3

Recognition

The coalescence of revolutionary groupings arranged in the spring of 1920 began to break up almost immediately. The foundation conference reconvened twice in November to adopt a programme, constitution and rules. The executive endorsed the branches formed in Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Townsville, and in Sydney it authorised the establishment of branches in Newtown and Balmain where former Socialist Labor Party members were keen to join.¹ Existing Australian Socialist Party branches in Sydney, Newcastle and on the New South Wales south coast were also to become branches of the Communist Party—but here already problems arose. When Earsman travelled to Newcastle in November 1920 to speak to potential recruits, he rashly disparaged the ASP and described its three representatives on the provisional executive as ‘dangerous individuals who had to be watched’.² His suspicion was reciprocated. The Sydney branch of the ASP, which possessed substantial assets (including the Liverpool Street hall), was reluctant to hand control of them over to an organisation in which it had only minority representation; it therefore stipulated that its property would be held in trust for six months. Earsman and Garden, for their part, lacked the numbers to prevail if they sank their group of followers into the branch structure of the ASP; they therefore constituted the provisional executive as the central branch of the new party.³

There were further spoils they coveted. The new party needed a newspaper for, as Christian Jollie Smith and Tom Glynn explained on behalf of the provisional executive, ‘a party without a Press is like a ship without a rudder’. The plan was to turn the ASP’s weekly International Socialist into a communist weekly and instal their own editor. This scheme turned on their control of the party, which they put to the test when the foundation conference reconvened for a final session on 11 December. There were just eighteen delegates present and Jock Garden was in the chair. Outnumbered, ex-ASP members Everitt and Reardon proposed the election of a new executive in the new year by a ballot of all members, for this would bring the entire membership roll of their own organisation into play. For precisely this reason, Earsman proposed that the provisional executive continue pending the first proper conference of the Communist Party. After Garden declared Everitt and Reardon’s resolution out of order, the conference adopted Earsman’s proposal by twelve votes to five. Next, Earsman suggested, they should appoint an editor of the newspaper. ‘I think that you are moving a bit too fast’, warned Tom Glynn. ‘You haven’t got the paper yet’. But Glynn was elected editor in preference to Everitt, and arrangements for the transfer of ASP property into the control of the executive were confirmed.4

Glynn’s warning proved prescient. Four days later Earsman received a letter from Reardon in his capacity as secretary of the ASP informing him that the executive of that organisation had decided to withdraw its delegates. ‘The whole of the negotiations’, Reardon stated, ‘have shown that a definite scheme exists on the part of a dominant section of the Conference, who represent no one but themselves, to subvert the attempt on the part of the ASP to bring about unity, to their own personal ends’. The ASP would therefore go on without them, ‘unfettered by the shackles of opportunism’, and was immediately adopting the title of Communist Party of Australia (The Australian Section of the Third International). On the first day of the new year this old party with a fresh identity announced itself and a long list of grievances against its false suitor in the pages of its renamed newspaper, International Communist.⁵ For his part, Earsman put a brave face on the rebuff. Rehearsing his version of the negotiations in the first issue of his organisation’s organ, the Australian Communist, he observed that communist discipline enjoined the acceptance of decisions reached by the majority. The ASP had shown itself impervious to this duty and ‘the purging process has to be undergone, sooner or later’.6

As part of their competition to secure recognition from Moscow and enjoy local legitimacy as the true Communist Party of Australia, the Liverpool and Sussex Street parties both bedecked themselves in the trappings of the ‘Communist International’. This early issue of the Sussex Street weekly newspaper sported the hammer and sickle, set in an elaborate frieze of wheat sheafs and laurels taken from Soviet publications. Note the unfamiliar translation of the communist slogan. (Source: ‘Australian Communist’, 21 January 1921)

So there were now two communist parties, each with its own premises, press, adherents and round of activities. Both parties conducted classes and maintained programmes of indoor and outdoor meetings. Both sported the hammer and sickle, both subscribed to the programme of the Communist International. The one that had been the ASP enjoyed the advantages of an established organisation; it owned its own press and meeting hall in Liverpool Street, after which it was commonly known as the Liverpool Street Party (and sometimes as Goulburn Street, the address of its office). Beyond its existing base, however, it showed little sign of progress.

Its rival had to start from scratch. To begin with it printed its newspaper commercially, rented an office in George Street, opposite the Haymarket Theatre, and hired the Concordia Hall in Elizabeth Street for meetings; within three months it moved the office back to Rawson Place and by the end of the year obtained a new meeting hall conveniently adjacent to Trades Hall on the corner of Goulburn and Sussex Streets, after which it was commonly referred to as the Sussex Street Party. But this was not the only tag. Its Liverpool Street critics commonly dubbed it the Rawson Place Party, in reference to the conspiratorial dealings there between Simonoff and Earsman that had brought the alternative party into being, or the Trades Hall Group, to draw attention to its proximity to the site of Jock Garden’s machinations.

