The Communist Party in Australian life

The CP Industrial Committee operated a complex strategy of trying to influence the Labour Council leadership, but from time to time, gave them a bit of curry, so to speak, just to keep them honest. The CP faction in the railways had obviously organised a march by the Council of Railway Shop Committees on the Labour Council weekly meeting that Thursday night.

I remember a couple of hundred railway workers being led by a rather unshaven and young Tom McDonald, then a carpenter in the Railways, and Ted Walsham, an old CP veteran, in an extremely vigorous demonstration at the Labour Council meeting. That was how things proceeded in those days.

The impact of the crisis of international Stalinism on the CPA after Stalin's Death, and particularly after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

In 1953 Stalin, the bloodstained Machiavelli, and murderer of almost all the leaders of the Russian Revolution and more than a million Communists, died. After factional struggles in the CPSU, Khrushchev came to power and, to keep his factional rivals at bay, launched an attack on Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956.

This attack on Stalin was made in what came to be known as Khrushchev's Secret Speech to the Congress. It detailed, from inside Stalin's court, many of the vicious crimes committed by the despot against the Soviet Communists and people, and against the international working class. This speech commenced the destruction of Stalinism as an international force, but that destruction took another 40 years or so to complete.

The impact of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin on the CPA was considerable. The Party leadership, with powerful Stalinist reflexes, attempted to suppress the speech and to deny its authenticity, although the Political Committee of the Party had been informed of its genuineness by a member of the New Zealand CP leadership who had attended the Congress and reported to the Australian CP leadership on the way back through Sydney to New Zealand.

The impact of Khrushchev's speech was blunted a little in Australia by the fact that, for the previous three or four years, the Australian CP leadership had been quietly coming under the influence of Chinese Stalinism and many of the leading cadres of the CPA had been studying in China, and the Chinese posture in relation to Khrushchev's secret speech -- which was to say that Stalin had indeed made mistakes, but he shouldn't be exposed -- suited the Australian CP leadership quite well.

They relied heavily on party loyalty and also traditional loyalty to the Soviet Union, and also on the exotic private pro-Soviet political culture that had developed in the Australian CP. As the Soviet Union was fairly remote from Australia physically, and China was closer, the CP leadership's attempt to limit the impact of Khrushchev's speech was reasonably successful.

As a result of the crisis caused by Khrushchev's Secret Speech exposing Stalin, the Australian CP leadership's reaction, and that leadership's support for the Russian military intervention against the Hungarian workers revolution in December 1956, a few hundred people were either expelled from, or broke with the CP.

They included a number of rapidly maturing labour movement intellectuals like Ian Turner, Bob Walsh, Helen Palmer, Stephen Murray Smith, Jim Staples, Eric Lambert, George Petersen, David Martin, Ken Buckley, Lionel Anet, Edgar Waters, Ken Gott, Miriam Dixson, Anne Turner, Peter Hamilton, Bob Gollan and quite a few others.

Many of the men in this group had joined the CP on the basis of their Army experiences and been Commonwealth Reconstruction Trainee Students after the War. (There is a most moving retrospective tribute to these people in an extract from the second volume of Dorothy Hewett's autobiography published in the latest issue of Overland.)

Zoe O'Leary's interesting biography of the writer Eric Lambert, The Desolate Market, describes his separation from the Communist Party after his journalistic reporting on the Hungarian Revolution against Stalinism in 1956. The book describes the attack on Lambert by other communist writers like Frank Hardy, who remained loyal to Stalinism during this crisis.

In Hardy's case, and that of Rupert Lockwood, another important communist intellectual, their personal disillusionment with Stalinism was brought to a head 10 years later by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which led Hardy to write his important work, The Heirs of Stalin, and Lockwood to write much journalism about Stalinism, leading them to be attacked by those who still defended the Soviet Union after 1968, in a similar fashion to the way Hardy had attacked Lambert. By this time Eric Lambert had died, and the human reconciliation that might have taken place between him and Frank Hardy was no longer possible.

The departures from the Communist Party in Australia in 1956 were, however, mainly confined to intellectuals, and Khrushchev's Secret Report and the Soviet invasion of Hungary did not have anything like the terminal impact on the Australian Communist Party that it did, for instance, on the British Communist Party.

This political upheaval was resolved in the traditional Australian Stalinist way. No real internal discussion was allowed in the party and oppositionists were removed from the organisation speedily and rather brutally. For instance, read Dennis Freney's account of his expulsion from the CP in his autobiography A Map of Days (William Heinemann Australia, 1991).

I vividly remember the termination of my own brief experience in the orbit of the CP. I was present at a cadres meeting chaired by Bernie Rosen, the East Sydney section secretary, in the old CP shop in William Street, where 150 of us crammed in to listen to a predictably three-hour long address by the silver-tongued J.R. Hughes.

