Recognition came at a price. While membership of the Communist International brought assistance, contacts, prestige, not to mention the heady excitement of participation in the great political experiment of the modern era, it also imposed substantial obligations. The Communist Party of Australia was not simply an affiliate of an international forum where like-minded delegates could pool their experiences and exchange views on policy and methods: rather, it was the Australian section of a ‘centralised world party’ that invested its Congress and Executive with absolute power over every constituent organisation.1 Furthermore, the Executive’s Anglo-American Bureau was already vexed, not just by the tardiness of the Australian comrades to comply with instructions to achieve unity, but by their laxity in the application of communist principles of political activity.
The Leninist model posited a revolutionary party of a kind unknown in Australia, a vanguard organisation that led the workers in all their struggles, projected its presence wherever they gathered, including in the organisations of the labour movement, in order to unmask the traitorous leadership of that movement and rescue the toiling masses from economism and reformism. This formula challenged the ingrained habits of Lenin’s Australian followers. Their rejection of gradualist labourism had led them to repudiate compromise, to maintain the ideological purity of their socialist creeds in tiny, proselytising sects and, in the case of the Wobblies, to counterpose their own industrial organisation against the existing trade unions. The uncompromising tone of the Russian comrades seemed at first to confirm that oppositional stance, for was not the success of the Bolsheviks a vindication of their own vanguard role? It was to combat such attitudes among misguided British revolutionaries that Lenin wrote Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder. Its insistent argument that real revolutionaries did not stand aloof from the forums of the working class but entered them to win over the workers was readily taken up by the Sussex Street communists for use against Liverpool Street’s accusation that they were simply opportunists. While Earsman studied an early translation of Left-Wing Communism on board the ship that took him to the Third Congress of the Communist International, he found ‘good propaganda but nothing new contained in it’. Lenin’s arguments seemed to accord with the strategy that he and Garden had been following all along, namely to recruit the ardent revolutionaries into a new party and harness their energies to assist the Trades Hall Reds’ campaign to win control of the labour movement. As Earsman progressed further in his reading, his pleasure increased. ‘Many familiar arguments are dealt with in a way that is entirely new to me but which I have been acting on.’2
Yet, like many polemics, the import of Lenin’s tract went further than this. It acknowledged the strength of reformism in countries where the working class had substantial experience of parliamentary democracy and had been able to win a share of the spoils of imperialism. It incorporated his strategic assessment that in the advanced capitalist democracies the postwar revolutionary tide had peaked for the moment, so that further preparation was necessary to win their workers over to communism. It rejected the Wobblies’ project of setting up alternative industrial organisations in favour of effort within the existing unions. It construed the labour party as a political form that was fundamentally different from the European social democratic parties, one constituted by its trade union membership rather than a coherent political programme and hence susceptible to ‘permeation’ or ‘boring from within’. It therefore demanded of the newly formed communist parties a degree of discipline and coherence of purpose that they had not previously displayed. Finally, and Lenin did not disguise this limitation even if he was characteristically insistent in his exposition, it relied on its author’s second-hand knowledge of the circumstances from which he derived his conclusions: Left-Wing Communism drew its estimate of the balance of forces from answers provided to his leading questions by erstwhile British leftists. It was this aspect of the work of the Communist International that made its theoretical practice so susceptible to disputation: not just the reliability of the evidence or the aptness with which reported symptoms were diagnosed, but the inevitable blurring of meaning when a common vocabulary was applied across divergent cultural systems. Lenin found the British (and Australian) form of working-class politics bizarre in their liberalism. Trade unions that were open to workers of all political persuasions sustained a political party that in turn tolerated a remarkable diversity of views. So different was this from the organisational principles with which he was familiar that he underestimated the strength of the British Labour Party’s attachment to parliamentary gradualism, and for similar reasons he failed to appreciate the extent of the Australian labour movement’s dependence on its privileged relationship with the state.
If the peculiarities of the British puzzled the leading Russian communists (and Lenin had after all studied that labour movement in some depth), how much more paradoxical seemed the circumstances of Britain’s antipodean colony. Earlier reports such as that written in 1913 by Sergeyev had suggested that the much-vaunted social laboratory of reformist experimentation was in fact hopelessly backward. It described a class accommodation that was so thorough and complete as to suggest that communists were wasting their time in Australia. The Australian delegates who arrived in Moscow eight years later told a different story. In articles and reports produced at the request of the Communist International during 1921 they dwelt on the radical nationalist tradition, the audacity of the Eureka rebels, the determination of the strikers in the 1890s, the more recent defiance of arbitration tribunals and rejection of conscription. Indeed, so prodigious was their assessment of the class conflict in Australia that foreign readers found it difficult to understand why the local Communist Party was so small and ineffective.3
In any event, the way to build the Communist Party of Australia and strengthen its influence seemed clear. It should intensify work in the unions by means of the Red International of Labor Unions, and use the affiliation of unions to the ALP to extend its influence into the Labor Party. As it transpired, neither of these tactics was as straightforward as they appeared to the Comintern. The implementation of both revealed divisions among communists as well as the strength of resistance to them in the Australian labour movement.
