The Australian party made its unswerving loyalty to the new line of the Communist International quickly apparent. From the beginning of 1930 the executive embarked on a course of absolute fidelity to the politics of the Third Period. It gave constant and uncritical support to Stalin’s actions in the Soviet Union: the breakneck industrialisation, the collectivisation of agriculture and the purges and show trials that accompanied them. It reproduced his strident denunciations of the imperialist powers and exhorted workers to defend the Soviet homeland from imminent assault. It heralded the world crisis of capitalism as the harbinger of a revolutionary upsurge. It construed fascism and social democracy alike as devices to which the capitalists resorted in their attempt to avert the crisis—hence the social democrats were now social fascists, a term that meant little in a country where few recognised the Labor Party as the local form of social democracy, but was promulgated regardless—and it sought to expose the reactionary nature of both. It therefore embarked on a strategy of defiant confrontation of the authorities and unrelenting opposition to the Labor Party and the trade unions. It imposed an iron discipline on its own adherents, who were expected to make any sacrifice, endure any hardship, accept any risk, in the service of the party. The Communist Party of Australia had come late to the Third Period and it now embarked on a frenzy of activity designed to provide revolutionary leadership to the victims of the crisis, workers, unemployed workers, the poor and dispossessed, in the struggle of Class Against Class.
Circumstances lent plausibility to the new line. The federal Labor government that won office in October 1929 was confronted almost immediately by the breakdown of the international financial system and paralysis of world trade, with domestic consequences that a debtor country heavily reliant on its export industries was powerless to withstand. As wool and wheat prices tumbled, and loans were called in, many farmers walked off the land. Falling sales, business failures, wage reductions and lay-offs extended the misery to towns and cities. Thus began what would become known as the Great Depression, though at the time it seemed more like collapse. It was an economic crisis of unprecedented severity that engulfed Australia along with every other capitalist country, and its effects persisted for years. It was a social crisis that upset established patterns of production and consumption, overwhelmed entire communities and strained the relationships that gave order and meaning to collective life. And it was a political crisis that swept away elected governments and threatened to extinguish democratic freedoms.
Unable to prevent the economic disaster, incapable of dealing with its budgetary consequences, the national Labor government succumbed to internal division and was voted out of office at the end of 1931. The inability of federal Labor to protect jobs was matched by the failure of Labor governments in South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, and later in New South Wales and Queensland, to provide more than the most meagre relief to the victims of the Depression—the wage-earners who were thrown onto the scrap-heap, the families deprived of an income, the young people who had no prospect of finding a job, the growing army of destitute, homeless and desperate Australians. Their rising discontent brought street protest to every Australian city, which in turn was answered by police repression and the mobilisation of right-wing organisations to suppress the left. The capacity of the trade unions had been sapped by the defeat of the waterside and timberworkers, so that when the miners were bludgeoned into submission the effective resistance of the industrial labour movement was exhausted.
According to the Communist Party every one of these developments confirmed the logic of the Third Period. The poverty of the countryside, the cuts imposed on wage-earners, the misery of the unemployed, the weakness of the Labor Party and the unions, the brutality of the police and the outrages of the paramilitary right, all were consistent with revolutionary crisis. In the first flush of its supremacy, the new leadership exulted in the beleaguered condition of the party. A constant round of activism, street demonstrations, confrontations with the social fascists, expulsions, bashings, arrests and repeated gaol sentences, all validated the line. Even as it fought to survive, the party drove out any who hesitated to make such gestures of defiance most of which were futile as they were destined to be ignored by workers. For a brief moment, the logic of Class Against Class pushed Australian communism to the verge of insurrection.
