Why did the CPA fail?

Seventy-five years ago, under the impact and inspiration of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the Communist Party of Australia was founded.

26 people attended the founding conference in Sydney on October 30, 1920. There were two main groupings, those from the Australian Socialist Party, and the “Trades Hall Reds” around TLC secretary Jock Garden, plus former IWW members and representatives from other small groups.

It was a modest beginning, but nevertheless an historic event. The CPA went through many ups and downs, and finally dissolved in 1991, but for most of its life it was the dominant party on the left in Australia and an important force in the Australian workers’ movement.

There are many proud chapters in its history – organising the unemployed during the Great Depression, the numerous trade union struggles led by the CPA, organising women, aborigines, young people, important civil liberties fights, and solidarity with international struggles in Spain, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, and East Timor, to name a few.

The CPA’s founders had a vision of a socialist revolution in Australia, and this was the goal of most of its rank-and-file members over the years. The party inspired dedication and commitment from thousands of men and women, and organised the most militant, idealistic, self-sacrificing section of the Australian working class.

But it was also a history of mistakes, of betrayals, of lost opportunities – often a result of the CPA leadership echoing the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow, putting those interests before the interests of building a revolutionary working-class party in Australia.

In commemorating that history we must draw some lessons from that past – what went wrong, what was done right, both the positive and negative experiences. Thus we’ll better equip the coming generations of socialists, of new worker and student activists, to learn from our history, and not repeat mistakes of the past.

In what periods, and with what tactics, did the CPA grow and go forward as a Marxist party capable of leading militant workers? And what policies and mistakes led to the CPA’s defeats, decline, and final dissolution?

A revolutionary party?

The CPA was founded with hope, and fire, and dedication. Its founders, and most who joined later, wanted to build a revolutionary party.

However, it was a revolutionary party that lost its way. But when? Certainly by the time of its dissolution in 1991, only a small minority wanted to continue the struggle, and they were overruled. Others date its decline or degeneration from the time they were expelled or dropped out.

But it’s more complex than that. The CPA always had a dual nature. It’s essential to understand that, it helps us make sense of its history.

Even from the beginning in the ‘20s, there were conflicting pressures, with the desire to build a revolutionary working-class party counterbalanced by the tradition of the earlier socialist groups trying to work through the ALP.

During most of its history it was a hard-line Stalinist party, a term used not as an epithet but as a description of a social process and a political outlook. It had a fundamentally contradictory nature, torn between fighting for socialism and defending working-class interests in Australia and internationally, and following Stalin’s directives and defending the interests of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

During its last 25 years, as the CPA attempted to come to terms with both its past and with new political challenges, it was buffeted right and left. The party leadership tried to make a break with Stalinism, but without returning to Leninism, and so ended up with a purely liberal critique of Stalinism.

They responded energetically to the “new social movements”, but without integrating them into a Marxist class analysis. They encouraged new forms of workers’ struggles, on wider issues and with rank-and-file involvement but were still unable to break from the dynamic of their bureaucratic positions in the unions, and their basic acceptance that the ALP was somehow the real workers’ party. So they ended up instigators and defenders of the ALP-ACTU Accord, one of the biggest disasters ever for the Australian working class.

Towards the end they were increasingly demoralised, and uncertain about socialism, the possibility of revolution, and the party’s role.

Most of the former CPA leaders who have written their memoirs in the last few decades conclude that the whole idea of building a revolutionary party in Australia was misguided.

Bernie Taft, the central CPA leader in Victoria from 1962-1984, is quite explicit – revolution is not on the agenda, so it would have been better not to use the word “revolution”. In his memoirs published in 1994, The Party’s Over, he writes that “it would have been wiser to dispense with a term which inaccurately described our position”. Taft and most of the Victorian CPA leadership jumped ship in 1984 to join the ALP, not even becoming part of the left, but the centre..

John Sendy, a former national president and associate of Taft, put a similar view in his memoirs Comrades Come Rally published in 1978. He’d dropped out in 1974. In a pamphlet he put out in 1978, he wrote that while recognising the rapid growth of the CPA during the early 1930s, he’s very critical of this period because it “…alienated a great many people in the labour movement and permanently damaged relations with important organisations.” He claimed that the CPA was seen as “violent, foreign, un-Australian”. He advocated policies more in keeping with 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 to accept the dominant ruling-class culture and values, nor acquiesce in the ALP tradition, a capitalist tradition. The logic of this position is capitulation to the ALP organisationally as well as politically – liquidation as a party, or joining it individually, which is what happened to his current.

Eric Aarons, a party functionary for many years, and joint national secretary from 1976-82, in his memoirs, What’s Left?, published in 1993, even suggests that the very word socialism might be wrong. He writes that socialism has “inherent problems”, that arise not from their enemies but from socialism itself. He thinks the goal of radical social change requires “a major redefinition and reformulation. Even the name may constitute a problem, indicating as it does the centrality of the socialisation of the means of production, with all that has entailed in elevating central planning and eliminating the market.”

But the problem is not the necessity or possibility of socialism, but mistakes that were made, internationally and in Australia, in the name of socialism. Fundamental political questions need addressing: why did the CPA fail, and what can we learn from its history.

Stalinism

It’s impossible to come to terms with the CPA’s errors, and final demise, without understanding the problem of Stalinism. No new revolutionary party in Australia will be built without this understanding.

