For the whole of his adult life, Lenin, the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks and founder of the Communist International, was a professional revolutionary. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a provincial official and himself a graduate in law from the prestigious St Petersburg University, he had first come to the attention of the authorities in 1887, when his elder brother was arrested and hanged for conspiracy to assassinate the Tsar. In the following year he discovered the writings of Karl Marx and joined the underground socialist movement; in 1895 he travelled to Germany, France and Switzerland to meet the followers of Marx who had recently come together to form a Socialist International; later in the same year he was arrested in St Petersburg (Leningrad), and subsequently exiled to Siberia. There he formulated the strategies and methods that would enable an illegal socialist party to flourish, and published them under the pen-name Lenin. From 1900 he lived successively in Brussels, Paris, London and Geneva, reading, writing, organising, intriguing. Through his ferocious polemics he gained leadership of the more militant faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a confederation established in 1898. In 1903 these militants gained the upper hand and assumed the name of the Bolshevik or majority party. In 1905, when the Tsarist autocracy yielded to the groundswell of demands for a representative assembly, Lenin returned to St Petersburg to organise the Soviet, or workers’ council, which had sprouted during the national crisis and briefly contended for control over the elected Duma, or parliament. With the collapse of that popular insurrection, he escaped to Finland and then resumed the life an émigré conspirator in Switzerland, then France and finally in a province of the Austrian empire hard up against Russia. The outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 forced him back to neutral Switzerland. But that war, the Great War, eventually broke the Tsarist regime and took Lenin back to his native land.
While Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power in Russia, his gaze crossed national boundaries. He apprehended capitalism as a world system that connected an investor in Amsterdam to a plantation in Java, a textile manufacturer in Leeds to a sheep station in Victoria. The very concatenation of imperial rivalries that brought war in 1914 and revolution in 1917 demanded a global response. Thus communism, which became the generic term for the Bolshevik doctrine and practice he created, was at once a particular application of Marxist socialism to Russian circumstances and a universal application of that formulation to all countries. It was the outcome of a campaign Lenin had waged in the Socialist International, even when the Russian Social Democrats were a small and beleaguered contingent, trailing far behind their Western European counterparts in numbers, prospects and prestige. Widely read and deeply studious—one of his projects during the Siberian exile was to translate Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s history of British trade unions—Lenin confronted the German, French and British socialists as a fanatic, utterly ruthless and single-minded in his revolutionary purpose. He followed developments in these and other countries keenly, construing press reports of foreign correspondents from around the world as despatches from the far-flung battlefields of a unified class war.
It was not until 1913 that Lenin registered his first impressions of the workers’ movement in distant Australia. This was a brief commentary in a Bolshevik newspaper on the recent federal election that had resulted in the defeat of the Commonwealth Labor government formed in 1910, which had been the first in that country or in any other country to hold a parliamentary majority. For the ardent Lenin it was remarkable that a labour party should have enjoyed supremacy in a national legislature for three years without even threatening the capitalist system. He explained the paradox by clarifying the identity of the Australian Labor Party. It was not a socialist but a ‘liberal-bourgeois party’. Historically, the term ‘bourgeois’ denoted one who enjoyed the freedoms of the city, but in socialist usage it referred to the class that derived its wealth and power from ownership of capital. How could a political movement so unmistakably plebeian in its composition as the early ALP be described as bourgeois? Lenin explained: ‘In order to understand the real significance of parties one must examine, not their labels, but their class character and the historical conditions of each separate country.’ Australia was a young British colony, Australian capitalism still formative and the workers mostly immigrants from England under the grip of liberal illusions formed while England still enjoyed economic supremacy. Hence those liberals in Europe and Russia who pointed to Australia to show that the class war was obsolete only deceived themselves. Once Australia matured as an independent capitalist state, the conditions and the consciousness of the workers would change and a socialist labour party would emerge.1
Lenin’s brief review of Australian politics relied on sketchy press reports and contained numerous inaccuracies. His appraisal of Australian exceptionalism, on the other hand, took up well-developed issues in European socialist discussion. The rapid formation of the Labor Party at the turn of the century, its early electoral successes and speedy achievement of office—by 1914 there had been Labor governments in every one of the Australian states as well as the Commonwealth—the introduction of industrial legislation, a basic wage, welfare benefits and state enterprise, all seemed to confirm the antipodes as a ‘workers’ paradise’. From the end of the century investigators travelled from Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere to this ‘social laboratory’ of advanced democracy in order to discern the implications of its state experiments, in much the same way as visitors to Silicon Valley or the Asian Tiger economies have more recently divined the future.2 Those who pinned their hopes on a democratic advance from capitalism to socialism saw Australia as blazing a trail that other countries might follow to escape the class war. For revolutionaries, however, Australia posed a challenge, and the gauntlet was taken up by another Bolshevik, Fedor Andreevich Sergeyev. His substantial report on antipodean developments appeared in the St Petersburg journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) three months after Lenin’s, but he had been sending back reports from Australia since 1911, and Lenin might well have drawn upon them.
