggles on and off like a tap, which, coming after a long period during the Second World War of blocking industrial struggles, frequently collided with working class sentiment, particularly among more conservative layers.

The Australian CP took up the left turn from Moscow with considerable enthusiasm. In the late 1940s it launched a systematic and belligerent attack on the British Communist Party, which kept trying to stop industrial struggles into the late 1940s.

This attack on the British CP, like the attack by Maurice Thorez, the French CP leader on the leader of the CPUSA, Browder, for a similar deviation, obviously took place on Moscow's initiative, but the Australian CP prosecuted it with vigour and enthusiasm, and Lance Sharkey sent his capable and inventive intellectual amanuensis, Rupert Lockwood, off to Britain to tour that country, dishing out copies of the Australian Central Committee's attack on the British CP to Communist dissidents all over Britain. This was a very considerable breach of international Stalinist etiquette, but was obviously given the go-ahead by the unseen hand of Stalin in Moscow.

In this period, Sharkey made a famous speech at a conference of Asian Communist Parties in Calcutta, which, in pretty unequivocal tones, laid the basis for Communist parties in South-East Asia making a direct bid for power. This speech coincided with the rapid development of the Telengana Peasant Uprising in India, and was followed shortly after by the launching of the Malayan Communist Party's guerrilla struggle for power.

The Australian CP was up to its neck in all these aspects of the international Stalinist left turn, and played quite a role in these ideological and political developments, particularly in the Asian region. To its considerable credit, but not always tactically wisely, the CP in Australia did everything it reasonably could to organise solidarity with the Indonesian independence movement, the Vietnamese revolution and the insurrection in Malaya.

The coal strike

The tempo of the Cold War hotted up from the time of the Berlin airlift in 1948. The Soviet Union gave the cue to Communist parties throughout the world to adopt a more aggressive stance, particularly towards exposure of Social Democratic parties, including the ALP.

The leaders of the Australian CP got carried away by this new atmosphere and this posture culminated at a political level in frantic and totally unsuccessful attempts to get unions to disaffiliate from the ALP and affiliate to the CP.

At an industrial level the CP leadership encouraged a headlong collision between the Miners Union and the Chifley Government. There is no question that the miners had a number of legitimate, unfulfilled industrial demands, but the well-entrenched CP leadership of the union swung this struggle in the direction of a political challenge to the Chifley Government, which was, to say the least, tactically reckless.

When the Chifley Government, completely predictably, refused to back down, and put troops into the mines -- a despicable act for a Labour government -- the CP quite unwisely tried to encourage the miners to hang out doggedly to the bitter end.

A more realistic socialist leadership would have argued for a tactical retreat, but the CP did not do this, primarily because of the leadership's fantasies about a final showdown with the Labour Government.

The results are well known. The miners lost the strike, and straggled back to work. The CP leadership of the Miners Union was displaced for a period. The Chifley Labour Government lost the 1949 election, ushering in a long period Liberal government under Prime Minister Robert Menzies.

The Moscow-Yugoslav split in 1948

In 1948 Stalin expelled Tito and the Yugoslav CP from the Cominform, because the Yugoslav Communist leadership, who had led an independent Partisan military struggle for political power, displayed too much independence from the Stalinist centre in Moscow.

Immediately afterwards, the Yugoslavs were denounced as “Trotsky Fascists” and a series of bizarre trials, similar to the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, took place in most Eastern European countries, the victims being Communist leaders in Eastern Europe who displayed at least the potential for some independence from Moscow.

The frame-up of Yugoslavia and the witch-hunt trials in Eastern Europe were all subsequently exposed as fraudulent during the Khrushchev period, in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.

Entrenched as it was in the bizarre political culture of High Stalinism, the Australian Communist Party swallowed whole the expulsion of Yugoslavia, the vilification of Tito, and the Eastern European trials. Fantastic literary falsifications, like Wilfred Burchett's repellant book, Peoples' Democracies, justifying the Eastern European trials and the excommunication of Tito, joined Stalin's 1939 History of the CPSUB, and the Great Conspiracy Against Russia as central texts in party education.

A scattering of Yugoslav Communists in Australia, and some other Australian Communists who supported Yugoslavia, were excluded from the CPA.

The 1950s

After the defeat of the Coal Strike in 1949, the CP, while remaining rigidly Stalinist, began to recover a bit from the ultraleft delirium of the previous couple of years. After the fall of the Chifley Labour Government, and the election of the Menzies government, the attempt by Menzies to ban the Communist Party became a watershed in Australian society.