Following Lenin’s death in 1924, and after the trials and deprivations of years of civil war and imperialist interventions against the young Soviet state, and the failure of the expected revolutionary upsurges in the West, the Russian working class progressively lost the direct exercise of political and economic power. Joseph Stalin assumed dictatorial control. His base was the consolidating bureaucracy, and the degeneration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union away from revolutionary Marxism into an instrument of that bureaucracy.

In place of an internationalist revolutionary perspective, Stalin put forward the possibility of completing the construction of socialism in one country. Thus the prime task of Communist parties in other countries became defending the Soviet Union. In country after country the revolutionary struggle was sacrificed to the diplomatic needs of Moscow.

The CPA’s major errors were the result of uncritically following Moscow. It forced them to make many bizarre twists and turns on foreign and domestic policy. In spite of belated and inadequate attempts to come to terms with its past in the last few decades of its life and reassert its independence, the central leadership never overcame the political errors of its Stalinist heritage.

A central error was the distortion of the traditional Leninist position on the united front, clearly set down at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1921, and expounded in Lenin’s polemic Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. The tactic proposed united action with social democratic parties on issues, to win the support of the workers away from the reformist parties.

Stalin’s Popular Front, by contrast, was a cross-class alliance. It became the new orthodoxy after the 7th Congress of the Comintern in 1935, a justification for subordinating the working class and revolutionary struggle around the world to the narrow needs of Moscow.

It reinforced the false views about the ALP common among socialists before the founding of the CPA, going along with the populist, nationalist tradition in the labour movement.

But while looking for alliances with right-wing forces, in and outside the ALP, the CPA was extremely factional towards others on the left. It dogmatically refused to collaborate with other leftists on issues of common agreement. Internal democracy was also lacking. To raise a difference with the leadership line meant expulsion.

This undemocratic party regime was not the essence of Stalinism nor the source of the CPA’s mistakes, but it was still an important question.

Foreign influences…

In trying to break with its Stalinist past from the mid-’60s, the CPA leadership concentrated on the question of independence from Moscow, and building an Australian party based on Australian traditions and conditions, making its own decisions.

This is also often the concern of academic writings on the CPA. For example, it’s the central theme in Alastair Davidson’s history, “The Communist Party of Australia,” a useful factual resource 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…”.

But “Australian traditions” confuses two concepts: firstly, the actual social, cultural and political conditions, which any Marxist party must take into account; secondly, the dominant capitalist ideology of the society, 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 an international centre. The experience of this has certainly been harmful, both in Australian experience – FI, US SWP, see it in ISO and other sects today – and in the experience of the international communist movement. In the case of the CPA, it was disastrous. From the beginning of the ‘30s until the mid-’60s Moscow dictated its policies, often to terrible effect, and was able to determine the leadership.

Secondly, there are foreign ideas. 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. But it’s vitally important which ideas are imported – the national Communism of Stalin or the revolutionary Marxism of the Bolsheviks in Lenin’s time.

Laborism

The worst “Australian tradition” that must be overcome by Australian socialists is the ALP, an expression of the limited class consciousness and the national outlook of the Australian labour officialdom for most of its history. Socialists need to be clear about the nature and role of the ALP – it’s an obstacle to the further development of working-class consciousness.

Lenin had it basically correct when he described it as a liberal capitalist party. The ruling class calls on the ALP to govern in times of crisis, or to implement structural changes in the interests of capitalism as a whole which the openly capitalist parties would find difficult because of their ties to particular sections of the capitalist class. This role was clear during the world wars, and it’s been demonstrated very clearly during the last 12 years of Labor government.

The ALP’s policies were never socialist. It’s a vital part of Australian capitalism’s attempt to contain the political activity of workers and others struggling for social progress. The ALP attracts workers’ support partly because of its links to the trade union bureaucracy, and partly because its liberal policies seem fairer, so it can posture as the party of the working class. But its leadership is always dominated by political agents of the capitalist class.

That of course doesn’t predetermine the tactics of a Marxist party in regard to the ALP at any time. Here as elsewhere you need maximum tactical flexibility. But for tactical success, you need the maximum political clarity.

The CPA, and many of its left critics, were not clear about the nature and role of the ALP. Apart from the “Third Period” interlude in the early ‘30s when Comintern policy dictated a mad sectarianism to all social democratic or Labor parties, labelling them “social fascist”, for most of the time the CPA treated the ALP as though it were a workers’ party. Certainly for the CPA’s last 30-40 years this meant tailing the Labor Party, and a framework of reform of the capitalist system, not fundamentally challenging it.

The CPA has had many positive experiences in organising workers and leading them in struggle. In contrast to their lack of ‘parliamentary success’ with the one exception of Fred Paterson in Queensland in the 1940s, CPA members were elected to leadership positions in many trade unions. Unemployed workers won to the CPA during the ‘30s Depression got jobs in industry as the economy picked up, and provided the base for the CPA winning control of key industrial unions. Communist rank-and-file activity was extensive and well organised.

But other pressures also bore down on the party from the trade unionist milieu after the party succeeded in winning official positions. 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 with the adoption of the Popular Front line, and then the worsening Cold War political climate plus dwindling CPA membership at the base in the 1950s, often led the CPA trade union officials to adapt to the politics of their ALP counterparts. In later years the actions of Communist union officials were often indistinguishable from ALP trade union bureaucrats.

Histories

That false view of the ALP has led to a fundamentally flawed analysis of CPA history itself by nearly all writers and historians with an orthodox CPA background.

This 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. I dispute that view.

