[The following talk was presented at a Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) Conference at the Hawksbury Agricultural College in January 1989.]

In September 1944 the Communist Party of Australia had reached 23,000 members. It had led mass struggles of the unemployed during the 1930s. It had developed substantial support amongst Australian workers. During the late ‘40s CPA members occupied leadership positions in unions representing nearly half the organised working class. At the end of WWII the CPA had 4000 of its members in the armed forces. Its national weekly had a circulation in the tens of thousands, and it published separate weekly papers in Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia as well.

Yet over the last four decades, attrition and splits have reduced the Communist movement in Australia to a mere shadow of its former self.

Much of the decline was certainly a result of objective circumstances – the difficulty of building a revolutionary party in Australian conditions, and international factors such as the Cold War, the post- World War II capitalist economic boom, and the splits in the international communist movement.

This talk will try to examine the political factors over which the CPA did have control. Which strategies and tactics aided the growth of the CPA, and which ones contributed to its decline?

Bourgeois commentators and historians generally praise the periods when the CPA was on a right-wing tack, accommodating to the ALP, and condemn the supposed “ultra-left” periods as responsible for the decline. This unfortunately is also the assessment of much of the communist movement today – the current CPA leadership, the Association for Communist Unity, many former communists, and even the CP-ML.

But the reality of CPA history has been rather different.

This talk doesn’t pretend to present a balanced comprehensive history of the CPA. It’s a look at aspects of the politics of the CPA from a historical perspective. Socialists need to approach our past in a spirit of open research. We don’t want a dogmatic interpretation that replaces one error with another, but I hope this talk can provide a closer approximation to a clearer understanding of the CPA. Nevertheless I have stated the position quite sharply, if not provocatively in places, but I hope this serves to stimulate thinking and discussion.

The Australian Labor Party

For Australian revolutionaries, clarity in regard to the ALP is the touchstone, the central political question. The problem of the ALP is an undeniable fact of political life, an obstacle that can’t be avoided.

We in the Democratic Socialist Party (then Socialist Workers Party) didn’t get it straight until the 1980s. Thus our thinking on the CPA and Australian Labor history in general has only been getting clearer in the last five years or so, once we cleared up our contradictions on the ALP, ditching our inherited Trotskyist schema. Saddled with misconceptions about the ALP, we also ended up with mistaken views on the CPA, thinking they were wrong when actually right, and vice versa.

Our document, Labor and the Fight for Socialism, adopted at our January 1986 conference, went a long way to getting it right on the fundamental theoretical analysis of the nature of the ALP. Because Lenin had it basically correct – it’s a bourgeois liberal party.

That’s not the end of the matter, of course. It doesn’t predetermine the tactics that a Marxist party must pursue in regard to the ALP at any one time. Here as elsewhere one needs the maximum political flexibility – so ably demonstrated by Lenin in his own political practice. One needs to take into account the specifics of the ALP at any particular time – the leadership; the ranks; the state of the class struggle; whether the ALP is in or out of government; the state of our own forces, the size and mass influence of the Marxist party.

But the CPA throughout most of its history has vacillated about the fundamental nature of the ALP and its role.

And this has led to a fundamentally flawed analysis of CPA history itself by nearly all writers and historians with an orthodox communist movement background.

This flawed analysis has as its central thesis that “sectarianism” towards the ALP is the main cause of the decline of the CPA, and conversely, a “correct united front approach” to the ALP directly contributed to the growth of the CPA.

This is the central thesis of Bill Brown (of the Association for Communist Unity) in his book The Communist Movement and Australia. It’s perhaps the most ambitious “history”, in its attempt to be comprehensive, but it’s certainly far and away the most dishonest and inaccurate.

Early CPA official histories such as those of Lance Sharkey and E W Campbell also have the same misconceptions and distortions, but at least Brown, writing in the 1980s, had the benefit of a whole range of later historical research, and the unfolding of Australian and international political events of the last four decades.

Other memoirs and reminiscences of former CPA leaders, such as Ralph Gibson, John Sendy and Edgar Ross all also have the same central thesis of the main danger of left sectarianism toward the ALP. Although they suffer from the consequent political mistakes and historical distortions, they do at least have the merit of providing some interesting first-hand reminiscences mixed in.

Recent positions of the CP-ML also have the same basic thesis about the CPA and the ALP, (although in the years immediately after their split from the CPA Ted Hill and the CP-ML did present a different position).

Perhaps the firmest (and in places the crudest) statement of this analysis comes through in an MA thesis written by Stelios Courbetis, a Greek ACU member in Melbourne:

“The adoption of ‘ultra-revolutionary’ attitudes towards the ALP by the CPA illustrates the Party’s failure to take into account the significance of an important political factor: that the majority of Australian workers perceived the ALP to be representing their interests. The CPA’s ultra-revolutionary policies resulted in its isolation from those sectors of the working class it was aiming to attract.” He contrasted this with “the success the CPA enjoyed when it adopted the ‘united front’ policy of cooperation with the ALP and broad left forces”.

(Naturally, histories written by people actively involved in politics can’t avoid reflecting their current political positions, and CPA history written by ACU members can’t help but be influenced by their absolute commitment to the ALP’s Accord project.)

Histories of the CPA taking a counter position to this orthodox line have not been as numerous, but include Robin Gollan’s Revolutionaries and Reformists, to an extent, Tom O’Lincoln’s (of Socialist Action) Into the Mainstream, and Winton Higgins, writing in the 1974 Socialist Register when he was a member of the CPA’s Left Tendency.

Foreign influences…

The approach to the ALP is the central question to get clear in discussing the history of the CPA. But a second question, which I don’t think is as important, is that of foreign vs local… that is, Comintern control, and imported revolutionary ideas, versus building an Australian party based on Australian traditions and conditions, making its own decisions.

This appears to be the central theme in Alastair Davidson’s history, The Communist Party of Australia, written in 1967. In a 1970 article titled Writing the History of a CP, he wrote: “…I came to the conclusion that the central theme in CPA history was the dialogue between local exigencies and central orders.”

The introduction to his book states: “The history of the CPA before 1950 can be understood better as a move away from Australian traditions into an alien tradition, which made the CPA inappropriate in Australia. After 1950 its history becomes a stumbling, groping, limping move back to Australian traditions, with the weight of past errors on the party’s shoulders.” (p. xi)

Of course there’s an interconnection between the two themes or explanations – Australian traditions are identified with the ALP, so the ALP question still comes to the fore.