Sergeyev’s life followed a similar path to that of the leader he served so faithfully. Born in 1883 in the Ukraine, he joined the Social Democrats in 1901 and was almost immediately gaoled. Upon release he travelled to Paris and met Lenin, led the Bolsheviks in Kharkov during the 1905 uprising, was arrested, gaoled, escaped, arrested again, exiled to Siberia and escaped to arrive in Australia in 1911. As Big Tom Sergeyeff he worked in railway construction, bricklaying, farm labouring and waterside lumping, joined the Brisbane branch of the Australian Socialist Party, established a Russian-language newspaper, took part in a free-speech campaign and served time in Boggo Road gaol. ‘I cannot stand the sight of unorganised masses’, he confessed. As soon as the news of the overthrow of the Tsar reached Australia, he returned to Russia and under the nom de guerre of Artem rose rapidly in the ranks of the Bolsheviks during the civil war, only to die in a train accident three years before Lenin’s own premature death.3
‘I am writing from a country which, due to a strange set of circumstances, is called “Australia, the Lucky Country”.’ Sergeyev’s introductory sentence signalled two objects: to discredit the appellation and explain the circumstances that gave rise to it. As he acknowledged, the celebrants of Australian exceptionalism ‘exclaim[ed] in rapture at the touching experience of class co-operation’, rejoiced in the equality of women with men and celebrated the end of economic exploitation that seemed to render the doctrinaire programme of social democracy superfluous. His refutation worked from personal experience of a harsh penal system, restrictions on the press (he had been forced to deposit a bond before his paper could be published), limits on public meetings, fines for strikes, compulsory military training, exclusion of women from public life and prohibitive deposits demanded of workers who wished to stand for parliament. He found the explanation in the infancy of capitalism in Australia and the absence of an industrial proletariat. The Labor Party was not a workers’ party but a party of the petty bourgeoisie and local manufacturers, and Sergeyev quoted from its platform to illustrate the nationalistic and racist principles it espoused. Even though the Labor Party was ‘decisively supported by almost all trade unions’, they neither controlled it nor determined its character. The Australian Socialist Party was ‘sprouting up like mushrooms after a rain’ but it ‘would have to work very hard before it succeeds in rejuvenating the political life of Australia and making Australia even a remotely democratic country’.4
It is apparent from these early Bolshevik estimates that the prospects for a communist party of Australia were not encouraging. There was certainly a substantial socialist tradition. Socialists had played a vital role in the formation of the Labor Party in the 1890s, but Labor quickly subordinated socialist principles in the quest for electoral popularity. Its rapid achievement of office confronted Australian socialists with a dilemma that their European counterparts did not have to resolve until some time later: were they to accept the limits of parliamentary democracy in order to ameliorate capitalism or should they insist on nothing less than a complete reconstitution of politics, the economy and society? The great majority chose the first course, leaving the ASP, the Socialist Labor Party and the other such groups as isolated critics. Socialists had also been active in the recovery and spread of trade unionism after the disastrous defeats of the 1890s, but here again the advance of industrial organisation brought a painful choice: did the state recognition of unions through the system of compulsory industrial arbitration merely bind workers more fully into wage slavery or was it possible for them to combine in ways that would enable them to take control over their working lives? Most socialists accepted the institutional constraints of the system of industrial relations, leaving the Wobblies as vehement dissidents. To suggest that there was a division between the reformist and revolutionary wings of Australian socialism was to put a brave face on a more fundamental incapacity of Australian socialists of all varieties to align their principles and practice.
The distinction between reformist and revolutionary socialism emerged gradually out of a spectrum of schemes for human redemption formulated during the nineteenth century in response to the spread of capitalism. Socialists, utopian and scientific, ethical and philosophical, religious and rationalist, insurrectionary and gradualist, authoritarian and libertarian, took issue with capitalism for its violation of certain fundamental social values. Capitalism was a system that extended the market to every aspect of material life, treating even the most basic necessities—land, labour, food and shelter—as mere commodities, to be bought and sold for profit. It replaced custom and mutuality with an impersonal logic of calculation that set every person against all others. It deemed everyone free and equal to buy and sell, only to heap up vast inequalities of wealth and esteem. It linked the economic freedom of the market with representative forms of government, yet created agglomerations of power that nullified democracy. It justified the private ownership of property as the basis of personal autonomy, but allowed the few to command the labour of the many, and thereby produced a whole class of property-less workers or proletarians entirely dependent on the sale of their labour to another class that monopolised the means of production—the capitalists. It made exploitation the mechanism of the process of capital accumulation.
In the course of the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism expanded from its Western European cradle to transform the world. Its technologies of mass production replaced handicrafts. It drew men, women and children into giant factories that obliterated subsistence forms of household production and bound families to the tempo of the machine. Its steamships and railways shrank distance. Its weapons overcame resistance to territorial expansion. It settled great tracts of land and incorporated them into empires. Its methods of government and techniques of administration extended surveillance and control from coercion into consent. It universalised its values of growth and progress into a process of constant change.