Early CPA official histories in the ‘40s have this perspective, such as that (published in 1944) by Lance Sharkey, CPA national president and then secretary for more than 30 years until 1965, and E W Campbell, director of the Marx School in the ‘40s. The same approach is carried through as the central thesis of Bill Brown (of the Association for Communist Unity) in his 1986 book “The Communist Movement and Australia.”.

Other memoirs and reminiscences of former CPA leaders, such as Bernie Taft and John Sendy already mentioned, Ralph Gibson’s books, all 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 provide some interesting firsthand reminiscences.)

Histories are not objective. They’re always written from a certain class viewpoint. Even the stated intentions of objectivity from academic histories are often themselves attempts to conceal a bias, the acceptance of the status quo. Autobiographies and histories by participants of course have their own bias. They’re often attempts to justify present positions. And histories written by opponents of socialism, or those who have given up the struggle and want to interpret history to justify their retreat, their inaction, their adaptation to capitalism, have limited use.

Becoming a Stalinist party

The treatment by orthodox CPA historians of the transformation of the CPA into a hard-line Stalinist party in 1929-30 illustrates this.

The Kavanagh leadership was replaced in 1929-30 through intervention from Moscow and a factional push by Sharkey and Moxon. Stalin had just pushed through his Third Period, “social fascism” line at the 6th Congress of the Communist International in 1928. The new CPA leadership, and most books on the CPA, portray this as a left victory over a right-opportunist Kavanagh leadership. Academic writings go along with this, just focusing on the imposition of the Stalinist “social fascist” line.

But the fact is, Kavanagh had led the struggle against attempts to liquidate the CPA into the ALP in the mid ‘20s, he was already putting forward a line critical of the ALP, and for building the CPA independent of the ALP. This was clearly shown in a 1972 Labour History article by Jack Blake, a long-time CPA leader himself victimised in the ‘50s.

Two approaches overlapped, which have been confused and condensed by historians of the CPA, including former CPA leaders themselves in their memoirs and histories.

Firstly, was the analysis of the ALP as fundamentally a capitalist party, a roadblock to socialism and misleader of the working class, and a strategy for building an independent working-class party, the communist party, and engaging in militant struggle to try to win the leadership of workers, the unemployed and other oppressed. That’s not “sectarian”. That’s fundamental and necessary for a revolutionary party. This had been the approach of the early Comintern, of Lenin’s party. And it had been the approach of the Kavanagh leadership.

Secondly, there was the Third Period line imposed by Stalin, consisting of slanderous attacks on the ALP as “social fascists”, regarding the ALP left as the worst of the “social fascists”, and ultra sectarian action, leading to isolation from leftward moving workers with illusions in the ALP leadership, especially Jack Lang. This line led to disaster in Germany, and the smashing of the German working class. In countries like Australia, although the stakes might not have been so high, nor the consequences so bloody, it also severely harmed the development of the Communist Party and meant many missed opportunities.

Growth of CPA

When did the CPA grow?

When it was soft on the ALP?

No, the CPA’s experience indicates otherwise.

The party experienced the most rapid growth in its history in the Depression years, in 1930-1934, going from 300 to 3000 members. The misery and desperation of the Depression years, with up to one third of the workforce unemployed, pushed many to look for radical solutions.

CPA members showed determination and sacrifice in fighting the Depression’s terrible impact. The CPA provided leadership and organisation for the unemployed, through the Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM), in the eviction battles, dole strikes, hunger marches, demonstrations, free speech fights, defending against the New Guard.

They could point to the Soviet Union as a socialist alternative to the horrors of capitalism in the midst of crisis. They put themselves forward as an independent alternative to the parties responsible for administering the mess, the ALP included.

The CPA’s increased support and membership was a result of organising the unemployed, and as the Depression started to ease many of the unemployed members found work in industry. CPA members in the unions were organised through the Militant Minority Movement. From this foundation the CPA started to win leadership positions in key industrial unions, and built a strong party with a significant working-class base.

The union base was not built as a result of the popular front line adopted in 1935, but because of the previous work in the UWM and MMM, with the perspective of building an independent leadership.

The next big infusion of members came during WWII. Despite the fact that it was made illegal, CPA size increased spectacularly. When the party was banned in June 1940 membership was 4000; when the ban was lifted in December 1942 there were over 16,000 members. In 1943 the CPA reached its peak membership of 23,000.

Was it a period of growth that resulted from right-wing policies? I don’t think so. I think it primarily resulted from the CPA’s identification with the struggle of the Soviet Union against Nazism. It wasn’t because of the Popular Front line, or the fact that it was soft on the ALP, or pursuing a no-strikes-in-war policy. After all, this growth was when the party was illegal.

With the war’s end, half the wartime members almost immediately fell away. In the immediate post-war years, the CPA expected a crisis of capitalism, and supported a militant line industrially. It polemicised against the very right-wing line of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which argued that socialism was possible through parliament and the Labour Party.

As the Cold War set in, the going got tougher. The 1949 coal strike was defeated against the combined front of the capitalist class and the ALP government.

The CPA simplistically interpreted the defeat as due to “sectarianism” towards the ALP, moved back to the right again.

Menzies was elected in 1949. The industrial groups and the National Civic Council were organising attacks against CPA union positions. The state and other right-wing harassment of CPA activities and members stepped up.

Menzies introduced a Bill to ban the CPA, which was blocked in the Senate for a time and then ruled unconstitutional by the High Court. His subsequent referendum in September 22, 1951 on banning the CPA was defeated by the mobilisation of a broad movement AGAINST it.

But nevertheless party membership declined further, from 12,000 in 1947 to 6000 in 1952.