The Communist Party Dissolution Bill, and the subsequent High Court case and Referendum campaign after the Bill was thrown out by the High Court, took place in the context of the Korean War.

During the Referendum campaign, the Communist Party quite sensibly swung back a little to the right, and attempted to mobilise a broad united front of the whole labour movement against the ban, which tactic proved successful in the subsequent Referendum, and the ban was defeated.

This was a very good thing from the point of view of future possibilities for the Australian workers' movement. It's hard to imagine how bad the future contours of Australian society might have been had Menzies succeeded with the ban. The defeat of the attempt to ban the Communist Party was a fairly major turning point in Australian political life, and one result of it was that the Menzies Government cautiously drew back from too brutal an attack on trade unions, and the conditions unfolded for effective trade union struggles during the post war boom, that really got fully under way in the early 1950s.

By 1952 the CP had swung back completely towards an exploration of united front tactics in the labour movement. In that year Sharkey wrote an article in the party's theoretical magazine, Communist Review, The Labor Party Crisis, in which he sketched out, in his usual rather crude fashion, a new tactic that became the dominant feature of CP tactics and strategy for the next 30 years.

In sum, Sharkey said the class struggle continued, and the Communist Party had a major “leading role”, but for practical purposes it was necessary to form a kind of bloc or alliance with progressive forces in the Labor Party and the trade unions, against the Liberal Government, the employers and the right wing in the labour movement.

Despite the literary clumsiness characteristic of Sharkey's writing style, this wasn't such a bad general tactic. Moving away from that tactic had proved disastrous between 1948 and 1950, and had played into the hands of the Grouper faction, which had been practicing its own united front with the Labour right during that period.

Over the next few years, a continually widening civil war erupted in the labour movement between the Santamaria Movement -- the cadre group of the right -- and the general labour movement left, of which the CP was the most powerful force.

At the critical point in this battle in 1955, after the Labour federal leader, H.V. Evatt had launched his public attack against Grouper control of the ALP, the Groupers made the same kind of tactical error that the Communists had made in 1949, and split away from the mainstream of the labour movement, taking very few allies with them.

The Labour Movement Split

The tactical mistakes of the Groupers, and their self-isolation and ultimate split away from the ALP, gave the Communist Party a considerable political opening, which it rapidly filled, with enthusiasm and ingenuity.

Many anti-Grouper Laborites, particularly many anti-Grouper union officials, even including the deeply anti-Communist bureaucratic clique running the AWU, swung over quite rapidly to an informal alliance with the Communist Party, dictated by the CP's very real and widespread organisational network in the trade unions.

The CP also recommenced a certain amount of entrism in the Labor Party, particularly in the major states of NSW and Victoria, and key figures, of whom the most extraordinarily capable and professional was Arthur Geitzelt in NSW.

Geitzelt, who had a close ideological and tactical association with the CP, became central figures in the organisation of the ALP left, which relied particularly on the large block of votes exercised at ALP Conferences by unions in which the CP was the major political influence.

A broad left emerged, once again, of which the CP in practice was the ideological and practical central force, although contested from the left by small groups of Trotskyists, who were for the first time grudgingly tolerated within this broader left coalition.

This basic CP strategic orientation became institutionalised for many years. The Communist Party had an “independent role”. It recruited and maintained the maximum membership it could achieve, and it also prosecuted a “united front” relationship with the Labour left and other progressive forces in society.

The instrument of this united front was often the institution of unity tickets in trade unions, which became the bete-noir of the extreme right in the labour movement and the newspapers of the bourgeoisie. These unity tickets usually involved open members of the CP and left-wing Laborites, often under CP influence. They were even broadened in the Ironworkers Union to include the CPs old Trotskyist bete noir, Nick Origlass, as candidate for general secretary of the Ironworkers Union against the incumbent national secretary, Laurie Short, Nick's one-time associate, who had crossed over to the right and had become the major leader of the right wing faction in the trade union movement.

The CP at this time had a considerable literary and cultural network. On the basis of the successful agitation against the attempt to suppress Frank Hardy's important political novel, Power Without Glory, the Australasian Book Society, a leftist publishing venture, was set up.

Realist writers groups were set up in every state. The magazine's Realist Writer and Overland were commenced under CP auspices, and the New Theatres in each city were developed and invigorated. Communists were to be found active in everything from local housewives' associations and progress associations to film societies and folk music organisations.