‘Moxon tends to be hysterical, acts as though he were in the midst of a battle in which instant action was of vital importance.’ Jack Kavanagh made the observation in his diary in February 1930, just a few weeks after Bert Moxon assumed the post of party secretary and plunged into precipitate implementation of the new line. Moxon had immediately turned the Workers’ Weekly over to reports of a general capitalist offensive upon workers in all industries, along with repeated explanations of how the treacherous social fascists were sapping resistance. The newspaper’s tone of desperate urgency transmuted any wage cut or work speed-up into a symptom of the impending crisis, any communist activity into evidence of a rising revolutionary tide. The forms of communist activity it held up for emulation were stridently confrontational, accusatory, defiant, irreconcilable. Every rebuff it suffered, every failure to answer its shrill proclamations, became further confirmation of the bankruptcy of the reformists. ‘The correct appreciation of social fascism’, Moxon predicted, ‘will forge the party into a steely power to meet the coming decisive class battles’.1
The steel was forged on the northern coalfield where, after nearly a year of defiance, the miners were in a desperate condition. All savings were exhausted, the local co-ops had long since emptied their shelves. The federal Labor government had failed to end the owners’ lockout, the conservative state government had despatched large squads of police to open pits with volunteer labour and stopped unemployment relief, the craft unions had surrendered and the central council of the Miners’ Federation still refused to extend the dispute to other fields. As soon as he assumed control of the party, Moxon despatched leading comrades to Maitland, Cessnock, Kurri Kurri, Weston and the other mining townships, with strict orders to defy the bans on public assemblies and conduct themselves without regard to their personal safety.
The Hunter Valley thus became a testing ground for party members in the new rigours of Class Against Class. Dozens were arrested, charged and convicted for offences ranging from intimidation and assault to vagrancy, profanity and insulting policemen.2 The party insisted that members should refuse to be bound over or pay fines: ‘gaol must be accepted if only to prove that such institution cannot deter or intimidate the real revolutionary workers’. It held Joe Shelley up as a model of ‘Communist defiance’ when he was charged with incitement to murder in a speech given to a meeting in Kurri Kurri on 8 January. ‘I am a Communist’, he declared at the trial. ‘I hold that force, violence and energy are the essence of progress and as such are necessary.’ Sentenced to two months hard labour, he refused to enter into a bond of good behaviour and was given another three months. A local communist, Bill Laidlaw, responded similarly when convicted of insulting police from the same platform four days later with the words, ‘They are so low, they could crawl under the belly of a snake and still have a bit to spare’. He chose to serve a fortnight in gaol rather than pay his fine and since a good behaviour bond would have required him to desist from public speaking, he accepted an additional four weeks.3 The party celebrated its martyrs and it singled out particular comrades for martyrdom. Moxon sent many of the old executive for spells of duty on the coalfield; he accused one of sounding the retreat as the union executive prepared to conclude the forlorn resistance, and even ordered Esmonde Higgins to use force if necessary to prevent union officials from putting its proposals to a mass meeting of miners. Of the 3000 present, Higgins judged that perhaps a dozen would have backed him.4
The defeat of the miners, the last of the major work groups to have resisted the employers’ drive at the end of the 1920s, demonstrated the depleted condition of the Australian labour movement. As the Depression intensified, no union was able to withstand the insistent downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Yet Moxon’s repeated exhortations to smash the capitalist offensive by ‘ruthless exposure’ of the Labor Party and the trade unions, a project which belied their enfeebled condition as well as that of his own party, culminated in April 1930 with a directive for nothing less than a general strike: ‘Workers of Australia, the hour has struck—fight as one man. Smash capitalism in a mass strike.’5 Not one worker responded to the party’s call and not one communist seriously expected them to do so. The directive was aimed at Moscow, not Australia; for while the new executive undoubtedly enjoyed the approval of the Communist International, it had yet to make good its undertakings of unswerving loyalty to the new line. Its need to consolidate control over the Australian party and its determination to break utterly with the old ways both required the most credulous revolutionary rhetoric.
Breaking with the old ways meant discrediting the old leadership. Jack Kavanagh still enjoyed the respect and companionship of prominent comrades such as Esmonde Higgins and Joy Barrington, Jack and Edna Ryan, Tom Wright and his future wife Mary Lamm, who clustered in the inner suburbs of Glebe and Newtown, close to the party headquarters, and sustained much of its activity. His residual influence was apparent when he topped the poll in elections to the New South Wales state and Sydney district committees conducted shortly after the national party conference. He and Jack Ryan showed no signs of remorse, and Kavanagh was said to have boasted that the new national leadership would not last six months; yet neither man could be attacked without serious risk of collateral damage since Kavanagh enjoyed a strong personal following on the New South Wales Labor Council, which remained a valuable affiliate of the Red International of Labor Unions, while Ryan was still the Australian organiser of the RILU’s Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, to which both the Labor Council and the ACTU were affiliated. Even in full flush of the Third Period, the Communist International was reluctant to sacrifice these valuable footholds in the Australian labour movement. Moxon proceeded, nevertheless, to do so.
