In early 1931 Fred Airey made his way to the Lenin School. Disembarking in Italy, he travelled to Berlin, where the German party had organised his entry into the Soviet Union. He found the party headquarters on the Wilhelmstrasse inspiring, a great fortress protected by a steel door. On his return two years later, all had changed. Hitler was chancellor, his stormtroopers were everywhere, and Airey was under strict instructions to stay out of trouble, so he ‘went back to the station and bloody well stayed there until my train left’.1 The failure of the German left to prevent Adolf Hitler’s march to power is a turning-point of twentieth-century history. The two working-class parties, the social democrats and the communists, both with a large following and considerable resources, allowed their mutual antagonism to take precedence over the threat from the right. Each blamed the other for the national malaise that made the authoritarian programme of the Nazis so plausible. Even as Hitler snuffed out the political freedom afforded by the Weimar Republic, they were unable to unite for its defence.
Historians affix much of the blame for this ruinous division on the communist policy of Class Against Class. By abandoning its earlier call for a united front and by heaping abuse on the social democrats, the Communist International made cooperation impossible. The policy postulated a deepening crisis in which capitalism would cast off its democratic trappings in order to crush working-class resistance to the growing misery. As popular discontent mounted, the reformists would stand revealed as the false friends of the workers. The very term social fascist obliterated any distinction between reformism and reaction. To suggest that one was preferable to the other was to fall into the error of the lesser evil; indeed, communists were expected to strike the main blow at the social democrats in order to hasten the polarisation of Class Against Class. Hitler quickly demonstrated that there was indeed a greater evil, a regime that simply suppressed the labour movement, but by the time the communists grasped that reality it was too late. Their fortress on the Wilhelmstrasse had fallen.
Australia had its admirers of Hitler and Mussolini. In the depths of the Depression popular movements formed in opposition to the existing political parties, critical of the democratic forms of Australian government, impatient with the licence given to left-wing agitators. Some of them had links to clandestine paramilitary organisations that were prepared to defend God, King and Empire by force if that became necessary. It turned out not to be necessary. The Labor government in Canberra reluctantly accepted the inevitability of harsh economic measures, and maintained sufficient discipline over its more radical members until they were implemented. It was not until 1931 that growing internal dissension brought down the Scullin government, and by then a revitalised conservative party was ready to take office. In New South Wales the demagogic Labor premier Jack Lang rode the wave of working-class radicalism with his denunciation of the federal Labor government’s economic measures and defiance of their implementation in his state, but he submitted meekly to his dismissal in May 1932. Both during the lead-up to the fall of the Scullin government in late 1931 and the destabilisation of the Lang government in early 1932, politics spilled onto the streets with clashes between the left and the right that threatened a crisis such as those that had ended capitalist democracy in Germany and other countries. In Australia, however, the crisis quickly passed.
The measures taken by the Labor Party in response to the Depression were wholly consistent with the arguments of Class Against Class. From its initial inability to end the lockout of the miners in 1929 through to its final defeat over a proposal to finance unemployed relief work in 1931, the Labor government failed utterly in its election promise to get the country back to work. Hamstrung by its lack of a Senate majority, dependent on the cooperation of the states, it was a weak and ineffective administration. Efforts to ameliorate economic hardship were undone by its acceptance of cuts in public expenditure dictated by the banks. Under the Premiers’ Plan it negotiated with the states, all outlays were reduced, including pensions. The state Labor governments followed Canberra in reducing their own social expenditure and consequently offered only the most stringent emergency relief to the mounting numbers of unemployed. The strategy the Commonwealth reluctantly adopted was for Australia to trade its way out of the Depression by reducing all costs, public and private, which effectively abandoned Labor’s commitment to the regulatory devices that protected the standard of living. The Arbitration Court made an across-the-board cut in the basic wage. Employers followed with their own assault on wages and conditions. The politicians upheld, and the police and the courts enforced, the laws that maintained their property rights.