The positive lessons – highpoints

The ‘30s and ‘40s were the best decades for the CPA, the decades of growth. There were many achievements, and many positive lessons.

The main tribute has to be to the many thousands of dedicated rank-and-file CPA members who joined in those years, working class militants, building the party on the job, in the communities and campaigns; distributing the party’s press; organising all kinds of political struggles.

They unstintingly gave their time, their money, their lives to what they saw as the cause of the working class and the socialist future. They approached their tasks with enthusiasm, dedication and commitment.

• In the early 1930s, the party led the unemployed through the Unemployed Workers Movement during the desperate years of the Depression and grew tenfold, even though this was also the period of their “social fascism” line.
• Later in the decade the party built a base in the unions from their base among the unemployed. They developed strong organisation in the unions, and left many lessons for us today, even though this had a negative dynamic too, with later tendencies towards bureaucratism.
• The CPA had an internationalist outlook… to an extent – on issues that coincided with Moscow’s diplomatic interests. Otherwise, there were some bizarre twists and turns.

Although the Popular Front line codified in 1935 reinforced any tendency inherent in the traditional Australian Labour movement in the direction of Australian nationalism, nevertheless, the CPA waged some important international campaigns. On Spain, for peace, against fascism, supporting the campaign for Indonesian independence in 1945.

• The CPA carried out pioneering work among Aborigines

• Helping get out an Aboriginal newspaper in the ‘30s;

• Helping with the 1946 Pilbara strike;

• Their support role in the Gurindgi land rights struggle at Wave Hill against Vesteys was covered well in Green Left Weekly by Chris a few months ago.

• The CPA also led and influenced a large cultural and intellectual milieu. Many working-class writers, novelists, poets and playwrights got their start here. There was a circle of radical artists around the CPA. New Theatre was a very lively theatre group in Sydney and Melbourne, and possibly other cities also.

• We can also learn some things from the CPA’s work among youth at this time. In the periods of growth, the ‘30s and ‘40s, it was a young party, recruiting young workers and unemployed, and students. The CPA and its youth organisations campaigned for the rights of young workers. They organised big youth camps, festivals.

But political activity was sometimes overshadowed by the apolitical rituals. The influence of the Soviet Union encouraged conservatism rather than rebellion, with ageing bureaucrats controlling the youth.

They carried out some pioneering work among women. They organised women workers through their trade union work, and through the Union of Australian Women. The party had some wonderful dedicated women activists.

But it also suffered from the line on women coming from Moscow, where the revolutionary position on women that the Bolsheviks had was overturned by Stalin. Sometimes this meant adapting to rather than fighting the chauvinism and values of capitalist society. Women were too often relegated to support roles, not the leadership.

Thus the many positive episodes and struggles of the ‘30s and ‘40s were often marred by mistakes resulting from the party’s Stalinist politics. It was very much a party with a dual nature.

After the high point of the 1940s, the path was very much downhill. Membership declined through dropouts and splits, with only temporary respites from a recruitment drive in 1955, and a small influx of radicalised students in the early ‘70s.

Certainly the objective circumstances were mostly unfavourable, especially during the Cold War period and the long post-war boom. But there were opportunities to grow, and opportunities to correct and overcome the mistakes of the past.

Three tests

Over the next three decades the CPA had three main opportunities to do this, it faced three tests:

1. In 1956, in response to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khruschev’s secret speech to that congress, and events in Hungary later that year, the CPA was confronted squarely with the question of Stalinism.

2. During the radicalisation of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the party did start to come to terms with Stalinism, and responded to the new social movements, but faced a choice between developing further along a left path, or reverting back to an accommodation with Australian capitalism.

3. In the late ‘80s, there was a final choice for the CPA – the possibility for a New Left Party, and unity with others on the left, such as ourselves, or else unity with the right, a collapse back into the ALP, and dissolution.

Unfortunately the CPA failed all three tests.

Failing the test in 1956

By 1956 the repressive regime in the Soviet Union and many of Stalin’s crimes were public knowledge. Some had been exposed by the Trotskyist movement. But CPA members were mainly closed to such reports, rejecting them as capitalist propaganda – Trotsky and the rest of the old Bolsheviks had somehow or other become “traitors and agents” of Berlin or Washington. “Fascist dogs” was one of the politer epithets.

But it was another matter when Khruschev himself exposed the crimes in the secret report to the 20th Congress. Khruschev’s bombshell had a dramatic impact on CPs around the world, even though it was planned to be confined to the top echelons of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Australian party, however, was one of the least affected.

As Eric Aarons admits in his memoirs, they “failed the test”.

Khruschev’s secret speech of course only went halfway. The purpose was to denounce Stalin in order to maintain the Stalinist bureaucracy. It detailed some of the crimes, the murder of the majority of the CC elected in 1934, Stalin’s own faction. But it didn’t go further back, the murder of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Lenin’s CC, the old Bolsheviks. It was a relatively mild exposure, shocking though it was to the audience and to CPs around the world. It was still only part of the truth.

These were crimes, against the majority of the Russian communists, against the working class and peasantry, against revolutionaries around the world. They were not just blemishes on an otherwise good record, not just mistakes, political misjudgements. And they were not just problems of the “cult of the personality”, as it was explained by Khruschev. It was a much deeper social problem, the usurpation of power by a bureaucratic caste.

The reaction of the CPA leadership was pathetic. Tribune at first maintained silence. Then they claimed that reports of the secret speech were a fake. Victorian secretary Ted Hill had been there, and knew it was genuine, and admitted so later, but the CPA persisted in maintaining its falsity. They thought they’d better not let the membership know about it.