The creation of an Australian section of the RILU was entrusted, at the organisation’s founding congress in Moscow in July 1921, to Jack Howie. For all of Earsman’s difficulties with Howie there, his task seemed straightforward. Howie was a former president of the New South Wales Labor Council and close associate of its secretary, Jock Garden. He returned from Russia, it was said, ‘a changed man, abler, straighter and with a better insight into the revolutionary movement’. He also had £300 to help him with the task.4 His scheme was to secure the affiliation to the RILU of the peak union bodies, the New South Wales Labor Council and its interstate counterparts, a scheme wholly consistent with the methodology of the Trades Hall Reds though scarcely what Moscow had in mind with its slogan of ‘To the masses’. The Trades Hall Reds represented a miscellany of craft, industrial and general unions affiliated to the New South Wales Labor Council, which met and had its offices in that ramshackle building in Goulburn Street from which they took their name. Elected as officials or delegates at sparsely attended general meetings of their members, these Trades Hall Reds commanded an uncertain following. By day they endeavoured to organise worksites and improve their members’ pay and conditions; at nightfall they gathered in the forum of the Labor Council to pass fiery resolutions against wage slavery.
The scheme to make this body of officials the local arm of the RILU ran into immediate opposition from Tom Glynn. He joined with his former Wobbly comrade J. B. King in October 1921 in the formation of an Industrial Union Propaganda League, based, they said, on the manifesto of the RILU, for the purpose of combatting the sectionalism and craft consciousness of existing unions. The Sussex Street executive denounced this misinterpretation of the purpose of the RILU and expelled them, yet on the eve of the unity conference of February 1922 accepted them back into the party as an Industrial Union Propaganda Group and recognised their newspaper, Direct Action, as a communist publication. In the same month the New South Wales Labor Council voted to affiliate to the RILU. The Communist Party made much of this endorsement from the largest trade union council in the country, yet in truth it was a somewhat hollow victory: the Labor Council was a sparsely attended forum that lacked the membership of key unions, and no other trades hall elsewhere in Australia followed its lead.5 Furthermore, Garden’s contemptuous dismissal of rank-and-file industrial organisation brought angry condemnation from Glynn and King, who terminated the support for the Communist Party and RILU of their Industrial Union Group.6
This was the final, irrevocable and perhaps inevitable breach, and the tangible cost was not great since the Wobblies were a declining force in Sydney. A more serious setback occurred in Adelaide when, in late 1922, Glynn and King’s colleague Charlie Reeve revived the IWW and precipitated the collapse of the local branch of the Communist Party.7 Of greater significance for the Australian left, in the long run, was the eclipse of the rebel tradition the Wobblies embodied, a singularly heroic form of workplace agitation imbued by a rebel spirit that scorned all compromise and refused the subordination of workers’ interests to calculations of political advantage. It would be almost a decade before the communists rediscovered such forms of obdurate, oppositional militancy, longer still before they overcame their persistent tendency to impose political control over industrial activity.
Corresponding weaknesses bedevilled their attempt to enter the Labor Party. This was an objective that Garden had pursued by one means or another from the time that he and his Trades Hall Reds had parted company with it in 1919. They had resigned or been expelled following their unsuccessful attempt, along with Albert Willis of the miners, and other industrial militants, to win control of the New South Wales branch. Their earlier effort to create an alternative Industrial Socialist Labor Party had failed. Now, through the Communist Party, Garden tried again. His opportunity arose in the middle of 1921 when, to heal the divisions and revive its flagging fortunes, the federal executive of the ALP convened an All-Australian Trade Union conference in Melbourne. It was a forum well suited to Garden’s purposes. The politicians present were anxious to mend bridges with the unions and accepted the proposal that the Labor Party should take as its new objective ‘the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange’ (even though a federal conference later in that year added the qualification devised by Maurice Blackburn that exempted those enterprises conducted in a ‘socially useful manner and without exploitation’). The chief point of contention at the Melbourne conference arose over the revived push for One Big Union as the appropriate form of industrial organisation. Garden no longer pursued that chimera. Instead, he entered into an alliance during the conference with the conservative Australian Workers’ Union, which had most to lose from such a scheme and counterposed its own half-hearted alternative by which it would swallow its rivals. Here indeed was a marriage of convenience! The president of the AWU central branch and the dominant figure on the New South Wales Labor Party executive was John Bailey, a bare-knuckle fighter who had hounded the industrial militants out of the ALP back in 1919. Henceforth Garden and the Communist Party would back him in the intense factional conflicts that bedevilled Labor in New South Wales. Such cynical opportunism brought condemnation from Glynn’s Industrial Union Propaganda Group, the Liverpool Street communists and his former ally Willis, yet Garden was finally blocked in the pursuit of his objective of readmission to the ALP by his own Sussex Street comrades. As it was reported to the Communist International, following the Melbourne conference an invitation to rejoin the Labor Party was given to the Trades Hall Reds along with the rest of the Sussex Street party, but when Garden reported this offer to the executive they one by one rejected it on the grounds that acceptance would lead to the disintegration of the party.8
The episode occurred in mid-1921, before the decisions of the Third Congress of the Communist International, which might well have strengthened Garden’s hand, were known in Australia. The Sussex Street party did report the Congress’s theses later in the year. As early as 1922 it echoed the Comintern Executive in calling for a united front. The form of this alliance, however, was specified as ‘unity in action’ rather than communist affiliation to the Labor Party. Apart from their concern that any application to join the ALP might leave them open to accusations of opportunism, the Australian party leaders simply did not trust Garden. Perhaps they sensed that the strategy of permeating the ranks of the reformists might well overtax their own revolutionary purpose, and that the permeators would themselves be permeated. They certainly feared that Garden was using the Communist Party as a device to re-enter the Labor Party, where his main ambitions lay.9