It is easy to criticise the political folly of Class Against Class. By directing a small number of diehards onto a collision course with every significant body in the country, it condemned them to severe retribution. Worse than that, its absolute hostility to the Labor Party and the unions cut the Communist Party off from exerting influence within those organisations as both began to draw back from the measures taken in 1930 and 1931. But desperate times bring desperate measures. For those who practised Class Against Class, it was no abstract analysis. The class war was apparent to them as a daily reality. The boss who held the whiphand and used it without restraint, the local officer who determined whether or not they would be given a bag of rations, the union secretary who refused to take up their grievances, the Labor parliamentarian who insisted that nothing more could be done—these were its forms. If you didn’t take up the battle of Class Against Class, the other class would walk all over you.
Through its newly refashioned organisational structure, the party therefore engaged in battle. It lost many more engagements than it won, and frequently the result of Class Against Class was to to maroon the Communist Party in isolated outposts of militant endeavour; but it persisted, and by trial and error gradually began to modify its tactics. So too did its opponents, and the patterns of activity reveal a dialectic of initiative and response. This can be illustrated by turning to the three principal sites of communist activity: in the workplace, among the unemployed and on the hustings.
An Arbitration Court judge prepares to stab a worker in the back while the social-fascist demagogue distracts his attention at the behest of the capitalist.The worker is upright and vigilant; the spanner in his hand suggests a capacity to defend himself as the Third Period demanded. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’,20 March 1931)
In its industrial campaigns the party aimed to unite workers in resistance to the employers’ assault on wages and working conditions. In keeping with the new line, the Communist Party now regarded all trade union leaders as accomplices of the employers. ‘All tendencies and hang-overs of trade union legalism must be annihilated from our ranks’, proclaimed the Minority Movement in 1931.2 The effect was to estrange those few left-wing unions, such as the Australian Railways Union, which had previously offered some support for the party. Communist condemnation of the New South Wales Labor Council and violent denunciation of the ACTU poisoned relations with even the most sympathetic union officials, who dismissed as utterly unrealistic the insistent demands for strike action against new awards in the railways, the metal, meat and other industries issued by an organisation that lacked any presence within them. Repeated disturbances at meetings of the trades hall councils in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide during 1930 and 1931 resulted in the suspension of communist delegates and the closure of public galleries.
In this early 1930s illustration, the worker is a behemoth. The emphasis on brute force is heightened by the absence of any suggestion as to where his hammer will fall or how it will ease his anguish. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 7 March 1930)
Under these circumstances the Minority Movement functioned as an industrial opposition group that counterposed its own revolutionary demands to the treachery of the officials. It operated outside the union structure, typically in factory committees, and its roneoed job bulletins were as antagonistic to the union secretary as they were to the management—it was at this juncture that J. B. King and a sprinkling of erstwhile Wobblies drifted into the party.3 The circumstances of the period undoubtedly exacerbated that style of oppositional militancy. Party activists were sacked as soon as they were identified; union officials afforded them scant protection and frequently colluded in their dismissal. Those members who survived in employment were marginal, transient workers thinly scattered across the transport, construction, mining and metal industries, given to disruption and walk-off in the absence of sustained organisational presence. While the Minority Movement was ostensibly aimed at broadening the struggle, it suffered from an insistent circumscription of activity in accordance with the party’s rejection of ‘trade union legalism’. Membership of the Minority Movement remained small: 3000 were claimed in 1932.4
At a national conference of the Minority Movement at the end of 1931, Bill Orr introduced the first cautionary note. He advised that it was important for militants to base their campaigns on bread-and-butter issues, and wrong to neglect opportunities to use union meetings in order to reach workers. Union officials should be criticised for their policies, not their positions, and random abuse lent weight to reformist allegations that the communist ‘propaganda was merely anti-union’.5 Orr, who took over as national organiser of the Minority Movement after he returned from the Fifth Congress of the RILU in 1930, played a crucial role in the reorientation of communist activity in the early 1930s. Strongly opposed to the policies of the Third Period during the protracted debates of the late 1920s, he accepted the decisions of the party’s conference at the end of the decade as binding and never disputed the new line. His comrade, Charlie Nelson, president of the Lithgow state mine lodge, did and was expelled in 1932 for his ‘anti-party and anti-working-class attitude’.6
Orr stood third in seniority to Miles and Sharkey on the central committee and was the party’s authority on industrial issues. A man of nervous intensity who burned the candle at both ends, he brought an evangelical fervour to the party’s denunciation of the union leaders—as a young man he had aspired to become a missionary, and when his devout Scottish mother first heard him expound the gospel of secular salvation she was moved to declare ‘what a fane meenister oor Wullie would have made’. Just as Orr’s background as a miner and lodge official tempered intransigent opposition to all traces of ‘trade union legalism’, so the devolved structure of his union and the close solidarity of its constituent mining communities channelled his energies into the resuscitation of existing institutions. He was assisted in the conduct of the Minority Movement’s weekly newspaper, the Red Leader, by Esmonde Higgins, who shared his sympathies for patient, practical activity. The publication in the Red Leader of an ‘Agit-Prop Corner’ with its exegesis of ‘Unfamiliar Terms Explained’ went some way to translate the arcane vocabulary of the Third Period—‘bureaucracy’, ‘social fascist’, ‘right opportunism’, ‘left sectarianism’, ‘reactionary’, ‘pseudo-left’—into a language more accessible to the uninitiated.7 Under his encouragement, party members set out to build the Minority Movement by selling the Red Leader and distributing factory bulletins—if need be outside the workplace beyond the notice of the foreman. They were prepared to hold their meetings at the factory gate, where the risk of victimisation was reduced, and to seek to build up support within the union before proposing strike action.