When asked the million-dollar question by oppositionist Peter Hamilton, who knew that the New York Times version of Khrushchev's speech was authentic, because the same New Zealand Communist leader who had reported the genuineness of Khrushchev's report to the Australian CP leadership had met a Communist friend of Hamilton's, an old university colleague, in a Sydney street and told him of the authenticity of the speech, but had sworn him to secrecy.

Hamilton was in the difficult position of knowing the truth but not being able to dob in his indirect informant. He used the device of asking Jack Hughes the direct question: “Wasn't it a fact that the New York Times version of the speech was authentic?” Hughes responded by the most skilled piece of Stalinist demagoguery that I have ever witnessed. No mean orator, Hughes performed like a silver-tongued Jesuit.

Appealing to the battle-scarred, party-loyal, mainly proletarian audience, he said: “The New York Times! We know the filthy New York Times like all the filthy bourgeois press. They lie about the working class and its struggles! They lie about the Soviet Union! They lie about everything the working class holds dear! How can you believe anything that they say?” He went on in this vein for at least 10 minutes, avoiding a direct answer, but whipping up the deeply ingrained loyalty to the Soviet Union and the Party, of the very fine group of working class Stalinist activists in the room, directing it against the small group of critics and sceptics, which included me.

I found this experience traumatic, and that was the last Stalinist meeting I ever attended as any kind of supporter of Stalinism, reluctant though I was to sever the connections that I had developed with the fine working class activists in the CPA in East Sydney, who I still admired for their considerable human qualities.

Their extraordinary loyalty to the exotic political culture of Australian High Stalinism, in the face of the obvious truthfulness of Khrushchev's speech, was just too much for me to stomach, and this experience shook me loose from the influence of the Stalinist movement, which turned out to be a critical development in my political life.

The Sino-Soviet Split and Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War

These two major developments, which unfolded in time fairly close to each other, had a much greater impact on the Australian Communist Party than the 1956 crisis over the 20th Congress and the invasion of Hungary.

The Sino-Soviet split, which unfolded between 1960 and 1963, produced a fairly deep crisis in the Australian CP because, for the previous 10 years, the Australian CP had moved very close to China and many of its middle cadres had gone for long periods of training in China. Relative geographical closeness and natural human excitement about some very real, and some idealised and imagined, features of the extraordinary revolution in China had become part of the popular culture of Australian Stalinism.

Magazines like China Pictorial, Peking Review and China Reconstructs were widely read by Australian Communists. Pamphlets by Mao Tse Tung and Liu Shao Chi, particularly Mao's pamphlet On Contradiction, and On Practice and Liu Shao Chi's How to be a Good Communist, and On Inner Party Struggle had, for a period, very wide circulation in basic Party education in Australia.

Initially the central leader, Lance Sharkey, favoured the Chinese, and Ted Hill, the Victorian CP Secretary, favoured the Russians, but in the course of the early stages of the international Stalinist debate, which took place behind closed doors, and was confined to the leadership of most CPs including the Australian CP, Sharkey and Hill changed roles, with Sharkey ending up on the Soviet side and Hill ultimately became the leader of the pro-Chinese.

A clandestine factional struggle unfolded in Victoria, with Bernie Taft, Rex Mortimer, Harry and Jack Stanistreet, Keith McEwan and others, conducting a factional struggle within the large full-time apparatus of devoted CP functionaries, against the pro-Chinese position of Hill, Flo Russell, Vin Bourke, and Victorian CP union officials like Paddy Malone, Norm Gallagher, and a number of others who followed Hill in supporting the Chinese.

As there was no constitutional framework or political tradition of any kind for open debate in the Stalinist party, this factional struggle was initially confined to the leadership of full-time functionaries and some other privileged members like certain union officials.

This inner-party struggle developed in a ruthless and cruel way, as the Stalinist tradition allowed no scope for any sort of civilised resolution of differences. It is described fairly accurately in Keith McEwan's autobiography Once a Jolly Comrade, and Geoff McDonald's strange but informative autobiographical book.

Eventually this struggle could not be contained within the leadership, and when the international split between Russia and China became total, it erupted here in a split conducted in the usual Stalinist fashion.

Lance Sharkey and Laurie Aarons' control of the central apparatus in Sydney was the decisive factor, and though the Maoists initial had comfortable majority support in Victoria, the Hill group was rapidly isolated because of the tradition of Stalinist centralisation, effectively forced out of the party, and split away to form a new rival party, the Communist Party-Marxist Leninist, (CPA-ML) with the initial support of most full-time CP union officials in Victoria, but with minimal support in other states. This split was a much more fundamental and deep rooted split in the body politic of Australian communism than the upheaval ten years before.

The impact of the Vietnam War

In early 1965 the Australian Government did the bidding of its great and powerful friend, US imperialism, and sent Australian military conscripts to Vietnam, a very fateful political decision for the future of Australia. Fortuitiously, this deepening of the Vietnam conflict and the involvement of Australia coincided in time with the unfolding of a “cultural revolution” among the youth of advanced capitalist countries, as the extraordinarily rapid expansion of postwar tertiary education had produced a much larger proportion of students in relation to the total population than had ever previously existed under capitalism.