Such was the advice that Earsman took to the Communist International in 1922 and it was badly received. Along with its decision to recognise the finally united Communist Party of Australia, the Anglo-American Bureau of the Comintern was preparing a letter to the Australian comrades that instructed them to apply immediately for membership of the Labor Party. Earsman resisted strenuously. Such a unilateral instruction, he said, was simply holding a pistol to the head of his party’s executive and would split the membership. At the very least, he urged, the executive should be given time to prepare those Australian comrades who had devoted their political careers to denunciation of the Labor fakirs for the unwelcome news. A telegram to that effect was despatched to Sydney, while a draft of the letter went off to the praesidium, which passed it across to Karl Radek for a final polish, a fortuitous delegation since items that landed on his desk tended to remain there indefinitely—and there the Australian letter did stay until after the Congress. Even so, the ground for the Australian implementation of the united front was prepared by the appearance of Garden at this Fourth Congress of the Communist International. He was credentialled as a delegate and departed Sydney in early September along with Tom Payne, one of the recent recruits from Liverpool Street. The fact that Earsman had signalled his opposition to the united front just a few weeks earlier makes this hurried addition to the Australian delegation all the more significant. Garden received a full credential as a delegate, Earsman, Payne and another Australian based in the Comintern the lesser consultative ones. Furthermore, Garden arrived in November with a cabled message from the Australian party that cast a cloud over Earsman and, try though he might, the wily Scot could not get his genial compatriot to show it to him.10
Bill Earsman’s diary entries during this second visit to the Soviet Union reveal new depths of cynical self-absorption. Thoughts of his beloved Christian had given way to Mollie, and in the meantime there were Lola, Wilma and unnamed others in the febrile foreign quarter of Moscow. He had hopes of winning a place on the executive of the Communist International and lobbied assiduously, only to find in the end that Garden would be accorded that honour. He was in touch with Gordon Stettler, the leader of the disbanded Sydney branch of ex-ASP members who had appealed to Moscow for re-instatement to the CPA, but the Comintern Executive knocked that scheme on the head. Earsman’s old ally Peter Simonoff was also in Moscow, but had fallen so far from favour that now Bill had to buy the drinks. The Comintern expected Earsman to return to Australia at the end of the Congress, but he had no intention of doing so. Drinking heavily and resorting to casual ‘kneetremblers’, he declined rapidly. At the end of the Congress he did some work for the Comintern in Germany and in Britain, where he was informed at Australia House that he would not be allowed to re-enter Australia. Back in Moscow by mid-1923, he earned a living as an English teacher at the Military Academy for a year, still censorious, still condemning the opportunists in the party who would use affiliation to the Labor Party for their own ends. He was joined by his wife and children from Melbourne, but she died in 1925; he became an engineering consultant for the Soviet Union, remarried and eventually settled in Scotland where he joined the Labour Party, was elected to the Edinburgh City Council, helped establish its festival and passed out of the history of Australian communism. Few lamented his departure. His lack of scruples and secretive, self-serving habits were unattractive. Yet he has a place in the history of Australian communism, for without those qualities the Communist International would not have endorsed the fledgling party that he assembled.11
There was lengthy discussion of the united front during the Fourth Congress. ‘Theoretically’, Earsman reported, ‘all parties accepted the tactic but not two agreed on the application’. Earsman defended as best he could the Australian party’s earlier limited application. But Jock Garden won the limelight and the argument with a speech to the Congress of remarkable audacity. He described a party that was small in numbers but immense in influence: ‘The Communist Party in Australia has a membership of nearly one thousand, and yet it is able to direct just close on 400 000 workers …’ In every union, according to Garden, communist workers served as nuclei to provide leadership and direction. They had linked up the union forces into One Big Union to break down craft barriers and defy the employers. They had exerted their influence at the 1921 Melbourne conference to change the policy of the Labor Party and open its doors to communist affiliation. In short, the Australian Communist Party had ‘found the keynote to organisation so far as the Anglo-Saxon movement is concerned’. The speech was a resounding success and won Garden election to the Executive of the International, even though it exaggerated the influence of the party to a ludicrous degree. The party membership, which he put at close to a thousand and the Congress record had at 750, was in fact reported by the acting secretary as 250 and even that figure was too high.12 The count of 400 000 followers was reached by aggregating inflated estimates of the membership of unions affiliated to the New South Wales Labor Council and the Brisbane Trades and Labor Council. There were no union nuclei. How could there be when the pitifully small number of communist trade unionists concentrated their efforts on manoeuvres at Trades Hall and its adjacent pubs? There was no One Big Union, not least because Garden had joined with the AWU to frustrate it. His speech travestied the prospects of the Communist Party of Australia as well as his own role. ‘Why did you do it, Jock?’, he was asked when he returned to Australia basking in his celebrity. With a grin and broad wink, Jock answered: ‘That’s what they wanted’.13
Jock lived dangerously. On his way to Moscow he had parted company with Tom Payne (who was travelling on a false passport) to visit family and friends in Scotland, and Tom never recovered the sum of money given to Jock for safe-keeping.14 After the Congress Jock again interrupted his passage in Scotland. On 10 February an Edinburgh newspaper carried a sensational report from its correspondent on the north-east coast describing remarkable ‘Revival Scenes at Lossiemouth’ as the Reverend J. S. Garden made hundreds of converts with his fiery sermon, ‘Young men, the rapids are below’. Bill Earsman was himself visiting Scotland at the time, and seized on the incident as a means of discrediting the former ally who had so recently eclipsed him. ‘I have never trusted him from past association’, he claimed, and added that he hoped that ‘little bugger Rakosi’, the Comintern official (and future Stalinist despot against whom the Hungarians rose in 1956) who had championed Garden at his expense, would be present when he returned to Moscow with chapter and verse of the scandalous incident. Carpeted for his indiscretion, Jock produced an explanation worthy of a character in a John Buchan novel—he presented himself as a white Prester John who put on the dog-collar as a disguise. The Scottish police were on his trail, he said, so that he had adopted the identity of a preacher to throw dust into their eyes. Could he be blamed if his pretence was so effective? There was a grain of truth in this alibi. Jock had returned to his birthplace for a reunion with family and friends. Cutting a fine figure—he was recalled 50 years later for his bright purple cravat—he had at first addressed public meetings as a publicist of Australia as a land of opportunity. It was the concurrent excitement of a religious revival in north-east Scotland that tempted him to display his prowess as a preacher, and he subsequently apologised for his indiscretion, affirmed his fidelity to the materialist conception of history and declared himself ‘willing to bow to any discipline’. The Anglo-American Bureau considered his actions foolish but he was too important a figure to lose and no further action was taken.15