On 6 February 1930 he accused Ryan of ‘perpetuating the reformist illusion’ with an article Ryan wrote in the Pan-Pacific Worker that attributed the persecution of the miners to the Nationalist New South Wales government and a notice in the same journal that donations to a defence fund for Indian prisoners should be sent to ‘the counter-revolutionary Garden’. Flimsy though these charges were, they sufficed to achieve Moxon’s purpose, as Ryan disdained to answer them. He was accordingly expelled from the party later in the same month, on the very eve of the ACTU congress in Melbourne. The timing was unfortunate. At that congress the ACTU’s link to the PPTU came under sustained attack from right-wing delegates; Ryan was excluded from the communist fraction of five inexperienced delegates who voted against a compromise resolution, and by a narrow margin the congress then rejected further affiliation.6 Moxon reported Ryan’s expulsion to the ECCI by telegram and lamely sought its immediate advice about the implications for the RILU and PPTU. The Comintern Executive’s response to his message is not known but its displeasure can be gauged from a subsequent comment that the expulsion was ‘inexpedient’ and Moxon’s apologetic justification that Ryan was ‘unreconcilable’. Ryan himself reported his travails and their larger consequences in a letter to Lozovsky, the secretary of the RILU, who lobbied on his behalf in Moscow. If he had been prepared to recant his errors, he would undoubtedly have been readmitted. But as he remarked, it was obvious that the Australian party must be making ‘remarkable strides’ if it was able to expel one of its most active members out of ‘personal animosity’.7
Moxon conducted his campaign against Kavanagh more circumspectly. The former leader retained the confidence of party members in Sydney, as the recent election of the district committee demonstrated; he still believed that the recent change of national leadership was a temporary reverse and that his supplanters would quickly discredit themselves. Moxon therefore sought to detach Kavanagh from his base of support by despatching him to the provinces. To do this he had to assure Kavanagh that he bore no grudges. Kavanagh was justifiably sceptical of Moxon’s disavowal of the insistent rumours that he was ‘head hunting’, but perhaps too ready to interpret the new party secretary’s simulation of conciliation as a sign of weakness: ‘He is afraid to push too far’, Kavanagh noted in his diary. So he allowed himself to be sent out of Sydney on missions that were designed to discredit him. First Moxon directed Kavanagh to the northern coalfield and then accused him of going there without permission. Next he ordered Kavanagh to Adelaide to supervise the party’s campaign in the state elections. Kavanagh found the theoretical level of the South Australian comrades low, and no wonder, since the branch there had only just been re-established, but was censured by the Central Executive Committee in his absence for perpetuating reformist illusions in the campaign literature.8
He returned to Sydney in April to find the Sydney district branch in uproar. An aggregate meeting in the previous month, called by the CEC to explain the expulsion of Ryan, had produced open criticism of the party leadership; Tom Wright was reported to have said that ‘The CEC is a gang of nincompoops led by the nose by Moxon’. The CEC interpreted such frankness as a ‘glaring example of the flagrant opposition to the New Line’ and convened a further aggregate meeting in April, with one of its own members, Ted Docker, in the chair. Docker, a Sydney carpenter and early member of the party who had emerged as a particularly zealous enthusiast for the new line, wielded his authority with relish to chastise the branch and replace dissident members of its committee. When he denied Kavanagh a hearing, Joy Barrington called him a Mussolini.9