In only one instance did the party manage to go further and establish a breakaway union, as most other communist parties did during this period. The Pastoral Workers’ Industrial Union (PWIU) emerged in 1930 out of a strike by shearers against a new award handed down in July that cut the old rates by up to a quarter. The consistent failure of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) to protect the interests of its members in the wool industry fanned the discontent of a rank-and-file movement, which in December 1930 established the new union. Senator Arthur Rae, a veteran socialist long since expelled from the AWU, was president and Norm Jeffery secretary. The PWIU remained a small union, with several thousand members at most, who fought to organise shearing sheds in New South Wales and Queensland in the face of victimisation, arrest and violence from vigilantes. Faced by the combined force and active collusion of the AWU, the graziers’ association, the state police and the Commonwealth government, its survival for seven years testified to members’ resolution. Nor was it a purely communist union. The party had frequent occasion to criticise the PWIU for failures and deviations from the line. Nevertheless, it was the closest the Australian party came to the policy of dual unionism that the Communist International encouraged during the Third Period.8
The rural crisis also provided the Australian party with an opportunity to extend its presence in the bush. The collapse of the export market hit farmers hard, especially wheatgrowers and other small producers engaged in more intensive forms of agriculture, who had little capital and relied on good prices to service their mortgages. In accordance with the instructions of the Communist International, the CPA established a new agrarian section in 1930, again headed by Jeffery, to link the farmers’ misfortunes to the exploitative logic of finance capitalism and encourage them to fight foreclosures and resumptions. Mistrust of the Money Power ran freely among the cockies and bush battlers, many of whom had strong sympathies with the labour movement. Albert Robinson, who would become a communist organiser, was just one rural militant who took up a smallholding because he was blacklisted by the employers of his north Queensland region; similarly, Laurie Jarmson, a Shetlander who joined the Party in the early 1920s, ran a few hundred hens on wasteland outside Newcastle for three years because he was marked out as an activist in the Carpenters’ Union.9 Such refugees from the labour market imbued some local producers’ associations with an anti-capitalist temper, and poultry farmers’ associations would eventually become one of the more unlikely communist redoubts; but rural discontent more commonly found expression in populist ideologies of a more insular and conservative kind—the Australian kulaks regarded the communist agitator no more fondly than they did the foreign bondholder. Larger farmers’ organisations remained firmly on the non-Labor side of the political divide, linked through the Country Party to the conservative coalition and as antagonistic to the left as other employers’ bodies.