The Sussex Street party undoubtedly cast its net more widely than the Liverpool Street party. Through Glynn it cultivated former Wobblies; through Garden it had links with the New South Wales Labor Council; through Earsman with the labour college movement; while as a new initiative unfettered by sectarian associations it aroused interest in circles of free-floating radicals in and beyond Sydney. The key members sketched a description of a new kind of revolutionary politics conducted from within the established organisations of the labour movement—even the craft unions—by a new kind of party dedicated to constant agitation. ‘The business of the Communist Party’, as Jock Garden perhaps tactlessly put it, ‘is to get Communists in control of all positions, and to do anything, and everything, to get them there’.7 Yet the very expediency of the new party’s tactics brought immediate difficulties. Tom Glynn, who had already lent his name to the Communist International’s appeal to the IWW, was quickly accused by his former comrades of betraying his industrial unionist principles: clearly stung by the accusation, he resigned as editor of the Australian Communist on grounds of ill health after just three months in that position. Earsman, on the other hand, was accused by Wobblies, the ASP and the SLP of going soft on craft unionism, while Garden was condemned for ‘intriguing and smooging from the Trades Hall to the Pollies’.⁸ In short, the Sussex Street communists’ attempt to steer a middle line between the industrial unionism of the Wobblies and the political purism of the socialist sects left them open to condemnation from both quarters, while their readiness to grasp at any advantage made a mockery of the claims to constitute a distinctively new revolutionary vanguard.

The accusation of opportunism arose partly from the Sussex Street party’s attempt to break the doctrinaire mould of Australian radicalism, partly from the expediency and inconsistency with which the Sussex Street leaders conducted their enterprise. While the term itself was not new, it took on a new salience in the vocabulary of the left after 1920. Hitherto, the charge of opportunism had been levelled at Labor politicians who compromised their principles in pursuit of electoral advantage or trade union officials who sold out their members in industrial negotiation. An opportunist was a backslider or a renegade from the rigours of the class war. Now there was a new kind of opportunism practised by self-proclaimed revolutionaries who rejected industrial and political purism alike in their attempt to gather up the fragments of the revolutionary left into a new kind of radical crusade. These ‘unity at any price mongers’ were clearly vulnerable to charges of opportunism, yet they combined latitudinarianism with an intolerant suspicion of potential heretics: Jim Quinton, a former Wobbly, came down from Queensland with the intention of promoting unity by joining both communist parties, only to be told he would have to leave the ASP before he could sign up with Sussex Street; Bill Thomas, the lecturer on venereal disease and editor of the Brisbane Communist, was turned away after cross-examination by Simonoff and returned to the Liverpool Street outfit. Simonoff himself was chronically conspiratorial, forever ‘telling everyone things in whispers and telling each one not to breathe anything to anyone else’; and before the end of 1921 the party expelled Tom Glynn for forming an Industrial Union Propaganda League with his old Wobbly friends, despite his insistence that it was based on the Communist International’s industrial programme.9

A similar pattern of attraction and repulsion operated in the party executive’s dealings with branches. When it convened another unity conference in March 1921, its fresh overtures to the SLP and ASP were rejected. Ernie Judd, the unbending leader of the SLP, denounced the party as a front for capitalist spies and agents provocateurs, while Reardon returned the ASP invitation with the observation that that organisation no longer existed. Earsman was able to issue conference credentials to local delegates from Sydney, Newtown, Balmain and Darlinghurst, visiting delegates from Newcastle, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide, with a proxy from Perth.¹⁰ Yet when Jock Garden and Tom Walsh visited Melbourne in February 1921, they shunned the local branch in favour of more credible hosts such as Percy Laidler, while the fledgling Perth branch criticised the party constitution, and Newcastle and Brisbane pressed for rapprochement with Liverpool Street.11

The picture is of a shifting constellation of enthusiasts for different forms of revolutionary working-class politics, drawn by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia to the prospect of an Australian communist party yet unwilling or unable to sink the differences that defined their distinct forms of activity, and unimpressed by the alternatives—the one a familiar presence decked out in new trappings, the other a motley crew of adventurers. Left to their own devices, the rival claimants might have continued to denounce each other and become just two more sects on the fringes of Australian radicalism. But they were not left to their own devices. For the commitment they made was to a new kind of organisation, international in structure and discipline, and it was to the authority of that organisation that they now turned. While the Liverpool Street party enjoyed the support of most Russian exiles in Australia, the Sussex Street party began with the apparent advantage of Peter Simonoff’s sponsorship. Difficult though he could be, he was, after all, the officially accredited representative of the Soviet regime and, at least in 1920, was able to inject the vital ingredient in which Australian revolutionaries were habitually deficient—money. By 1921, however, government surveillance was closing Simonoff’s lines of communication to Moscow. Furthermore, a new emissary had arrived in Australia who threatened to upstage him.

Paul Freeman moved, during the war, from Broken Hill to north Queensland. Everything about him was mysterious except for his politics, which were indubitably militant: his name, usually Freeman but sometimes Miller or Cox; his birthplace, which he said was in the United States; even his nationality, either Dutch, Hungarian or possibly German, as the Australian authorities alleged when they arrested him in Cloncurry and deported him in 1919. The United States refused to accept him, so he was shipped back and forth across the Pacific until, after a hunger strike in Sydney, he was despatched to Germany where the government could not prevent his landing. Thence he travelled to Russia, where he made contact with Big Tom Sergeyeff, who was now a member of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee. Well-connected and resourceful (‘he was afraid only of mosquitoes’, one Australian colleague recalled), Freeman was entrusted with the mission of organising Australian delegations to the Third Congress of the Communist International and the inaugural congress of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), both due in mid-1921. He arrived in Adelaide early in that year with a false passport and a set of conference credentials, and made contact with communists there and in Melbourne as he travelled to Sydney. From March he began publishing a series of articles in the International Communist designed to give the impression he was writing from Moscow.12