At this inauspicious point in the new regime, the representative despatched by the Communist International arrived in Sydney in April 1930. His name was Harry Wicks, though in Australia he used his Christian names, Herbert Moore, and also the pseudonyms Simpson and ‘XYZ’. He was an American, who had gone to Moscow in 1929 as part of a delegation of the Communist Party of the United States of America, which itself had fallen into the error of national exceptionalism in resistance to the new line of the Third Period. Lovestone, the United States party leader, had been denounced by Stalin and expelled, but Moore submitted and was now sent to root out the same error in Australia. Tall, commanding, with a square-shaped, close-cropped head that reinforced a barrackroom manner, he immediately imposed his authority on the Australian comrades. Kavanagh, who resisted him from the outset, claimed to have recognised him from an earlier American encounter as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. That seemed an extravagant allegation but Moore was ultimately expelled from the American party as a spy and subsequent evidence suggests that he was an undercover agent for anti-communist organisations for the whole of his party career.10
Moore took up the campaign against the party rebels as an object lesson in Bolshevik discipline. His method of imposing control was far more subtle than the bluff and bluster of Moxon, for it involved the systematic use of a new punishment known as self-criticism. Self-criticism was a form of public confession in which the errant communist publicly acknowledged his or her failings and undertook to eradicate them. In rebuking the Australian party for its deviations from the line in 1929, the Communist International had instructed the leaders to embark on a cleansing process of self-criticism and Moxon had endeavoured to comply, with limited success. Moore insisted. Within two weeks of his assumption of control, the Workers’ Weekly announced ‘Self-Criticism as a Means of Winning the Masses’. He straightaway summoned the oppositionists in the Sydney branch to appear separately before him and accused each of failure to carry out particular tasks in an appropriate manner. Joy Barrington had already been expelled for calling Docker a Mussolini, but then appealed to the state committee, which reinstated her. She now came before Moore and the CEC, and was forced to apologise for ‘an impermissible attack upon the leadership of the Party’. Upon signing a public undertaking that she would henceforth submit herself to revolutionary discipline and join the struggle against ‘all who continue to follow my former wrong line’, he allowed her to remain. Among the other dissidents to follow her example was Tom Wright. He would become at once the most pliable and the most steadfast of party functionaries, a striking example of the restorative powers of self-criticism.11
Ryan and Kavanagh were harder to crack. Moore sought out Ryan and urged him to apply for readmission. As he related their private meeting, Ryan declared that he wanted to be in the party but that ‘many comrades have it in for me’. Moore replied that ‘personal considerations cannot enter into the work of the Party. It is purely a political question.’ (Ryan’s impish aside that he knew Moore must have arrived in Australia because of a split infinitive in a recent party manifesto suggested that personalities were not so easily suppressed.) In any case, Ryan’s utility was declining as the communists widened the breach with Garden and the New South Wales Labor Council by setting up their own fraction of the RILU and seizing control of the Australian office of the PPTU, so that by 1931 the Labor Council was not even a nominal ally. Before that final breakdown in relations between the communists and the erstwhile Trades Hall Reds, Moore had, in any case, convinced the ECCI that Ryan was incorrigible since he still refused to make a confession of his errors.12
It did not stop there. Edna Ryan, Jack’s wife, was called upon to repudiate his opposition. Initially torn between attachment to the party and loyalty to Jack, she allowed the Workers’ Weekly in early 1931 to publish a statement that she was not associated with his anti-party activities. In a cruel twist, she was then denounced by her former friend, Mary Lamm, for a defiant speech given at a women’s meeting and ordered to appear before the party’s disciplinary tribunal, the Central Control Commission. Jack Loughran, another old comrade, interrogated her.