It was among the unemployed that communism found readiest response during the Depression. This was a general feature of Western communist parties and Moscow recognised it with the declaration of International Unemployment Day on 6 March 1930, 25 February 1931, 25 February 1932 and 27 February 1933. The phenomenon was not new—throughout the 1920s there were never less than 100 000 members of the Australian workforce in search of jobs—and in each of the major cities fragmentary organisations, loosely connected to the trade unions, had employed the time-honoured devices of the street march and the public remonstrance to press the authorities to make good the deficiencies of the labour market. Now, as unemployment became a mass phenomenon, these cast-offs grew into an army, and makeshift bodies previously on the margin of the labour movement became central to its political concerns.10
The Communist Party turned its own unemployed groups into a national Unemployed Workers’ Movement in 1930. Its first major conference in June of that year began with a hunger march from the coalfields to Sydney that was marked by arrests, a police raid on the party headquarters where the hunger marchers were billeted, a three-day gathering notable for communist attacks on the Labor Council delegates, and then a city demonstration that swelled the numbers in police cells. Kavanagh, who chaired one session of the conference in the absence of the party nominee, observed that its poor organisation and sectarian tone destroyed any chance of union cooperation, and in the immediate aftermath of this inauspicious launch a number of Sydney branches of the UWM went over to the Labor Council’s own Unemployed Workers’ Union.11 The same pattern of rivalry between the communist Unemployed Workers’ Movement and the non-communist alternative organisation set up by trades halls councils was quickly replicated in Melbourne, Brisbane and other cities.
Street protest, the customary form of unemployed activism, remained the principal communist tactic in the first phase of the UWM. A series of demonstrations in Sydney culminated in November 1930 with mass arrests at city rallies, and then a march on Parliament House where Moxon and others were taken into custody. In Melbourne an earlier unemployed rally on the steps of the Victorian Parliament House in October, called to protest against the state Labor government’s replacement of food vouchers with direct issue of rations, turned into a vicious melee that resulted in nearly 60 arrests. In Adelaide in January 1931 the UWM organised a march to the city from Port Adelaide to protest against a government decision to substitute mutton for beef in the food ration. The ensuing ‘Beef Riot’ hospitalised seventeen, including ten policemen, and brought twelve arrests. Not to be outdone, the Darwin unemployed marked the new year with an occupation of the government offices, over which they raised the red flag; the police evicted them and incarcerated their leaders. In Perth there was a major disturbance outside the Treasury building in March 1931, resulting in ten arrests and nine admissions to hospital. Each of these demonstrations drew large numbers into the city centre and in each case the demonstrators came prepared for trouble, with truncheons and banner poles for use against batons and mounted police.12
These mass rallies were deeply disturbing of established attitudes. The comfortable and secure Australians who had previously extended charity to the deserving poor were now confronted with the importunate demands of a milling throng. Those displaced wage-earners who had previously recoiled from the humiliation of such dependence were now presented with an alternative response to their predicament. The immediate official reply to the emergency, the creation of municipal depots for the distribution of rations, served as focal points for communist agitation. By haranguing the queues, distributing handbills, chalking the footpaths and publicising their city rallies, the UWM mounted a significant challenge to control of public space. But the consequences of such activity were costly to both the unemployed, who forfeited all sympathy in the one-sided press coverage of the violent confrontations, and to the Communist Party, which suffered damaging reprisals. By the end of 1930 most of the national leadership was in Sydney’s Long Bay prison. In Melbourne, following the October demonstration, the police raided the Communist Party hall and a number of other addresses to round up all known communists. Similar police action in Adelaide and Perth crippled the UWM there.