The rather difficult and crowded conditions of student life for many of the new students created objective circumstances for a certain radicalisation, which rapidly intersected, in Australia and the United States, with the brutal impact on the student population, and youth in general, of conscription for a remote and morally unjustified colonial war in Asia.

The period 1965 to 1970 witnessed the constant broadening and escalation of the youth and student radicalisation to which the Vietnam War became the catalyst. All significant leftist groups in Australia, the CPA, the small but significant group of Trotskyists in Sydney, and the CPA-ML in Melbourne, threw themselves, in their own particular ways, very quickly, into the agitation against the Vietnam War.

The CPA was at an initial slight disadvantage in one way, that its primary penchant for generally cautious and rather moderate agitation against the war was in fairly sharp contrast with both the Trotskyists in Sydney and the Maoists in Melbourne, who initially favoured somewhat more militant strategic actions like occasional civil disobedience.

The CP, however, had a certain initial advantage in another way, in that it had widespread mass connections in unions and the Labor Party left. It had an established network of “peace” organisations, which had a large middle class constituency, and considerable official left wing trade union support. The network of CP influenced peace organisations had substantial financial resources, which the newer, radical antiwar organisations, like the Vietnam Action Committee, didn't have.

Sydney and Melbourne experiences were different. The Sydney Trotskyists, while somewhat more radical than the CP in relation to mass demonstrations, were also active in the same labour movement arena as the “official left” influenced by the CP.

This fact constrained the Sydney Trotskyists to practice more militant tactics than the CP, but to conduct these tactics carefully so that they were not so extravagant as to completely alienate the bulk of the labour movement.

While there was a fair amount of competition, with the Trotskyists at first having an advantage, because their more radical style had an initial popularity with radicalising youth, nevertheless, the organisational grip of the CP in the broader labour movement led to a kind of dual power, which proved in the event to be quite healthy.

In Melbourne the situation was a little different. The CPA-ML rapidly recruited an important group of radical students, particularly the rolly-polly but politically charismatic Albert Langer, and the Melbourne Maoists were quite unrestrained by broader labour movement tactical considerations, and carried over into Australia an extraordinarily colourful and rather exotic culture of total confrontation with the capitalist state, which, despite its sometimes suicidal implications, acquired a certain glamour for some of the young, who were engaged in their own rite of passage, so to speak.

One result of all these developments was to break down the rabid Stalinist cultural isolationism of the CPA. It was forced by circumstances to drop the public practice of denouncing Trotskyists and Maoists as “police spies” and “agents of the bourgeoisie”, and a kind of grudging united front developed in the antiwar movement between the different leftist actors, which was, however, intertwined with constant tactical and ideological conflict at the same time, making for an exciting and colourful political and cultural life on the left.

I was one of the leaders of the Trotskyist current in the Sydney antiwar movement (secretary of the Vietnam Action Committee). We engaged in a strategy of orienting ourselves both to the radical youth and, over the heads of the CP leaders, to the militant trade unionists and shop committees, and militants on the waterfront, etc.

From our point of view, this tactic worked quite well. Although they hated us, the CP leaders were forced to acquiesce in our more militant street demonstrations, the core of which were radical youth, and older CP workers. These older proletarian CP activists often developed the grudgingly respectful attitude that “Bob Gould and the VAC may be Trotskyist bastards, but they are pretty good at organising effective demonstrations”.

In Sydney, throughout the whole period of the antiwar movement between 1965, and the winding down of the war in 1972, preliminary to the final victory of the Vietnamese Revolution in 1975, a sort of dual power prevailed between a more radical Vietnam Action Committee, which mainly concentrated on militant street demonstrations and a bit later, on radical youth organisation, and a broader structure of mobilisation committees and Moratorium Committees, which included both the more moderate elements and the more radical groups, and was in practice run, largely financed and held together by the dedicated, hardworking, poorly paid Stalinist functionaries who had devoted most of their lives to the peace movement.

Despite the sharpest political differences amongst us, a certain esprit de corps and grudging mutual respect and tolerance eventually unfolded, but that didn't happen all at once, and the previously ferociously separatist Stalinist culture never entirely disappeared in the CP, even in the 1970s.

The radicalisation of the 1960s and the early 1970s brought a whole new generation into left wing politics. Marxism revived in universities, and a broad cultural radicalisation throughout the whole population took place, which assorted reactionaries have been whingeing about ever since.

The CP remained a powerful influence, and it recruited quite rapidly from the more conservative among the young leftists of the time, and also a bit from some ultraleftist youth. The Trotskyist and Maoist groupings, while they had extremely broad support amongst the youth and students, didn't have the durable implantation in the labour movement that the Stalinist movement had.