It was hard to believe I was being carpeted by that Irishman who could be so funny, full of humour and repartee—one of the enjoyable members of the group. He was sour, bitter and quite ridiculously authoritarian and judicial. I did not try very hard, I did not plead … If I ever received an official notification of the result, I do not remember it. It was over and I never went back.13
Kavanagh was also resistant. He first came before Moore and the CEC for his conduct at the Sydney branch meeting in April 1930 and for criticising Moxon’s rash call for a general strike. The Third Period was still not operating in Australia, Kavanagh told his critics, and there was not yet sufficient resistance among Australian workers to justify its tactics. It was ‘a serious error’, he insisted, ‘to issue a call that would bring our members out of industry and sacrifice them needlessly’. Moore appealed to Kavanagh as a leading member of the party to reconsider his position. ‘We don’t want to discipline members to the limit’, he claimed, and Kavanagh’s cooperation was all the more important because the executive was ‘not as strong as it ought to be’. Kavanagh was unimpressed. He observed in his diary that ‘Self-criticism is intended primarily for those who do not kowtow to the CEC’. Later in the same month he allowed himself to be elected to the chair of an unemployed conference in place of the party nominee. In the following month he again accepted nomination at the Labor Council in an election of delegates to the RILU conference in Moscow, despite instructions from Moxon and Jeffery to withdraw. That he attracted as many Labor Council votes as the two party candidates, Sharkey and Docker, only aggravated his offence. The CEC discussed this serious infraction and Moore made clear how it was to be treated. ‘Will we expel him? No. He is a leader so we deal with him in a different way. We do not expel him at once. We kill him politically.’14
They did so by pressing home the duty of self-criticism. Kavanagh appeared before the Central Control Commission on 26 May charged with his conduct at the Labor Council, his persistent questioning of party policy and his attacks on the CEC ‘for indulging in self-criticism’. The last of these charges occasioned fierce disputation. Kavanagh contended that the constant rehearsal of errors and failures had a demoralising effect on members, just as the emphasis in the party press on the defeats and betrayals of the workers dampened the spirits of readers so badly in need of encouragement. If differences between leading members arose, they should be resolved internally and not by public confessions that could only damage the party’s credibility. For the Central Control Commission, however, self-criticism was a necessary safeguard against the pernicious errors that sprouted in a malign environment: ‘Such criticism must be for the purpose of searching out the roots of such errors in order that they may be exterminated from the working class soil. Even more, it must absolutely destroy the soil from which such poisonous things spring.’ It deemed Kavanagh’s aversion to public confession a form of petty bourgeois individualism and warned him that a failure to submit would place him outside the party.15
For almost half a year Kavanagh fulfilled his obligations. While privately contemptuous of the new leadership’s empty gestures, he publicly stated he had been wrong and that he now accepted the new line. He took classes for the party, he addressed meetings both in Sydney and on the coalfields, he served a spell in Long Bay prison for holding a street meeting, he read Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel Working Bullocks (‘story is realistic but grammar is poor’) and he stood for the party in the electorate of Newtown during the 1930 New South Wales state elections. But as the date set for the next party conference drew closer he was once again under attack, this time for his role in a demonstration at the Sydney Town Hall on 7 November to mark the anniversary of the Russian Revolution.16 Moxon ordered Kavanagh, who was one of the party speakers at the Town Hall, to attack the new state Labor government and Kavanagh refused. When inflammatory oratory from Norm Jeffery and Moxon resulted in a baton charge and arrests, Moxon led the crowd to Trades Hall, where further arrests were made. Moxon claimed that he stood on a windowsill and urged the crowd to avenge their mates, and that Kavanagh held them back. Kavanagh claimed that he had simply drawn public attention to the presence of agents provocateurs. Even though he had been warned by Esmonde Higgins that this time Moore and Moxon were after his head, he responded hotly to allegations of cowardice. It was a trumped-up charge, he insisted, and in any case it was ‘un-Marxian’ to suggest one man could have prevented the workers from attacking the police. Arraigned before the Central Control Commission for his conduct on 7 November, he remained defiant:
A Communist Party is not an association of Pharisees which excuses its sins by blackening the sins of others, nor is it yet an association of sadists taking pleasure in self-flagellation for the sake of manifesting its humility and by the same action its supreme egotism.