There was only one principled voice on the whole Central Committee, Jack Blake. At the December 1956 CC meeting, according to Len Fox, after Sharkey’s report on the question of Stalin was delivered, “all the other Central Committee members stated that they endorsed the report. Blake didn’t mention it when he spoke. Sam Aarons rose to his feet and pointed out that everyone present had endorsed Sharkey’s report ‘with one exception’, thus challenging Blake to make his position clear. Blake did so, and when Lance Sharkey summed up, he blasted Blake as a ‘disrupter’. A few days later, Blake handed in his resignation from the Central Committee.”

Blake and his wife Audrey, who also had been a CC member for many years, were now shunned.

Sydney lawyer Jim Staples circulated the report in roneoed form. He was expelled.

Those who had listened to or read a further copy of it were reprimanded or expelled.

CPA intellectual Ian Turner argued that Stalinism was a social and not a personal problem, and the party should have another look at Trotsky. He was expelled.

Then when the Russian army crushed the workers uprising in Hungary, more intellectuals left. There wasn’t nearly as big an exodus from the CPA as there was in the CPs in Britain and the USA. So in that sense the Sharkey leadership’s cover-up policies succeeded in the short term, at least earning a temporary reprieve. But the delay compounded the problem.

As Jack Blake wrote later:

“The late fifties were years of crisis for the Communist Party. In a crisis the first need is a thorough study of its causes. Instead, the leaders insisted there was no crisis and denounced anyone who suggested that there was. The result was a steady process of deterioration. Having deprived itself of the intellectual resources capable of helping to diagnose and remedy its critical illness, the party began to slowly die. Dissidents and creative critical voices were silenced. Only when the process of decay had advanced so far that the party’s very existence as an institution hung in the balance were efforts made at the top to refurbish its image.”

But 1956 was a twofold failure. The CPA didn’t grasp the chance to make an analysis of Stalinism, even the weak chance offered by Khruschev.

But they grabbed and ran with the public thrust of the CPSU 20th Congress, peaceful coexistence and the peaceful road to socialism, i.e. in Australia the ALP question again.

They got it wrong in both directions. They covered up on Stalin’s crimes, and welcomed the peaceful coexistence reaffirmation of the popular front, a rejection of class politics, of a revolutionary perspective. It was all covered with a fair amount of bluster and fulminations against “revisionism” at times, but that was partly a blast at the intellectuals and others wanting a freer party and an honest response to the exposures of the Stalin era, and partly to do with the uncertainties of CPA allegiance as the Sino-Soviet rift unfolded.

Two Trends in the CPA

There was also another dynamic coming to the fore in this period.

The CPA has suffered from contradictory pressures and pulls throughout its history. 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.

There were three possible sources of reformist pressure on the CPA:

1. Adaptation to the populist Australian culture, (expressed in most state and political institutions, including 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 had two main features:

Firstly, 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.

Secondly, a political subservience to Moscow, following any new right turn by Stalin.

In the 1950s both these factors underwent significant change.

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

And the situation in the world Communist movement changed – the Yugoslav ex-communication; the death of Stalin; the Cominform becoming inoperative; the Khrushchev revelations; the seeds of the Sino-Soviet split and the development of two centres. So 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 now predominates.

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

“Trade union politics proved to have its own dangers for a revolutionary party”, one left CPA member wrote later. “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 pre-occupation 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. (For him, the ‘50s are the “highpoint”.)

“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, a new Labor Government “would be a progressive government and not one of the betrayal of the people’s vital interests”.

It’s similar to the line of the CPGB they polemicised against in the immediate post-war period.

It’s easy to see the support for 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 labor 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 5 and 6 thousand by the end of 1955. But those who remained were experienced tacticians in the politics of the labor 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.”

Not only didn’t the CPA grow in periods when it pursued its supposedly “correct united front approach to the ALP”, but it declined, and posed a challenge to its own existence. If you’re trying to build a party 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?

The DSP and the CPA

The second important test for the CPA came during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was also the period of the origins of Resistance and the DSP, in the student and youth revolt of the ‘60s and the mass campaign against the Vietnam War, and so it was a test for us as well.

After the Sino-Soviet dispute, when the CPA had to switch from its leanings towards Peking [i.e., Beijing], and following the split of the pro-Peking supporters of Ted Hill in 1963, the CPA was cut adrift from some of the old certainties.

Laurie Aarons replaced Lance Sharkey as general secretary in 1965. The party was affected by the stirrings of Eurocommunism from the Italian CP. They raised concerns over the treatment of Soviet dissidents, protesting in 1966 about the imprisonment of Sinyavski and Daniel. Communist Review became Australian Left Review in 1966. They started to break from their Stalinist past.

The CPA was also affected by the youth radicalisation of the ‘60s, and attempted to orient more to the radicalising youth and the “new movements”. It was centrally involved in the anti-Vietnam War campaign, the Moratorium, with the usual contradictions, both some good work and political errors. New political forces were developing – ourselves in Sydney, the student Maoists in Melbourne, anarchists and left social democrats in Brisbane and Adelaide. The CPA attempted to catch up. But its youth organisation, the Eureka Youth League, was totally unattractive to radicalising youth.

Did we make mistakes in relation to the CPA? Could we have rescued more from the wreckage?

In our early years we were hindered by our own newness, our organisational weakness, and the sectarian errors and wrong politics we’d inherited from our Trotskyist origins.