There were other tall stories told by the Australians at the Fourth Congress. On the evening of 1 December Earsman and Garden were summoned to a private audience with Lenin. As Earsman related the meeting, Lenin listened with close attention to the Australians’ account of the changes in the Labor Party and urged the most patient cultivation of its members. He heard of the affiliation of the New South Wales Labor Council to the RILU and declared it a magnificent achievement, warned of the need to prepare thoroughly before risking a seizure of power, and stressed the importance of Australia ‘because we all know it as the land of bourgeois political experiments and if a successful social revolution were carried out there, that would be the last straw of the Labor bourgeois politicians smashed’.16 Earsman also related an earlier meeting with his hero Trotsky at the headquarters of the Red Army. Trotsky asked the Australians how their party had been formed and laughed heartily at the account of the expropriation of Liverpool Street: ‘That was real direct action and the party composed of that kind of material is a good fighting C.P’. He paid particular attention to the role of the IWW, for he considered its adherents ‘the real proletariat and the real fighters’. Trotsky’s partiality for the Wobblies, for those who came to the Communist Party free of the contamination of the ‘politicals’, was marked. Still, he too pressed the Australians for a statement of their work in the Labor Party and was told that although the party had been bitterly opposed to it and there had been a ‘bitter struggle’, the members ‘now fully understood the full significance of the “United Front” ‘. Trotsky’s interest flattered the Australians; his confidence and elan captivated Earsman in particular: ‘You felt the strength and power in every word he uttered’.17 But according to Tom Payne, the whole meeting was based on a misunderstanding—Trotsky was under the impression that Bill Earsman was the far more important American communist delegate, Max Eastman, and brought the discussion to a speedy termination when he realised his mistake. Payne also gave a different emphasis in his account of the audience with Lenin, whom he thought had quizzed the Australians at length because he was deeply sceptical of Garden’s exaggerated claims.18
At the conclusion of the Congress the Executive Committee of the Comintern issued its long-awaited letter to the Communist Party of Australia. It pulled few punches. Like other young sections of the Communist International, the letter read, the CPA suffered from isolation, and members worked ‘in doctrinaire and sectarian fashion, merely as a means of preserving the purity of their principles’. In particular, ‘your press leaves a good deal to be desired’. It was not enough to write clever articles showing up the backwardness of the masses; the paper had to take part in their struggles. Recent developments had confirmed the appropriateness of the Third Congress’s call ‘To the Masses’ against the capitalist offensive, and the subsequent tactic of the united front. The Australian Party should therefore intensify its work in the unions and make immediate application to join the Labor Party, for in Australia even more than in Britain, the Labor Party was a peculiar type of union-based party with a petty-bourgeois leadership that could be unmasked and overthrown from within. ‘The United Front is not a peace treaty. It is merely a manoeuvre in the proletarian struggle. It is not an end in itself, but a tool for the acceleration of the revolutionising process of the masses.’19
Apprised in advance of the receipt of the letter, the annual conference of the Communist Party of Australia adopted this version of the united front at the end of December 1922. The resolution on industrial policy declared the trade unions to be the ‘mass organisations of the working class’ and the primary site of the class struggle. Communists were to take up the immediate demands of the workers in ways that would promote class consciousness; they were to encourage the move towards industrial unions but not to split the existing craft unions, and—this final instruction confirming Garden’s role—they were to work through the state union councils with the object of aligning Australian trade union policy with the RILU. The resolution on the Labor Party recognised it as the political expression of the Australian working class: ‘the aims, ideals, leadership of the Labor Party remain anti-revolutionary because the workers themselves lack class-consciousness’. Only through action would workers gain the experience and understanding necessary to throw off these middle-class prejudices and the reformist leadership, and to this end the Communist Party declared its readiness to support the Labor Party in resistance to capitalist oppression, proclaimed its solidarity with the Labor Party membership and demanded the right to affiliate while at the same time insisting on its own ‘independent and revolutionary point of view based upon the unassailable principles of Communism’.20
While this was a fair translation of the Communist International’s instructions, there was no sign that the larger implications of its criticisms were recognised. The Australian party continued to operate as an association of dispersed branches organised on a residential basis, those outside Sydney in intermittent contact with headquarters; and the Trades Hall rather than factory groups serving as its industrial arm. In Sydney the traditional forms of activity remained much as before: the street meetings with their sale of literature, the evening lectures in the party hall that waxed and waned in attendance, a popular dance on Saturday night and much less popular educational classes that repeatedly had to be revived. The set-piece debate was a political format that continued to pull crowds, so that in August 1923 three communists accepted a challenge from three Protestant ministers to contest the proposition ‘That a classless democracy requires for its realisation a Christian dynamic’. Jock Garden prudently occupied the chair.21 In the same month there was a free speech campaign after the police began breaking up street meetings in the city. Garden, Baker, Howie and Tom Payne were among those gaoled for refusal to pay fines in a traditional form of defiance, and the party was able to mobilise support from the Labor Council, the ALP and sympathetic churchmen in its demand that the established pitches be restored. This was a united front but still of a traditional, restricted and temporary nature.22
A communist Sunday school for the young comrades attracted controversy during 1922 when a New South Wales cabinet minister who eventually would be convicted of murder, accused the communists of poisoning the minds of the innocent. Yet in truth the Sunday school merely continued along the lines of earlier socialist children’s groups, with dances, songs, classes in nature study and industrial history, and stories that endeavoured to lift young minds ‘above the animal plain that some adult minds are satisfied to dwell on’. Branches of a Young Communist League for teenagers were formed in Sydney and Brisbane during 1923, with study classes and social outings. The league also published its own periodical, The Young Communist.23 The party press continued to publish clever articles that dwelt on the backwardness of the masses. Thus the archetypal bonehead worker Henry Dubb, who had his origins in cartoons of the American socialist press, was constantly set right by Australian communists of superior intelligence in dialogues published in the party newspaper, only to remain obstinate in his ignorance, invincible in his lack of class consciousness.