The most influential nineteenth-century socialist critic of capitalism was Karl Marx. A radical intellectual, Marx combined a training in German philosophy with an appreciation of the political legacy of the French Revolution and reading of the nascent science of political economy that he supplemented from his own study of the British factory system. With his friend, patron and disciple, Friedrich Engels, who drew both wealth and insight from the cotton industry of Manchester, Marx challenged the springtime of liberal optimism in 1848 with the Communist Manifesto. In vivid phrases it enunciated themes that he himself would develop in complex theoretical texts, polemics, journalism and ill-fated schemes, and which his followers in the Communist International would seek to realise. All history was the history of class struggles, and the bourgeois revolution was but the penultimate stage of this historical pattern. The bourgeoisie had broken the fetters on capitalist production, conquered state power for itself and torn asunder the ties of custom, deference, family and culture for ‘naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation’. The bourgeois revolution centralised political power, concentrated the means of production and reduced all small producers, shopkeepers and peasants to the status of proletarians—in ancient Rome, the lowest class who contributed nothing to the state but their offspring. As the ranks of the industrial proletariat grew, as the victims of capitalism realised their degradation and sought to improve their lot, so they would form a universal class that transcended all divisions of nationality, sex and religion. This class would in turn overthrow the bourgeoisie, abolish private property, take collective control of the means of production and achieve real freedom. Communism would complete history.5
The Communist Manifesto was at once a political programme and an analysis of the objective laws of history. In contrast with those idealistic philosophers and utopian socialists who sought to redeem human nature, Marx and Engels insisted on the the primacy of material reality as it evolved in a complex and constantly unfolding yet socially determined process. The Manifesto summarised the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism in the proposition that ‘man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life’. The crucial determinant of capitalist social relations was wage labour. Labour was the source of value, capital the product of labour, and profit derived from the extraction of surplus value when owners of capital treated labour as a commodity. This labour theory of value suggested an inherent conflict between the capitalist and the proletariat; and as the drive for competitive efficiency increased the scale of industry, so the remaining capitalists sought to maintain their profits by increasing their exploitation of labour. The ultimate triumph of communism was thus immanent in the laws of capitalist development:
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.6
It will be apparent that this science of historical materialism was universal. Across the complexities of human behaviour, the shifting subjectivities and the differences of language, culture, belief and custom, it postulated a common logic leading to a common destination. Capitalism would obliterate all differences. The singular ‘man’ identified in the Communist Manifesto was thus the product of a convergent and irreversible historical process. Marx and Engels were not blind to biological difference, indeed they argued that men’s domination of women was a condition of the transmission of property, and they were keen critics of racial oppression; but they treated these and other injustices as corollaries of the class struggle. Nor were they alone in assigning primacy to class. Most nineteenth-century social critics feared the perilous consequences of the great transformation wrought by the market. The replacement of an older, more intimate social order by a vast and impersonal social structure held together by nothing more than the cash nexus was a common preoccupation of their age. But Marx followed the implications of that transition to its logical conclusion. With the final abolition of capitalism, humanity would at last be made whole.
‘The Communists’, Marx explained in 1848, ‘do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties’. They were simply the most advanced and resolute section of the proletariat, who pointed out and brought forward its common interests with the particular characteristic that ‘theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’.7 Lenin’s creation of a separate Communist Party, tightly controlled and utterly opposed to other working-class parties, pressed this advantage to extreme consequences. Working out of the cumulative experience of the socialist movement in the nineteenth century, drawing on the doctrinal disputes within the Second International and always insisting on his fidelity to Marx, Lenin transmuted Marxism into communism.
Marxists held that capitalism could not be reformed, that it would have to be swept away by revolution, and that the state was simply a mechanism ‘for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’.8 Even so, they differed from their anarchist rivals in their insistence that the proletariat must form political parties and make use of all available opportunities, including parliaments, to campaign for immediate improvements. The fight for higher wages and democratic reforms would augment their capacity and train them for the battles to come. Capitalism would be overthrown when the economic conditions and the class-consciousness of the proletariat matured—Marx’s followers called themselves Social Democrats, as Lenin did, to emphasise that the revolution was not to be the work of conspirators but would be carried out by the great mass of the working class. The actual path of capitalism after 1848, however, presented Marxists with sharp challenges. Economically, its seemingly inexhaustible capacity for further innovation and growth cast doubt on predictions of deepening crisis. Socially, the fact that the middle class and even skilled workers shared in its material benefits belied expectations of two increasingly polarised classes. Politically, the advance of democratic principles and representative institutions provided the state with greater legitimacy. Culturally, the increasing intervention of the state into economic and social regulation softened class antagonisms, while the growth of nationalism as a popular phenomenon undercut proletarian internationalism.9 By the end of the nineteenth century the member parties of the Second International were growing in membership, capacity and caution, beset by endemic disputes between revisionists and fideists, fatalists and voluntarists, possibilists and impossibilists, as its adherents sought to accommodate these developments.