But it’s less useful as a framework for contributing to our understanding of the CPA’s past, and also less relevant to the task of working out correct strategies for Australian Marxists in the future, since “Australian traditions” confuses two concepts. Firstly, the actual social, cultural and political conditions, which any Marxist party must take into account. And secondly, the dominant ideology of the society, which is bourgeois through and through, and which must also be taken into account, but in order to overcome it.

And there are two types of “alien” influence that should be clearly differentiated.

Firstly, there’s foreign control, what we in shorthand often refer to as “cominternism”, where orders, a general line, and even universal tactics are given to national parties from a centre. The experience of this has certainly been harmful, both in our own experience and in the experience of the international communist movement.

Secondly, there are foreign ideas, and these have been helpful, even necessary. The very idea of socialism, as well as all the subsequent theoretical advances and practical experiences of the workers’ movement, have been essential imports for the Australian revolutionary movement.

Sources of CPA errors

Although the thesis I’m presenting is that the fundamental failure of the CPA over the years was its lack of theoretical clarity on the nature of the ALP (linked to a low theoretical level and distorted attitude to theory anyway), I think it’s worth identifying three specific factors – objective to an extent – that contributed to the CPA’s political errors in relation to the ALP.

The inadequate theoretical understanding of the CPA meant that these three factors were able to shape CPA history in different periods.

Firstly, there was the strong populist, nationalist current in Australian culture, that found its expression in the ALP. This was a bourgeois cultural tradition, not a working-class, class-struggle tradition, and was an important factor in maintaining capitalist hegemony over the Australian working class. This is a problem for Australian revolutionaries right up to this day, but in the early years of the CPA it was certainly a tradition from which they found it hard to escape, and it led to some specific problems.

Secondly, there was the distortion of the traditional Leninist position on the united front, clearly set down at the 3rd Congress of the Comintern in 1921, and expounded in Lenin’s polemic Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. This distortion became the new orthodoxy after the 7th Congress of the Comintern in 1935, as a prop and justification for the needs of Stalin and the bureaucracy, subordinating the working-class and revolutionary struggle around the world to the narrow needs of the bureaucracy.

Thirdly, the pressures on the party from the trade unionist milieu after the party succeeded in winning official positions in a large number of unions. It was less of a problem early on, and when positions at the top were backed up by strong Communist support in the ranks. But in the 1950s, the political climate plus dwindling CPA membership at the base often led to adaptation by the CPA trade union officials to the politics of their ALP counterparts, and in recent times the actions of Communist union officials have often been indistinguishable from ALP trade union bureaucrats.

Each of these three influences was dominant at different periods and related to specific developments, but you get elements of all three persisting in the remnants of the communist movement to this day.

As an example of the first factor at work (bowing down before the status quo and accepting the ALP), here’s John Sendy, a former national president of the CPA, in a pamphlet he put out in 1978. It’s typical of scores of comments.

While recognizing the rapid growth of the CPA during the early 1930s, on balance he’s very critical of this period because it “…alienated a great many people in the labor movement and permanently damaged relations with important organisations”. He claimed the CPA was seen as “violent, foreign, un-Australian”. He advocated policies more in keeping with the Australian political realities…. “The CPA did not appreciate that the Australian working people possessed few revolutionary traditions.”

That may be the case, but the task facing Marxists is to find the way to change that, not acquiesce in the ALP (bourgeois) tradition. The logic of this position is capitulation to the ALP organisationally as well as politically – liquidation as a party, or joining in individually. The defection to the ALP in 1984 of the Taft leadership of the CPA (Sendy had been part of this current) was a very clear and recent illustration of where this tendency logically ends.

False views on the united front

In the very early years of the CPA this tendency had even more disastrous results. Formed in 1920 under the impact of the October Revolution, the CPA united various small socialist groups, former members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and people like Jock Garden (the “Trades Hall Reds”) occupying prominent positions in the workers’ movement. But there was very little published material available about the actual ideas of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, so the early CPA didn’t make a complete break with the ALP and illusions that it was “the mass party”, somehow a workers’ party.

Alastair Davidson writes how the united front policy adopted by the Comintern in 1921 “appeared to be similar to the policy already adopted by the CPA in accordance with Australian socialist tradition. Both advised party members to work through the trade unions and labor parties and emphasized the need to concentrate on piecemeal demands rather than extreme revolutionary attitudes. But there was one crucial difference….The Comintern’s advice to work with labor parties was not based on any belief that these parties were now acceptable. They were still just as untrustworthy, but they had the support of the workers. The object in uniting with them was not to refurbish them or to capture them but to steal their support and destroy them. All parties other than communist parties were considered outmoded political forms. This attitude differed from that of Garden or the VSP [Victorian Socialist Party, one of the groups that came to form the CPA] members who had chosen to work in the ALP, and it took the CPA some time to realize the difference.”

In 1922, following their interpretation of the united front line of the Comintern, all CPA members joined the ALP. Their formal affiliation was rejected in 1923, and the CPA was subsequently proscribed. Debates ensued in the party – should they stay in or not. Garden stayed in, and left the CPA in about 1925. Others, for example Guido Barrachi, one of the founders and a leading intellectual, proposed that the CP dissolve itself into the ALP. When his proposal was rejected, he quit. This experience reduced the CPA from about 750-1000 members at the time of its formation to 280 in 1925. Most stayed in the ALP. It wasn’t a promising start. And although there were a number of factors responsible, including Garden’s preoccupation with influencing the trade union movement at the top, it’s not a good advertisement for those advocating a “non-sectarian attitude to the ALP”.

Brown, for example, under a sub-heading “Early emphasis on the united front,” gives a favourable report on the 1923 attempt to affiliate to the ALP, and notes that “the Party had good connections with the Labor Party particularly through Jock Garden and other prominent ALP forces in the trade union movement”. But his “history” declines to mention the actual results of this line – the shrinking of the CPA to a third of its former size.

Rapid CP growth in early ‘30s

On the other hand, the next period of CPA history, the early ‘30s, was one of the most rapid periods of growth in the CPA’s history, yet was characterised by extreme hostility and opposition to the ALP. The growth in this period laid the foundations for establishing the CPA as a force to be reckoned with in the Australian labour movement.

For all its importance (perhaps because of it), myths and distortions about this period abound on all sides.

The Trotskyist movement, ourselves in the past included, erred in two directions.

