The Depression occupies a special place in twentieth-century history as a time of extremity. It brought acute distress, rancour and division that took capitalism closer to breakdown than before or since. With the advantage of hindsight, most economic historians mark the Depression of the 1930s off from the profligate excesses of the preceding decade, and see it yielding gradually to a hesitant recovery, with a resumption of growth and stability only after the necessary lessons were learned and the appropriate methods of economic management adopted in the 1940s. This retrospective periodisation misses the desperate uncertainty felt by people at the time of a slide towards an abyss. It loses sight of the continuities and cuts across lines of cause and effect that interwar critics of capitalism discerned. In the diagnosis advanced at the time by the Communist International, capitalist competition generated a growing imperialist rivalry that brought war in 1914 and revolution in 1917. After these cataclysms there was a temporary respite and then a renewed, deeper and more general crisis that intensified hardship, exacerbated international tension and compelled a final choice between revolution and war.
The dire predictions of the Third Period turned out to be too fatalistic. A second world war did follow the Depression, and it generated a new wave of revolutions, but capitalism survived and ultimately triumphed. Looking back over the interwar years, a distinguished communist historian suggested recently that the entire period from 1914 to 1945 might more aptly be characterised as the Age of Catastrophe. He sees the First World War and its revolutionary legacy as crippling the world economy, sweeping away colonial empires and overthrowing democracies, until a temporary and bizarre alliance of liberal capitalism and communism formed to win the Second World War and usher in a Golden Age of plenty. In this reading of the political economy of the twentieth century, the peace terms imposed after 1918 fatally impaired earlier patterns of international trade; by the late 1920s stocks built up by primary producers, such as Australia, swamped the costive market; once commodity prices collapsed, there was a general retreat into economic nationalism that intensified the contraction, so that world trade fell 60 per cent in the years 1929 to 1932. Deflationary remedies, balanced budgets and the absence of welfare expenditure deepened and prolonged the slump while they sapped the very foundations of government.1
Such an interpretation accords with the popular memory of the Depression. ‘Depression!’, a bushworker interviewed 40 years later exclaimed, ‘I never knew nothing else! The 1920s was just as bad.’ For many Australian manual labourers, jobs were scarce long before the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 signalled the collapse of the world financial system. These Australians continued to hunt for work long after the unemployment rate peaked at 30 per cent in 1932. Not until 1937 did national output regain its 1928 highpoint, and even then a quarter of a million Australians were still out of work. For those caught up in this Depression it had no clear beginning and no decisive end. It was a condition that suspended the passage of time into an indefinite waiting. It broke up families, embittered breadwinners, demoralised school-leavers. It marked its victims for life.2
The circumstances of the Depression were stamped on those it made into communists. Few, if any, had regular employment and most were out of work for years. They knew hardship not as a temporary misfortune, but as a constant condition, and the experience never left them. Their rejection of capitalism was no rhetorical gesture, it was a visceral hatred of a system that imposed hunger and humiliation, stunted lives and treated humans as outcasts. For these recruits, the class war was a daily reality. The police, the courts, the press upheld the claims of property over the most basic of all human requirements, the need for food, clothing, shelter and dignity. To submit was to abandon hope and succumb to despair, to resist and fight was to affirm one’s self-respect and concern for others. Some who had prior involvement in Labor politics turned in disgust from the utter failure of the ALP to protect its supporters. Les Barnes was an unemployed printer from the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick who regarded himself as an instinctive social democrat for whom the Soviet model of a revolutionary underground had little appeal, but he embraced communism in 1932 because ‘the Labor Party was doing nothing’, the Communist Party ‘at least was doing something’. Carl King, a canecutter, gave the Labor Party away in the same year that the Queensland Labor government blacklisted a group of relief workers who had simply asked for proper pay.3