This choice of newspapers was important. Freeman made contact with both the Liverpool and Sussex Street parties to urge that they sink their differences, but he clearly leaned towards the former, which already had a connection with Sergeyev. Furthermore, Freeman’s authorisation from the Red International of Labor Unions attracted previously unattached industrial militants into the ASP orbit. So encouraged were Reardon and Everitt by this windfall that they despatched a long message to the executive of the Communist International to press their claims for recognition. All their attempts at unity, they explained, had met with treachery from a group of infantile leftists mired in the outdated bigotry of industrial syndicalism. Their own party was firmly based on the twenty-one conditions laid down by the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, and all that was needed to advance the revolution in Australia was £3000.¹³

The new dispensation threatened the Sussex Street group’s chief claim to legitimacy, and was one reason for its convening the fresh unity conference in March. Earsman reported to his executive an approach ‘by a comrade whose name he was not at liberty to say’, and Sussex Street followed this up with a further letter to Liverpool Street taking up Freeman’s suggestion of a joint meeting of the two executives. Reardon, however, was now sufficiently confident to rebuff the overture, for Freeman was leaving for Russia the following day, having scattered his invitations so generously that the International Communist could boast that three of the party’s members would follow him to Moscow, and that ‘Comrade Freeman has also accepted credentials as our resident representative at Headquarters’.¹⁴

Assured by Freeman that the Communist International would reimburse their expenses, a ragtag band of Australians begged, borrowed and jumped ship to attend the world gathering of revolutionaries. They were making a pilgrimage to the first worker’s state where the red flag flew over the Kremlin. They were leaving a country where the flying of the red flag had been banned during the war and was still an illegal act of defiance. On Sunday, 1 May 1921, a procession of perhaps a thousand marchers followed a red flag through the city of Sydney to the Domain. Jock Garden spoke first in celebration of May Day, and then Jack Kilburn, the bricklayers’ leader and another founder-member of the Communist Party from the Trades Hall Reds. His speech was disrupted by a group of ex-soldiers carrying a Union Jack. The demonstrators seized and burned the hated emblem of imperialism. On the following Sunday an immense gathering, whipped up by the press and primed by a public meeting in the Sydney Town Hall, staged ‘an orgy of patriotism’. They converged on the Domain, broke up the platform, where representatives of both communist parties had joined the Trades Hall speakers, and then laid siege to the Sussex Street Party’s Concordia Hall. The police closed the evening meeting there. Ernie Judd of the SLP, who had refused to speak on the same platform as the others, was badly beaten and arrested for possession of a revolver.15 This was only one of many red flag incidents in postwar Australia that attested to the strength of resistance to communism.¹⁶

A commentary on the red flag riots in May 1921. This cartoon in ‘Smith’s Weekly’ portrays the attack on the radicals in the Sydney Domain as a salutary lesson. The bearded and tattered Bolshevik lets fall the red flag and his seditious leaflets. (Source: ‘Smith’s Weekly’, 14 May 1921)

Bill Earsman was aware of this resistance to communism in Australia as SS Themistocles bearing him and his fellow pilgrim, Jack Howie, made its way across the Indian Ocean. Earsman went as the representative of the Sussex Street party to the congress of the Communist International, Howie as a leading member of the New South Wales Labor Council to the congress of the RILU. With the assistance of the Seamen’s Union, they had signed on as members of the crew, and found the conditions less than congenial. The food was poor, the living quarters squalid, and worst of all, the attitudes of his workmates filled Earsman with disgust. The deckhands lived like pigs, stole without compunction, traduced their wives and obstinately insisted that ‘when it came to putting bombs under your arse they would have none of it and the old King was good enough for them’. As for the firemen, their language surpassed imagination and some of them would ‘do you up for sixpence to get a drink if they were stuck’. Earsman confided to Howie at one point that ‘every one of these bastards should be taken out and shot’. Seasick, neuralgic, tormented by the bugs in his bedding, lonely and pining for his sweetheart Christian Jollie Smith, Earsman found his patience with Howie also wearing thin: ‘Howie makes me sick the way he guzzles and feeds all day long’, not to mention his ability to fraternise with his companions. Earsman’s shipboard study of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder yielded the reflection that the master tactician’s criticism of opponents was too offensive and antagonistic, a weakness he discerned in himself. Attempts to spread the word among passengers and crew demonstrated the acuity of the self-criticism; for the most part he shunned company. Anzac Day passed at sea with a service at which Earsman spoke up for the red flag. ‘Gorblimey, who would take any note of that?’ replied a fireman. ‘It is only mugs and bastards who talk about Red Flags.’ ‘All right mate’, rejoined Earsman, ‘you will see the day when you will raise your hat to the Red Flag’.17