Firstly, because we had a mistaken analysis of the ALP, we focussed all our attention in that period on the ALP, NSW Labor Premier Jack Lang, or the socialisation units within the ALP. We’d criticise the CPA for their abstention from the fight going on inside the ALP (which wasn’t complete in any case, they did play quite a role in the socialisation units), but we’d ignore or play down the two big movements that the CPA was involved in and out of which they grew – the Unemployed Workers Movement and the Militant Minority Movement in the unions.

Secondly, we were very familiar with the quite real disaster in Germany that paved the way for Hitler – a direct result of Stalin’s “Third Period” line pushed through at the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928. This characterised the period as one of imminent showdown with capitalism, referred to the social democratic parties as “social fascist”, the main prop of capitalism, and directed that the main blow should be directed against them. Thus we assumed that exactly the same dynamic was in operation in Australia, when there were a number of significant differences – the absence of a mass fascist movement, and a Labor Government administering capitalist austerity in the Depression, to name just two.

The fact is, disregarding the tactical mistakes, and the mad language, the CPA did grow in that period, by organising the working class and unemployed in struggle, and posing itself as an alternative to the ALP. The fundamental thrust of CPA strategy was successful: 1. They tried to develop an independent leadership of the working class through the CP; 2. They attempted to win leadership of the working class through mass struggles; 3. They posed this independent working-class leadership in opposition to the ALP. On the other hand, the new CPA leadership that was installed at the 1929 CPA Congress had its own reasons for developing myths about this period. Lance Sharkey, H Moxon, Jack Henry and J B Miles replaced Jack Kavanagh and Jack Ryan, and remained the central leadership for the next three decades. The story given in all orthodox CP accounts is that Kavanagh represented a “right opportunist” trend, a “grave Right deviation”. With Comintern help, the new team is portrayed as having rescued the party, and being responsible for the successes resulting from the new line.

But the reality was more complex. For example, Kavanagh was already pursuing a line critical of the ALP.

Much light has been shed on this period by an important article in the journal Labor History by Jack Blake, a central leader of the CPA, and Victorian state secretary until he himself was ousted as a scapegoat for the perceived errors of the party in the 1949 coal strike.

Kavanagh, wrote Blake, “saw the Labor Party as the main obstacle to the development of the Communist Party, and he campaigned vigorously to rally the communists to concentrate their main struggle against the ALP. As he saw it, Kavanagh was fighting for a Leninist Communist Party which would be independent of the Labor Party and capable of leading the working class in revolutionary struggle…

“Some confusion has been caused by the way the post-1929 leaders of the Communist Party, as part of the process of establishing their legitimacy, coloured some of the facts about events and the role of various people in the period leading up to the 1929 conference.”

This confusion has been continued by orthodox historians of the CPA, like Brown. His description of the “social fascist” period was that “an aspect of sectarian trends which temporarily came to the fore in the Comintern in the late twenties… (this) erroneous line was corrected and the united front policy was restored in the mid-’30s.”

That is, the norm, communist orthodoxy, is the “united front” line (his version anyway). But there are two problems for Brown to explain away (both of which he merely ignores).

1. The CP leadership from 1929 to the mid-’60s came to power supposedly as a left move against the right-wing line of Kavanagh. (It’s not actually as simple as that, as we can see from Blake’s article). This is the official view of CPA history.

2. From 1930 to 1933 was the period of the most rapid growth of the CPA ever, from about 300 to 3000 members, growing tenfold.

The Unemployed Workers Movement

Let’s briefly review the two main areas of CPA success, their two important areas of mass struggle, the Unemployed Workers Movement, and the Militant Minority Movement in the trade unions, just to get a picture of the depth of these struggles.

The Unemployed Workers Movement was formed in April 1930. It was initiated by and was under the leadership of the Communist Party. With one in three Australians unemployed, the UWM grew rapidly. In around a year and a half it had grown to a membership of 31,000 and continued to grow until 1936. In 1934 it claimed around 68,000 members in the Eastern states. In 1935 Sharkey told the Comintern that the CPA, through its control of the UWM, had effective control of the unemployed in NSW and Victoria.

There were other organisations of the unemployed created by the Labor Party and Trades Hall Councils. But the UWM, primarily due to the leadership of the CP, outstripped these organisations, both in size and in activity. The UWM led struggles that contributed greatly to the militant tradition of the workers and the poor in this country – anti-eviction fights, fights to defend free speech, dole strikes.

One such struggle was the heroic dole strike of the unemployed in 1933. The UWM conducted an 8-week strike of the unemployed (who had to work for their pittance), which forced an increase in dole payments.

The CPA recruited a large proportion of its new members through the UWM. As Ralph Gibson points out in his book The People Stand Up, when he joined the CPA “was largely a party of the unemployed”. (Amazingly, this is a fact that Kourbetis in his thesis uses to denigrate the successes and the CPA growth in these years!)

Building a base in the trade unions

Again in the trade unions, the CP made very impressive gains in the 1930s, building a strong base and winning control of some key unions. The foundations for this were laid by the work amongst the unemployed, and in the Militant Minority Movement.

As Australia entered the Depression the old union leaders proved incapable of adequately defending the workers they were supposed to represent. Trade unionism on its own proved totally inadequate to the task of even fending off the bosses’ attacks.

But as the economy lifted slowly out of the Depression, militancy stepped up, with militant leaderships being elected in some powerful unions. A number of these militants were members of the Militant Minority Movement.

The MMM was a movement of rank-and-file trade unionists, formed by the CPA in 1928 on the model of the British MMM. In 1930 the CPA started paying more attention to organising through the MMM. It published a weekly newspaper, the Red Leader, which was selling over 9000 copies by 1934.

The MMM was particularly strong on the coalfields of NSW and at Wonthaggi in Victoria, and on the waterfront and in the railways. Discussing the work of the MMM during the long miners’ strike at Wonthaggi in 1934, Richard Dixon, CP assistant secretary and later party president, wrote that 400 of the local miners were members of the MMM. According to John Sendy, a retired miner who participated in the events has claimed that 700 Wonthaggi miners eventually belonged to the MMM.

Communists Bill Orr and Charlie Nelson won the leading national positions in the Miners Federation in 1933 and 1934, the first significant communist union victory, as a direct result of the strength of the MMM. This was followed in 1935 by Tom Wright being elected secretary of the Sheetmetal Workers Union. Then Ernie Thornton was elected general secretary of the Federated Ironworkers Association (Sheetmetal Workers Union..) in 1936, and in 1937 Jim Healy was elected secretary of the Waterside Workers Federation. Victories were also recorded in the Teachers Union, the Australian Railways Union, and the Tramways Union.