Lenin’s intervention into the debate drew inevitably on his own national circumstances. Russia, ruled by a Tsarist autocracy that refused to tolerate a workers’ movement, offered scant opportunity for the sort of democratic activity that was practised by socialists in Western Europe or Australia. Its economic backwardness, in a country where the great majority worked the land and were only emancipated from serfdom in 1861, made the prospect of a working-class majority long distant. It was hardly surprising that Lenin, writing from exile in Siberia in 1902, should enunciate a conception of the revolutionary party that was small, centralised and imbued with a military discipline, a vanguard party transmitting instructions from its leaders to the rank-and-file membership. His answer to the question What is to be Done?, the title of the polemic he wrote in 1902, went far beyond these local circumstances, however, in its rejoinder to the revisionists. Lenin was wrestling with the patently unrevolutionary temper of the workers’ movement. Against those who held that the objective circumstances of capitalism would bring workers to revolutionary class-consciousness, he insisted on the need for a more decisive intervention. ‘The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness’, and ‘trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie’. Equally, those workers who in Western countries elected parliamentary representatives in the hope of ameliorating capitalism were merely succumbing to reformist illusions. Only through revolutionary theory could the workers come to understand the fundamental opposition between their own class interest and capitalism, and that theory could only come from intellectuals such as himself.10
From this starting point, Lenin’s construction of the Communist Party proceeded. Since a spontaneous movement of workers would fall prey to economism and reformist error, the revolutionary party must be composed chiefly of professional revolutionaries—men and women who devoted their whole time to its activity. They would take up the protests of the workers and all other oppressed groups, participate in every aspect of their endeavours, speak for them, lead them and draw together all the dissatisfactions and protests into a revolutionary movement. This party would consist of both workers and intellectuals, and it would fuse them in a unified whole in which the party would constitute, as it were, a collective worker-intellectual, pure in doctrine, decisive in practice. It would embody the correct consciousness of the workers, irrespective of their actual outlook, because it alone possessed a scientific knowledge. The circumstances of such a party’s operation precluded disagreement; the class war did not allow for freedom of criticism. In a subsequent dispute with the Mensheviks—the minority group of the Russian Social Democratic Party—Lenin enunciated his principle of ‘democratic centralism’ to signify that decisions of the party would be binding on all members.11
These ideas, which Lenin urged on all members of the Socialist International, were more novel in their force than their substance. Few of his contemporaries would have dissented from Lenin’s proposition that ‘There cannot be a revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory’. Was not Marx himself an intellectual, and was not Marxism a scientific socialism? This, after all, was a recurrent point of contention in their disputes with the anarchists, syndicalists and other champions of spontaneity. Where Lenin differed from other Marxists was in his preparedness to pursue the implications of this line of thought to its extreme end point. His party claimed an absolute authority to activate an otherwise confused or inert mass. He substituted the party for the proletariat—as his sometime critic and sometime colleague Trotsky observed as early as 1904—in order to make politics rather than social location the basis of class identity: thus, just as he described the Australian Labor Party as liberal-bourgeois on the basis of its policies, even though the overwhelming majority of the members were workers, so he claimed that his own Bolshevik organisation, which at this time possessed a minimal working-class membership, was the sole voice of the Russian proletariat.
Unlike those historical materialists who awaited the maturation of social conditions, Lenin was prepared to hasten history. The revolution would not drop into the laps of those complacent leaders of socialist parties in the advanced capitalist countries of the West; indeed it might not begin there at all, for advanced capitalism was a global system of imperial exploitation and the fruits of imperialism blunted the edge of working-class discontent in the capitalist heartlands. It might well be in backward Russia, where capitalism was still new and raw, that the crisis would first arise and the revolutionary party must be prepared to seize the moment of opportunity in order to give shape and direction to inchoate discontent. With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, and the capitulation of so many Western socialists to chauvinism or pacifism, Lenin developed these expectations into a general appraisal, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). True socialists would oppose the war with revolutionary defeatism; they would welcome any movement, whether one of colonial liberation, a peasant rising or a national independence struggle, providing it weakened the imperialist powers.
Then, after the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917 and the formation of an unstable provisional government, came Lenin’s most utopian work, The State and Revolution (1917). All states were instruments of class oppression and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by means of parliaments must yield to the dictatorship of the proletariat by means of soviets. This workers’ state would abolish the principle of the separation of powers, which served merely to frustrate genuine democratic control, so that the representative, legislative, administrative and judicial functions would all be exercised by the soviets during the suppression of the remnants of the old regime and the transition to socialism; but the fact that the ruling class would for the first time be the majority would ultimately render politics obsolete and the new state would accordingly wither away.12
The revival of the soviets in 1917 provided the basis of the Bolsheviks’ success. Initially the councils of workers, peasants and soldiers assisted the weak and irresolute provisional government to repulse a right-wing military putsch; soon they claimed ‘dual power’ and ultimately they assumed complete control. The revolutionary programme of the Bolsheviks, ‘Peace, Bread and Land’, was something less than a socialist, much less a communist policy. It offered an end to Russian involvement in the Great War and a respite from the immense hardship of the war effort, a commitment fulfilled in the Brest–Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, and a redistribution of the great agricultural estates to the peasants who worked them, which was also quickly implemented. But the new regime was forced to fight for its very existence through three years of civil war and foreign intervention. Far from withering away, the new state imposed its dictatorship of the proletariat with increasing rigour to eliminate all opposition. Lenin argued initially that this was a temporary arrangement, the use of state terror justified by the national emergency, and that the Russian Revolution would be followed by other revolutions elsewhere that would bring succour to the Soviet Union. His formation of the Communist International in 1919 proceeded from a growing realisation that this was not happening, and the pitifully thin attendance of delegates from existing socialist parties at its First Congress showed that it would be necessary to create communist parties to constitute it.
The Second Congress of the Communist International thus promulgated in August 1920 the twenty-one conditions for membership. They were uncompromising in their generalisation of Bolshevik tactics for the rest of the world. Every party that wished to join the International had to break completely with reformism, patriotism and imperialism, change its name to the Communist Party, organise itself on democratic centralist lines, drive out all fainthearts and periodically cleanse its membership. Opportunists had to be removed from every responsible position, agitation had to be carried on within the armed forces and a parallel illegal organisation had to be created, for ‘in practically every country of Europe and America the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war’ and communists could have ‘no confidence in bourgeois legality’.13
Yet even as the Congress erected these barriers to any rapprochement with the non-communist workers’ movements, Lenin was rebuking those doctrinaire leftists in the West who refused to work in trade unions for fear of sullying their revolutionary purity, or participate in bourgeois parliaments lest they encourage reformist illusions. He described such refusal to compromise principles as ‘Left-Wing’ Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920), and the very opposite of Bolshevik tactical flexibility, which required an appreciation of specific national circumstances and a responsiveness to particular historical conditions. This aspect of Bolshevism was perhaps the most difficult for those militant activists in the West, fired by the success of the Russian Revolution, to comprehend. They took that epochal event as a vindication of their own doctrinaire refusal of all compromise, a vicarious justification of the persecution and rejection they had endured. To be told that they must cooperate with the despised reformists or engage in the prosaic activities of the unions affronted both their pride and their conscience. To learn that they should be prepared to dissemble, to manoeuvre, to do whatever was necessary to achieve their object, was an early lesson in communist tactics.