The commission recommended his expulsion, the CEC enumerated twenty instances of slander, defiance and sabotage, expelled him and warned all party members against further contact.17
There was a protracted sequel. Kavanagh and Ryan applied repeatedly over the following years to be readmitted to the party. Ryan would not confess his errors and was rebuffed; Kavanagh did and was placed on probation, but he never managed to effect the level of abasement the party demanded and was ultimately deemed beyond redemption in 1934.18 To relate the full process of degradation to which he was subjected would take a history of Australian communism into a cul-de-sac; he was a negligible force after 1930, and the space given already to this squalid vendetta might seem excessive. It is significant, however, as an illustration of how the new leadership imposed its authority. The campaign against Kavanagh was at once an eradication of the old and an imposition of the new. Through the public humiliation of its most reputable figures, an organisation that had once allowed vigorous debate and open discussion of differences was reconstituted as a conventicle of rigid conformity. The obligation to engage in self-criticism drove party discipline into the very fibre of the party’s being, and removed all grounds of principled dissent. However ritualised its performance, whatever reservations a practitioner might harbour, the public recital of error sapped the capacity for independent judgement—thus, even though Kavanagh resisted, hedged and protested, repeated subjection to the device eventually broke his resolution. More than this, self-criticism dissolved old loyalties by turning friends into accusers. As Higgins observed in a letter to Harry Pollitt, the members of the executive ‘behaved like jackals towards Kavanagh’, and in rounding on him so savagely to save themselves from the same fate his former comrades forfeited their own self-respect.19
Kavanagh’s friends turned upon him as part of their own self-criticism during the pre-conference discussion that opened in October 1930. Its limits were made clear from the outset: there was to be ‘no repetition of last year’s purposeless wrangle’ and ‘no space will be found for letters questioning the correctness of the line’. Every contributor was to keep in mind the importance of self-criticism and even though most complied, Moore drew attention to the silence of Kavanagh, Ryan and Higgins. The approaching annual conference intensified the fervour of Class Against Class, and Moxon and Moore issued repeated calls for violent confrontations with the police. A series of street actions that followed the demonstration of 7 November resulted in so many gaol sentences that the conference set down for the end of the year had to be postponed until Easter of the following year.20
By then there was another victim of Moore’s authority. From the time he assumed the Australian leadership, Moxon’s habit of cabling the ECCI for advice whenever he encountered a set-back had made a poor impression in Moscow, as did his seeming incapacity to exercise authority without resort to expulsions. His profligacy with the large sums of money that the Communist International sent to Australia in 1930 was legendary, and an inability to delegate tasks exacerbated his administrative deficiencies. At the end of 1930 Moore relieved him of his duties as party secretary and sent him to Melbourne, where he again failed to fulfil expectations. In a characteristically madcap maneouvre designed to win control of the unemployed organisation created by the Trades Hall Council in that city, he directed the local branches of the communist body to join it. He was brought back to Sydney to express contrition at the party conference for his right-wing opportunism and assigned to other duties. Moore found Moxon bereft of judgement. ‘You only came upon [Class Against Class] by accident’, he told Moxon, ‘because being a leftist … you would inevitably hit upon the right line of the Comintern some time or other’. Now that the Australian party was fully committed to that policy, Moxon’s reckless impetuosity no longer compensated for his organisational shortcomings. Briefly he accepted demotion and remained a member of the central committee, but before long he tried to retrieve his fortunes with an appeal to the Comintern against the alleged anarcho-syndicalism of his supplanters. The ploy had succeeded in 1929; when he tried it again in 1931 it brought his demise.21
Moore was grooming a new leadership. The two young Lithgow comrades, Cliff Walker and Fred Airey had been sent for extended training at the International Lenin School along with a Victorian, Vic Varty: to avoid recognition by the security forces, they would return as Richard Dixon, Jack Blake and Len Donald. Lance Sharkey and Bill Orr also visited the Soviet Union as delegates to the Fifth RILU Congress in August 1930. Orr, the secretary of the Minority Movement, was confirmed there as the party’s leading industrial organiser. Sharkey’s ascent has been noted already: he was awkward, uncouth, slow in thought and hesitant in speech, still feeling his way as a dialectician and a public figure but with a growing firmness of judgement. He became editor of the Workers’ Weekly, clearly destined for even greater eminence. But not yet. It was J. B. Miles who was brought down from Brisbane to serve as party secretary.22
Miles had been an important member since the early 1920s, but his distance from party headquarters meant that he could make only occasional direct interventions into national affairs. Now, on the eve of the party conference, he moved his family down from Brisbane. He was in his early forties, older than the others, and readily assumed his new authority. Once Jack, henceforth he was known as ‘JBM’ and cadres would afterwards refer to him as ‘the Old Man’—but not in his hearing. A demanding patriarch, he applied a rigid Scots propriety to revolutionary purposes. His caution, frugality, attention to detail were all qualities that the Australian party had lacked. He, more than anyone, built it into a coherent, durable entity—at a heavy cost. Jean Devanny, with whom he began a clandestine and stormy relationship, found him tense, volatile, cutting, with a powerfully intuitive intelligence. ‘He’s got exceptional capacities’, a visiting European comrade told her, ‘but he’s too hard on the comrades. He hurts too often and too much.’23
The deferred tenth party conference set down for December 1930 met as the Tenth Congress in April 1931 and completed organisational changes Moore had begun during the previous year. The former state branches were now reconstituted as districts. Originally there were eight: Sydney, the south coast and the New South Wales hinterland became Number 1 District; Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, Number 2; Queensland, Number 3; Victoria and the Riverina, Number 4; South Australia and Broken Hill, Number 5; Western Australia, Number 6, Northern Territory, Number 7 and Tasmania, Number 8. In 1933 north Queensland became Number 9 District. Each district was divided into sections, also enumerated, and each section into factory and street units. At every level a committee supervised the work of the subordinate level; the district committee supervised the work of the sections and the section committee supervised the work of the local members. All communications were hierarchical, and members were forbidden to communicate across this vertical structure. In place of the central executive committee, there was now an enlarged central committee which in turn was led by a smaller political bureau (or politbureau) and a secretariat of just three members.24 At the Tenth Congress Moore introduced further refinements. The outgoing central committee elected a praesidium which nominated an examination committee to consider nominations for election to the new central committee.25 This method of controlling elections henceforth applied at all levels of the party and effectively suppressed democratic choice of representatives.