Some Sydney Trotskyists had a certain presence in the labour movement, but nothing like that of the CP. Over time the greater popularity of the Trotskyists in Sydney and the Maoists in Melbourne among the youth had greater impact, as the CP's proletarian base got older and more dispersed, and as the CP itself experimented with new ideas under the impact of the ferment of the times.

In the mid to late 1960s some very useful things, industrially, emerged from the CP, or the orbit of the CP. The rank and file agitation that culminated in the emergence of the Mundey leadership in the Builders Labourers Federation was the most effective campaign to change the leadership of any union for many years.

It had all the classic elements of the better sorts of such interventions organised by the CP. It involved a combination of older battle-scarred CP militants with a younger generation of knockabout auto-didact proletarians who were attracted to the CP, like Jack Mundey, who rapidly acquired the necessary mixture of militancy, commitment to ideology, ability to learn some trade union skills, and a certain amount of controlled ambition, all factors required for the success of any such trade union enterprise, conducted with a good deal less of the Stalinist sectarianism than had been the hallmark of some such enterprises in the past.

This model trade union agitation is usefully and pedagogically described in Paul True's little book, Rolling the Right, about the BL's rank and file movement.

Some other CP trade union ventures were marred by the old CP sectarianism. One very unfortunate example of this was the messy bust-up in the CP faction in the Liquor Trades Union, which culminated in CP members John Morris and John Woods swinging over to the right and taking that union with them.

In 1967 “permanency” was introduced on the Australian waterfront, impelled by the rapid mechanisation and containerisation of the industry. The Communist Party on the waterfront was divided over the details of the “permanency” proposals.

The Maoists, many independent leftists and the Melbourne right wing, all favoured a more belligerent attitude for more industrial gains for wharfies out of the inevitable deal on “permanency”. Many CP wharfies had a similar attitude, but the CP officials of the Sydney branch and Norm Docker (an old CP hand) in the federal office, went along with Charlie Fitzgibbon, the right wing ALP federal secretary of the union, accepting somewhat less than the more militant section favoured.

Several stormy wharfies stopwork meetings in both Sydney and Melbourne rejected Fitzgibbon's deal in favour of a better package. The critical point in this battle was the third Sydney stopwork meeting, at which Tas Bull, a talented, fluent and effective agitator, an ex-member of the CP, who had up to that point led the opposition to the deal, pronounced that they had squeezed as much as they could out of the shipowners, and that a moderately improved package, the one now presented by General Secretary Fitzgibbon, was the best the wharfies would get.

Bull's change of tack was decisive, and that critical Sydney stopwork meeting accepted the deal, which was then accepted nationally. (Bull was subsequently elected National Organiser of the WWF, and went on to succeed Fitzgibbon as General Secretary of the union.)

One most interesting feature of CP trade union work in the period was the important book written by AEU proletarian autodidact and CP member, research officer, Jack Hutson, From Penal Colony to Penal Power. This extraordinarily useful book was a balance sheet of the socialist and militant experience with the arbitration system and collective bargaining in Australia, and a rather comprehensive manual for union officials and rank and file activists on how to use the system from the socialist point of view.

It placed primary emphasis on rank and file mobilisation, delegates committees and collective bargaining, where that was possible, but it also treated the now quite well developed arbitration machinery as a fact of industrial and political life and indicated the importance of trade union activists having a professional and thorough mastery of the whole industrial relations system, and how to exploit and use aspects of it in the interests of the working class.

It is a very concrete and important book all round, imbued with a basic kind of class-struggle Marxism, but also infused with a sensible and responsible approach to the existing legal structures in which unions have to work. This book still stands as the highest point of the codified experience of the Australian labour and socialist movements in industrial matters, although it had one weakness: it didn't address in any detail the particular biases against women traditionally built into the Australian industrial system.

The radicalisation from 1965 to 1975 and the further differentiation within the CP that took place as a part of this radicalisation

A useful biography came out last year, Jennie George, by Brad Norington. This book, in a way, expresses in the life of one individual, the evolution of the CP in the period 1965 to 1975, and later from 1975 to the spearheading by the CP of the imposition of the prices and incomes Accord on the labour movement and the working class in 1981-83.

In the late 1960s the CP still aspired to be the hegemonic left wing institution, although its hegemony was contested by Trotskyists, Maoists and others, like the charismatic Brian Laver in Brisbane.

The CP itself moved quite rapidly away from the tutelage of the Stalinists of the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union. With the enforced retirement of Sharkey and the death of Dixon, personalities like Laurie Aarons, Bernie Taft, Mavis Robertson and Eric Aarons came to dominate the CP, and when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring, the CP joined with the rest of the far left to oppose the Soviet intervention.

This had an explosive internal impact in the CP, and led, over the next three years to a further split, this time of most of the union officials in the CP in the Sydney district, who broke away out of initial loyalty to Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and supported the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia. These union officials and others then went on to form the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA).