Others were too young, too unsettled or too preoccupied with immediate concerns to have had any involvement in politics before they were caught up in the novel forms of collective endeavour. Ernie and Lila Thornton were in their mid-twenties, living in inner Melbourne and moving accommodation every few weeks, when they joined in 1931. He was a boy migrant from Yorkshire who became involved in the local UWM and was badly knocked about by the police. She was a local girl horrified by the ‘red raggers’ until she accompanied him to the Yarra Bank and heard their orators promise to end greed and want. The need for such mutuality was never more urgent, and Lila Thornton found that the Depression did in fact ‘make people share’, just as it convinced her of the need for the compulsory sharing of communism. Joe Carter, from the New South Wales rural town of Moree, was barely in his teens when he began to carry his swag during the early 1920s. He was an instinctive rebel, quick with his fists, and fought a contractor during the shearers’ strike of 1930 from which the PWIU emerged. It was in 1931, when he arrived in Lithgow, that he joined the party. ‘Why did I become a communist?’ he later asked, and recalled the humiliation of begging for food, ‘the way they used to look at ya’, and the indignities of working with the boss ‘right over the top of you’. To turn the question around: ‘Why wouldn’t I be a communist?’ But there was more to it than this, as he himself suggested with his recollection of the warmth and purpose of the Lithgow party comrades. Human warmth seems conspicuously absent from the rigorous communism of Class Against Class, but with half the town on the dole, Carter found a complete absence of prejudice against the unemployed: ‘Lithgow, to me anyway, would be the greatest workers’ town I’ve ever been in in my life.’ After finding construction work in Port Kembla, Carter saved his wages to buy a passage to Spain and fight in the International Brigade. The pattern here is of an instinctive belligerence channelled into disciplined, collective militancy.4
Regardless of background, the commitment to communism was not made lightly. A panel of senior comrades subjected the applicant for membership to a searching interrogation. Bill McDougall, an itinerant Scots immigrant, was drawn to the party as a result of his involvement in the unemployed demonstrations in Sydney during 1930. Bert Moxon and two members of the district committee quizzed him. The question that stumped McDougall was why the Communist Party and not the Labor Party? He knew the answer instinctively, for it sprang from his recent activity and was manifest in his very application to join, yet how could he express it in the requisite formula before he was drilled in the vocabulary of Class Against Class? Fortunately, one of the district committee members filled the doctrinal gap for him and he was accepted. Others were treated more abruptly. Flo Davis, a deserted wife working in Brisbane pubs, dressed in her best clothes to appear before the district committee only to be told, ‘Come back when you know a bit more’. Ted Bacon, a young public servant in the same city, suffered the same fate: ‘Come back when you grow up’. Johnno Johnson scraped through his rigorous examination by the north Queensland district committee: ‘God, the things they asked you’.5
The recruits who survived such scrutiny accepted the iron discipline of the party as a necessary condition of the class war. The Depression communist was hard, unyielding, capable of enormous self-sacrifice, indomitable. ‘Compromise’ and ‘conciliation’ were terms of disapprobation in the party lexicon; ‘annihilation’ of the enemy was the object, to be achieved by ‘ruthless exposure’ of all faint-hearts and ‘liquidation’ of any personal reservations. The strident tone of communist agitation certainly increased the incidence and severity of official repression. The party fell prey to the comforting delusion that its success could be measured by the hostility it attracted. In January 1930 the prominent Queensland communist Fred Paterson was charged with sedition for a speech in the Brisbane Domain where he allegedly urged workers to take the law into their hands. While he was acquitted, another Queenslander, Bob Bossone, was found guilty of the same crime later in the year for declaring, ‘To Hell with King. To Hell with the Union Jack. The Red Flag is what we want to see flying here.’ Bossone then had to endure a scalding in the party press for entering into a good behaviour bond.6
Herb McClintock arraigned social fascism in a cartoon drawn for the first issue of ‘Strife’. The ‘basher squad’ of the Victorian police parades for inspection by a generic capitalist, with an ineffectual Labor member of parliament trailing in his wake. At this time of heightened police brutality, the Labor Party held office in Victoria. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/1994)