Party membership remained tiny. In a report to the Anglo-American Bureau secretary at the end of 1923, the Australian secretary regretted his organisation still had only 250 financial members. The actual figure was considerably smaller. Since dues had been reduced at the beginning of the year from ninepence a week to sixpence, and the total collected in 1923 was a little over £107, there were on average less than a hundred fully financial members. Three in four candidates for membership were quickly lost, the secretary said.
They fall out for various reasons, some because we have sought affiliation with the ALP, some because they have been forced to work in centers where no other party members are working, some because they get unfinancial and are unable to devote their time to party activities, others because of indifference, etc.
He listed fifteen groups, several new ones in north Queensland, others in the northern coalfields of New South Wales and the industrial south coast. Most of these were tiny and ephemeral.24
Fifteen women members were reported. After some initial attention to capitalism’s corruption of sexuality, the party made little effort to recruit women. Adela Pankhurst Walsh had lectured and written in the early days on communism as a force for sexual purity that would free women from the tyranny of lust and the degradation of labour. Her appeal was to women as wives and mothers of the working class, and she vehemently opposed the bourgeois feminism that sought to expand career opportunities for women: ‘emancipation does not consist in driving buses and entering munition factories, nor in possessing a latch key or studying the law’.25 By 1923 she had dropped out of the party and even this circumscribed attention to women’s interests had disappeared as the party directed its attention to the masculine arena of industrial politics. The handful of female comrades meanwhile addressed their sisters as backward partners of working men who lacked the class consciousness that came from the factory floor but who might be persuaded to stand by their men. The working-class wife could assist the class struggle so long as she did not carry the sex war into the class war, suggested Christian Jollie Smith, and concluded that it was ‘at least twice as hard for a woman to be a Communist as a man’.26 If the communist was a militant worker, then those who performed domestic labour could at best serve as auxiliaries.
The Communist changed its title in June 1923 to Workers’ Weekly. The change was intended to assist the promotion of a united front, and in response to criticism from Moscow the executive explained that the more forthright bannerhead was unpopular. Circulation rose to 4500, the executive claimed—actual receipts suggest an average circulation of between 2000 and 3000—as some effort was made to popularise the contents in accordance with the Comintern’s advice that the party press should ‘take part in the daily struggles of the workers’ and be a record of ‘live activity and example by deed’. Party members offered accounts of their work in the unions and their efforts to permeate local branches of the Labor Party, emphasising the need to consider the views of Laborites and avoid needless antagonism while always seeking to expose the reactionaries ‘in their hideousness to the masses’. An impatience with the older declamatory style of socialist propaganda was apparent, as in the self-portrait of a miner on the northern coalfield.
Many of us do not carry about with us in our heads or our pockets a Cyclopaedia of Marx, and beyond ‘Value, Price and Profit’ know little of his works (while recognising the absolute necessity for our leaders to have an absolute knowledge of Marx); still, we have brains to understand—that is why we believe in Communism. We are not nice Sunday Communists who attend the Hall in Sydney once every three months.27
The mixture of provincial deference and proletarian superiority is striking, if somewhat feigned (for the rhetoric betrays the fluency of a worker-intellectual); the juxtaposition of theory and practice, local activism and guiding doctrine, gives early notice of a persistent tension in Australian communism. At the end of 1922 the party had assumed responsibility for the monthly Proletarian Review, dropped its suffix, and moved it from Melbourne to Sydney; under the editorship of Carl Baker it served as a doctrinal primer in the manifold iniquities of capitalism and the laws of history that guaranteed its imminent collapse. Baker, schooled in the soap-box tradition of defiant infidelism and cerebral socialism, also edited the Workers’ Weekly until September 1923 when H. L. (‘Snowy’) Denford took over both as editor and party secretary. A knockabout activist who had left school before his thirteenth birthday, and been active both in the IWW and the ASP, Denford was by this time an official of the Ironworkers and one of the Trades Hall Reds. In March 1924 he was succeeded as editor by Jock Garden, who also became the political secretary of the party while Denford continued as financial or organisational secretary.