The discontent of the pro-Russian trade union officials was sharpened by episodic dabbling in industrial ultraleftism by the Aarons leadership. At this time the Aarons leadership tossed around fanciful rhetoric about “action committees as instruments of dual power”, and even encouraged a rather exotic work-in in the tiny Harco Factory in south-west Sydney, which only had about 30 workers.

The results of this kind of rhetorical ultraleftism were rather unfortunate for the courageous workers involved in some of these adventures. I often wonder what happened later to Lloyd Caldwell, the courageous and loyal boilermaker leader of the Harco work-in. In the CP rhetoric of the time, work-ins and action committees were raised to the level of a charismatic global strategy, which was a kind of delirium, given the objective conditions that prevailed in Australia at the time.

The curious feature of this kind of activity by the Aarons leadership was that, at the same time, it still exerted considerable influence on the official left of the Labor Party. In that sphere, they encouraged a fairly dogged conservatism. So in the actual practical work of the CP there was, during that period, a ferocious kind of Stalinist double-entry book-keeping -- by no means a new development in the Stalinist political tradition.

In 1969 the new, more leftist industrial and political mood in Australia culminated in the action of the courageous Melbourne Maoist Tramways Union secretary, Clarrie O'Shea, in refusing to pay a fine inflicted on his union under the Penal Clauses of the Arbitration Act.

He was supported by the breakaway Melbourne Trades Hall Council leftist group of unions, and to their considerable credit, the CP leadership exerted every piece of industrial influence that they had in mobilising a national general industrial action for the release of O'Shea. It was quite clear from the pattern of strikes and mobilisation that the CP was the main influence that came to bear in the O'Shea campaign, but the campaign spread to much broader layers.

The widespread industrial action panicked the ruling class, and some Tory paid O'Shea's fine “for the good of the country”. The penal clauses were never thereafter used, and the period from 1969 to the Accord in 1982 became the longest period of sustained incremental improvements for the Australian working class, achieved through the usual combination of normal trade union industrial action, combined with appropriate activity in the industrial courts.

This whole process was assisted by the fact that it was now no longer politically possible for the employers, the government or the courts to enforce penal clauses.

Throughout this period the competition between left and right in the trade union movement for hegemony, that I have described earlier, continued to act as an instrumental factor in the forward march of the trade unions and the labour movement.

The atmosphere in the CP and on the left in the 1960s and the 1970s is captured very well in Frank Hardy's important novel The Dead are Many, and in Roger Milliss's autobiographical novel, Serpent's Tooth.

Victorian ALP upheaval. The 1971 ALP conference. The election of the Whitlam Government and the “wages explosion”

In 1971 the ALP parliamentary Centre Group organised by the rather cunning Clyde Cameron, Mick Young, Tom Burns and Jack Egerton, moved in to get rid of the intransigent old-style syndicalist leftist Victorian ALP executive, in the interests of the “moderation necessary to get a Labor government elected”.

The CP leadership gave tacit support to this intervention against the leftists in Victoria, although denying it publicly, and key figures in the “official” ALP left, like Jim Cairns also gave the intervention against the Victorian left, initial tacit support.

However, the middle ranks of the left wing unions, the state officials in Victoria, almost universally revolted against this intervention, and formed a new formation, the ALP Socialist Left, which rapidly developed major influence in the ALP and the trade unions in Victoria.

This was a development that broke significantly free of the direct influence of the CPA, particularly of the Taft leadership of the CPA in Victoria, which most Victorian left-wingers could see was complicit in the intervention against themselves.

Coincident with the formation of the Socialist Left in the ALP, there emerged inside the CP an opposition grouping called the Left Tendency, which conducted a rather abstract Althusserian polemic with the CP leadership over the nature of the capitalist state, which did not have very clear immediate strategic implications, other than a general itch by the Left Tendency for a deepening of the kind of rhetorical ultraleftism that the Aarons leadership had dabbled in briefly.

The Left Tendency was easily contained by the CP leadership, because their opposition was politically and industrially incoherent. The fact that, even at this late stage in its development, the CP refused to accept the Left Tendency's demand for the right to form open factions in the Party, underlined the CP's continuing Stalinist character in some respects.

The 1971 ALP Federal Conference in Launceston, to which I scraped in by one vote, as the one delegate from a mushroom growth, the NSW Socialist Left, that I helped organise, became a bit of a barometer of the political circumstances in the Australian labour movement at that time. Clyde Cameron attempted to get the conference to accept a “Wages and Incomes Policy” very similar to the later 1982 Accord.

The Socialist Lefts in Victoria and NSW beat the drum loudly against these proposals, particularly the aspects of them that restricted the right of unions to push for improvements. The CP leadership was initially attracted by these proposals, but pressure from the middle ranks of the trade union movement caused them to change their position to opposition.

Even the bulk of the right wing in the trade unions ended up being opposed to the proposals because they so clearly contradicted the traditional prerogatives of trade unions to fight for their members' interests. As a result the Cameron proposals were rejected by the conference, and the subsequent Whitlam Government was therefore not in a position to effectively impose a policy of “wage restraint” on the trade unions.