They landed in London on 26 May 1921 and proceeded immediately to the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It was not a propitious time: a national lockout of the coalminers was in progress, emergency regulations were in force and leading comrades were in hiding. Earsman was immediately advised to do something about that all-too-conspicuous hat. Still, the vigilance of the authorities produced one useful result: the arrest of one of the Liverpool Street delegates, Jim Quinton, who was picked up while loitering around the docks in Hull and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Of the two men Freeman had issued with credentials in Adelaide, one was delayed and the other had disappeared. That left three other members of the opposition at large: Alf Rees from Brisbane and Paddy Lamb of Broken Hill, both of whom had been credentialled to the Communist International by Freeman, as well as Freeman himself (who was making his way to Moscow from the other direction, through China and Siberia). There were some additional delegates to the RILU in transit but its congress was not due to begin until July, a fortnight after the opening of the congress of the Communist International, which was the crucial occasion for Earsman’s purposes. Earsman also learned that Rees had preceded him through England.18 To add to his anxiety, he had to wait a week for the next ship that would take him and Howie to Germany, so it was up to his family and the damp cold of Edinburgh before they departed on 2 June. On arrival in Berlin they took in the sights (Earsman thought the Unter den Linden one of the finest thoroughfares in the world, comparable to Princess Street in Edinburgh or even St Kilda Road in Melbourne), arranged visas to the Soviet Union, quarrelled, met other delegates and eventually got away. On 13 June they arrived in Moscow.

This was the third gathering of the Communist International. The first, in 1919, was scarcely more than a gesture of Lenin who had decided that the Socialist International must be replaced because it had betrayed the proletariat by failing to oppose the war with revolutionary leadership. Barely 50 delegates, representing weak and embryonic communist parties, gathered in that year in a Soviet Union wracked by civil war and threatened by the troops of the victorious Allies. Lenin still clung to his conviction that the Russian Revolution was the first of many such revolutions, on which indeed its fate would depend. Revolutionaries from the band of countries to the west of Russia—Germany, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans—shared his optimism. Since the pre-war Socialist International had been the second such organisation (and the successor to that begun by Marx and Engels), the 1919 pilgrims constituted themselves as the Third International. That designation soon gave way to the more expressive Communist International, commonly shortened in the Russian fondness for such contractions to the Comintern.

By 1920, when the Second Congress of the Communist International met, expectations of speedy revolutionary success had been abandoned. While the Red Army had pushed its enemies back from Soviet territory, communists in each one of the Central European countries had met with decisive reverses. Indeed, with the loss of momentum in west, Lenin was more inclined to look east to the countries subjected to European dominion; he now thought their anti-imperial struggles might well prepare the way for communist success in the capitalist heartlands. The emphasis of the Second Congress was on the consolidation of a Third International fully committed to communist principles. Hence more than 200 delegates at the Second Congress from 35 countries adopted the rigorous twenty-one conditions of membership, binding them to a form of organisation dedicated to seizure of power, and then the elimination of parliamentary democracy in favour of soviet dictatorship. Following the Second Congress, moreover, the affiliates in Germany, France and Italy were subjected to damaging splits meant to purge their ranks of moderates and waverers. At the same time, Lenin aimed his tract Left-Wing Communism, which Earsman had studied on the voyage to Europe, at those doctrinaire leftists who rejected any involvement in trade unions or parliamentary elections. He drew his examples from Western Europe—though if he had bothered to consider Australia, his strictures might have been applied to both the Liverpool Street communists and the former Australian Wobblies—and his object was to erase all non-Bolshevik traces from the revolutionary left.

A year later the concerns of the Soviet leaders had changed further. The long civil war was over and the exhausted survivors sought respite from the hardships of War Communism. The urgent task of reconstruction demanded a resumption of trade with the capitalist world, and the so-called New Economic Policy adopted early in 1921 allowed market exchange to encourage production of food and other essentials. The 500 delegates to the Third Congress who gathered in Moscow in June 1921 enjoyed special privileges in their dining room at the Hotel Lux, and Earsman supplemented the meals with fruit, vegetables, cakes and lollies bought at Moscow’s semi-legal street markets, yet he still felt constantly hungry. He was fortunate that the Congress occurred in the northern summer, for starvation and disease would reach catastrophic proportions as winter set in. He was fortunate also that the Third Congress marked a further shift in Comintern policy. Lenin and Trotsky now regretted the disastrous effects of recent splits, which had reduced the European communist parties to an ineffective rump. Under the slogan of ‘Back to the masses’, they called for a more defensive consolidation of communist presence in the principal organisations of the working class, which meant a renewed effort in the unions and labour parties—the very course of action that Liverpool Street derided Sussex Street for pursuing. The Australians were by no means the only delegates divided among themselves in 1921: the Germans, the French, and others brought differences created by their recent convulsions, while the Americans despatched rival claimants to the title of the true communists. The Australians, however, were wholly new to this kind of forum.