State governments employed a variety of laws to quell demonstrations and deter participants. Unlawful assembly was the most common charge, frequently supplemented with loitering in a public place, offensive behaviour, insulting police, resisting arrest, or assault. The increasing prosecution of activists for vagrancy turned an economic condition into a political offence since in a period of mass unemployment very few of those the police picked were able to demonstrate ‘lawful means of support’. To add insult to injury, the police accused one communist seized in a house raid in the Melbourne suburb of Newport, where at least one in every four adult males was unable to find a job, of ‘dodging work’, and he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. In another Melbourne case the magistrate made it clear that the offence consisted not in the indigency of the defendant but in his party activity. Jack Stevens, the party organiser in Western Australia, was gaoled in 1931 on a charge of being a person of ‘evil fame’.7
The states also introduced special laws during the Depression that augmented police powers to prevent public gatherings. They formed special police squads to maintain surveillance over communists, break up street protests and put down resistance to evictions. These squads gained a fearsome reputation for brutality. They also exchanged information with the Investigation Branch of the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, which continued to gather anti-communist intelligence. The election of a federal Labor government in 1929 had been expected to curb the Investigation Branch’s activities; in May 1930 it was even rumoured that its budget would be cut from £10 000 to £3000. But customs officers continued to seize communist literature and over the next few months the Investigation Branch coordinated raids on communist headquarters in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne.8 Postal officials destroyed 2000 copies of the Red Leader in 1931 on grounds that the Postmaster-General refused to divulge despite repeated questions from Eddie Ward, a sympathetic federal parliamentarian.9 Newspapers, pamphlets and handbills were a particular target of police action, and printing presses were often confiscated.10
In the first flush of enthusiasm for Class Against Class the party expected members to prove their revolutionary mettle with a reckless contempt for the restrictions on their activity. They mounted the stump, spoke out, took the beating and served the time. The charge of cowardice Moxon levelled at Jack Kavanagh for supposedly holding back workers from attacking police outside the Trades Hall on 7 November 1930 was the most damaging of all the accusations against him. Following that affray, Moxon directed a series of further confrontations. On Friday 14 November the Women’s Group defied a police ban on a city march. Twelve were arrested, the formidable Joy Barrington twice: when first bundled into the back seat of a police car she escaped from the other side and resumed her attack on the police. A week later Moxon himself was arrested after he urged the crowd to break through barriers in front of the New South Wales state parliament. He appeared in court in full revolutionary fig, his head swathed in bandages, and was sentenced to two weeks’ imprisonment. Along with ten UWM members serving stiff terms for their part in the Clovelly anti-eviction campaign, this November action brought the number of incarcerated Sydney communists to more than 50, and most embarked on a hunger strike until the party called their action off in December.11
Hard cases received special attention. Bill Laidlaw, a miner who had been convicted of insulting police at Kurri Kurri in January 1930, was one of those arrested on the hunger march from the Hunter Valley to Sydney in June; in August he was gaoled for three months as the result of a dispute with the owner of a city restaurant where he was working; the court was told he had not worked underground for five years. Joe Shelley was another arrested during the hunger march. He had served three months in Townsville in 1929 for his part in a free speech campaign (and would have done time in Melbourne a year earlier for insulting the police had not Guido Baracchi paid his fine) before his conviction for incitement to murder on the northern coalfields in 1930. He completed that five-month sentence just in time to be arrested on the hunger march. The party then put Shelley onto a coastal steamship as its maritime organiser, but he was sacked and threatened with deportation as soon as he was identified in 1931. Later in the same year he was set upon by thugs when speaking in Katoomba, New South Wales; the local policeman arrested him and a further two months’ hard labour followed. A small boy who witnessed the incident recalled Joe Shelley, ‘bloody but unbowed’, ‘tough as Stalin’s nails’.12