This was the period of the extraordinary popularity and success, for year after year, of Helen Palmer's and Dick Diamond's leftist New Theatre musical, Reedy River. This CP cultural network had very wide influence.

Black Jack McEwan, the Menzies Government, the postwar economic boom and its effect on the Labour movement, including the Communist Party and the Groupers

What we now know, in retrospect, to have been the Black Jack McEwan postwar settlement, came upon the workers movement in Australia piecemeal. Protectionist economic arrangements satisfied the farming community, whom McEwan represented. They also made possible significant incremental concessions to trade union demands.

Australia has a patchwork of governmental set-ups, a federal government and, in those days, six state governments, some Labour and some Liberal. Throughout the 1950s and half the 1960s the Libs were in power in the federal sphere, and Labour was in power in NSW, the main industrial state.

After the attempt to ban the Communist Party, the Menzies government began to treat the trade unions with more circumspection. As the split in the Labor Party between the Groupers and the left widened, the left won back a certain number of unions, or won control in some new unions, like the Miscellaneous Workers, the Liquor Trades and newly emerging public service unions.

The Groupers mainly retained control of two big unions that they'd seized from the Stalinists in 1951 and 1952, the Ironworkers and the Clerks, and developed considerable influence in the enormous Shop Assistants Union, and they too had considerable influence in the newly emerging public service unions.

The battles for control between the right and the left proceeded in unions, state Labor councils, state Labor Party conferences and branches, and shop stewards' committees. The role of the Communist Party as the major left wing organising force in the labour movement, became almost institutionalised in this period, despite the still entrenched Stalinism of the CP.

When I started attending NSW ALP Annual Conferences -- coincidentally the first Conference held in the Sydney Town Hall -- in 1954, I became a witness, all through the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, to what became the structural framework of the incremental improvements achieved by the Australian working class during the postwar boom. The real industrial guts of every Annual Conference in NSW was always the Monday morning discussion of the Industrial Report.

This was usually scheduled to happen on Sunday, but always seemed to be carried over to Monday morning. Magically the Conference would fill up as delegates returned from the pub, etc. Conference would discuss for three hours, with a pretty packed Town Hall floor, every piece of minutiae of the industrial life of NSW.

“Village Hampdens”, from every union under the sun, would speak eloquently and with considerable detailed knowledge, about the specific issues affecting their industry. There would be banter and sharpness in debate, but despite this, everyone would be listened to seriously, and unlike other simply political arguments at the Conference, positions occupied would often cut across factional boundaries.

The general rubric would emerge, of the left pushing for all kinds of reforms and improvements, some of the right doing the same thing, and the managers of the right trying to slow down the tempo. A composite resolution would eventually emerge that satisfied most delegates, embodying demands for many significant new improvements across a range of industries and callings, a kind of ambit claim.

You could almost write the script of the meetings the following week between the right wing Labour Council officials and the representatives of the State Labour Government. It is easy and accurate to imagine Jim Kenny or John Ducker or whoever, saying to various ministers: “This is what the unions want. You had better give us at least this, this, this and this, or the Coms will eat us at the Labour Council and the next ALP Conference”.

You can even imagine representatives of the state Labour Councils and the ACTU making the same sort of educated demands, with the same sort of appeal to prevent the Coms eating us, to state and federal Liberal governments.

The Communist Party in the unions and the labour movement

The 1950s and the 1960s were a period of instrumental influence for the Communist Party in the broader labour movement, which was, in a way, more significant than the more overt numerical preponderance that the CPA had in the trade unions at the height of its formal structural influence at the end of the Second World War.

The CP never regained national leadership in the two major national unions that it lost control of to the Groupers in 1952: the Federated Clerks Union and the Federated Ironworkers Association, though in the late 1960s a group of left wing militants defeated the Groupers in the important Port Kembla branch of the union, and the left stubbornly held on to the leadership of the Port Kembla Ironworkers thereafter, while the right was in control federally and in the other branches.

The left regained power in a number of other significant unions, and in particular it regained power in the Victorian Australian Railways Union. The left eventually won the protracted and complex battle for control of the Amalgamated Engineering Union which seesawed backwards and forwards all through the 1950s and the 1960s.

In addition to this, the self isolation of the Grouper unions that went with the DLP put the right wing in the trade union movement, somewhat on the defensive.