Ralph Gibson quotes some notes by Richard Dixon in the 1970s reflecting on this period and the CPA’s “independent leadership” policy:

“We saw in this the possibility of a whole new mass movement and of leadership in the anti-capitalist struggle. We were out to build unity on the factory floor, at the gate, and locally in unemployment committees. We were for workers electing leaders from their own ranks and keeping control of struggles in their own hands. This policy, despite its shortcomings, brought positive and lasting results for the workers. Attacks were made on them such as had never been known before but we rallied large sections of working people into the struggle.”

(There’s an important lesson there, totally ignored by the fake left union officials today – unity in struggle, rather than unity in inaction with the ALP leadership.)

The success of the CPA in this period can also be gauged by their membership figures. At the start of 1930, they had 300 members. In early 1931, they were more than 1000. In January 1932, they had more than 2000. And by 1934 they’d grown to nearly 3000 members. As Ralph Gibson states in his book The Fight Goes On, there were two great infusions of members into the CPA:

“First came the Party members who organised the unemployed in the depression. Many of these later became a leading force in the trade unions as they entered industry with the partial revival of employment….

“Then there was the infusion in the war years 1941 to 1945 – a double infusion of factory workers influenced by the changed political climate and of members of the armed forces.” [A total of 4000 CP members were in the armed forces, obviously quite a few were already CPA members when they enlisted.]

“Many of these came back to do university courses, and this largely accounted for the student influx of the middle and late forties.”

The Popular Front

Well, what happened between these two infusions?

All CPA historians agree that the party grew only slowly in the period 1935 to the outbreak of war. (Campbell, Sendy, Brown)

But a big political shift in line had been inaugurated by Dimitrov at the 7th (and last) Congress of the Comintern in 1935 – the Popular Front.

Following the disasters that resulted from the application of Stalin’s Third Period line in Germany – the smashing of the German working class and the coming to power of Hitler – the new line, while trying to counter the monster that had been unleashed, introduced a major revision in Marxist-Leninist theory.

It went far beyond a united front of workers’ parties to fight fascism, which Stalin had rejected for Germany, and proposed the inclusion of outright capitalist parties in the popular front as well. But it went even further, sanctioning the participation of Communist parties in capitalist governments also.

The basis for this line was Stalin’s determination to subordinate everything to the diplomatic needs of the Soviet Union – not necessarily having the desired results of providing the best defence of the Soviet Union, but certainly putting the needs of the revolutionary struggle in other countries way down the list of priorities.

The immediate results of these policies in the strategic countries they were immediately intended for were disastrous. The working class in France and Spain suffered major defeats.

In countries on the periphery of world politics, such as Australia, the same Popular Front line was adopted.

So in addition to the first factor I outlined, the tendency to adapt to the ALP, to cave in to what were seen as “Australian traditions”, “the Australian reality”, to support the ALP for other than tactical reasons, a second factor came into play, and was sanctioned and formalised with the Popular Front theories in 1935.

From then on, this was the new orthodoxy in the Communist movement, in conflict with the traditional Leninist views on the state and the class struggle dynamics of the revolutionary process. In many Communist parties such as the CPA, both positions could coexist side by side, sometimes even in the same document. But in the CPA for the next 30 years, the norm was the Popular Front line, with the class struggle line only coming more to the fore in exceptional situations, generally situations beyond the party’s control when it was forced to react.

This was the fundamental impact of Stalinism on the CPA, a right-wing influence, not an ultra-left impact, as some writers have tried to maintain. The Third Period line was an exception. For example, John Sendy in Comrades Come Rally goes even further than most and identifies the supposed errors as Leninist. “The attitude of the CPA towards the ALP, while marked by chops and changes, has been immature and impatient and heavily influenced by the tactics adopted by the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks.”

The lack of any significant immediate results for the application of the new line in Australia is a bit awkward for orthodox CP historians. The party didn’t grow much! They point to a growing number of positions won in the unions, but it’s clear these victories were the fruits of the previous period, the successes in the UWM and the MMM.

Bill Brown puts forward the excuse that “sectarian tendencies were not adequately eradicated in the immediate years” after the 7th Congress.

Party growth during WWII

However, with the big growth of the CPA during WWII, Brown and others feel they have a clear vindication of the correctness of the new line, of striving for unity, that is, unity with the ALP.

After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in June 1941, the CPA certainly did vigorously push a policy of national unity to further the war effort. They gave full backing to the Curtin Labor government that came to power in September 1941. They discouraged strikes so as not to hinder in any way production for the war effort. And they proposed formal unity and affiliation to the ALP.

In the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, the phoney war, before the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, it appears the CPA membership declined. At the outbreak of war, they had about 5000 members. When the party was declared illegal in June 1940 they were down to 4000.

But with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in June 1941, their membership rocketed, to about 16,000 by December 1942 when the ban was lifted, to 20,000 in September 1943, and a high point of 23,000 a year later.

Sendy writes: “The changed policy towards the war and the advent of the ALP Government had allowed the party to function fairly openly. The Soviet Union deservedly won tremendous admiration for its war victories and sympathy for the incredible destruction wrought upon it.”

Brown states that “An important factor in the increase in CPA membership was the great impact made on Australians of widely varied walks of life by the heroic and decisive fight against fascism waged by the Red Army and the Soviet People.”

This was certainly the case. Probably in the past we’ve underestimated the scale of the Soviet struggle and victory in WWII. But from June 1941 onwards, this was the major aspect of the war. Most of Hitler’s massive war machine was involved in the onslaught on the Soviet Union. Soviet sacrifices and casualties suffered make the losses of the rest of the Allies seem relatively minor.

A conflict of such world shattering scope and significance did have a reflection in the Australian political scene, and obviously was responsible for a major part of the CPA growth in this period.

For example, Ralph Gibson describes how on December 13, 1941, a Russian Relief Day was held in the streets of Melbourne, stalls were set up, 100,000 buttons were sold, and 4744 pounds raised for the Soviet people.

Brown reports that the Soviet Union’s national day celebrations on November 7 in 1942, ‘43 & ‘44 were marked by big processions and/or big social functions in most of Australia’s major cities.

Nevertheless, Brown realises that these facts might undermine his overall political thesis – ALP unity as the main road for Communists – and hastens to add in a counter argument:

“A key answer to those who assert that the Party’s considerable growth in membership in the war years was due solely to Soviet military successes is contained in the response to the CPA’s ‘Build the Party’ drive of 1942. Certainly, the influence of the Soviet stand against the Nazis was highly significant. But it also needs to be noted that the 1942 CPA membership drive took place before the most decisive Soviet military success occurred.”