At the heart of communism lay a will for power. Lenin’s extreme flexibility of tactics went always with a fundamental intolerance of opposition. Communism was omnivorous, subordinating every aspect of society to the control of the party. Questions of morality were no more immune than religion, philosophy, art or literature to the insistent demand that they serve class interests as determined by the party. The doctrine of historical materialism held that standards of human conduct were determined by social relations. In this sense an ethical code was a product of a class position, and all ethical principles were class specific: hence communists talked of proletarian or bourgeois morality. This left little room for personal accountability, since any actor was directed by forces beyond that individual’s control. How else could a capitalist act but selfishly? Why should the perfidious conduct of a Labor politician cause any surprise? Yet communism was a doctrine of emancipation and moral redemption. It employed a language that was saturated in judgements of capitalist evil and proletarian virtue. The party demanded that its members accept the strictest discipline; it expected them to make extraordinary sacrifices for the common good. Australian communists would learn that they must suppress all personal feelings and loyalties, be prepared if necessary to put the interests of the party before family and friends.
It is a common device to explain Lenin by his national circumstances and Leninism by its historical circumstances. Fernando Claudin, a dissident Spanish communist, has written of the way the Bolshevik party was forced to operate as an extra-parliamentary organisation with little experience of the trade union activity that sustained socialist parties elsewhere. ‘The circumstances in which this type of party had to maintain its cohesiveness and effectiveness—illegality, repression, the situation of the proletariat as a minority in a peasant and petty-bourgeois milieu … —account very largely for the semi-military features of its structure and mode of operation.’ He also observed that the civil war intensified these qualities while it robbed the working class of autonomous vitality.14 Lenin himself became increasingly critical of the failure of the workers’ state to wither away, of the corruption, inefficiency and bureaucracy that dogged the new regime. His explanation was the backwardness or lack of culture of Russia, his solution to create new layers of administration wielding still more draconian powers. During his final infirmity, before he died in January 1924, he became alarmed at the concentration and abuse of power by leading party members, especially Joseph Stalin, the secretary-general. Yet Lenin himself was utterly selfless, treating himself and everyone else as an instrument of the cause. His theory of the party was as monolithic as his theory of the state, eliminating all difference, disagreement or human imperfection, reducing every institution of civil society to a lifeless appendage of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He revitalised Marxism with his assertion of the primacy of politics only to abolish politics.
In the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution critics condemned communism, as they do now in retrospect, as an atavistic lapse into some pre-capitalist order, either feudalist absolutism or Asiatic despotism. This cannot be reconciled with Lenin’s insistently modernist and modernising inclinations. Determined to rescue his own country from backwardness, he sought to leap forward from capitalism to its necessary sequel. It is true that socialism’s quest to recover the communal intimacies of a vanished past often involves a rejection of change, but this hardly fits the iconoclastic and innovative zeal of the early Soviet experiment. It is also true that the Soviet success appealed most immediately and directly to those in countries that lagged behind the West, but this was because it offered the promise of joining world history at the next and higher stage. Communism attracted the intelligentsia of the decrepit imperial regimes of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, the restless former subjects of the Hapsburgs, the Romanovs and the Ottomans. Although their immediate efforts to emulate Lenin proved unsuccessful, the Finn Otto Kuusinen, the Pole Karl Radek, the Hungarian Bela Kun and the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov assumed leading positions in the Communist International, and the crescent of countries fringing the western border of the Soviet Union became a communist Pale. Communism appealed also as an advanced variant of the ideology of the West to nationalists in the East, such as the mercurial Indian Manabendra Nath Roy or the dogged Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, who took up Lenin’s critique of imperialism as a potent weapon in their anticolonial struggle. Within the West it found a response among advanced liberals, who saw its application of collective will to the rectification of society as a fulfilment of the Enlightenment project.
The image of a worker striking chains from the globe appeared as the cover illustration on issues of the theoretical monthly, the ‘Communist International’, which was prohibited from importation into Australia for much of the 1920s. This copy of the familiar image appeared in the Australian newspaper to publicise May Day. The single, heroic metalworker stands for revolutionary proletarians the world over; the links of capitalist oppression are broken over Russia. (Source: ‘Communist’, 27 April 1923)
The initial attempts of Lenin and Sergeyev to explain the strength of reformism in Australia supplemented historical materialism with the precepts of Bolshevism. The absence of a genuine revolutionary party deprived Australian workers of any understanding of capitalism. The Australian Labor Party was a ‘liberal-bourgeois party’, utterly bereft of the organisational rigour of a real socialist party, and Australian trade unions perpetuated the illusions of their members. Beyond this, an Australian working class was still formative. In the absence of heavy industry, the country’s wage-earners worked in small enterprises without any clear separation of employer and employee. Many, suggested Lenin, were immigrants from England who expected to improve their lot in the colony. This in turn reflected the historical circumstances of Australia as a producer of primary products for a Britain, which had long enjoyed the status of the workshop of the world, and the correspondingly limited state of local manufacturing, which in turn inclined the labour movement to act as the champion of domestic industry. The infancy of capitalism in Australia, Sergeyev observed, fostered a false consciousness that found expression in racial exclusiveness and a tendency to put national before class interests.