An alternative tactic became increasingly common. The founding conference of the UWM had resolved to prevent the eviction of unemployed workers and their families. The first attempt to implement this decision, at the Sydney suburb of Clovelly in July 1930, was inauspicious—a police spy gave advance warning and framed the organisers—but anti-eviction activity gave the authorities far more difficulty than the city rallies. It took place in working-class neighbourhoods and drew on the solidarity of residents with the tenant against the landlord. It offered little advance notice: the appearance of the bailiff could be answered by the rapid assembly of pickets in advance of the police. It was an effective deterrent since the UWM was prepared to destroy a property rather than allow it to be repossessed. The terrain, away from the open spaces where police could use their horses, was also more advantageous for defensive resistance. Finally, it enjoyed considerable popular legitimacy in its assertion of the right to shelter over the the claims of property: the sight of an evicted family’s meagre possessions dumped on the footpath was perhaps the most emotive image of the Depression. ‘The first eviction I saw’, recalled the artist Noel Counihan, who joined the Communist Party in 1931, ‘had a devastating effect on me’; the experience ‘finished the capitalist system as far as I was concerned’.13
The success of anti-eviction activity, which quickly became common in all cities, was evident in amendments to tenancy legislation in New South Wales in 1931 and new provisions for rent assistance in Victoria in 1932. Such victories did not reduce the incidence of evictions, however, and there were major confrontations in Sydney during 1931 after the political bureau pronounced the anti-eviction campaign ‘the main point of struggle’. Clashes in the Sydney suburbs of Redfern, Glebe, Leichhardt, Bankstown and Newtown in May and June of that year developed into warfare. In these suburbs activists answered the threat of eviction of unemployed tenants by occupying the residence in strength and turning it into a garrison. They boarded up windows, fortified the entrances with barbed-wire entanglements, laid in supplies of missiles and in at least one case invested the property with explosives. The police in turn laid seige to the house, turned away food supplies and drove off sympathetic local residents before eventually storming the residence with firearms. In every case the police prevailed. Some of the defenders were shot, all of them were badly beaten. So heavy were the casualties that by the end of June the political bureau had to caution restraint.14
Similar incidents occurred in other cities. Brisbane’s fiercest battle was fought in September 1931, and in the Newcastle suburb of Tighes Hill there was a particularly violent affray in June 1932 when the police turned on local residents who sought to assist those inside the beseiged house. These and other set-piece engagements were difficult to sustain. Occupation of a house surrendered the advantage of mobility, and almost invariably ended in beatings and wholesale arrests. Sometimes widespread community sympathy augmented the original action, as in Newcastle where the mayor headed a defence committee and an outspoken Anglican priest, Ernest Burgmann, denounced the police brutality at Tighes Hill: after 22 of the defendants were acquitted, charges against the remainder were dropped. In the absence of local support of that kind, however, unemployed activists were always vulnerable to reprisal.15
The same was true of agitation among the homeless unemployed who took to the track. This was a common experience, especially for the young and unattached, who would team up in small groups to seek casual jobs or handouts from farmers, eking out a hand-to-mouth existence as they roamed the country. Their displacement and humiliations, the daily fight for survival, the brushes with local police and the dodging of railway police fostered a distinctive ethos that is registered in novels such as Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers and the autobiographical account of Frank Huelin, ‘Keep Moving’. Huelin, a young immigrant from the Channel Isles, arrrived in Australia just as the Depression hit and was one those it turned to communism, for communism provided the more resourceful and spirited of the bagmen with purpose and companionship. As he narrates his experiences, communism preserved some basis for fellow-feeling and mutual support among outcasts who otherwise turned in on themselves and against each other.16
The UWM had most success in channelling the discontent of the itinerant unemployed when they gathered seasonally in rural centres and pressed demands for assistance. Such aggregations, however, raised fear and resentment that anti-communists were quick to exploit. In the irrigation town of Mildura, for example, townspeople sided with the police in hostility towards the itinerant unemployed who camped on the banks of the Murray. At the end of 1931 they broke up a UWM meeting, hospitalised the organiser and seven other comrades, and forced the visiting speaker, Ted Tripp, to flee to safety.17 In the pastoral centre of Bourke, armed squatters and land agents swept down on an unemployed camp in the riverbed, and ordered the UWM members from the town. At Cairns in the following year, locals evicted several hundred unemployed men from their quarters in the showground in a ferocious assault; communists hid out in the bush for weeks afterwards.18