This 1971 ALP Federal Conference also went within one vote of supporting my motion for the abolition of ASIO, Australia's secret political police unit, which was only saved by the intervention of a section of the “official” left that supported Murphy's proposal for the reform of ASIO, which won by the aforesaid one vote.

The effect of all these developments was that, for the whole period from 1969 to the defeat of the rather weak Fraser Tory Government in 1982, trade union membership, influence and power reached its peak in Australian society.

All through the period trade union membership hovered around 50 per cent of the employed population, a very high figure, and in the so-called “wages explosion” of 1972-75, the share of wages in the GNP rose rather sharply.

This whole period was a period of “Forward March” for the working class and the labour and trade union movement in Australia, although the beginnings of a capitalist slump, and the unwise demolition of some tariff barriers by the Whitlam Government, precipitated the onset of a period of highish unemployment.

Nevertheless, the influence of trade unions, the size of their membership, and their capacity to represent the interests of their members, was at a peak. This continued even in the period of the Fraser Liberal Government, which, like the Menzies Liberal Government before it, proved much more circumspect in its dealings with trade union matters than Tory rhetoric might otherwise have indicated.

The rise, struggles, and fall of the Mundey leadership of the Builders Laborers Federation

The rank and file struggle organised by the CP for leadership of the Builders Laborers Federation is best described in the book already mentioned, by Paul True, Rolling the Right. The story of the Mundey, Owens, Pringle leadership of the BLs in the 1960s and the 1970s, is in Meredith and Verity Burgmann's useful book, Green Bans, Red Union. The Mundey leadership was elected as a product of an entirely normal trade union agitation for a more militant industrial leadership, which happened, fortuitously, during the maturing of the capitalist building boom, in metropolitan Sydney in particular.

Initially the Mundey leadership led major struggles for industrial gains for builders labourers. In its middle period, it added to this industrial menu, environmental concerns, which in a way stemmed from the very nature of the building industry, but which was sharpened by the political consciousness of the leadership of the union, and their desire to assist, and make alliances with, new forces emerging in social life who were fighting for the preservation of the natural and built environment.

To their eternal credit, the Builders Laborers Federation and their leadership took up the cudgels for the environment imposing “Green Bans” on a number of undesirable developments, often with a great deal of success, the Green Bans provided the necessary window for public agitation and support to build up for the preservation of many desirable aspects of the Sydney environment.

Without the Builders Laborers, freeways would have devastated Glebe. Millers Point, the Rocks and Victoria Street would have been destroyed, Kelly's Bush would have disappeared, and the environmental restraints on development, which have become entirely normal parts of social life, would never have developed.

In the heady industrial and political atmosphere of the time, the BLF leadership made several honourable, but in retrospect, fairly obvious, mistakes. One of them was in the sphere of union leadership. At the height of the CP leadership's fairly “leftist” industrial rhetoric, “limited tenure of office” for union officials became a fashionable CP catchword.

Jack Mundey became, in fact, the only union official in Australian history to implement this slogan, and stood down from full-time office as union secretary after a certain period, and went back “on the tools”. This action is a powerful commentary on Mundey's enormous personal integrity, but looking back on it, it was politically unsound.

The problem in the uneven and combined social development that always exists under capitalism, is that the complex mixture of militancy, conscientious beliefs, principles and industrial experience, embodied in a Jack Mundey, is at this stage in human society, a fairly unusual phenomenon, and in my view, for a “good guy” like Mundey to relinquish office in pursuit of some principled abstraction like limited tenure of office was a courageous and noble act, but a political mistake, a kind of substitutionism in reverse.

This is thrown into bold relief by the relative rareness of the phenomenon of union officials defeated in union elections going back “on the tools”. Only a few such instances spring to mind, J.J. Brown, the CP leader in the ARU in Victoria, Bernie Willingale, the left wing leader of the AFULE in NSW, and Jenny Haines the independent leftist in the Nurses Union in NSW.

Most defeated union officials go off to more comfortable jobs in management and the political world. The minority, mentioned above, of union officials defeated in elections who go back to playing a rank and file role in their industry often become once again major leaders in their industries (and are quite frequently eventually re-elected to full time union positions). It's an entirely different question for a competent official like Mundey to voluntarily stand down from full-time union leadership in his prime, and he remains the only example of this phenomenon in Australian industrial history.

The other significant mistake of the BLs leadership was overuse of the entirely righteous and defensible Green Bans tactic. The problem was that industrial gains for the membership became harder to achieve with a downturn in the building industry. For defensible moral reasons, the BLF placed a very large number of Green Bans on different developments, but they became very difficult to maintain in the context of the downturn, and they began to strain the allegiance of the rank and file to the union leadership.

In a completely unscrupulous way, the federal Maoist leadership of the BLF, led by General Secretary Norm Gallagher, made an obvious deal with the Master Builders Association and intervened in NSW and sacked the officials of the NSW branch in 1975. Despite initial resistance by the rank and file at several stopwork meetings, the resistance collapsed, in my view, partly because of the exhaustion of the rank and file at the large number of Green Bans.