There is much in this analysis that finds support in the analyses of Australian socialists, from Vere Gordon Childe’s mordant explanation, How Labour Governs in 1923 to Humphrey McQueen’s agitated denunciation, A New Britannia 50 years later.15 That gadfly, Donald Horne, would echo Sergeyev’s characterisation of ‘The Lucky Country’ to account for the blissful innocence of his compatriots. Australians did ride on the sheep’s back and it long afforded them a remarkably high standard of living. These prosperous colonial settlers provided for their needs with local industries that were small in scale and, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, they were accustomed to a degree of social mobility absent from the more hierarchical European countries. They enjoyed the amenities of liberalism, freedom, the rule of law, representative government and a dense fabric of voluntary associations that sustained civil society; together with the egalitarian ethos, these both sustained and restrained the coercive aspects of the capitalist economy.
The great economic crisis of the 1890s first called these arrangements into question. Strikes, lockouts and mass unemployment gave rise to a language of class, of labour as the victim of capitalism, a response accentuated by the use of police, army and courts to put down union resistance. The novel of labour organiser William Lane, The Workingman’s Paradise, written in and of the chief confrontation between the shearers and the pastoralists, portrayed a loss of youthful innocence as the serpent of capitalism entered the garden of Eden. The young republican poet Henry Lawson used the same imagery in his lament:
And now that we have made the land
A garden full of promise,
Old Greed must crook his dirty hand
And come to take it from us,
as well as the same militant response:
We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting
Of those that they would throttle;
They needn’t say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle.16
In the immediate aftermath of its decisive defeat, however, the Australian labour movement took up the ballot as its preferred weapon. The speedy electoral success of the Labor Electoral Leagues, and their equally quick absorption into the existing forms of parliamentary government, encouraged the belief that labour could civilise capitalism. The various state experiments in public enterprise, industrial arbitration and social protection fostered the attachment of the unions to the Labor Party. As that party sought to broaden support in pursuit of an electoral majority, it jettisoned its earlier flirtations with republicanism, internationalism and millenarian socialism in favour of a more pragmatic moderation. There remained a sense of class difference, a conviction that the division between those who laboured and those who profited from the labour of others marked the moral faultline of Australian society, and a corresponding determination to reduce inequality and eradicate exploitation. There also remained a belief that such abuses were alien to national tradition, Old World evils visited on the New, to be resisted as an unwelcome intrusion rather than recognised and overcome. Class was both a solace and a scourge.17
The tiny socialist groups that existed on the fringes of the labour movement thus used a language that was both familiar and foreign to Australian workers. Their denunciation of capitalism spoke to a deep-seated, almost instinctive resentment of the excesses of the market. Their preaching of socialism touched an aspiration to make good the injuries of class and redeem the deprivation, insecurity and humiliation that scarred so many working-class lives. But their insistence on the forcible overthrow of capitalism fell on deaf ears as impractical, indeed unimaginable, in a country that prided itself on its progressive traditions and democratic opportunities. The ASP and SLP operated as ineffective critics of the ALP, arraigning it for its shortcomings but never deflecting it from its course.
The Victorian Socialist Party came closest to mounting an alternative. Formed in 1906 by the charismatic English socialist Tom Mann, it sought to operate as a party within a party: the socialist conscience of the ALP. The VSP grew rapidly to attain a membership of 2000 a year later, and its influence was appreciable; but the tactic of permeating the Labor Party to convert it to socialism soon exhausted the patience of Mann, who turned to industrial activism and departed for Broken Hill. His successor as party organiser was the journalist, Bob Ross, who had little time for revolutionary ‘impossibilists’ and ensured that the VSP offered a more affirmative message of high-minded endeavour. It thus served as a training ground for activists who leavened the Labor Party with their idealism without ever altering its pragmatism.18
The Industrial Workers of the World, by contrast, presented this pragmatic labour movement with a serious challenge. The Wobblies discarded doctrinal declamation in favour of direct action, and in doing so they cut at the distinctive arrangements that linked the trade unions to the Labor Party. The Labor Party had been created by the trade unions, whose continuing affiliation, resources and energies sustained its electoral success, while in turn the state apparatus established as a result of Labor’s entry into politics provided a framework in which unions were able to prosper. Now this interlocking relationship was called into question. In the more thoroughgoing Chicago version of Wobbly doctrine, which prevailed in Australia after 1910, the IWW practised revolutionary industrial unionism. It condemned the existing craft unions as ineffective and divisive. It dismissed parliamentary methods and despised Labor politicians. It abhorred the White Australia policy and the protective devices that favoured the European-Australian workingman at the expense of those excluded. It rejected the constraints of industrial arbitration in a succession of major pre-war industrial confrontations that shook the Australian settlement between capital and labour. Above all, Wobblies insisted that the workers would achieve their emancipation themselves. They also refused patriotism, and it was the IWW’s opposition to the Great War that provided federal and state governments, mostly Labor ones, with the excuse to suppress the organisation. In their hatred of capitalism and the corresponding odium they incurred, the Wobblies prefigured the communists. With their uncompromising model of working-class self-emancipation, their openness and organisational simplicity, however, the Wobblies were quite unlike the Bolsheviks. Some, like Tom Glynn, would join the Communist Party of Australia but those who remained communists would have to relearn their politics.19