Our biggest problem was our wrong analysis of and strategic approach to the ALP. We got this question very wrong. Our main criticism of the CPA then 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.

We also tended to have a preoccupation with the purely organisational side of things, rather than the political (a partially understandable consequence of the battle with the anarchy, disorganisation, anti-Leninism of the members of the old Trotskyist group that recruited us). Our early analyses of the CPA suffered terribly from these two errors.

But we had an active orientation to the CPA. In the ‘60s, we tried to influence CPA members, having some success with members of the EYL. When Resistance was formed in 1967, it was actually an attempt to build a broad youth organisation that included the CPA. (In fact the first organising meeting was held at Brian Aarons’ house.)

We attempted joint work where possible – their organisational sectarianism was usually the biggest problem.

With the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 the CPA took a decisive step, publicly opposing Moscow. We held a joint protest with them on the issue in Sydney.

But its moves to break with its Stalinist past 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) adopted at their 1967 Congress, 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.

What were the roots of their Eurocommunism? It was partly triggered by the schism in the international Communist movement, the Sino-Soviet dispute. The Australian party had initially been seen as in the Chinese camp. Many party leaders had been to long schools in China in the ‘50s. The split in 1963 with Ted Hill and the formation of the CP-ML gave a push to the new Aarons leadership towards Eurocommunism.

It was also a partial response to the challenge of the new movements and radicalisation.

But its main roots were in the conservatisation of the trade union base of the party.

How ideological, how conscious, was the change? There was certainly the Italian influence, but the ideological justification probably came more after the event.

By 1970, Eric Aarons, in his book on Lenin’s Theories of Revolution published in 1970, questions Lenin’s theory of the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1972, in his Philosophy for an Exploding World, there’s a full-blown infatuation with “values”, promoting humanism vs Marxism.

Similarly, with Jack Blake’s book Revolution from Within, published in 1971. It was not CPA policy, but was reviewed favourably. It was one more expression of retreat. But his thesis that the necessary organisation of workers led to Stalinism, that a Bolshevik-type revolution was not possible, foreshadowed the final disillusionment of the CPA leadership and winding up of the CPA over the next two decades. (Jack Blake himself seemed to draw back from the worst implications of his book – self-criticism in Arena 63, p.139.)

Should we have entered in, tried to change the CPA in the late ‘60s, rather than building Resistance and an independent party? That was the approach of Denis Freney, the former Trotskyist who joined in 1969-70. He published his memoirs a few years ago, and died this year. He was totally assimilated, even used as the hatchetman against the left, inside the CPA and outside. It was a sorry experience.

But there was an important left current that developed in the CPA, the Left Tendency in the early ‘70s.

From 1968 the CPA had a refurbished left image. Following the departure of the hard-line Stalinist faction that supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia and split in 1971 to form the Socialist Party of Australia, it was seen as having decisively broken with Stalinism. In the ‘70s it related to the many new movements and new campaigns – the women’s movement, the famous BLF Green Bans, campaigns for workers’ control, the campaign against the Springboks tour, anti-racist struggles, campaigns on environmental issues, on homosexual rights, East Timor solidarity and so on.

It did succeed in attracting student radicals in the ‘70s. It did recruit women.

Some went in as conscious revolutionary Marxists, hoping to influence the party to the left. Some of these from Melbourne were initially organised around the magazine Intervention. In 1972 a group in Adelaide, the Adelaide Revolutionary Marxists, formerly Students for Democratic Action, joined and became the SA leadership, with Rob Durbridge as state secretary. Inside the CP these lefts formed the Left Tendency.

One of its members Terry O’Shaughnessy wrote a very thorough account of the development of the Left Tendency and the inner party fights in the ‘70s. Another member, Winton Higgins, wrote an optimistic article for the 1974 Socialist Register, Reconstructing Australian Communism, analysing the development of the CPA, which was seen as most advanced among CPs around the world at the time.

There were three factions in the CPA in the early ‘70s after the departure of the SPA: the Left Tendency, the centre, which was the main leadership led by The Aarons’, and the right, based in Victoria, and led by Taft and Sendy.

The question of the ALP was at the core of the differences. The Left Tendency in essence had a correct Marxist analysis (much better than ours at the time). Taft had a tailist position toward the ALP. Aarons and the majority were initially looking for new strategies, and encouraged the new current.

The debate on the ALP arose in earnest in 1974, in the lead up to the 24th Congress. An extensive position paper was prepared by the left – it became known as the Adelaide document, or the pink document. An intensive debate took place, in their discussion bulletin Praxis, and in self-published pamphlets and letters. At the Congress the centre’s positions were endorsed, with the left supporting them.

But the right was still pushing its line, so that by the 25th Congress in 1976 there was a clear shift to the right. The left was thoroughly defeated, the line of Taft and Sendy and Mavis Robertson was de facto adopted by the Aarons leadership. Factions were banned. Eric Aarons, Mavis Robertson and Joe Palmada became joint national secretaries. They moved to further conciliate the right, and over the next three years the CPA put into practice the perspectives Bernie Taft and the Victorian leadership had advocated.

The hopes of the new recruits who’d looked for a left turn, a new-type CPA, after the 1970 and 1972 congress decisions, were dashed.

Thus the CPA failed that second test, arising from the ‘60s radicalisation and formal rejection of Stalinism – a chance to assert a non-Stalinist, and non-reformist political line.

Should we have had a more active orientation in the early to mid-70s?