The bureaucratically imposed Maoist leadership managed to establish themselves in the Builders Laborers in NSW, and they victimised many of the supporters of the Mundey leadership until they themselves were bureaucratically removed with the deregistration of the BLF 10 years later, which was a sad example of the “biter bit”.

The imposition in 1982 of the Prices and Incomes Accord on the labour movement. The CP, the “official” left, and the peak trade union leadership, in collaboration, impose unprecedented new industrial arrangements, which have catastrophic results for the whole labour movement

In the late 1970s and the early 1980s the CP and the “official” left moved into what was, from the standpoint of hindsight, a terminal crisis for both of them, as a serious alternative force in the Australian labour movement. Many of the older people in the left of the labour movement had been worn down by history and circumstance, and the gradual unwinding of the Stalinist regimes overseas, in which they had placed such great, though misguided, hopes.

Many of the younger people around the CP and the “official” left had rapidly developed a powerful desire for careers in and around the labour movement and in the bureaucracies of the helping professions, and proved ready soil for the idea of new industrial and social arrangements in which “experts” and professionals would have the major industrial and political role.

In 1980, about 20 years ago, the CP held an Anniversary Conference about its own history in Melbourne, which was a rather interesting catalogue of many past events and glories. The papers were eventually produced in two substantial booklets.

The most interesting session was in a packed hall of 300 or 400 people to which a quite unrepentant E.F. Hill defended his Maoist point of view, while in a cautious way, endorsing the project of all the fragments of the old CP forming a united front. Another rather curious paper was given by Jack Hughes, lamenting the tactical mistake that he and other CP leaders had made in adopting the “Hands off Russia” resolution, and splitting away from the official Labor Party during the Nazi-Soviet Pact period.

He showed great sadness over the fact that if it hadn't been for this tactical error, he himself and others like Rupert Lockwood would have taken their rightful places as Labour members of parliament.

This interesting, nostalgic conference was only a short interlude in a very fundamental shift to the right that was taking place in the CP and the official left at this time. This shift was very noticeable at the CP summer schools at Sydney University in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

At these schools, classical Marxism was derided, the nuts and bolts of the class struggle were dismissed as “economism”, and a series of fashionable books, which undermined the idea of the working class as agents of social change, and socialist parties as effective vehicles, such as Beyond the Fragments and In and Against the State, were praised as the way of the future.

The ideas expressed in these books, which downplayed the significance of the economic class struggle, had an enormously disintegrating impact internally in the CP.

The idea of “giving up the crude wages struggle” in favour of an “incomes policy”, was peddled at these conferences for several years, particularly by the industrial star of the CP leadership, the energetic and forceful assistant secretary of the metalworkers union, Laurie Carmichael. A powerful and intimidating presence, and a widely read and persuasive proletarian auto-didict, Carmichael argued aggressively for an “accord” with the Labor government, a “wages and incomes policy”, what he called “strategic unionism” against what he dismissed as “economism”, ie the continuance of the traditional form of class struggle for wages and conditions improvements.

He convinced the CP leadership and the left, centre and right of the trade union bureaucracy and, in fact, he set about writing most of the required policy documents himself. Carmichael became the energetic and practical spearhead of the new ideology, policy and practical arrangements in the labour movement.

In particular, the right wing of the trade union bureaucracy and the ACTU capitulated to Carmichael's ideas immediately, and the triumph of this new scenario was almost instantaneous at the official level. Eighty years of developments advantageous to the working class in Australia were ditched in the space of a year or so.

This uneven and combined kind of development, where the trade unions, in which a broad left faction led by the CP was the energising force, which had produced most of the improvements for the working class since the turn of the century, was over the short period of a couple of years, demolished in favour of a new set-up which, in practice, removed the effective mobilisation of the class struggle from the industrial scenario.

It would be totally unscientific to reduce this major abdication and collapse to a simple question of betrayal. The acceptance of the Accord was partly the product of the wearing out of a whole social group and political generation.

The people who inflicted the new arrangements by and large believed that they were doing a good thing, believed that they were engaged in useful innovations. They argued that, despite the abdication of all the traditional forms of struggle for improvements, something better would take place, a broad new arrangement in society.

They were a bit hazy about the details of how this new utopia would be achieved, and they rather self-servingly prattled on about the importance of the “social wage” which they hoped to achieve. They mobilised every piece of influence and power that they held in the labour movement to make this schema the new political and industrial orthodoxy.

The leadership of the CP was at the absolute centre of this dramatic destruction of the previous labour movement set-up, and Carmichael was the extremely charismatic personality, the energetic prophet of the “New Order”.