The parliamentary leaders of the Australian Labor Party survived the pre-war strike wave and used the wartime powers of the state to clamp down on the Wobblies. Yet the strains of the war effort, which curtailed working-class living standards and devoured the ranks of the Australian Imperial Force, also brought mounting discontent. The determination of the Labor prime minister, Billy Hughes, to put his proposal to conscript Australians for overseas service to referendum against his party’s opposition led, after the defeat of the referendum, to an ALP split. He joined in 1917 with the anti-Labor forces to form a National government that intensified the military endeavour and cracked down on all forms of dissent. Labor, now in opposition, felt the iron heel of the state. Furthermore, Hughes’s departure, along with the imperial patriots of the labour movement, shifted Labor’s centre of gravity to the left so that industrial militants, such as Jock Garden, Albert Willis and the New South Wales Trades Hall Reds, were encouraged to challenge the dominance of the politicians. The narrow failure of their bid to win control of the New South Wales branch of the ALP in 1919 led to the formation of the breakaway Industrial Socialist Labor Party, and, when it proved ineffective, the decision to establish the Communist Party. Industrial militants also revived the Wobbly project of One Big Union, a unified organisation of workers that would take control of industry. This proposal was formally adopted by a national conference of unions in 1919.20
The labour unrest in Australia was part of a broader pattern that enveloped Europe and its dependencies. Four years of killing had brutalised human conduct, embittered social relations, fomented national uprisings, brought down governments. It seemed to many that the collapse of Russia anticipated a more general cataclysm, and responses to the Russian Revolution in Australia, as elsewhere, registered domestic as well as international concerns: thus conferences of the Labor Party in both New South Wales and Victoria congratulated the Russian people on their overthrow of the Tsar at the beginning of 1917 as part of their own call for an end to the fighting.
Then at the end of 1917 came the news of the Bolshevik seizure of power. The government, the media and conservative commentators were hostile from the outset. They dwelt on the wholesale destruction and terror, and worked on popular prejudice with invented stories that the new regime had decreed the nationalisation of women. (It was widely published in the Western press that the Bolsheviks had abolished marriage, ended the sanctity of conjugal relations and made all women available to all men.) Most of all, the Bolsheviks’ immediate withdrawal from the war created an implacable antagonism towards the Soviet Union, since it enabled the Germans to transfer their Eastern armies to the Western front and prolong the trench warfare with the Allies that was taking so many Australian lives. The Boche and the Bolshevik were thus linked in the public mind as a common foe. In this initial and powerfully formative reaction, the Russian communists were traitors, their domestic supporters little better than enemy agents. Hence the intervention of the Allies after the Armistice into the Russian civil war in an initial, unsuccessful attempt to put down the communist regime. Hence also the attacks on the left by returned Australian soldiers that punctuated the immediate postwar period, and the right-wing nationalist temper of ex-service organisations that became a persistent feature of Australian public life.
For similar reasons the Australian left responded eagerly and enthusiastically to the news of the October Revolution. Beyond the fact that these obscure revolutionaries were opposed to the war, little was known of them. Tom Barker, one of the twelve Wobbly ‘martyrs’, was asked by the prison governor in Albury who these Bolsheviks were, and had to confess his ignorance. Wartime censorship meant that Australians had only sketchy, unreliable reports of what was happening in Russia, and it took some time to remedy the dearth of testimony from the protagonists. Peter Simonoff’s What is Russia? (1919) explained the division between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks with a gloss on Lenin’s What is to be Done? Some fragments of Lenin’s own writings began to appear later in 1919, along with translations of statements by Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin, but so central a work as State and Revolution did not appear in Australia until the second half of 1920.21 Lenin himself quickly became familiar as a mephistophelian presence through garbled newspaper reports, his diminutive figure with its balding pate, fierce eyes and goatee instantly recognisable in photographs and caricatures. But his Western dress set him apart from the undifferentiated mass of his followers as a deranged pedagogue amidst primitive, shaggy muzhiks. If the three-year interval between the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Communist Party of Australia confirmed the singular durability of the Soviet model, it also illustrated the distance between the two countries. A star had arisen in the east but who would follow it?