There were some complaints at the congress about the Communist International’s dictatorial ‘Instructor’ and his methods. Ted Tripp had returned from the Lenin School in 1930 in the expectation of speedy advancement but was already on the outer, probably because he had met American students there who regarded Moore as a ‘huge joke’. Tripp told the congress delegates that Moore had told him to feign friendship with Kavanagh in order to discover his plans, but he drew the line at ‘pimping’. Charlie Nelson from Lithgow claimed that he was told to toe the line or his head would come off. Jack Loughran, the most outspoken of the dissidents, suggested that ‘the Party is being reduced to a party of gramophones that will only play one record—it must be “Moore’s Melody” ‘. The great majority accepted the new regime. One comrade told Tripp that ‘Inside and outside the Party he must be prepared to obey the Party and even if it is your own mother, you must pimp on her if necessary’. Ted Docker insisted ‘There is no room in the Communist Party for slight differences of opinion—we must be on the line completely’. Moore, who had opened proceedings with an address lasting four hours, congratulated the Australians on a ‘better discussion, more Bolshevik’, one that had ‘annihilated’ the arguments of the dissenters. ‘We are going to have one monolithic whole’, he predicted.26
The first congress of the Australian party was also its last annual gathering. In its place there would be regular meetings of the party plenum (which consisted of the members of the central committee and other nominated participants) or extended sessions of the central committee (enlarged with leading district officials), usually at quarterly intervals. Full transcripts of these proceedings of the plenums, which usually occupied two or three days, and even of the central committee, were produced to enable Moscow to invigilate the work of the Australians. The next congress, Moore explained, would not meet until the Communist International judged that a change of line made it necessary. His work completed, Moore left Australia in July.
Moore’s reorganisation of the Communist Party of Australia was foreshadowed in a lengthy ECCI letter sent to the party in October 1930, ‘Resolution on the Situation in Australia and the Tasks of the CPA’, which restated the postulates of the Third Period. The growth of mass struggles against the bourgeoisie showed that all the features of the general crisis of capitalism were manifest in Australia, completely destroying the theory of Australian exceptionalism advanced by former leading comrades. The task of the party was to provide independent leadership against the social fascist Labor government, Labor Party and trade union bureaucracy, partly by industrial demands and partly by organisation of the unemployed. Admonitions against trailing behind the workers were balanced with warnings against sectarianism and also (this a clear rebuke to Moxon) perpetually calling for strikes without adequate preparation. The Australian party must be a ‘broad mass organisation’ and not an ‘isolated adventurist group’. To this end the ECCI set out the national, district and local structure, with a strong emphasis on factory groups as befitted a party of the revolutionary proletariat, and on the Minority and the Unemployed Workers’ Movements as the means of extending party influence throughout it. These and other mass organisations were to be controlled by fractions of party members under the careful supervision of the party.27
The meagre resources of the Australian party strained its capacity to implement these instructions. Throughout 1930 the membership remained tiny: the various districts reported 486 members at the end of the year, a twofold increase over twelve months. The Tenth Congress in April 1931 enumerated 1135 members, and a subsequent membership campaign lifted the total to 2021 by July. In December 1931 there were 2093 members, and a year later 1929. Based on the returns of district committees anxious to report success, all of these figures have to be treated with scepticism. As Moore cautioned in 1931, ‘Let us not fool ourselves. A good part of the increase exists on paper and on paper only.’ One district organiser admitted at the end of that year that less than a quarter of the nominal membership in his state ‘participate to any extent in the life and work of the Party’. Many of those signed up at public meetings or recruited in membership drives during the early 1930s remained purely nominal members; others failed to pay their dues, dropped out or were expelled. The national organiser noted a persistent pattern of recruitment and failure to retain recruits. The statistics were unreliable because ‘the large percentage of unemployed members and the movement of these members from place to place and their consequent falling into inactivity are difficult to tabulate’. He was able to identify two features of the membership: just 518 of the 1929 on the books in December 1932 were in employment and only 216 were women. Both features were pronounced in other membership reports: just 9 per cent of the Victorian district membership were in employment at the time of the Tenth Congress and 10 per cent were women; six months later in New South Wales the corresponding figures were 13 and 8 per cent. This was an organisation of unemployed men.28