However, the real point is that workers oriented to the CPA because the Soviet Union was fighting fascism, bearing the brunt of the fighting, and making the greatest sacrifices. People joining just to be on the winning side would be pretty poor recruits. 100,000 buttons in one day in Melbourne, in 1941, before any victories, shows the level of identification.

Another point to note, perhaps, is that the bulk of the recruitment took place when the CPA was still formally illegal. And Davidson notes that about 70% of new members won during illegality were factory workers, while after the ban was lifted about 50% were middle class or intellectuals.

As for an influx from the amalgamation of the Hughes-Evans State Labor Party with the CPA in January 1944, there doesn’t seem to have been a significant jump in membership, from the figures available. Probably the bulk of the activists in the SLP would have already taken out dual membership in the years leading up to the formal amalgamation.

So although it’s not as clear-cut as the experiences of the CPA in the ‘20s and ‘30s, the war period doesn’t provide any support either to the proponents of the “unite with the ALP” thesis. On the contrary, an examination of CPA history in its period of rise from its foundation to the mid-’40s lends support to the strategy of building a strong independent communist party and mobilising the masses in struggle, exposing the role of the ALP leadership, both in and out of government.

Post-war decline

In the period of the CPA in decline, from the end of the war, similar lessons can be drawn.

But orthodox CPA historians, such as Brown, Gibson, and Sendy, try to maintain that the decline was due to ultra-left errors, when the “correct united front approach” to the ALP was neglected.

This is a thesis that’s hard to sustain.

An objective look at CPA history shows that throughout this period of decline the overall approach of the CPA was a fairly right-wing one, within the framework of the Popular Front policies laid down since 1935. Any left positions generally were responses forced on the party by the bourgeoisie. And the periods in question were generally brief.

The main period singled out as ultra-leftist is from 1947 to 1950, three years, out of two decades where the right-wing strategy had most of the time to demonstrate its effectiveness – or otherwise.

There were obviously many objective difficulties in this period, which I’ll just touch on briefly. (A complete, rounded history of the CP and the political context is beyond the scope of this talk.

WWII concluded as a tremendous victory for the Soviet Union and the working class and oppressed peoples of the world. Fascism was defeated. Peoples’ Democracies were established in Eastern Europe. In 1949 the Chinese Revolution triumphed. Vietnam was on the march. Socialism would seem to be on the advance. (And incidentally, the Soviet leadership subsequently pointed to this as one of the reasons for a further elaboration of the Popular Front positions in the direction of a peaceful and parliamentary transition to socialism.)

But with Hitler and German imperialism defeated, the victorious imperialist powers soon turned their hostility on their erstwhile ally – much to Stalin’s surprise.

The Cold War was launched, and the Cold War offensive in Australia itself obviously created difficulties for the CPA. (It’s quite false to charge, as Davidson and others do, that the CPA actions helped bring down a wave of repression on themselves.)

A second factor that contributed to the CPA decline was the misestimation of the economic conditions that would follow WWII (as well as the economic boom itself.) The CPA (and the CPSU theorists) expected a period of acute capitalist economic crisis. (In fact the capitalist economists were anticipating this economic climate also.)

A third factor would have been the divisions in the international communist movement between Moscow and Peking [Beijing]. The impact of the actual split in the CPA was relatively small numerically but created widespread confusion nevertheless.

The bureaucratic organisational methods and inflexibility of the CPA would have been contributing factors also, but they’re not areas I want to cover in this talk. What I’m trying to extract out is the political factor, “sectarian or not towards the ALP”, especially because most orthodox CPA historians focus on this factor. And although this may be primarily to justify their current right-wing positions (in the case of the CPA or ACU leaders) or their dropping out (Sendy), the argument still needs refuting.

Stalin’s line for communist parties

The general line of the CPA in the immediate post-war years was very much determined by the guidelines being laid down from Moscow, even though the Comintern had been dissolved by Stalin in 1943 to convince his British and American allies that he had no intention of fomenting revolution in their agreed upon areas of influence after the war.

Stalin’s strategy banked on the continuation of the war-time grand alliance. The policy of CPs around the world centred on national unity to fight fascism.

Some of the more enthusiastic followers took the line a little too far. Earl Browder, leader of the CP-USA, went so far as to dissolve the CP into discussion clubs. Ernie Thornton, former FIA secretary and prominent CPA leader, also got attracted to the idea after a visit to the US. But this deviation was fairly quickly reined in.

With the defeat of fascism, the wartime alliance crumbled, and imperialism launched its Cold War offensive against the Soviet Union.

A good analysis of the whole dynamic between the Soviet Union and other CPs during the war and after is given in an excellent book by Fernando Claudin, a former top leader of the Spanish CP, expelled in 1965. (The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform)

Claudin points out that after the defeat of Germany, Stalin needed a new justification for the policy of national unity in Western Europe. It couldn’t just be tactical.

So the idea of “New Democracy”, “People’s Democracy” was applied to Western Europe as well. It had been created for another purpose – the buffer states in Eastern Europe – but was used as a new justification for the neo-reformism of the communist parties of Western Europe.

“In this way”, wrote Claudin, “the model of development which seemed to be establishing itself in the East was transferred to the West by a process of abstraction from the factors which had made it possible [the Soviet army]. There was pretence that the communist parties had won, or were in the process of winning, control of the state by exclusively democratic and parliamentary means and that they retained power by the same means.

“The ‘cold war’ performed the function of practical criticism [of these ideas], and they did not reappear until after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, when they were developed with much greater theoretical elaboration.”

In 1947 Truman announced the “Truman Doctrine” aimed at the containment of Communism. In July 1947, the Marshall Plan conference was held in Paris, marking a new stage in Washington’s attempt to isolate the Soviet Union. They offered aid in return for political subservience.

Moscow’s response was twofold. Firstly, they tightened up politically in Eastern Europe. Secondly, the Cominform was formed in September 1947, consisting of nine parties – seven in power, plus the Communist Party of France and the Communist Party of Italy. Notably not invited were the Chinese and Greek parties, both strong parties in the midst of revolutionary struggles for power.

Zhdanov’s report to the Cominform conference set the line for the movement until the death of Stalin in 1953. The framework of the “Grand Alliance” was replaced with the framework of “two camps”.