The wider labour movement was divided. Most welcomed the new revolutionary government’s declaration of peace. Many discounted the hostile reports of its initial measures in the capitalist press, with one Labor journalist mocking the story of the nationalisation of women:
In Russia still are lovers—lovers’ lies pinched from Above—You can lead a man to Russia, but you cannot make him love.22
Socialists and industrialists especially celebrated the creation of the first workers’ state as an augury of the overthrow of capitalism elsewhere in Europe as well as in Australia—thus Red Europe (1919), the report of a radical Labor parliamentarian, Frank Anstey, on his end-of-war tour of the ravaged continent. The leaders of the Labor Party did not. Even if they had shared in the enthusiasm for that prospect, there were immediate practical reasons for them to distance the Australian labour movement from its Russian counterpart. Electoral considerations forced them to maintain support for the Australian war effort, for while the voters had rejected conscription, a subsequent federal election confirmed the tenure of the Nationalist government formed by a fusion of the the non-Labor forces and the ex-Labor conscriptionists. Moreover, Billy Hughes used his popular mandate to excoriate the slightest dissension and characterise any concession to revolutionary internationalism as evidence of Labor disloyalty. The Labor parliamentarians therefore resisted the incursions of the industrialists, rejected the One Big Union, opposed the attempts to commit the party to a socialist objective and, as part of the same defensive moderation, distanced themselves from the Russian Revolution.23
The ensuing struggle between the pragmatists and the radicals occupied the Australian labour movement into the 1920s. National conferences of the trade unions and the Labor Party adopted resolutions calling for working-class unity, One Big Union, wholesale nationalisation of industry, and defence of the Soviet Union. E. J. Theodore, the Labor premier of Queensland, complained at the 1921 federal ALP conference that delegates ‘enamoured with the proletariat in Russia and the sentiments of the IWW’ had their minds ‘saturated with ideals and dogmas that did not belong to Australia’.24 In fact the decisive influence on these conferences was exercised by socialists who were convinced that communist methods were not appropriate to Australia. Of these the most perceptive was Bob Ross of the VSP, who published his thoughts on Revolution in Russia and Australia on the very eve of the formation of the Communist Party of Australia. Ross appreciated the signal importance of the Bolsheviks’ success: ‘With the Russian Revolution we woke up’. The thrilling grandeur of their accomplishment was ‘like an immense lighthouse, set on the highest mountain peak in the world, with inspiring rays sweeping all continents’. Insofar as he understood the Soviet principle, it seemed utterly appropriate; as far as he could judge the operation of the dictatorship of the proletariat—and he set Lenin’s justifications alongside the criticisms of Kautsky and other Western European socialists—it appeared justified. His argument was that neither of these two devices, the soviet form of government nor its sweeping powers, was necessary or desirable in Australian circumstances since Australia could achieve its social revolution peacefully.
To establish this claim, Ross traversed much of the ground covered before the war by Lenin and Sergeyev. Australian workers had won sufficient amelioration of their circumstances to justify the methods followed by their industrial and political movement. Taking advantage of their British constitutional heritage, along with their country’s youth, to catch capital off guard with their formation of a Labor Party, they had brought about an advanced democracy. Through industrial arbitration they had achieved a higher density of trade union membership than any other country, through the White Australia policy they avoided racial division ‘in competition for bread and women’. There was still much to be done, for capitalism continued and many workers still suffered hardship and suppression, yet something distinctive had been secured. This something, which for want of better he named ‘Labor Dominance’, was an ethos that penetrated into the whole of Australian thought, a national ideal and outlook that permeated even opponents of Labor ‘to an extent that would have made their fathers shudder’. It was this that rendered a dictatorship of the proletariat unnecessary in Australia, for it allowed socialists to enlarge freedoms rather than restrict them, to extend trade unions into One Big Union that would take charge of industry, and by such renewed effort to complete the transition to socialism. The more Ross studied Lenin (‘and he grows bigger and ever bigger to me’), the more he could see Australia achieving its own social revolution according to its own traditions. This did not exhaust the vitality of the Soviet achievement, which had led the world in the overthrow of capitalism; indeed, its violent revolution made possible peaceful revolution elsewhere.25
Ross died in 1931 with most of his hopes confounded. Labor Dominance gave way after the First World War to two decades of conservative supremacy in national politics, punctuated by just two years of Labor government. There was no advance of social democracy, minimal supplementation of public provision and the protective devices that assisted wage-earners were heavily qualified as a new generation of conservatives revised the national settlement. The Labor Party itself drew back from its flirtation with socialism, the One Big Union scheme collapsed and the VSP was abandoned. During the 1920s capitalism extended its grip in Australia, introduced new forms of production and consumption, found new markets, contained its workforce; at the end of the decade, when expansion gave way to severe contraction, it shed workers and cut wages. The advanced democracy became a troubled, deeply divided and fearful dependency, its freedoms circumscribed rather than increased, until in 1939 it plunged once more into a Second World War.
These misfortunes might seem to confirm the earlier predictions of Lenin and Sergeyev. Capitalism had indeed outgrown its infancy in Australia, dispelling illusions that the country was immune from its pernicious effects. The belief that Australian wage-earners could share the fruits of industry with their employers was discredited. The much-vaunted public institutions that were meant to sustain national living standards—arbitration, the basic wage, immigration restrictions, the tariff—failed to do so. The imperial connection provided neither economic nor strategic security. The idea that Australia stood outside the world communist movement, apart from the class struggle, would surely have to be abandoned.
The history of Australian communism is an exploration of these expectations. It is a history of an attempt to realise a political project that was imposed by the logic of history and willed by an organisation of doctrinaire rigidity. Communism broke decisively with the dominant forms of Australian politics. It drew inspiration from events on the other side of the world. It took its instructions from revolutionaries working in utterly foreign circumstances and idioms. Yet it also gathered in local experience and local forms. It harked back to earlier confrontations between capital and labour to establish a line of continuity with earlier rebels. In laying claim to their oppositional practices, communism was itself assimilated. The unintended consequences of Australian communism—its effects on conservative as well as Labor politics, its contribution to trade unionism, its educational contribution, its impact on diverse social movements, intellectual and cultural life, international linkages and polarities—were perhaps of greater long-term consequence, for with the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to see the sheer implausibility of schemes for a Soviet Australia. The challenge is to comprehend what that aspiration meant to the men and women who served it, to ask why Australians gave themselves to such a cause and what happened when they did.