Earsman immediately began lobbying. His most useful initial contact was Tom Bell, a fellow Scot and a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who introduced him to both the secretary of the RILU and the credentials committee of the Comintern. Howie and Earsman were accepted with Rees as delegates to the RILU Congress, Earsman given his mandate for the allimportant Congress of the Communist International. For the next ten days he worked feverishly to consolidate his advantage. He introduced himself to other delegates, especially the influential Germans whom he thought could be useful allies; attended the preliminary commissions of the Congress and listened to such legendary figures as Lenin, his wife Krupskaya, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Zetkin and Bela Kun; he wrote and submitted reports on Australia; marvelled at a Red Army parade in Red Square to mark the opening of the Congress, to which he was the Australian representative, and was introduced to Trotsky; pleaded in vain on behalf of the cast-off Peter Simonoff; and endeavoured to stop Howie hobnobbing with Rees. During the rare moments of leisure when he was not washing his clothes, writing up the diary or corresponding with Christian, he struck up a romance with a young German woman.19

On 22 June Freeman arrived, apparently friendly but giving little away. Thereafter the contest was intense. First, Earsman discovered that Freeman and Rees had contrived full mandates for the approaching Congress, whereas his own was a lesser, consultative mandate; it took several days of string-pulling to achieve parity. Next it emerged that Quinton’s credentials for the RILU as a delegate of the Seamen’s Union had been transferred following revelation of his arrest to Rees, an act of betrayal on the part of the union secretary and fellow Sussex Street party member, Tom Walsh. Then Paddy Lamb, the third Liverpool Street delegate, arrived (his forged passport, it was alleged, supplied by John Wren, the sporting tycoon and dubious Labor patron), too late to play a role in the Comintern Congress but in time to attend the RILU Congress as a delegate of the Broken Hill miners. To make matters worse, Freeman was telling influential Comintern officials that Earsman was an anarchist syndicalist, Christian Jollie Smith a bourgeois, Simonoff an incompetent adventurer and their Sussex Street party simply an IWW outfit. With the dispute between the two claimants now well and truly out in the open, Earsman was able to have it referred to a Small Bureau of the Comintern executive at the close of the Congress; meanwhile he resolved to resist the relentless baiting of Freeman. His tactics over the next few weeks were to immerse himself in the business of the Congress, arrogate to himself the role of the senior Australian representative, and leave his opponents to respond as best they could. He quickly sensed the fortuitous change of direction in Comintern policy. He studied the modus operandi of his heroes: Lenin was too scathing; Bukharin, a ‘wee jaunty chap’, was impressive, but none touched the magisterial Trotsky. He listened to the backstairs gossip and tut-tutted Calvinistically at the sexual immorality. Always at the back of his mind was the uncertainty about Freeman’s capacity for mischief.²⁰

Freeman’s election as an alternative member of the Comintern executive boded ill. Then came an accident that removed Earsman’s worry. On 24 July a party of Comintern delegates on a tour of inspection of coalmines as the guests of Fedor Sergeyev, now president of the Russian miners’ union, were aboard an experimental train drawn by a propellor-driven locomotive when it left the track. Sergeyev was one of six killed in the crash, Lamb and Rees were badly bruised, while Freeman died several days later from blood poisoning following amputation of a leg. As Earsman reflected, ‘It seems all the ASP delegation is fated. Quinton in gaol. Freeman dead. Lamb and Rees in bed injured. I am very sorry but thank God it was not Howie or myself’. Earsman was a pallbearer four days later as Sergeyev was given a heroes’ funeral and buried in the shadow of the Kremlin; he thought it ‘a peculiar touch of fate’ that he should have to deliver one of the eulogies to Freeman when he was buried two days after that.21

So now only Rees and Lamb could oppose Earsman at the Small Bureau’s imminent consideration of the Australian dispute. The odds evened when a fresh group of Australian trade unionists arrived in Moscow on 29 July: one of them was Bill Smith, the pliable secretary of the Victorian railwaymen’s union who was immediately furnished by Earsman with credentials as a Sussex Street communist. Suitably briefed, he was present at a preliminary meeting of the accredited Australian delegates—Earsman, Lamb, Rees and Smith—chaired by a senior Russian comrade with Earsman acting as reporter, which reached an agreement for ratification by the Small Bureau:

In view of the fact that there is no difference in principles, program or tactics, except differences arising out of local troubles, this meeting to-day proposes to the Commission of the Small Bureau to recommend an immediate unity of the two parties to take effect before the end of January 1922. This unity to take place at a general conference representing the two parties.²²

Such an outcome might seem a triumph of Bolshevik consensus over reality. There were very real differences of principles and tactics, if not programme, between the two Australian communist parties. Earsman himself had told the Small Bureau that the Liverpool Street imposters were ‘opposed to the theory of the mass party’ and acted as ‘a sect who surround themselves with a halo arising from the Marxian platitudes which they give lip service to’.²³ But if the Comintern wanted an agreement then Earsman was happy to provide it. Principles and tactics, after all, had been the stick with which the Liverpool Street comrades belaboured the Sussex Street opportunists, while Sussex Street was more concerned to get its reluctant spouse to the altar and take possession of the dowry. Moscow was insisting on the first step; he and his associates would take care of the second. He had the additional advantage of acting for all seven Australians who remained in Moscow, as they sought recompense of their expenses; he obtained £500 from Moscow for the costs the two parties would incur in organising the unity conference, and he also established valuable contacts with the German communists as he travelled back to Britain. He left behind the dilatory South Australian delegate, Fred Wilkinson, who as a founder of the Adelaide branch of the Communist Party was clearly aligned with Sussex Street. Wilkinson stayed on in the Soviet Union for eighteen months and ensured that the Comintern officials received Sussex Street’s version of subsequent events.24