Should we have helped the Left Tendency? Would it have made a difference if we’d merged with the CPA and added our weight? The result was that they were swallowed, were defeated. We continued on, built our party, and are still here today.

A more successful orientation at that time would have required more foresight and tolerance and flexibility on the part of the CPA leadership, as well as from the Left Tendency. It would have required us to have got a clearer position on the ALP, been sharp er, and ditched the entryism shibboleth properly, which we didn’t manage until the ‘80s. It would have required us getting greater clarity on the dynamics of revolution, the Russian Revolution, and ditched Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution distortion earlier than we did, in the ‘80s again.

Some of the new recruits – Freney, Peter Murphy – become the most sectarian. How did that happen? What was the process of assimilation?

Their sectarianism was most marked towards the new currents that developed from the ‘60s radicalisation, ourselves especially.

Perhaps some of them had nagging doubts, guilt, about where they came from, and perhaps where they should have been?

Their sectarian assumption of the “right” to be the only left party was itself a legacy of the CPA’s Stalinist past. They rightly saw us as their main competition on campuses and in the new social movements, in the women’s, lesbian and gay, environment, and solidarity campaigns.

The Victorian Taft leadership split away in 1984, even though their line had in fact been adopted. They were just moving a little in advance of the rest…

The victory of the right-wing line in the mid-’70s ushered in a series of increasingly class-collaborationist projects and documents by the CPA.

The People’s Economic Program, Australia Uprooted, Australia Reconstructed, Australia Ripped off etc. etc. They paved the way for the Accord disaster. The CPA was the brains behind the Accord, and in the person of Laurie Carmichael its midwife also.

Our sharp criticism of this class-collaborationist disaster was essential. We made some impact, but were not big enough to have real effect in the trade unions, and deter the ACTU and the ALP from this course.

We hammered away at the CPA though, in the unions, in our newspaper Direct Action, with leaflets and pamphlets.

By the time of the Broad Left Conference at Easter 1985 in Sydney, they were not so confident about it. Although they had 1500 people attend, they suffered a political defeat, on the Accord, on the Victorian BLs, and we and others had an interesting alternative meeting in Glebe Town Hall [Sydney]. The Broad Left Conference was really the swansong of the CPA, its last big fling.

New Party – A third test, the final chance

In 1986, having been responsible for the Accord, and having defended its disastrous results uptil then, the CPA took a little veer to the left, with a mild criticism of it. We responded. We took up their call for a New Left Party, and were prepared to unite with them and others in a new formation.

The CPA’s contemplation of unity with the DSP was possibly their last chance, and the third big test they failed.

In 1987 at Sydney University we held a joint conference, although not many of them turned up.

But the CPA leadership took fright. They drew back politically. Perhaps they realised we had a lot of young active cadres, and even though they would have had a numerical majority in the New Party, the majority of the energy would have been with our tendency, and our political positions were likely to win in the long run.

By the Melbourne Charter conference for a New Left Party in November 1987, it was clear they’d taken a decision against a genuine new left organisation, and at least some of them had decided we would be excluded. The CPA demanded right of control of any new party.

They’d also retreated from their mild criticisms of the Accord. In the changed political situation, they were now looking to the ACU, a rump split from the SPA of the most right-wing, pro-Accord trade union officials. The Aarons leadership preferred unity with them on the basis of support for the Accord. And they played up the role of the “independents”, the guarantors of their right-wing line. But unfortunately half a dozen rather lacklustre, not very energetic, right-wing independents was about all they could bring along.

This was probably the last chance for the CPA. They balked at it. They cut off negotiations with us, and went ahead with a rump NLP, which only lasted a year or two before being scrapped, and the CPA was finally dissolved in 1991, over the objections of the remaining left-wing groups in the party.

The result of the promise of the early ‘70s was the taming and incorporation of the left tendencies, the new generation of radicals. They were even incorporated in the leadership. But there are many individuals out there, former members, frustrated, still with some ideals and hopes for a socialist future.

The Socialist Party of Australia

The Socialist Party of Australia still hangs on, trying to pick up the mantle of the CPA and claim the continuity. At the time of the split in 1971, the SPA represented the worst Stalinist attitudes, unwilling and unable to break with the habits of decades, opposing the new movements, very conservative.

There was some element of attachment to the class struggle past of the CPA, its positive experiences in union struggles. This was itself mixed, and led to the subsequent split in the SPA, with the more bureaucratic, right-wing elements of the SPA walking out in the early ‘80s, and forming the Association for Communist Unity, supporting the Accord.

On Australian politics, on the key question of the Accord, the SPA took a principled opposition stand. This made possible our joint work them in the ‘80s, on the Social Rights conference, and the Social Rights campaign.

After the failure of our unity efforts with the CPA, we approached the SPA and held discussions about unity. We were able to organise joint activities on local Australian political issues. But their support for the Chinese regime over the Tiananmen massacre wrecked our attempt to unite with them.

I think that was their last chance too. They had some very good working-class militants, who were attracted to the CPA for the right reasons, but couldn’t come to terms with the problems of Stalinism, the contradictory nature of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, and the CPA itself. Their older working-class militants were attracted by our youth, our enthusiasm. They wanted the Communist tradition to continue, the struggle to continue. They weren’t recruiting youth. But the [Peter] Symon’s leadership opted for isolation, preserving their Stalinism.

This has got worse if anything. In their paper a few months ago Rob Gowland’s column resurrected all the old Stalinist lies about the ‘30s purges. They’re trying to recreate the hard-line Stalinism of the ‘30s and ‘40s. They’re hoping to make a rallying point for retired CPAers.