The ACTU Conference which adopted the Accord

The Accord was officially ratified at a federal unions conference in 1983. Norington's biography of Jennie George describes the scene exquisitely. A small group of unionists spearheaded by Jenny Haines, an independent leftist recently elected general secretary on a Reform Movement ticket in the important NSW Nurses Union, but including some ACTU delegates from round the CP orbit, like Jennie George and Van Davey in the Teachers Union, resisted the pressure to accept the Accord's abdication of the right of unions to press for award improvements.

At left union caucuses and elsewhere, enormous pressure was exerted to try to make acceptance of the Accord unanimous. Right up to the last moment Jenny Haines believed, on the basis of their statements and the political rhetoric that they used, that the teachers' officials and some others, would vote against the Accord.

Norington describes what happened. Van Davey and Jenny George decided between themselves that they might abstain if the platform weren't looking straight at them. In the event, rather to her own surprise, Jenny Haines was the sole elected trade union official and conference delegate to vote against, which gave her considerable notoriety amongst the trade union bureaucracy, particularly its left, which ever after did everything it could to destabilise her newly elected leadership in the Nurses Union.

Along with the new Accord arrangements went an acceptance of “Enterprise Bargaining”, which atomised trade union influence, and a program of rapid, often forced, union amalgamations under the rubric of “modern unionism”. Many of the amalgamations took place bureaucratically, based on the political alignments of the amalgamating unions, and created unwieldy conglomerates, cutting across natural industrial boundaries.

Rather than creating authentic industrial unions, in many instances the cumbersome entities were almost the antithesis of industrial unions. This amalgamation process coincided with the abolition, at one stroke, of the traditional round of wage claims, claims for improvements, industrial action for claims, interacting and combined with cases in the state Industrial Commissions, and the Federal Industrial Court.

For the following 12 or 13 years it became rather unclear to most trade unionists what in the hell trade unions actually did, as all the social and wages arrangements were made by top-level negotiation, including, as they did, a substantial lagging of wage increases behind inflation. When the modest wage increases that had been negotiated at the top level eventually resumed, they were ruthlessly associated with “award restructuring”, “offsets” and other givebacks, which involved the liquidation of many conditions that had been gained over the previous 30 years.

The rapidly declining “official” left of the labour movement, and particularly the CP, completely reversed their traditional role in this period. They ceased to have as their central interest working class mobilisation at the rank and file level, or even the official union level, for periodic improvements and increases. The role of the “official” left became totally reversed. It became the collective “enforcer” for the new arrangements, vigorously opposing all spontaneous working class actions which took place outside of the framework of the Accord.

“Maverick” trade unions and workers, like the Pilots, the Victorian Food Preservers and the NSW Nurses, which tried to get the 38 hour week without offsets, and had the impudence to fight the closure of hospitals and psychiatric institutions by the state Labor government, were isolated, attacked and beseiged, with the “official” left, particularly the ubiquitous Laurie Carmichael, playing the role of super-propagandist for the ACTU leadership in this whole development.

The culmination of this process was the deregistration of the Builders Laborers Federation.

In the quarterly journal, Labour History, industrial relations academic Ross Martin customarily has written a report of a comprehensive and thorough sort, on each biennial ACTU Congress since about 1980. His reports of the ACTU Congresses through to now make fascinating reading.

They describe in ruthless detail a process (which Martin himself possibly favoured) but which he observes truthfully, in which the left of the ACTU bureaucracy -- people like Laurie Carmichael, Tom McDonald and Tas Bull -- played the constant role of verbally battering into the ground any attempt to go back to the old class struggle practices of the labour movement.

It can be argued that this bureaucratic ruthlessness and the participation of the “official” left in it, preserved the Labor government many years beyond its natural life, but it's now pretty clear that the actual impact of the Accord process on the organisation of the labour movement and the working class was devastating.

The proportion of wages in the GNP dropped during the period. Unemployment remained fairly high for most of the 1980s and 1990s, although there were some gains for the working class in the sphere of superannuation. The much touted notion of the “social wage” that had been the ideological spearhead used to gain acceptance of the new arrangements, quietly went by the board.

What is clear in hindsight is what the courageous initial opponent of the Accord, Jenny Haines, predicted. The coincidence of the Accord arrangements, enterprise bargaining, award restructuring, bureaucratic trade union amalgamations, and the demolition of the old class struggle institutions like councils of shop committees etc, has had an absolutely devastating impact on working class organisation.

The Trade Union Training Authority structure was used all through this period as a mechanism to indoctrinate union delegates in the virtue of the new arrangements, and to discourage them from the older type of trade union agitation.

The disastrous character of this whole process is demonstrated by the results. The proportion of employed workers in unions has halved. Trade union delegate organisations have atrophied. A real crisis has developed in the organised labour movement, and it's fairly easy to see that one of the main causes of this development is the disappearance of any organising centre or broad political formation capable of energising the left to act as a serious force for improvements and change.

All of this stems directly from the corporatist abdication from the role of collective organiser of proletarian discontent, by the “official” left, including the Communist Party, in 1982, when the CP took the initiative in devising the Accord.