For a time the party flirted with reprisals. There was talk in 1930 of armed resistance on the northern coalfield, of sabotage of the power supply in Adelaide where the port and its surrounds were under police occupation as volunteer workers were introduced to the wharves, and even of a general uprising in Broken Hill.13 The Australian delegates to the RILU Congress in August 1930 boasted of these designs and were chastened to discover that the Comintern disapproved. To embark on such romantic escapades in the absence of far greater support than the party enjoyed, they were told, was dangerous folly. While communists were revolutionaries who sought to overthrow capitalism by force, they abjured terrorism and condemned random acts of violence. Such unscientific blows in the class war were ill-directed and self-defeating, a symptom of the impulse to revolt that in the absence of Bolshevik discipline found expression in anarchosyndicalist spontaneity such as had brought the Wobblies undone. Sharkey and Orr returned from Moscow with clear instructions to halt such plans and thereafter the Australian party eschewed them. The same held for individual acts of violence. Mick Ryan, who abandoned the Labor Party to become a leading figure in the UWM, issued a public repentance in 1931 for his action in assaulting a Labor organiser, ‘Plugger’ Martin, at the ALP’s Sydney office. Martin was a notorious bully and had besmirched Ryan’s reputation with sexual tittle-tattle; but the ‘correct Communist line of action’, Ryan recognised, was to ‘maintain the utmost self-control in all situations’.14
In 1930 the party also formed a Workers’ Defence Corps. Composed initially of ex-servicemen, and organised along conventional military lines into companies and platoons, it was to provide protection to the pickets, eviction resisters, speakers and demonstrators so sorely in need of such assistance. On the northern coalfield these formations achieved some initial success against the far-flung police detachments that guarded the pit-heads from angry miners, but the police hit back with massive reinforcements. Operating out of fortified camps, special detachments used motor transport to descend en masse upon their adversaries. Subsequently the WDC adopted a more flexible form of organisation, better suited to ‘guerilla warfare’, with units of no more than eight members. The defensive purpose suggested by the title of the Workers’ Defence Corps is nevertheless significant. Despite flirtation with stronger measures—Sharkey claimed the miners’ contingent of the Corps obtained two machine guns—communists remained defiant rather than insurrectionary, incurably majoritarian even though they constituted only a tiny minority, convinced that capitalism was doomed and that their own resolution in its death throes would win the support of the working class. The object of the WDC, then, was to afford the necessary protection to working-class activists in their legitimate activities.15
Even this proved a hazardous business. In New South Wales, where the WDC originated, state legislation forbade unauthorised paramilitary drilling: the leaders were marked men. Those members who were found with weapons—batons and coshes were most common—incurred heavy penalties. The WDC also attracted some desperate types. Among its Sydney ranks was a group of Irish descent, well versed in the traditions of the republican army, who acquired a cache of police revolvers and a store of gelignite from the coalmines. They were preparing to invest a house at Bankstown under order of eviction when the police stormed it. Several of the defenders received bullet wounds, others were hospitalised by beatings administered afterwards at the police station when those arrested were handcuffed, then bashed senseless. An Aboriginal party member, Dick Eatock, got eighteen months and his brother Noel two-and-a-half years for a later WDC action in Glebe.16
The Bankstown eviction case occurred in 1931, when the Communist Party came under fierce assault, more general and more violent than it had so far encountered. The attack came from the paramilitary bodies, formed largely from ex-servicemen, that had sprung into existence during the 1920s to uphold national and imperial interests against the threat from the left. Initially they operated in a clandestine fashion, drilled under cover of darkness and held themselves in readiness for the moment of need. The mounting difficulties of the federal Labor government in dealing with the country’s financial crisis, the return of Lang to office in New South Wales at the end of 1930 after three years in opposition, and above all the communist agitation among the unemployed, convinced these conservatives that the moment had arrived. From 1931 members of the New Guard in New South Wales, the League of National Security in Victoria and equivalent bodies in other states began to appear in force. The Victorian organisation called out its rural detachments to prepare for an uprising in March 1931, probably in response to the communist International Unemployment Day, though the hard-faced men who dug trenches and patrolled their towns through the night were taking no chances and in several instances locked up the local Catholics as an additional security precaution. In the cities these clandestine organisations presented themselves as defenders of law and order who would assist the authorities in their enforcement of the public peace. At a communist demonstration at the Sydney Town Hall in April 1931 against Joe Lyons, the former Labor treasurer who was preparing to go across to the conservatives, a police officer asked a returned serviceman to hold one demonstrator while he apprehended another, and the helpful volunteer obliged by punching his charge unconscious. At a street meeting in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, custodians of conservative honour threatened to knock a member of the Young Communist League off his box for insulting Lord Baden-Powell. Two constables in the crowd stepped in to arrest the young communist for offensive behaviour.17