There was further welcome news when Bill Earsman reached England in September: the arrest of Lamb and the consequent exposure of his Liverpool Street contacts to British and Australian security agencies. Earsman had a far more innocent-sounding drop for Moscow’s communications to Sussex Street: ‘Miss C. J. Smith Ll.B., c/-Rev. T. Smith, The Manse, Coppin St, East Malvern, Victoria’, though this too was soon discovered. Earsman again spent time in Scotland where he saw his family, his football team (Hearts) and fellow activists, then embarked for Australia, this time as a passenger. He much preferred that mode of travel, which provided drinks, cards and hi-jinks. Earsman organised several of the shipboard concerts and when ‘God Save the King’ was played at one of them, he tactfully pretended to faint. Chastised for disloyalty, he found a ‘little evasion’ saved serious trouble. On his arrival back in Australia the customs confiscated a number of publications in his luggage.²⁵

Of the nine Australians who made that trip to the Soviet Union, we have only Earsman’s account.²⁶ Allowance has to be made for his pronounced tendency to present himself as the only reliable revolutionary among fools and knaves. In his diary we see Jack Howie as a man out of his depth, Bill Smith as a dupe, Alf Rees and Paddy Lamb as spiteful plotters brought to heel. Of the political ideals that had brought them all to Moscow there is little: the diary dwells only on their vanity and cupidity and fondness for a good time. The place to which they have come is the site of contrasts: a Tsarist palace given over to proletarian business; lavish concert halls turned into people’s palaces; superstition, famine, Russian unpunctuality and backwardness side by side with militant atheism, fervent rhetoric, idealism and ideals made real. Earsman’s mode of life becomes almost dreamlike: a round of meetings and discussions and appointments that seldom end before two or three in the morning, interspersed with interminable waiting for a favourable answer. ‘Time is of no importance to the Bolsheviks. They work all day and all night. There may be a shortage of food but never of time.’27

The evidence from Earsman’s diary suggests that this regimen was bad for him, indeed, that it had deeply corrupting effects. He had journeyed to Europe almost as a tourist on a working holiday, tetchy, unsure of himself, missing his lover but wide-eyed and anxious to learn. As he acquired knowledge and expertise, he grew in confidence and vanity. His criticisms were always directed at the laxness and venality of others, for the diary becomes the record of an egocentric monster who projects his own obsessions into the denunciation of convenient miscreants—it becomes a communist variant on James Hogg’s The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, secure in a Calvinist conviction of the immunity of the elect. Earsman’s thoughts of Christian become more perfunctory, replaced by observations of other women in unfamiliar guises: women smoking in bars, women sweeping streets, women accosting him with offers. He is admired for his attractiveness and acquires a red Russian blouse that increases his allure. His esteem for the Soviet leaders is an admiration of their eloquence and insight, but most of all of their potency. So too with the plenipotentiary of Australian communism. He knew what he wanted and he had achieved it: ‘I have done my job well’, he congratulated himself on the settlement of the Small Bureau decision. To be sure, it was a remarkable performance; heavily outnumbered as the only Sussex Street delegate, he had first of all averted the Communist International’s recognition of Liverpool Street, and then set in train a procedure that promised to see them forced into the control of their rivals. ‘This appears to be a good bit of business’, he told himself, ‘and if our party has gone on as suggested, then all is well and we will score and come on top’.²⁸

Meanwhile, in Australia, the party had gone on much as before with a round of public activities, lectures, classes and open-air meetings. For all its talk of a new kind of revolutionary agitation, it continued the old forms of socialist propaganda very much as the Liverpool Street party did. A systematic comparison of the work of the two parties in Sydney was compiled by a visiting Queenslander, J. B. Miles, in August 1921. Originally from the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, Miles was a stonemason who emigrated from north-east England to Brisbane in 1913 and on his own admission became ‘stuck in the mud politically’ until he joined the small Queensland Socialist League in 1918. That group was persuaded by Simonoff, together with the Brisbane branch of the ASP, to throw in its lot with Sussex Street following the foundation conference. A visit from Freeman in the early part of 1921 caused Miles to switch his allegiance, so his visit of inspection of the two Sydney claimants yielded a report that favoured ‘Goulburn Street’ over ‘Rawson Chambers’: even so, its description of their activities is instructive. Both parties held street-corner meetings in the city on Friday nights at which they sold their respective weekly newspapers, Goulburn Street vigorously and Rawson Chambers listlessly; both had their platforms in the Domain on Sundays, that of the Rawson Chambers adherents smaller and less successful; both conducted lectures in their halls on Sunday evenings; both ran educational classes. Miles was scornful of the shortcomings of a Sussex Street teacher as well as of the efforts of Adela Pankhurst Walsh as a lecturer in Concordia Hall: ‘Mrs Walsh is still sentimental and pacifist’.29

There was much that Miles passed over: the links of Sussex Street, through Garden, to the New South Wales Labor Council and its affiliated unions; the fact that Sussex Street still commanded the support of his own Brisbane branch as well as most others; the extension of its influence through the Brisbane fortnightly, Knowledge and Unity, as well as its association with the Melbourne monthly journal, Proletarian. Nevertheless, the similarity of the public forms of the two communist parties was marked. Their weekly papers, the International Communist and the Communist (it had recently dropped the national prefix) both offered a mixture of rhetorical uplift and savage invective in blocks of grey letterpress. Their calls to the working class still enunciated the same litany of evils with the same call to salvation. Both were chronically indigent: Carl Baker, the Sussex Street acting secretary and editor of the Communist, was able to draw just thirty shillings a week as payment, while Liverpool Street had a mounting debt.30 Both offered the same beleaguered fellowship of the elect, and both invoked the Russian Revolution as an affirmation of their cause. The lecture on ‘War and the Working Class’ delivered by Adela Pankhurst Walsh that Miles heard and dismissed as a vestige of pre-communist naivety had been preceded by items sung by the popular Russian choir.³¹