Then there were the shanty towns created on wastelands within the cities. Here homeless families would gather, build humpies or shacks with scrap iron, bagging or flattened tins, and try as best they could to make do. These camps lacked basic amenities, they were rife with poverty and disease, and yet their inhabitants sustained a collective existence. They entertained themselves, restrained domestic violence, organised working bees to kerb and gutter the footpaths, and agitated for the provision of water and sanitary services. Above all, they fought for recognition. The formation of a UWM branch was a natural extension of such activity, even though it might lapse as the immediate grievance disappeared and the particular enthusiasts moved on.19
The Depression aroused acute discontent because the provision for support of the unemployed was so rudimentary. There was no system of public welfare and only Queensland had unemployment insurance. Elsewhere it was intermittent relief work for male breadwinners, meagre issues of food and clothing for their dependants, work camps and rations from rural relief depots for the single unemployed. Sometimes the UWM sought to apply familiar methods of collective bargaining. At Bulli on the south coalfield of New South Wales the replacement of local relief committees by state officials, who used police to identify applicants, triggered a boycott of the dole offices in May 1931. On the northern coalfield the issue of a new relief registration form, designed to tighten eligibility requirements and cut recipients from the dole, launched a communist campaign in October 1932 to burn the offensive questionnaire. Neither of these unemployed ‘strikes’, for that was the model they followed, was successful but both attracted considerable publicity. A similar outcome awaited the several hundred men who marched on Perth in September 1932 to protest against the hardship of their conditions in the unemployed camps on Frankland River. Their leaders were arrested and their demands refused. The same pattern was repeated in relation to other UWM activity elsewhere, and with little more to show for it. ‘But we felt we’ve got to make a stand’, as one activist put it, ‘Do something! Don’t cop it passively’.20
Towards the end of 1931 the party secretary warned members that a ‘serious sectarian condition’ was impairing the work of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. ‘Where the UWM is not stagnant, it is declining.’ While noting that anti-eviction struggles had mobilised large numbers in defence of the unemployed, Miles criticised members for their antagonism to other bodies that offered assistance: ‘the organisation had become divorced from large numbers who had been compelled, through sheer poverty, to rally to the charity organisations’. Too many comrades who spoke at meetings of the unemployed were concerned to display their revolutionary credentials to the disregard of the ‘concrete problems of the unemployed’. In too many localities the local committee of the organisation had ‘dwindled to a small communist sect calling itself a branch of the UWM’. The politbureau ordered the Workers’ International Relief to establish kitchens for the unemployed and ‘overcome the sectarian tendency of just howling for revolution’.21
Miles’ strictures recognised the fragile character of communist activity among the unemployed. It was difficult to maintain the UWM: active members fell away under the rigours of their duties, and recruits were easily disheartened by the regimen of protest and punishment. His diagnosis is less persuasive, if only because it was his own organisation that maintained tight control of the UWM. It had insisted that the UWM was a protest and not a relief organisation. It imposed a didactic routine. One activist recalled meetings of the district committee of the UWM in the Hunter Valley, where the party cadre ‘would give a political report that took you from the Arctic to the Antarctic’ in an exhaustive survey of the world capitalist crisis. ‘We’d start at seven o’clock at night, and at nine o’clock we were only at the equator on the way down.’ The validity of the Communist International’s line was not in question. ‘Brilliant bloody analysis’, the activist found it, ‘but I used to keep thinking: how do you get that back to the rank and file?’22
It was the party, also, that imposed the sectarian policies that restricted the UWM’s appeal. Communists were quick to single out the Labor Party and the unions for betrayal of the unemployed. The major demonstrations in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in the summer of 1930 to 1931 were all directed at Labor administrations, indeed the election of a Labor government in New South Wales in November 1930 triggered a new round of unemployed protests designed to discredit Jack Lang as premier and Garden as secretary of the Labor Council. For similar reasons, the UWM kept up an unrelenting hostility to the bodies for the unemployed created by the trade unions, even when the demands of such bodies coincided with its own. In Melbourne the UWM responded to the refusal of Trades Hall Council to allow it representation with repeated disruption of council meetings and, when a subsequent raid on the barricaded entrance was repulsed by police, with denunciation of ‘the vermin’ inside doing the bosses’ work.23 The frequent invasions of meetings of trades hall councils in other cities alienated delegates to the point that UWM delegations were forbidden further entry to the council meetings. The obligation to discredit the social fascists ensured that what was intended as a front organisation remained narrow in its political base. It had been established with Senator Arthur Rae as president and a brace of federal Labor parliamentarians on its executive; by 1932 the ALP forbade its members any association with the UWM.