With the formation of the United Australia Party in May and the growing paralysis of the hopelessly fragmented federal Labor government, such events became increasingly common. In swollen numbers and with the clear approval of the press, detachments of the secret armies broke up communist meetings. Typically, the New Guard members would howl down the speaker, sing loyal refrains (which had a practical as well as a patriotic purpose, as they served to distinguish foe from friend—any man who did not remove his hat for the National Anthem was a red) and then set upon their opponents. ‘Nothing more lethal than a pick handle’, was their commander’s instruction, though he ‘noted with amusement many a bulge on the hip’. His men did not always prevail, especially when they ventured into working-class neighbourhoods where their flash cars and prosperous appearance made them conspicuous, but they undoubtedly increased the hazards of left-wing activism. The growing incidence of street violence bore disturbing resemblance to the rise of fascism in Germany, Austria and other countries at this time, as did the sympathy of many police and magistrates for the right-wing combatants. Australian communists noted the similarities, but at least initially they did not cause any reconsideration of tactics. Rather, the fact that the police in New South Wales and Victoria were administered by state Labor governments confirmed communists in their belief that social fascism was responsible for their persecution. ‘The correctness of Communist theory is again demonstrated in the unity of the social-fascist and fascist forces in the present anti-working class offensive.’18
The wave of anti-communism swept the countryside. The assault on the UWM in Mildura on 1 November 1931 and Bourke a fortnight later were followed by similar actions in northern Victoria and western New South Wales. Again there was a consistent pattern. A town meeting of ‘concerned citizens’ would deliver an ultimatum that all communist activity must cease. Those who resisted were beaten, then taken onto the highway and told to keep walking. One activist had the word RED burned onto his forehead with acid. Other unemployed residents were rounded up and made to affirm their loyalty. Police intervened only when this wholly illegal action threatened to turn into a lynching, at which time they would arrest the victim. Moxon was one of those arrested at Bourke, and he served ten days for speaking without a permit.19
The federal election, which followed the fall of the Labor government at the end of November, extended the right-wing offensive. Communist candidates for the Senate were prevented from campaigning in rural centres in both Victoria and New South Wales. In Sydney a number of municipalities announced a ban on all communist activity which the New Guard enforced with renewed rigour. At Lane Cove, Bondi, Drummoyne, Darlinghurst and King’s Cross large crowds gathered to close down communist meetings. Sometimes they gave notice of their intention to the police, who then escorted the communists from the locality; sometimes they instigated a brawl, which almost always resulted in arrest of communists. Mark Gosling, the minister in Lang’s cabinet with responsibility for the police, both deprecated and abetted the anti-communist offensive. He insisted that the New Guard had no authority to prevent public meetings; he also published a list of the names and domestic addresses of all known Sydney communists.20
The Lang government itself came under increasing attack from the New Guard in the early months of 1932. Apart from the celebrated incident when one of its officers, Francis de Groot, slashed the symbolic red ribbon across the Sydney Harbour Bridge with his sword before the premier could cut it with ceremonial scissors, there were raids on Labor meetings and even an assault on Jock Garden in his home. This final frenzy lasted until the governor finally dismissed Lang from office and the electors returned the United Australia Party, and again it occasioned pitched battles between left and right. The fear and hatred of the unemployed turned respectable middle-class men into thugs who invaded working-class neighbourhoods to clean up the reds, a challenge the communists met with equal resolution. The battle of Bankstown, on the night of Friday 26 February 1932, was perhaps the most celebrated encounter. When a motorised column of several hundred New Guards attempted to stop a meeting of the UWM, they were beaten off in savage fighting, their cars put out of action: ‘the hoods were ripped to pieces, windscreens were smashed, side windows in the sedans were holed, and tyres were damaged’.21