A census of the delegates who attended the Tenth Congress provides further insight into the Australian party’s social composition. Of 60 delegates who provided information, there were sixteen miners, eleven labourers, five building workers, three railway workers and three waterside workers, two each from the sugar and textile industries, two intellectuals, a butcher, a baker and a miscellany of manual occupations other than candlestick-maker. Seven were women. Twenty-nine were born in Australia, twelve in England, seven in Scotland, four in Ireland, two in New Zealand and the remainder hailed from Wales, Holland, Finland, Poland, Patagonia and New Guinea. Twenty-six were employed, 23 unemployed and the remaining eleven worked for the party or other organisations. At a time when nearly 30 per cent of the country’s trade union members were out of work, the number of unemployed communists at the congress was disproportionately high, but a much higher proportion of the delegates packed a work-lunch than the membership at large. It is hardly surprising that the number of factory units were pitifully small, or that the women’s section remained little more than a pious aspiration.29
When the new leadership took control the Workers’ Weekly was faced with imminent closure as the result of the libel action begun in 1929. Christian Jollie Smith negotiated a settlement with the help of a donation from Guido Baracchi, the usual standby, but the printing plant remained under threat of seizure for debt. Editions of the newspaper appeared in 1930 without illustrations because the blockmaker refused further credit, and with prominent notices rebuking district committees because they owed large sums on their bulk orders. The circulation was given as 10 000 in January 1931, a suspiciously round number; 9997 a year later; and 11 463 by the end of 1932.30 A monthly Woman Worker commenced in 1930 and the Young Worker in 1931 as journals of the women’s section and the Young Communist League, but both suffered from parlous finance and irregular publication. Re-establishment of a theoretical journal, the Labor Review, had to wait until 1932 and it mostly reprinted articles from Inprecorr. Red Leader, the newspaper of the Minority Movement, appeared in 1931 along with Soviets To-day, which was produced by the Friends of the Soviet Union. These were two of many auxiliary bodies through which the party implemented Class Against Class: the League Against Imperialism to campaign against the oppression of colonial people; International Class War Prisoners Aid and Workers’ International Relief to provide legal and material support to the victims of the class war; the Unemployed Workers Movement to rally its Australian victims; and, briefly, a Workers’ Defence Corps to provide physical protection.
In 1930 Lance Sharkey assumed control of the party paper at a time when sectarian excess, lack of money and legal proceedings threatened its future. Its banner was now in heavy capitals and flanked by the party badge. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 17 March 1930)
Each of the ‘fraternal’ organisations had its own headquarters and leadership, published its own literature and convened its own annual conference. Each was designed to draw class-conscious workers into revolt, to detach them from the grip of social fascism and lead them to communism. Each enjoyed its moments of success when it sparked the popular discontent with the effects of the Depression. The problem was to reconcile autonomous vitality with party control. Characteristically, an impressive list of names adorned the letterhead of these communist fronts, but a party official directed their activity, and fractions of party members ensured that the directions were implemented. All too often, their zealotry would reduce the auxiliary to a mere reflex of the party itself, smother broader participation and perpetuate the dependence on the flagging energy of overworked comrades. Such was the Bolshevik organisation created out of the Communist Party of Australia in the early 1930s.