Neither in the report nor the declaration was there any mention of the struggle for socialism in the capitalist countries, even as a long-term project. The two revolutionary actions of any scale, the Chinese and Greek revolutions, were passed over in silence. There was no analysis, they weren’t presented as examples, there was no call for solidarity.

Peace, national independence and democracy were the main themes. Zhdanov explained that the aim was to get an alliance with sections of the European bourgeoisie against US imperialism, therefore it was not possible to go beyond democracy.

Claudin concludes: “The political line that (Stalin) laid down for the Communist movement in 1947 continued to give priority to the exploitation of inter-imperialist and inter-capitalist contradictions rather than that between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Since the former had been momentarily buried under the European bourgeoisie’s fear of revolution and the prospect of dollars, the primary task of the Communist parties was to resurrect them. More rigorous methods would have to be used to defeat the centrist and social democratic politicians who fell in with American plans, and it could prove useful for the purpose to encourage class struggle in the economic field, contrary to the practice of the previous period.”

In Australia, the struggle for socialism had not been on the agenda, as it certainly had been in France and Italy, but this international background helps explain the course of the Australian CP and the sources of its political explanations, the second of those three factors pushing the party to an accommodation with the ALP.

Post-war industrial upsurge

It does appear that the CPA did take a turn to the left in its industrial policy in 1947, following the stepping up of the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the setting up of the Cominform in response.

But the conditions in Australia and the feeling amongst the working class seemed to be tending in that direction in any case. The Australian working class had made sacrifices during the war, and with the outbreak of peace desired higher living standards. In fact, industrial disputes were stepping up even before the end of the war. In the three years 1945-47 nearly 5.5 million working days were lost in strikes, more than double the number in the three years before the war. The central issues were wages and hours.

A major victory was won by metal unions in 1946, that flowed on to other industries. In 1948 there was an important dispute in Queensland in the railways, in which the CPA played a more prominent role. The 40-hour week was won in this period also.

The immediate post-war years certainly deserve examination at greater length. There are probably many lessons to be drawn from the experiences of activity on a wide front, by a strong CP. The industrial struggles are certainly interesting. The CPA’s work amongst youth and students was at a peak in this period. And the CPA’s international solidarity work, and work amongst women and other sectors of the population in this period all would hold rich lessons for us.

And it occurred with a Labor government in power. The break with the line of unity with the ALP leadership began even before the new line was initiated internationally. Jack Blake, Victorian secretary, had called as early as 1945 for a “consistent campaign of enlightenment on the essence of the class collaborationist views of the Labor Party leadership”. In 1946, the Victorian CP “got out of step” with the national leadership, who had to intervene in the Victorian conference to reassert the official line of unity with the ALP leadership. But by early 1947 the party as a whole was reconsidering its positions. The ALP began to be criticised in sharper and sharper terms. Henry announced that “conditions are maturing for a very big break with reformism”.

Debate with the CPGB

The position of the CPA contrasted with that of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and a lively public debate flowed back and forth. In the post-war years the British party had first called for an all-party “national government” at a time when the workers were preparing to sweep Labour into power. Then, when forced by events to modify their approach, they moved to a position of virtually uncritical support of the new Labour government. The CPA took exception to this, and in 1948 wrote a letter, claiming that the CPGB had consistently opposed strikes, and had spread the view that Britain under Labour was in “transition to socialism”.

The biggest struggle in the ‘40s was the 1949 coal strike. It pitted the miners, and other unions the CPA was able to mobilise, in full conflict with the Labor government. Chifley brought in the troops. A very distorted version of some of these events appeared in the TV series, “The True Believers”. A more accurate account is Edgar Ross’s The Coal Front, recently reprinted in 1988 by the BLF and the Miners Federation.

Without going into the details of the strike, it’s a turning point in the history of the CPA. It was a defeat for the working class, and the CPA, and proved yet again the nature and role of the Labor Party. But the CP leadership, in making a self-criticism afterwards, tended to identify the decline of the CP under the blows of reaction, at the height of the Cold War, with the stance of being too critical of Labor governments, even shying away from militant industrial struggle itself.

Although the CPA has declined continuously from 1944 on, the blame can hardly be laid at the door of militant opposition to the ALP and Labor governments, since during most of that period the approach has been much more moderate.

Some of the loss of membership can certainly be explained by the nature of the recruitment during the war. Some no doubt joined up with a limited political understanding, and weren’t up to the long haul or a rise in the class struggle.

Numbers fell to 16,200 in 1945, 13,450 in 1946, and 12,105 in 1947. It seems the party held its numbers in 1947 and 1948, at least in Sydney. There the number of new members was higher in 1948 than for 1947 or 1946. And turnover of membership fell from 23% in 1946 to 19% in 1947 and 11% in 1948. The CPA also held on to its union base in the first few years after the war.

So militant policies as pursued in this period weren’t the problem. (The objective factors mentioned earlier can explain the decline.) And even Brown, in his account of this period, has to present on the whole a fairly positive picture of the party’s work.

So why the “conventional wisdom” that has developed in the CPA and amongst historians about the “misguided” militancy of the late ‘40s and especially the defeat of the 1949 coal strike?

The ‘50s – a low point

Bill Brown heads his chapter on the ‘50s in his book, “The ‘50s – a high point”, but compared to the ‘30s and ‘40s, this decade, when a more right-wing policy was followed, was much more a period of decline and crisis for the CPA. It probably has something to do with providing a justification for his and the ACU’s very right-wing politics today.

In any case, a new line was implemented, and Blake and Henry were scapegoated in 1954 for the supposed ultra-left errors of 1949. And now, instead of criticising the line of the CPGB, the CPA copied it. The June 1951 Communist Review carried the new program of the CPGB The British Road to Socialism. The next issue carried the draft of the CPA’s new program Australia’s Path to Socialism, which followed the British line in its essentials, although it sometimes maintained more militant phrases and formulations.

The British Program had an approving introduction by Lance Sharkey, and he quotes a bit of it. On the basis of the strength of the forces of peace, democracy and socialism, and the rich experience of the Peoples’ Democracies, the Program states:

“The British Communists declare that the people of Britain can transform capitalist democracy into a real people’s democracy, transforming Parliament, the product of Britain’s historic struggle for democracy, into the democratic instrument of the will of the vast majority of her people. The path forward for the British people will be to establish a People’s Government on the basis of a Parliament truly representative of the people.”

The program called for a campaign to stop Britain being an economic satellite of America, called for “the unity of all true patriots to defend British national interests and independence”.