The CP-ML is a dead little sect, a handful buried underground. Their paper Vanguard remains unchanged, timeless, dogmatic. Pick it up, is it this week’s or last year’s? Or five years ago? It’s difficult to tell.

The Association for Communist Unity hardly functions. It’s a network of a few union officials and ex-officials, and runs a little discussion group. It’s a dogmatic, narrow, sect of ageing Stalinist bureaucrats, who are mostly now in the ALP.

The CPA’s ghost

The CPA remnant from the NLP debacle by the end of the ‘80s were politically demoralised about Australian perspectives. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was the final straw. It completed their demoralisation, and they closed down the CPA in 1991.

By the 1990s, they were unable to match us on most political fronts. We’d organised the Socialist Scholars Conferences in October 1990 and July 1991. They were big broad successes, the sort of things the CPA might have been organising in the past. But no longer. Now it was the DSP. In 1994, we organised the International Green Left Conference.

We came out with Green Left Weekly in 1991. The ex-CPA/NLP came out with their “independent” Broadside a year later, but it folded in less than a year.

They closed down their offices and all their bookshops, finally International Bookshop in Melbourne, which was the best left bookshop in the country. This year, they’re closing down their last institution, the Left Book Club, a late initiative of theirs in 1987. They’re sitting on cartons of unsold books.

Their NLP also folded after a while, and all that’s left now is Left Connections, a loose network in a few cities, practically invisible. It was the final whimper.

The Aarons leadership, spanning several generations, including three serving as national secretaries, was the leading faction from the ‘60s on at least. It presided over the winding up of the CPA. Most of the leadership from that period have dropped out of active politics. Some have careers in the labour movement, or government departments.

But one last institution remains, The Search Foundation, with reputed assets of $3-7 million. The money lives on. But is it being used for the purpose for which the CPA’s working-class membership originally gave it? For building a party? For making a revolution? For socialism?

Not really. Its purpose seems partly a pension fund, partly a funder of academic projects and hander out of research grants, It’s provided some funding for the Adelaide magazine Options that’s started up, an extremely modest, not very political, discussion journal for ex-NLPers. But unfortunately it also seems to be partly still a resource to bankroll the former CPA’s remaining sectarianism, to defeat any efforts to build a socialist party.

So in the ex-CPA, the ghost of sectarianism lives on.

They have no perspective for a party, no perspective for socialism. They’re totally cynical and demoralised. But the ghost of sectarianism is still there.

• The Peter Murphy incident at anniversary committee
• The Philippines, supporting the Sisonites, hard line Stalinist Maoists

You get the impression they’ll still try anything to hurt us, to hinder the development of a revolutionary Marxist party that they failed to build, and no longer believe in.

It’s a sad departure, a party that was once a significant force in the Australian workers’ movement. But at least there’s now a clearer field, as long as we understand the history, and the reasons for the successes and failures of the CPA.

There are many individual sad departures too, the many working-class activists who sacrificed so much to build the party.

Conclusions – the heritage

But their efforts won’t have been totally in vain if we’re able to retrieve the positive heritage and experience of the CPA, in particular:

• The inspiration and the goals of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary Marxist tradition of the Bolsheviks;
• The class struggle tradition and aspirations of the Australian workers’ movement.

And repudiate the negative experiences, especially:

• Stalinism, in the Soviet Union, and its projection here;
• Tailing the ALP, popular frontism.

Lenin wrote, in Left-Wing Communism:

“The attitude of a political party towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest criteria of the seriousness of the party and how it fulfils in practice its obligations towards its class and towards the toiling masses.”

The CPA failed on this count. Miserably. Its failure is both indicative, and also contributed to its demise.

Who will inherit the best traditions of the CPA, the inspiration and ideals of the original founders?

Who can learn from, and look back with respect at the highlights, the militant traditions, the unemployed battles, the bitter strikes, the dedication and enthusiasm? Certainly not those who’ve given away the fight, become cynical about socialism, thrown in their lot with the status quo.

The final remnant of the CPA retained the negative – the elements of Stalinism, sectarianism, and taking immersion in the ALP to its final conclusion.

And they’ve rejected the positive – the party-building, the dedication and enthusiasm, the belief in socialism and revolution, the class struggle.

The ghost keeps the worst, and repudiates the best.

The DSP and Resistance do the opposite. We reject the crimes and mistakes, and treasure the best traditions, the heroic exploits of the CPA.

We look to the positive achievement of the Russian Revolution. We still see the necessity and possibility of socialism, we still have a revolutionary perspective.

And we’re able to learn the lessons, avoid the mistakes.

It’s impossible to build a new mass revolutionary socialist party without this, and without an understanding of the betrayals, the mistakes of Stalinism, in the Soviet Union and here; without an understanding of the nature of the ALP; without an understanding of the nature of the state, the need for fundamental change; without understanding the need for a party with internal democracy, able to act in unison.

Such a party needs dedication, commitment, seriousness, enthusiasm. It must be a party that builds a base in the working class, the youth, that fights for women, blacks, gays, other oppressed, for the environment, and all cases of injustice, here and around the world. It must be a party that’s internationalist.

So there’s both continuity and breaks in the communist tradition here. We’re the inheritors of the best of that tradition. And part of that tradition now is the experience of Resistance and the DSP, including Jim Percy’s role, his achievements in building the movement.

We should see it now as the CPA-DSP tradition. The youth, the new generation of activists, are carrying that tradition forward.