The Communist Party in Australian life

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper

The eventual collapse and liquidation of the CP was almost an anticlimax in relation to these broader developments. The final overthrow of Stalinism in Eastern Europe had a devastating impact on the whole ethos of the “official” left, including the CP.

In the early 1990s the CP was wound up, leaving behind the Search Foundation to manage the still substantial resources of the organisation for unspelled-out future political activities and, incidentally, on the right, the Grouper organisation, the NCC, fractured and the Santamaria wing of the NCC withdrew fairly deliberately from labour movement activity.

The collapse of the “official” left, cleared the field for a number of younger groupings, the three major ones being out of the Trotskyist tradition. A balance sheet on these groupings is a bit outside the scope of this chapter. It belongs in a separate chapter.

These groups are quite large, and are mainly made up of enthusiastic radical youth and students, and they are capable of energetic agitational activity, often reasonably successful, as demonstrated by the colourful and effective S11 protests recently in Melbourne. The problem with these latter day socialist groups in the Trotskyist tradition is that they tend to operate a bit “outside society”, so to speak, and it has to be said that none of these groups has, at this point, anything like the significant implantation in the labour movement which the CP had from the early 1950s to the end of the 1970s.

They have not shown, as yet, a primary interest in training a broad layer of activists in the trade unions, in the instrumental way that the CP used to do, as described earlier in this article.

As an old Trotskyist, I'm struck by the paradox that I am bemoaning the disappearance of the significant role the CP played for a considerable period as the mobiliser of a serious and useful wing in the trade unions and the labour movement.

I am the last person to regret the disappearance of the nasty, exotic and terribly misguided political culture of High Stalinism, or of the ruthless and centralised bureaucratic set-up that prevailed in the CP in the period that I'm talking about. I have spent a fair bit of my life fighting against the Stalinism of the old CP.

Nevertheless, the seriousness and professionalism in relation to the labour movement, the trade unions and the working class, embodied in Jack Hutson's Penal Colony to Penal Powers and even, in retrospect, in Sharkey's crude analysis of the Labor Party crisis in 1952, are very important things to study and learn from.

The labour movement as a whole is now in an extremely defensive situation. The official leadership of the trade unions and the ALP have shifted a long way to the right. Despite this more difficult political terrain, the strategic and practical perspectives of socialists have to be grounded in the realities of the existing workers movement.

The class struggle still exists even in this adverse set of circumstances. The new generation of serious socialists would do well to study many aspects of the experience of the CP at a number of points in its history, while rejecting totally the bloodthirsty Stalinist political culture, which was unfortunately part of that process, because of the overwhelming influence of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and China.

The beginnings of such a development might be to examine the industrial and political practice of such forces as the Workers First leadership of the metalworkers in Victoria, who have reintroduced industrial mobilisation for “pattern bargaining” in wage campaigns, and the Victorian CFMEU (the building workers union) who have mobilised the might of the union to successfully achieve a reduction in hours.

They might also study the experience of the small, but militant Fire Brigade Union in NSW, which has, by mobilising its members in industrial campaigns, achieved significant wage gains despite the resistance of the NSW government.

They might also examine the experience of the militants in the NSW Nurses Union. In this union, which happily has a historic structure that embodies more than 200 hospital branches, an annual conference of branch delegates, and six general meetings of branch delegates a year, the militants, although currently “in opposition”, to the “government” of the right wing officials, have even from this position of opposition, effectively led over the last few years a series of major successful struggles against cuts to health facilities, deskilling of nurses' jobs, closures of hospitals and other facilities, etc, and effectively created a situation where the NSW government treats the public health system with the greatest circumspection, because of the industrial strength of the NSW Nurses Association.

It's not accidental that in these four industrial situations, where “old” notions of struggle are still powerful, and traditional structures of mobilisation and organisation are maintained, that trade union membership is actually stable, or in the case of the NSW nurses union, steadily rising, in stark contrast with the bulk of the trade union movement, where the curve, at the moment, is ever downward.