Two trends in the CPA

The CPA has suffered from contradictory pressures and pulls throughout its history. Perhaps it could be said to have had a dual nature – revolutionary and reformist. Alastair Davidson, in a talk he gave to a New Left Party meeting in Melbourne in 1987, identified two trends in Australian labour movement history – a populist, nationalist trend, expressed in the ALP, and a class-struggle trend, generally identified with the CPA. I think this is a useful conceptualisation, and it can be extended to understand the dynamic within the CPA itself.

At the beginning of this talk, I identified three possible sources of reformist pressure on the CPA: 1. Adaptation to the populist Australian culture (expressed in the ALP).2. Adaptation to the needs of the Soviet state (more accurately the narrow needs of the bureaucracy), in the form of a Popular Front line, (popular democracy, the peaceful road…).3. Adaptation to the milieu of the Australian trade union bureaucracy.

In the 1950s, this third factor began to come more into play.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, the CPA could be said to have been characterised by two main determining features:

1. A growing base in the trade unions won by militant policies, that included both positions in the leadership of many unions, and mass support among the ranks for militant policies, with many rank-and-file and middle-level union delegates and officials in the CPA.

2. A political subservience to Moscow, following any new right turn by Stalin. It was a positive factor insofar as workers identified with the economic and social gains of the revolution. But it was negative insofar as these turns only reflected the state power needs of Moscow, not necessarily the needs of the revolutionary party in Australia.

In the 1950s both these factors underwent significant change.

1. The party’s support in the ranks of the unions declined considerably, under the impact of the Cold War and the post-war boom.

2. With the changed situation in the world Communist movement -- the seeds of the Sino-Soviet split and the development of two centres; the Yugoslav ex-communication; the death of Stalin; the Cominform becoming inoperative; the Khrushchev revelations – there were fewer easy certainties in political life for CPA members.

A party of trade union officials

Taking both these developments into account, a picture emerges of a distinct change occurring in the dynamic of the CPA in the 1950s.

It becomes an “Australian” party, yes, not a “foreign” party taking its line from Moscow, but the trade unionist dynamic of those CPA members in the leadership of trade unions comes very much to the fore.

It could be said to have become an Australian party, but a party of a section of the trade union leadership.

Winton Higgins, in an interesting article in the 1974 Socialist Register analysing the developments in the CPA in the late 1960s, pointed to the general nature of this problem in the CPA in the past:

“Trade union politics proved to have its own dangers for a revolutionary party. Once elected to office, communists were forced to operate within bureaucratic frameworks and to fight the employers and the state with the weapons available within those frameworks. In consolidating their positions, elected officials often resorted to the same manipulative tactics as their opponents. The party’s preoccupation with gaining and holding official positions, together with its lack of political development, left it incapable of resisting its militants’ degeneration into economism and bureaucratism. Moreover, as the number of communist trade union officials grew, so did their influence within the party, which increasingly reflected their economist outlook and bureaucratic style.”

These post-war developments had political repercussions in the party, especially in regard to the party’s orientation to the ALP.

Of the two trends that had been present in the CPA since its Inception:

1. Seeing the ALP as fundamentally a capitalist party, with the task of any united front tactic being to win away the support of the working class, and

2. Seeing the ALP as somehow a workers’ party, and the united front as designed to win economic and political reforms through parliament.

The second tendency came more to the fore.

Here is how Bill Brown in his history describes this reorientation (favourably).

“Study of the three Congresses of the CPA held in the 1950s holds particular interest in regard to the development of the united front concept over this period. The programs carried unanimously by the CPA within this decade showed that, despite difficulties, important new developments were made in regard to building broader CPA-ALP unity.

“… positive new steps were being taken to cut away the cancer of sectarianism that had been holding back the CPA from correct work with those Labor Party leaders and members prepared to join in areas of combined action or mutual discussion.”

But it wasn’t just united actions and discussions on issues that were in question, but the overall orientation to the ALP.

For example, in the foreword to a new 1957 edition of his 1952 pamphlet The Labor Party Crisis, Sharkey could write that the basis of the old reformism was decaying with the decay of imperialism. In these conditions, if the ALP adhered to its pledges, then a new Labor Government “would be a progressive government and not one of the betrayal of the people’s vital interests.”

It’s easy to see the origins of these positions in Khrushchev’s report to the CPSU 20th Congress in 1956.

He maintained there was now the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism, due to the increased strength of socialism and democracy, and the increasing weakness of capitalism.

In these circumstances, he claimed, the working class is in a position “to capture a stable majority in parliament, and transform the latter from an organ of bourgeois democracy into a genuine instrument of the people’s will”.

In the same issue of the Communist Review that carried Khrushchev’s report, Sharkey wrote approvingly:

“The statement of Khrushchev about the workers gaining control of Parliament is of vital significance to us. It is even more significant because of the trend within the ALP, that is, when our immediate policies are approaching towards each other.”

I think an accurate analysis of the process at work in the CPA is given by Robin Gollan in his book Revolutionaries and Reformists.

“By 1955 the Communist Party had regained much of the strength in the unions which it had lost in the previous five years. But it had paid a high price for its recovery. The price was that it had sought to assimilate itself as nearly as possible to the traditional Australian labour movement. Communist union officials, except for issues involving the Soviet Union or Soviet interests, were hard to distinguish in their words and actions from other union officials. The membership of the Communist Party had steadily declined to between 5000 and 6000 by the end of 1955. But those who remained were experienced tacticians in the politics of the labour movement. In 1956, when the publication of Khrushchev’s secret speech precipitated the exodus of dissident intellectuals, it became even more a party of the trade unions.

“In the 1940s the CP had set out to lead the labor movement. But by 1955 it was clear that any triumphs which it had had… reveal many of the characteristics of Jonah’s triumph over the whale.”

Splits in the CPA

A product of the “dual nature” of the CPA – its revolutionary intentions and reformist pulls – has been the unclear nature of nearly all the splits in the party from the 1950s on.

A split in a revolutionary party, if it’s on a clear revolutionary vs reformist basis, can even be helpful for the party. It can lead to political clarity, and the party can advance on that basis. If the split isn’t clear, if the issues are clouded over, it can just be destructive and debilitating for both sides.

The first example, though not formally a split, is the exodus of intellectuals after the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Although correct on the question of Stalin and Stalinism, most of them drew non-revolutionary conclusions from this, and drifted out of politics altogether or in a rightward direction, into the ALP, for example.

And this is a contradictory phenomenon seen several times in the history of the CPA, the wrong people were sometimes right, and vice versa.