As a front organisation the UWM was intended to extend the influence of the Communist Party, to tap the discontent of unemployed workers, draw them into action around their immediate concerns, lead them in activities that would demonstrate the futility of reform, and ultimately recruit them to the revolutionary cause. The details of party membership presented in the last chapter suggest that such a process occurred: of the several thousand who joined the party in the early 1930s the overwhelming majority were out of work. Yet CPA members represented only a fraction of the numbers the UWM mobilised. The actual membership of the UWM is difficult to estimate: a local branch could form, enrol as many as 500 members, and pass out of existence in the space of a year. The finances of the organisation suggest that only a minority kept up the minimal dues. But if nominal adherence and some participation in UWM activity are taken as a test, then the 30 000 members claimed in 1932 are a fairly accurate measure.24
UWM members sustained a multitude of endeavours that are difficult to incorporate into a national survey such as this. Here the UWM arranged for an unemployed family to keep a roof over its head; there it persuaded local shopkeepers to meet the needs of a group of homeless men struck off rations; elsewhere it provided warmth and fellowship to the outcast. The Brunswick branch of the UWM ran a successful weekly dance with an entrance charge of just threepence, which was less than the price of a bottle of milk; from the proceeds and with the help of sympathetic businessmen, it provided free lunches for the children of the unemployed.25 In such localised activities arising out of the direct needs of the unemployed the UWM achieved a success it never managed in the more dramatic engagements when the state was able to bring its force to bear on a concentrated target. Yet paradoxically it was the acts of defiance that gave hope and strength to the unemployed in their daily perseverance. The forlorn heroism of the diehards, the acts of quixotic bravery, the very sectarianism that Miles deplored kept the flame of rebellion burning through the Depression.
The revolutionary politics of the Communist Party in the Third Period placed particular emphasis on elections. Since the internal struggle that led to the adoption of Class Against Class had arisen out of the party’s attitude towards the ALP in the 1929 federal election, it is hardly surprising that the new leadership should insist on standing candidates against Labor wherever possible. The argument in 1929 had turned on whether the workers had sufficient experience of Labor in office to appreciate its treachery. The Depression provided plentiful experience. A federal Labor government from 1929 to the end of 1931, and state governments in New South Wales (1930–32), South Australia (1930–33) and Victoria (1929–32) proved no more capable of protecting jobs, and scarcely more generous to the jobless, than their conservative counterparts.
The pattern of Australian politics during the Depression was indeed unstable. No government that went to the polls in the early 1930s, with the exception of the Nationalists in Tasmania, survived the judgement of the electors. The dissatisfaction of conservatives with their own loss of national office, the fear of growing social unrest and a growing impatience with the results of democracy found expression in extra-parliamentary organisations that took the threat of communism as justifying emergency measures. The All For Australia League, established at the beginning of 1931, quickly enrolled more than 100 000 members. Behind it stood the secret armies, composed largely of ex-servicemen, that began skirmishing with communists. This phase of right-wing mobilisation peaked during 1931 in direct action against the left as seen in the terrorism at Mildura and Bourke. The formation of a new party, the United Australia Party, and its election to national office in December 1931, confirmed the conservative renewal.
The dissatisfaction of the labour movement, on the other hand, weakened the Labor Party. It suffered defections from its right wing, including that of two Labor premiers, and Lyons, the federal Treasurer, who became the leader of the new United Australia Party. The New South Wales Labor leader, Jack Lang, took his state branch out of the ALP, and his supporters in the federal parliament left the Labor caucus. Socialisation units agitated within the Labor Party in this and other states for more radical solutions to the crisis. Despite these developments, the Communist Party kept up an unremitting hostility to Labor. There was in fact considerable sympathy between communists and members of the socialisation units at a local level. Jack Hughes, a leading member of the units in Sydney, recalled how they and the communists would protect each others’ stumps from right-wing attack. Communists attended unit meetings and one of them, Tom Payne, formally proposed that the units accept the need for a revolutionary seizure of power. Yet the party leaders condemned the socialisation units vehemently, and following the rejection of Payne’s proposal, ordered him and all members to break with the socialisation units.26 A similar response followed the dismissal of Jack Lang by the governor of New South Wales in May 1932. This constitutional coup produced jubiliation on the right, profound indignation on the left. It occasioned what might well have been the largest ever political meeting in Australian history, a gathering organised by Jock Garden at Moore Park and attended by at least 200 000 supporters. The Communist Party’s response was to distribute leaflets denouncing Lang as a stooge, ‘the chief force holding the radicalised workers in check and keeping them from the path of struggle against capitalism’.27