News from the delegates in Moscow was frustratingly sparse, delayed by the poor communications between Russia and Australia, and impeded by the attentions of the security service. Earsman wrote regularly to Christian Jollie Smith and provided reports on the Congress for the Communist, but it was not until mid-October that the decisions of the Small Bureau of the Comintern Executive reached Earsman’s colleagues in Sussex Street. Hard on the heels of that welcome bulletin came a further message from Earsman in London that reported the arrest of Lamb, regretted ‘that the police now have ample evidence that Russia is playing a part in Australian affairs’ and warned that ‘it will not be very long before you have the police around’. He might have saved pen and ink, for the Australian security intelligence had long been intercepting his own correspondence; it also seems to have had access to his diary.³² When Freeman departed Sydney on 2 April, he left behind a series of reports on life in the Soviet Union, which were serialised from June in the International Communist as if they had been freshly received. The first genuine news of him there was the international press agency’s report of his death. Before he was picked up by the English police, Lamb had sent Reardon of the Liverpool Street party a letter relating how Earsman had contrived the outcome of the Small Bureau investigation and advising Reardon to check the credentials of Bill Smith. He somehow managed to get an early passage back to Australia upon his release and reported to Liverpool Street about the time that Sussex Street received Earsman’s report.33

The last thing the Liverpool Street leadership wanted was another unity conference. Having once escaped the toils of Earsman and Garden, they had no intention of allowing themselves to fall again into the Sussex Street embrace. So when Carl Baker, the acting secretary of the Sussex Street party, wrote to Reardon, the Liverpool Street secretary, to propose that 5 November be fixed as the date for the two organisations to meet and plan a unity conference, Reardon stalled. Acting on Lamb’s advice about the crucial role of Smith in Moscow, he had already written to Melbourne for evidence that Smith was a ring-in. Still awaiting that information, he wrote back to Baker on 21 December to decline the invitation: Liverpool Street intended to appeal against the Small Bureau decision on two grounds, first that Smith was not a communist and hence ineligible to serve as a delegate to the Communist International, and second that the Small Bureau was incorrect in suspending the prior affiliation to the International of his own organisation. Earsman, who by this time had reached Sydney, responded by stating he was entitled to issue Smith with delegate’s credentials and he challenged Reardon to produce evidence that Liverpool Street was affiliated. Such was the state of play when the Sussex Street party held its first annual conference at the end of the year. (There had been an earlier conference in March 1921, but that had merely ratified the decisions that were to have been taken at the failed unity conference immediately beforehand.) Delegates from Sydney, Balmain, Newtown, a new Trades Hall branch, Newcastle, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns and Innisfail heard Earsman’s report on events at the Comintern, and sent a delegation to Liverpool Street, without success.³⁴

There were worrying signs of setback registered at the conference. The executive complained of carping criticism from the branches. The several Sydney branches were difficult to sustain and the conference resolved to merge them. News from the outlying branches was mixed. Perth was inactive; Adelaide sent a message of support; Brisbane affirmed its loyalty, partly through the work of Peter Larkin, one of a family of Irish rebels, and who had also been active further north; but Melbourne was disaffected. It had begun with more than 50 members, rented a hall in Swanston Street and ran functions most evenings, but this early level of activity quickly ebbed. Of its founders Carl Baker had moved up to Sydney, where he deputised as secretary of the party in Earsman’s absence, while Guido Baracchi had sought exile in New Zealand from one of his recurrent romantic intrigues and would shortly leave for Europe. By the end of 1921 the Melbourne branch wanted to merge back into the VSP. Its two conference delegates, Jack Maruschak and May Francis, both thought the lack of unity in Sydney was as much due to Earsman’s ambition as Liverpool Street’s obduracy, and Francis claimed afterwards that Earsman was so cynical as to celebrate the death of Freeman. The Melbourne branch was wound up soon after their return.35

In the face of these difficulties, the imprimatur of the Communist International was all the more important to Sussex Street. If the Liverpool Street members would not agree to a unity conference, it would hold a unity conference without them. The All-Australian Unity Conference duly assembled on 18 February 1922, bereft of ASP representation but gathering Tom Glynn back in along with some other Wobbly remnants, to declare itself the United Communist Party of Australia and send Moscow a full account of how the dutiful comrades had been ‘fooled, humiliated and sabotaged’ by Liverpool Street.³⁶ The Liverpool Street party was handicapped by disruption of its correspondence from Moscow, but despatched its appeal against the Small Bureau decision. The Earsman group should have been instructed to join the party with the prior affiliation, argued Everitt, who also provided details of Smith’s ineligibility to attend the Small Bureau meeting (for his friend Reardon had since received confirmation from the foundation secretary of the Melbourne communist group that Smith had not taken part in its establishment).³⁷ It was too much for the exasperated secretary of the Comintern who despatched instructions to Garden and Reardon, reminding them that they had been instructed to resolve their differences by January and demanding that they explain what was happening by return of mail. Six months earlier the Kremlin had been crawling with Australians full of revolutionary zeal. Yet, as the convenor of the Comintern’s newly formed Anglo—American Bureau with responsibility for the Australian party remarked, ‘The comrades that came here last year voluntarily explained all differences and promised to achieve unity, only to go home and do nothing’. He issued Wilkinson with instructions to convene a new unity conference.38