There’s a lesson here, which we learned during our experience in the Fourth International. Each little Trotskyist group defends the idea that they have the Revolutionary Continuity, tracing back through their particular splits through Trotsky, through the early Communist International, through Lenin and the Bolsheviks, back to Marx. At each parting of the ways, their particular branch of the tree was right. This outlook brooks no self-criticisms, recognises no mistakes.

But it’s the outlook of a dwindling sect, only capable of splits, not of unifications and regroupments. The real movement will grow through fusions and regroupments, as well as splits. It will be able to analyse past mistakes, assess history objectively, understand the present and chart the way forward.

The important thing is not to feel that you have to take sides on all disputes – sometimes, as we’ve seen, they’re confused – but to be able to assess the issues.

The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)

A second example of a very unclear split was the split of the pro- Peking [Beijing] group, led by former Victorian state secretary Ted Hill, to form the CP-ML, from 1961 to 1964.

The tremendous damage the Moscow-Peking split has done to the international communist movement, and to the Australian movement as well, will hopefully one day be overcome. But to list just some of the contradictions:

Peking (and Hill) were wrong in their defence of Stalin’s crimes, exposed by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. But they were right to criticise the peaceful road to socialism perspective that was also identified with the 20th Congress. However, their subsequent right-wing international line, especially the stance towards American imperialism, negated this.

Hill was correct in some of his initial statements about the nature of the ALP, and what should be the correct Communist approach to it. But he and his party later switched over to a much more accommodating approach.

Hill was correct in some of his criticisms of the “trade unionism” of the CPA. But the CP-ML has still suffered from the same problem.

An analysis of this split, and the subsequent evolution of the different parties, is beyond the scope of this talk, but some points are worth noting to illustrate the complexities in the evolution of the CPA in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The majority of the CP leadership were initially influenced by the Chinese CP. Many of them had studied in China for extended periods, and at this time some of the tendencies coming through the Communist Party of China were against an uncritical acceptance of Stalin’s views and practices, for the CPA to think things out for itself. So the Chinese influence was not completely a left influence.

The Socialist Party of Australia

The third split that was not a clear split was the CPA-SPA split. This was the deepest, in terms of cadres that left.

The CPA was correct in its criticisms of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, and its attempt to orient more to the radicalising youth and the “new movements” amongst women, on environmental issues, on homosexual rights and so on. But it also contained a dynamic moving in the direction of the right-wing political strategies of the Eurocommunist parties, rejecting Leninism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and giving in to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion, becoming anti-Soviet in many of its attitudes.

On the Labor Party question, it was confused. The Coalition of the Left (their description for their new political strategy) was interpreted by some as an approach to other left forces outside the ALP; it was interpreted by others as an effort to seek an alliance with the ALP, one of the tendencies at play throughout CPA history.

Our tendency, which was just emerging at the time, got this question very wrong. Our main criticism of the CPA at the time was that they wouldn’t enter the Labor Party. We had elevated what might be a possible tactic in a particular situation to a general strategy.

On the trade union question, the split was very unclear. Both sides had significant numbers of trade union officials, and it wasn’t until the ACU split away from the SPA that this side worked through the question. The main issue there was between the Clancy forces demanding independence from party control for their trade union officials, and a clearer split took place between those almost totally adapting to the ALP and the rest of the trade union leadership, and the SPA determined to build a party where their trade union members were subject to party control.

Brown’s version of this period of Australian Communist history is full of lies and distortions. Since our party has lived through this period, and we know what has taken place, it leads one to suspect the accuracy of the rest of his history.

A listing of his distortions would fill a book in itself, but an example of his selective quoting of Lance Sharkey on the trade unions might be appropriate. Sharkey wrote his pamphlet in 1942, and it went through many reprints.

Brown quotes a section talking about “the need for good tactical leadership, to be able to understand when the strike has been definitely lost; to be able to retreat while the strikers are not divided…”

Brown comments: “Some of these valuable warnings against leftism were forgotten in a resurgence of left sectarian and adventurist tactics in the immediate years after World War II. These trends recurred in even more disastrous and decisive form in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. They recurred yet again in the early 1980s.”

I flicked through Sharkey’s pamphlet and quickly found two passages that Bill Brown and his group of trade union officials would do well to study more closely.

“It has happened in our history that with success in winning official positions in the union, the Party organisation has actually gone back, because comrades concentrated narrowly on the union, and lost sight of the need to build a mass Communist Party….”

“The object lesson of the role of the reformist officials, which was also the role of the Labor Governments of the time, must never be forgotten by us. It is identical with the role played by the European social democrats, which Lenin never tired of exposing.”

Lessons from CPA History

The history of the CPA is complex and contradictory. But I think it helps our understanding of that history to conceptualise two tendencies showing through within the party, a revolutionary Marxist tendency, and a reformist tendency adapting to the ALP.

I’ve identified three factors contributing to that reformist dynamic, and traced their actual impact on the CPA at key points.

The justifications of those affected by that particular dynamic -- present or former leaders of the CP – that this is the way forward, does not seem to be borne out by the facts of history.

There are good examples of rapid growth when the party took a strong class struggle stand and posed itself against the ALP. There is no evidence that taking this stand was the cause of its decline.

On the basis of political theory and analysis, and the experience of the revolutionary movement in other countries, we should be convinced of the need for a Marxist Leninist party, with a particular theory and program, in order to win socialism in Australia. And purely on the basis of common sense, we might conclude that if we attempted to construct a party that was just a little to the left of the ALP, supporting the ALP, with a gradualist, parliamentary perspective, then workers might sensibly ask, why join such a party, why not join the ALP directly?

But the real test is historical experience, putting different perspectives into practice. And in more recent decades, although the Communist movement is divided, and our forces are much smaller, the experience of different parties shows that left policies lead to growth, not policies that tail the ALP. Our own experience in Sydney in the ‘60s and other cities in the early ‘70s is one example. The rapid growth of the Maoists in Melbourne amongst youth and students at the same time is another. The CPA itself grew in the early ‘70s amongst youth and students when it was on a left tack. When the leadership reasserted its right-wing line in the late ‘70s, most of these new recruits were lost, or else they moved to the right.

If a right-wing approach to the ALP had worked, if it had increased the influence of Communist ideas, led to a growth of the CP, strengthened the party’s influence and base in the masses, then we should certainly change our views. But history has not indicated this, neither overseas nor in Australia. The CPA’s experience in the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s shows the opposite.