Garden was the dominant figure in the Communist Party from 1923. He operated out of his Trades Hall premises in Goulburn Street, where an assistant secretary and Albert Willis’s daughter, the stenographer-typist, worked in the main room while he used the phone in his thinly partitioned office to conduct his schemes. Guido Baracchi arrived there in 1924 to organise one of the communist united front initiatives, the Workers’ International Relief, and observed how Garden was constantly scheming with John Bailey, still his principal ally in the ALP factional infighting. Baracchi was intrigued by Garden’s brazen effrontery, his unscrupulousness and generosity, opportunism and courage—‘an unmitigated liar who also had his moments of truth’.28
Garden opened the united front when he led his Trades Hall communists into the 1923 state conference of the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party. Even by the standards of that body, it was a stormy meeting. The unholy alliance of John Bailey’s AWU and the Trades Hall Reds was outnumbered by other union delegates (including the miners’ leader, Willis) and the parliamentarians, led by the redoubtable Jack Lang. The conference considered Bailey’s malpractice in parliamentary preselection ballots and the executive subsequently expelled him. A delegate challenged the presence of the communist union delegates on the grounds that the ALP constitution debarred members of other parties. Willis ruled from the chair that the communists were eligible to attend. With the conference tied on a resolution to allow the Communist Party to affiliate, the chairman exercised his casting vote in favour. Three communists, Garden, Howie and J. J. Graves of the Stovemakers’ Union, were elected to the ALP executive.29
Willis’s support was clearly crucial: although estranged from Garden, he was still sufficiently sympathetic to the communists to entertain their membership of the Labor Party. Yet almost immediately the Communist Party threw away his support in a display of inept polemics. In a period of shrinking demand for Australian coal and intermittent employment, the owners locked the miners out of a strike-prone Maitland pit. While Willis and the union executive sought to negotiate a return to work, the Communist Party called for an all-out stoppage and accused the union officials of betrayal. No sooner was a resumption of work negotiated in July 1923 than the Communist Party publicised sensational allegations by Bill Thomas, who had now thrown in his lot with Sussex Street and was one of the communist speakers active on the coalfield. Thomas alleged that at the outset of the dispute he had been approached by the Nationalist minister for mines on behalf of an employers’ organisation with an offer of £500 if he would advocate violence and implicate the Communist and Labor parties in his activity. According to Thomas, while he was at the office of the employers’ association he met Cleeve Ullman, a former member of the ASP employed by the coalminers’ union as an advertising canvasser for its newspaper, Common Cause. Again according to Thomas, he enlisted Ullman’s assistance in playing along with the employers to gather evidence of their perfidy. Thomas duly broke the story, which was taken up in the press and parliament, but Ullman related a different story: he claimed that Thomas had told him he was hard up and had decided to approach the coal owners. For Willis, who accepted Ullman’s version of the episode, this was the final straw. He dismissed the communist editor of Common Cause for sacking Ullman and withdrew support for the communists in the ALP.30
So when the parliamentary wing moved against the communists at the state executive meeting of the ALP, Willis sat on his hands. The state executive voted to expel the communists from the executive and membership of Labor Party. The 1924 state and federal conferences confirmed that decision. In a series of purges the communists were driven out of the local Labor branches. The inquisition conducted by the New South Wales executive tested the resolve of the communists. Some made no bones about their allegiance and were promptly expelled, sometimes taking their Labor branches with them. Others refused to identify themselves in accordance with orders from the party executive, despite the clear instruction from the Comintern that all communists should be forthright in their revolutionary agitation. If the purpose of the united front was to unmask the traitorous leadership of the Labor Party, then in its Australian implementation it seemed that it was the communists who were hiding their true identity. Certainly in arguing the case for affiliation, the Communist Party executive minimised the differences between the two parties: it claimed that both shared the same object, socialism, and differed only over the means of its achievement. Labor needed the communists for they were the best and most reliable fighters.31
‘You cannot mix oil and water’, the Queensland leader E. J. Theodore insisted at the 1924 Federal Conference of the ALP.32 In retrospect the decision taken at that conference to close the door to communists seems so obvious as to render any close attention to the tactics of boring from within superfluous. No party that sought to win approval from the Australian electorate could afford to be associated with a revolutionary organisation that took orders from Moscow. The circumstances of political life forced the Labor Party to assuage the fears of voters for whom class rhetoric was alarming and the British Empire a bulwark of national security. Labor itself was a coalition of forces, including Catholics who recoiled from the atheist materialism of the communist Antichrist and moderate trade unionists who eschewed industrial militancy for the security offered by state arbitration. Leading communists had reputations as irresponsible adventurers and professional rabblerousers removed from the enthusiasms, anxieties and modest pleasures of ordinary Australians. All of these truisms have the force of hindsight and in truth they were acknowledged at the time by communist analysis of the unpropitious native environment. Yet the campaign to gain entry to the Labor Party was not wholly quixotic. Labor’s composition and character was not predetermined. Still scarcely three decades old, it had cultivated moderation during its pre-war era of electoral success and Commonwealth office. Following the wartime expulsion of its leading moderates over the conscription controversy, it was deprived of success in federal politics throughout the 1920s, and for a time—as the Melbourne conference of 1921 showed—oppositional currents ran strongly. The 1924 decision, then, marked the reversal of that dissident flow at official levels. Henceforth the reformist and the revolutionary streams ran in separate channels.