Lang was an old adversary of the communists, his denunciation of the silvertails and British bondholders a calculated appeal to populist sentiment. Even so, he undoubtedly tapped a substantial vein of radical sentiment. Yet in the context of the Third Period, the communists interpreted such elements as ‘left social fascism’, serving only to perpetuate the reformist illusion and thus constituting a further extension of the capitalist conspiracy. The ‘social fascists’ themselves remained the principal opponent, against whom the ‘main blow’ must be directed, and any suggestion that they constituted a ‘lesser evil’ than the conservatives was a deviation from the line. As fascism was deemed the form of class rule to which capitalists resorted in the final phase of their era, so social fascism was the form assumed by social reformism in that period of decline. The valency of this new communist terminology is striking. Earlier they had spoken of ‘Labor fakirs’, a term popularised by the Wobblies and other militants, and signifying a false friend of the workers. Literally the Arabic word fakir meant a poor man, more specifically a Muslim religious mendicant; the homonym faker suggested the insincerity of the Labor politician who feigned sympathy with the workers in order to attract their support. A social fascist, on the other hand, was more than a charlatan. He was a betrayer, a saboteur and, now that circumstances demanded, a repressive enemy. The main blow directed against him was designed to expose his true role. Mostly the blow was verbal, though on occasion it was physical. Communists (led by those who had been batoned at the Trades Hall in the previous year) rushed the official platform at the Yarra Bank in Melbourne on May Day 1932 and assaulted the Labor leaders, but this was an unusual occurrence and recognised by the party as damaging to its cause. It certainly was—the Trades Hall Council refused to participate in May Day for decades afterwards.28
More generally, the Communist Party chose elections as the most suitable occasions to campaign against Labor. The purpose of communist electoral activity was to popularise Class Against Class and offer working-class voters an opportunity to express their rejection of social fascism. The results were extremely discouraging. In its initial venture, the South Australian state elections in April 1930, where Kavanagh directed the party’s campaign, two Communist Party candidates attracted 696 votes. In the New South Wales state election in October 1930 there were no less than 51 communist candidates—probably a quarter of the membership in the state was pressed into service—and they won 10 445 votes, less than 1 per cent of the statewide tally. The two northern coalfield electorates of Kurri Kurri and Cessnock were most responsive, with over a thousand CPA votes in each, but in inner Sydney the tallies of 251 in Newtown and 143 in Glebe were disappointing and those in the affluent Lane Cove (24) and North Sydney (23) derisory. The federal election of December 1931 saw ten communists stand for the House of Representatives and four for the Senate. The best lower house results were obtained in the coalfield electorate of Hunter and some inner-Melbourne areas, but the total vote was only 8511. The Senate candidates, who drew from a wider pool, won 29 443 votes, but Queensland, where the communists received 2.32 per cent of the poll, was the best state result. Subsequent efforts were marginally better. Thirty-eight communists stood in the New South Wales state election of 1932 and won 12 351 votes; six in Queensland and one in Victoria in the same year polled 1057 and 953 respectively; three in South Australia in 1933 improved the result there to 1908; and two stood in Western Australia for the first time, attracting 442 votes. Results in local government elections—the party ran 120 candidates in New South Wales in 1932—were of the same exiguous order.29
Election campaigns made heavy demands on the party’s scant resources. Federal candidates were required to lodge a deposit, and most states had a similar requirement; a communist who made the payment in Victoria testified to the astonishment of the electoral officials as he counted out the sixpences and threepences.30 New South Wales, where the party made the most of free candidature, set a deposit of £25 after the 1932 election. Then there was the cost of literature and venues for campaigning, the calls on party members to speak and canvass, and the demoralising effect of repeated rebuffs. The very act of seeking parliamentary election was difficult to explain for a party that insisted parliamentary democracy was merely a cloak for capitalist dictatorship. The executive often had occasion to correct comrades for their mistaken campaigning. They were to put forward a platform of workers’ demands but not mislead the workers into believing those demands could be met. They were not to say that the election of communists would make no difference, but neither were they to encourage the illusion that the bourgeoisie would permit communists to win control of the state. They were to oppose the social fascist Labor Party absolutely but not to overlook fascist non-Labor. With these tortuous distinctions the communists offered themselves to the voters. Their venture onto the hustings and the stark rebuffs they encountered illustrated the difficulties of leading Class Against Class.