The CPA, in this period, became more clearly what it had partially been for most of its existence, a political formation preoccupied with serious and rather professional trade union and labour movement industrial activity, albeit conducted in an often bureaucratic fashion, and within the framework of the exotic and bizarre international Stalinist political culture, which had been mainly imposed on the CP by historical circumstances.

The industrial activity of the CP, although profoundly influenced by this international Stalinist political culture, was often carried out in a peculiarly vigorous Australian way. Shop committees -- cross-union organisations of delegates in factories and workshops -- had an episodic existence in Australian industrial life.

The CP mobilised and organised them as a main sphere of activity, wherever it had enough influence to do so, which was in a surprising number of places. Sharkey's small booklet on the trade unions, written in the early 1940s, is fairly summary and Stalinist in tone. It has three or four significant themes, one of which is that Communists in unions should develop shop committees vigorously. Another is the assertion of a rather utopian commitment to the ultimate socialist goal of the trade unions. Another is the importance of Communist union officials being vigorous and combative in their industrial activity and not relying too much on the arbitration system, while however being systematic and professional in their dealings with the said arbitration system.

Sharkey's little book on the trade unions The trade unions: Communist theory and practice of trade unionism, expressed though it is in his Byzantine Stalinist lingo, had a number of useful features and was regarded as a kind of bible by several generations of Communist trade unionists.

If you did a bird's-eye survey of the labour movement in Australia in, say, 1962, you would find institutions like the Council of Railway Shop Committees, vigorously led by Communist delegates in every Australian city that was the centre of a rail network, and shop committees in many parts of industry, which would contest the power of union officials and labour councils on numerous occasions.

A very successful example of shop committee organisation was the network in the electricity and coal industry around Yallourn in Victoria. The waterfront unions, which had largely CP union leaderships, vigorously developed a network of delegates.

The CP political committee and industrial committees would, from time to time, launch campaigns on industrial questions, and in Sydney and Melbourne the CP even required CP full-time union officials to attend a weekly meeting at 8am at CP headquarters, where tactics for the week would be discussed, the meeting being conducted by people like Eddie Maher in Sydney and Flo Russell or Ted Hill in Melbourne.

CP industrial strategy and practice still had a rather Stalinist aspect in the sense that CP union officials would often head off or contain struggles that had a too spontaneous character from their point of view, and they were always heavily preoccupied with preserving the united front with union bureaucrats of centre and right wing political persuasions.

Despite its profound bureaucratic limitations, the CP influence helped create a leftist and effective ginger group throughout the organisations of the working class, and in the labour movement in general. This was also a period in which the CP still produced a quite extraordinary range of roneod double-sided agitational bulletins in particular workshops, industrial locations or occupational groupings, as well as in residential localities, produced systematically week by week by dedicated typists working out of political commitment, on low party wages in CP headquarters in each city.

In a very obvious way, the contest for power and influence between the broad left formation, of which the CP was at the centre, and the right wing Grouper formation in the labour movement, was an energising force. It was partly the circumstances of this very conflict that produced the steady and implacable improvement in conditions for the working class that took place during the Black Jack McEwan epoch.

In my view, current labour movement “innovators” like Stuart Macintyre, who applaud the demise of these postwar social arrangements, are placing abstract considerations about some notion of the proper running of bourgeois society, that they have absorbed from the ideology of the ruling class, over the real and objective interests of ordinary working people.

I remember the years 1961 to 1965 rather vividly. I used to regularly attend fortnightly meetings of the ALP Youth Council at the Trades Hall, participating in the protracted war between the left and the right, after which we of the left would go down to the Electrical Trades Union Club in the basement, where we would rub shoulders with the rebel Builders Laborers led by Jack Mundey, Don McHugh and Mick MacNamara, who were gradually wearing down the right wing clique in control of the Builders Laborers Union at the BL's monthly meetings.

I remember how we all got very drunk the night Don McHugh and Mick McNamara were elected organisers on the floor of the Builders Laborers monthly meeting. In the early part of those years I was working as a letter sorter in the mail branch of the GPO, involved in the New Deal committee and then the Independent Labour factions in the Postal Workers Union, sometimes in unity, and sometimes in conflict with the CP faction in that union.

One event that sticks sharply in my memory is an explosive and colourful siege of the weekly Labour Council meeting in the Trades Hall. The Labour Council leadership had sold out a particular struggle in the railways for some incremental improvement, maybe an industry allowance or something like that. I forget the details.