While the campaign for unity failed to convince the executive of the Labor Party, its effect on communist membership and morale was debilitating. The party executive claimed 115 recruits enrolled during 1924; the financial records reveal a financial membership as low as 75.33 Nor was the Left Wing Movement it launched in the unions during 1924 any more successful in halting the drift of affiliates out of the New South Wales Labor Council. Garden wrote occasionally to the executive of the Communist International with fresh claims of success for the policy of boring from within, but the Comintern was not convinced. It chastised the Australians for the infrequency of their communications, the lack of information about party organisation, membership and policy, the lifelessness of the occasional copies of Workers’ Weekly that reached them, and the manifest lack of success. ‘Australia is one of the weakest sections of the Communist International’, the Executive Committee noted, and ‘so long as this silence on your part is maintained, we can never hope to build an effective section of the Communist Party in Australia’. No Australian delegate went to the Soviet Union for the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in 1924; instead Australia was represented by the former English suffragette Dora Montefiore, who had recently returned from an extended stay with family settled in Australia. She had been handicapped by the restrictions the Australian government imposed upon contact with the local comrades but reported that ‘I saw enough when in Sydney to realise how grave this muddled situation was’. A Comintern official who made a clandestine tour of Australia at this time to raise funds for Russian famine relief reached the same conclusion.34
There were some outside Sydney who shared these misgivings. At the Third National Conference of the party in December 1923 the Queenslanders J. W. Roche and Fred Paterson had wanted a clearer assertion of the communist case against the ALP, and suggested that in their state, where Labor had been in office for seven years, ‘the time was opportune for launching an attack’. The suggestion was defeated by sixteen votes to four.35 Similar criticism surfaced at the party’s Fourth Conference twelve months later when Carl Baker denounced Garden’s constant intriguing with Bailey and the subordination of communist principles to a strategy that had proved so unsuccessful. He had some support from the Melbourne and Brisbane branches, but was again easily outvoted and removed from the executive.36 Stung by the criticism, Garden himself signalled the need for more forthright tactics with a denunciation of those party members who had ‘hidden every semblance of being a Communist’ and subordinated themselves completely to the ideology and methods of the Labor Party. The conference instructed its remaining members in Labor Party branches to declare immediately their membership of the Communist Party and challenge the ALP to expel them.37 As a further step, the party announced that it would run six candidates in the 1925 New South Wales state election—Garden and Pat Drew in Sydney, Tom Payne and Lionel Leece in Balmain, and H. L. Denford and Nelle Rickie in Botany. Garden, as one of the six, might well have had misgivings since he had to rebut rumours that he was a reluctant candidate. The tortuous qualification the party advanced during the election campaign carries the ring of Garden seeking a bob each way: ‘These candidates are put forward, not in opposition to the Labor candidates, but in conjunction with them, in opposition to the orthodox capitalists.’38 He received just 317 votes. Tom Payne, who might well have won Labor endorsement for Balmain had he not been expelled as a self-declared communist, drew 191 votes. The Labor Party under the leadership of Lang won the election and not one of the communist candidates saved his deposit. At least Pat Drew kept his sense of humour. Asked how many votes he had obtained in Sydney, he replied, ‘Sixteen brother—four more than Christ had to start with’.39
Lenin coined the metaphor that communists would support reformists as a rope supports a hanging man. Here that metaphor is applied to the New South Wales Labor leader Jack Lang, who won office later in that year in an election in which six communist candidates attracted a derisory poll. The ghost of Lenin, who had died the previous year, looks on omnisciently. (Source: ‘Communist’, February 1925)
Badinage could not disguise the severity of the set-back. In this first test of its electoral popularity, the Communist Party had failed miserably. Furthermore, the anti-Labor forces exploited the communist bogey in federal elections later in the year, bringing new repressive measures and redoubling the determination of the ALP to distance itself from its inconstant and unwanted suitor. The instruction to reveal communist allegiance therefore completed the round of expulsions, just as the threats by the triumphant New South Wales Labor Party to disaffiliate unions with communist officials had a sobering effect on the Labor Council. While Garden remained in the Communist Party, many of his lieutenants did not. Some of these Trades Hall Reds had been open communists and some secret ones; by 1925 the majority came to the conclusion that communism would bring them no benefit in their careers and severed the links—just as Earsman had predicted three years earlier. Garden himself acknowledged after the horses had bolted that the direction ‘into the Labor Party’ had too easily been interpreted as complete subordination to the Labor Party. The work of the ALP had assumed greater priority than the work of the Communist Party. Its obligations were less irksome, its rewards more enticing. J. J. Graves of the stovemakers was one who opted for the Labor Party along with Jack Beasley of the Electrical Trades’ Union, Bob Heffron of the Marine Stewards’, Arthur Rutherford of the Saddlers’ Union, Jack Kilburn of the Bricklayers’ and soon even ‘Snowy’ Denford, the former Communist Party secretary. These men represented a mixed bunch of trades and differed in their qualities; even so, they included a future leader of the New South Wales parliamentary Labor Party, Heffron, and a Commonwealth Labor Party cabinet member, Jack Beasley. That great Australian party, composed of the ex-communists, was already swelling.40