Relief was at hand. Hitherto Reardon and Everitt had commanded the support of ASP membership in their denunciation of the Sussex Street adventurers; now divisions began to open. When the Small Bureau decision first reached Australia, Bob Brodney, who had initiated the ASP’s participation in the first unity conference, suggested that unity should be considered anew. Suspended from membership of the Liverpool Street Communist Party (the ASP abandoned that title at the end of 1920) for three months as a disciplinary measure, he appeared to repent but then repeated his error.³⁹ By March a group of dissidents emerged in the key Sydney branch of the party with allegations of central office mismanagement by Arthur and Marcia Reardon, and against Everitt’s conduct of the International Communist. The newspaper was deep in debt, and owed Everitt a large sum of money, while ownership of the press on which it was printed had been assigned to him as security, so he controlled the paper absolutely. The dissidents were younger men of radical temper including Bert Moxon, a knockabout with a quick tongue, Tom Payne, a bootmaker drawn from Victoria to the political excitement of Sydney, Gordon Stettler, who became secretary of the Sydney branch, and Bill Thomas, readmitted after an earlier expulsion and indignant because Everitt refused to publish another of his venereal disease tracts. But they were not the only critics of the ‘Holy Trinity’. Upon his return from Russia, Alf Rees found the ineffectuality of the Liverpool Street party pitiable. For his part, Arthur Reardon refused to budge an inch to the demands that Liverpool Street rescind its policy against participation in a unity conference with Sussex Street. ‘I am not against unity, but against unity by intrigue’, he insisted. There were violent rows, accusation and counter-accusation, culminating in a threat by Everitt to sell the press. In retaliation the Sydney branch members quit for Sussex Street, taking with them, under cover of darkness, the furniture, piano and office equipment. The press was too heavy to shift and Moxon wanted to burn it, but wiser caution prevailed and it remained to be sold to a commercial printer. This effectively killed the ASP. Arthur Reardon related its demise to Brodney.

Everything was taken. Piano, forms, platform, partitions, fans, everything! Honest men are not wanted in the movement. The slaves do not want them. I have no desire to stand between the slaves and their wishes. The wife is still in a bad way and generally our little world has crumbled to dust about our ears.40

A new unity conference was held in July to form a new United Communist Party, though the product was far from united since the former Liverpool Street comrades proved as mettlesome in their dealings with the Sussex Street executive as they had with Everitt and Reardon. Constituting the majority of the Sydney branch of the newly amalgamated parties, the newcomers exercised considerable autonomy in conducting their affairs: they took it upon themselves to discipline and even expel backsliders. With their large book membership (they claimed 175) and a new rule change that gave branches one delegate for every ten members, they were in a position to wield considerable influence at the annual conference due at the end of the year. When the Sydney branch elections went against the executive, the executive charged five of the Liverpool Street mob with various offences, including drunkenness, whispering and alleging that Carl Baker ‘was more concerned about a meal ticket than the movement’. Two of these miscreants were expelled. The defiant Sydney members elected them as branch officers. Further expulsions followed and the Sydney branch retaliated by charging the executive for the use of its hall.

Enough was enough. The executive disbanded the entire Sydney branch and set up a new one to which the rebel members were invited to apply. Some did; the diehards led by Stettler held fast and appealed to Moscow. In the meantime they barricaded themselves in the party hall and broke up the type of an executive statement for the party newspaper. They were cleared out in time for the annual conference to be held in the hall at the end of the year (though one of them assaulted delegates with a length of timber) on the understanding that the ‘country’ delegates from outside Sydney would adjudicate on the dispute. That part of the conference was chaired by J. B. Miles of Brisbane, who had rejoined the Sussex Street party earlier in the year and was now secretary of the Brisbane branch. This was the second time he had acted as an adjudicator and this time he picked the winning side. The conference endorsed the executive’s actions.⁴¹

All of this would have astounded the officials of the Communist International—not just the unseemly bickering and indiscipline but the very structure of the Australian Communist Party, which remained an organisation constituted along traditional lines, the members organised by locality rather than by workplace, jealous of their rights and delegating only limited authority to the executive. ‘Your Party is still weak, your experience of class struggle as a Party still inadequate, your preparedness for taking a lead in the future intensified class fights is still deficient’, the executive committee admonished the Australian comrades. Still, the deed was done. A united Communist Party was at last achieved. The patience of the Comintern committee responsible for Anglo—American Bureau matters had been sorely tested: Tom Bell, Earsman’s compatriot and friend in court, had pleaded they be given a little more time. The news of success was fittingly given to the Comintern by Earsman, who left Australia in the company of Peter Larkin early in May 1922. In July Earsman was in Berlin and able to pass on a report of the successful unity conference. In August he reached Moscow and gave a first-hand account; on the ninth of that month the United Communist Party of Australia was accorded recognition by the Communist International.42