Brief Notes on three significant questions in the history of the CPA

Moscow gold. Right wingers like Peter Coleman make much of the proposition that the CP got lots of money from Moscow. No doubt right-wing scholars digging into the Soviet archives will end up giving us a detailed account of whatever subventions took place. It seems clear to me that, on the scale of the activities of the CP, financial support for the Australia CP from Moscow was fairly modest. Unlike, for instance, the CPUSA, which was, literally swimming in the fabulous Moscow gold because of the great importance ascribed to the United States by successive Soviet leaderships. The overwhelmingly proportion of the funds raised by the CPA over its whole existence came from the generous contributions of generation after generation of left wing Australian workers. A small financial subsidy from the Soviet Union and the psychological impact of occasional trips to the “proletarian fatherland” for selected leaders and activists, were small issues compared with the overwhelming personal dedication, including dedicated financial support, of both the rank and file and the functionaries of the Stalinist movement.

Intelligence activity on behalf of the Soviet Union and China. It's pretty clear now that there was a small amount of intelligence gathering for the Soviet Union in Australia by dedicated Stalinists. This question is handled carefully and objectively in David McNight's book Australian Spies and Their Secrets and Dick Hall's sensitive and intelligent book about Ian Milner. The saddest case of all, of course, in this area, is the story of the peripatetic Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett. The empirical inferences clearly are that, at different times, Burchett acted on behalf of certain Soviet intelligence agencies, out of the same deep ideological conviction about the bankruptcy of the capitalist system that motivated people like the scattering of information gatherers for the Soviet Union in Australia and Kim Philby, Richard Sorge and Leopold Trepper. Those were the times. That was what people did. The really tragic thing about the Burchett story, however, was that politically he remained an unrepentant Stalinist until the end of his life.

The tragedy of this man, who had played the role of a Australian Joseph E. Davies, in the sense that he wrote the classic melodramatic defence of the Stalinist frame-up trials in Eastern Europe, Peoples Democracies, is that, having lived long enough to see the exposure of the criminal nature of these trials, for which he had been such an eloquent propagandist, he never made any kind of open honest balance sheet about Stalinism, like, say, his contemporary, Peter Fryer, the British Daily Worker journalist who also covered the 1950 trials. After Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech exposed the Eastern European trials as frame-ups, Fryer wrote a self-critical balancesheet on Stalinism and the Eastern European trials that he had reported, underlining their criminal character.

Despite Fryer's balancesheet, Burchett never faced up to the crimes involved in the East European trials, and in both versions of his autobiography he still apologised for them in an indirect way. It is also quite clear that he acted as a kind of policeman for the Hungarian Stalinist bureaucracy at the time of the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. I found extraordinarily moving an article published in Australia in one of the very last issues of the CP newspaper, by Burchett's daughter, who lives in Bulgaria, celebrating the overthrow of Stalinism in Bulgaria. The great tragedy of Burchett and the period in which he lived is that he could not bring himself to make any honest balancesheet on the Stalinism that he had witnessed at close quarters for many years, and for which he had been such an eloquent propagandist.

Police spies in the CP. In his book The Reds Stuart Macintyre mentions the case of Baker, the police spy in the CP from 1928 to 1938. In a recent article on the Diver Dobson affair in a historical journal, the historian Philip Deery notes in passing that his researches indicate that at the time of the Diver Dobson affair in the late 1940s, there had to be a police informant at the level of the Political Committee of the CP, because ASIO knew within 24 hours that Dobson had made contact with the CP and he had only made contact with members of the three-person Political Committee. Recently I, like others, have taken advantage of my constitutional rights to get my ASIO file and particularly my State Special Branch files. It's glaringly apparent, from my rather voluminous file, that I was being observed from the moment that I made contact with the CP in 1954, by a long-lived agent who was still active at a significant leadership level in the CP in Sydney into the 1970s, and still reporting on me.

I find this continuity of state observation in the CP not particularly surprising, but wryly amusing, considering that oppositionists like myself were routinely accused, by the CP leadership, before about 1965, of being police agents. Even at this late stage it would be nice, and useful for the education of the young, for many of us who have now got our files, to compare notes, with a view to piecing together the realities of the past, not judgementally or hysterically, but just to get an idea of how it all worked. It appears to me that police observation inside the CP was significant, but that it would be the crudest of unscientific conspiracy theories to regard it as being decisive in any of the political developments in the CP, in the melodramatic way that some Maoists view the evolution of the CP.