The Communist Party was at a low point. Guido Baracchi had returned to Sydney late in 1924 from Germany, where he had been an editor of the English-language edition of the Comintern’s journal, International Press Correspondence or Inprecorr. He was elected to the Australian party’s executive, became editor of its revived theoretical journal, Communist, organiser of educational classes in Sydney, and briefly filled in for Garden as political secretary. Baracchi was appalled by the isolation of the party as well as the sectarianism it practised, most notably during the worldwide strike of British seamen in the latter part of 1925 when the communists were at loggerheads with the Seamen’s Union, led by Tom Walsh and Jacob Johnson. Walsh (who had parted with the Communist Party) and Johnson (who belonged to a tiny and doctrinaire socialist group) were sentenced to deportation by the vengeful federal government for their solidarity with the British seamen, yet the most that Baracchi could persuade the Communist Party to do was to allow the indigent victims to bunk down in the Communist Hall.41 In the aftermath of the New South Wales elections he came to the conclusion that it would be better to liquidate the party and concentrate on gingering up the labour movement. An article by him to this effect was included in the December issue of Communist, but the executive stopped its publication. His advice rejected, he resigned:
I feel very much like a man who has just undergone a surgical operation. And this is so because I realise very well that the members of the Communist Party are the best comrades in the movement, although I feel that the Party itself, as an organisation, is such a tragic farce that I cannot bear to be associated with it a moment longer.42
The majority of the Melbourne branch, which had reformed in 1924, reached a similar conclusion and also resigned.43 Among the comrades Baracchi extolled was Tom Payne, whose popularity was such that Baracchi reported Balmain aldermen vying to be seen walking down Darling Street in his company. But at the party conference in December 1925 it was reported that Payne ‘did not place much enthusiasm into the election campaign’ and dropped his party duties soon after it. He was expelled.44
This was the state of affairs that awaited Esmonde Higgins, Baracchi’s friend and comrade-in-arms at the University of Melbourne during the anti-conscription struggle. Higgins also returned to Australia in 1924, from England where he had worked for the Communist Party in the Labour Research Department and formed a close friendship with the leading British Communist, Harry Pollitt. His return was arranged by Christian Jollie Smith (a former schoolfriend of his sister, Nettie Palmer), who suggested to Jock Garden that he might revive the Labor Council’s defunct Labour Research and Information Bureau in Sydney. Jock liked the idea, but its funding relied on his scheme to win control of the Labor Party so Higgins found himself running it on a part-time basis out of Trades Hall while trying to earn a living as a factory hand. He too was elected to the executive and entrusted with educational and editorial work by a party in which such skills were in short supply. Christian had warned him of the difficulties: ‘The movement here is in an extraordinary condition, Guido says unique, most of the rest of us say worse things’. The British party was hardly a model of efficiency, but he was quite unprepared for the extent of the disorganisation and demoralisation in Sydney, and he poured out his weariness and frustration in letters to Harry Pollitt. In September 1924, he described the party as ‘a handful of derelicts marooned away from everywhere, with four-fifths of the Party members only ‘‘secret’’ members as a result of the prohibitions of the Labor Party constitution, and therefore absolutely unreliable’. By March, when the secret members had been instructed to declare themselves, he wrote, ‘Things here are awful’. The party was reduced to just 40 active members, ‘a couple of handfuls in Sydney, varyingly small handfuls in Brisbane, Newcastle, Melbourne, north Queensland and the three New South Wales coalfields—and that’s all’. Squabbling and backbiting was constant. ‘Bluff, intrigue, faction, indiscipline, hypocrisy, talk, ineptitude—that is all the poor old Party is able to trade on now.’ By the end of July he could stand it no longer and tossed in the editorship of Workers’ Weekly to chase a job.45
There was another observer of the party at its nadir. Christina Stead was working in a city office, having resigned from the New South Wales education department less than three years after she completed teacher training, saving desperately to escape overseas. Through her father, David, who was a scientist, socialist and general enthusiast for good causes, she was familiar with Sydney’s radical circle; through her own privations and deep unhappiness she found herself in the inner-city milieu of the communists. Her novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney is set during the seamen’s strike of 1925 and presents a circle of tormented outsiders who seek through politics and philosophy to assuage their unhappinesses. Written after she reached Europe and drawing on the knowledge of her American communist companion, its overlay of later onto earlier politics makes identification of its characters all the more hazardous, but Guido Baracchi was convinced that he formed the basis of Fulke Folliot, the editor of the party newspaper. Folliot and his wife had independent incomes and had travelled. They worked hard among the seamen and the poorest of Australian workers, and ‘carried high the torchlight of their metropolitan culture at the same time, talked Cezanne, Gaugin, Laforgue, T. S. Eliot, Freud and Havelock Ellis’. The party librarian, who works as a printer, is suspicious of such culture: ‘There’s only one book yew need to know, an’ that’s Marx, and only one exegesis yew want to read an’ that’s Lenin on Marx’. The studious German who works alongside him sees Folliot as a romantic: ‘It riles me when I see Fulke get up before a body of bleak-faced, whiskered, half-starved men and get off his cheese-cake eloquence …’ Little Fulke, ‘gay, small, plump and mellifluous’, addresses party members and British seamen at the Communist Hall, some sleeping with their coats as pillows, and mocks the conservative prime minister, Mr Wellborn, with whom he had been at school (as Baracchi had with Stanley Melbourne Bruce) in a speech that passes high over their heads. The novel shifts about the sprawling city, from inner-city slums in Woolloomooloo to the harbour heads, where Stead spent her childhood, the point of departure from ‘Terra Felix Australis, this waste and sleepin’ land’.46
So at the end of 1925 Guido embarked once more for Europe. On the same liner a leader of the British seamen was being deported, and a long line of waterside workers had assembled to farewell him. As the vessel cast off and the first-class passengers exchanged salutations and streamers with friends on the wharf, the strains of the old Wobbly song could be heard rising over the clamour—sung not sadly as the funereal dirge it sometimes became, but with a jaunty tempo as an affirmation of the rebel spirit:
Hallelujah! I’m a bum
Hallelujah! bum again
Hallelujah! give us a handout
To relieve us from pain.47