In the course of the federal election the United Australia Party made much of the communist threat. Upon its accession to office at the beginning of 1932 it reimposed a more intense censorship of imported communist material and implemented a number of new measures. In February the postmaster-general refused mail delivery of communist newspapers. In April the Commonwealth deported a German-born party member upon the expiry of his imprisonment for crimes committed in the Adelaide beef riot. In May the attorney-general introduced new amendments to the Commonwealth Crimes Act which made it an offence to provide assistance to an unlawful association, and widened the definition of an unlawful association to include any body that encouraged ‘the overthrow by force of violence of the established government of a Commonwealth or of a State or of any other civilized country or of an established government’. He then prosecuted the publisher of the Workers’ Weekly for soliciting funds for the party.22
The court convicted the publisher and sentenced him to jail, but the High Court overturned the conviction on the grounds that the appeal was for an auxiliary body, which could not be assumed to share the revolutionary aims attributed to the party. The prosecution thus failed on a technicality and left the party free to continue, but the threat of further prosecution hampered its activities. The ban on postal transmission of newspapers caused an immediate drop of circulation (that of the Red Leader fell immediately from 8000 to 3500) and was costly to circumvent. The threat of prosecution of the party’s Sydney landlords under the Crimes Act deterred other property owners from allowing communists to rent premises or hire meeting places, while a proposed amendment to the Commonwealth Arbitration Act, which would have deregistered any union linked to an illegal organisation, forced the Australian Railways Union to withdraw from its proposed affiliation to the Red International of Labor Unions. The government’s augmented power to deport naturalised Australians for membership of an illegal organisation hung over the heads of many activists. Party members were also prevented from attending international congresses by cancellation of their passports, and several public employees who visited Russia as delegates of the Friends of the Soviet Union were sacked upon their return.23
Even these measures did not satisfy the more virulent anti-communists who bombarded the attorney-general with reports of red outrages and demands for summary justice. John Latham, who resumed the office of attorney-general in the Lyons ministry, had to remind one particularly insistent Sydney businessman that while he had redrafted federal laws on crime, customs, postal services, immigration and naturalisation, the rule of law still required evidence to secure a conviction—and he also called for a security report on his vexatious correspondent. Latham continued to chafe, nevertheless, against the constitutional limits on federal jurisdiction, and repeatedly asked the states to use their own untrammelled constitutional powers to simply close the party down. Victoria obliged him with its ban on the use of rail transport for communist publications; New South Wales toyed with the possibility of a more comprehensive Disloyalty Act.24
Restrictions on public assembly remained the chief curb on communist activity. With the return of conservatives to government, the right-wing thugs faded away; the police remained and tightened their control. The effects were severest in Victoria, where the commander of the secret army, Major-General Thomas Blamey, doubled as the commissioner of police. He had used a special squad to stop all marches and meetings in the city of Melbourne, an object achieved during 1931, and obtained additional powers in 1932 from the new UAP state government to break up suburban street meetings. Some municipal councils forbade such meetings and some, especially inner-suburban Labor councils, allowed them; Blamey now overrode the local authorities to close down pitches in Carlton, Prahran, Footscray, South Melbourne and Brunswick, which traditionally served soapbox orators on a Friday night. In the face of growing protest from the Free Speech League, the chief secretary agreed in March 1933 to amend the law so that such meetings could be held where they did not obstruct traffic. Blamey, however, continued to enforce the old law, even in Phoenix Street, a cul-de-sac off Sydney Road in Brunswick.
The free speech fight became concentrated on Brunswick and brought many arrests. It culminated on the evening of Friday 19 May, when Noel Counihan volunteered to defy the ban from inside a lift cage bolted to a cart padlocked to a verandah post along Sydney Road. His friend ‘Shorty’ Patullo would climb on top of a tram to harangue the crowd and distract the police while the deed was done. Both of these young men were recent recruits to the Young Communist League, single and sufficiently reckless to accept the inevitable consequences. Counihan was able to speak for fifteen minutes and connect the free speech campaign to the plight of the unemployed, the rise of fascism and the ambitions of the warmongering imperialists before the police battered a hole in his cage. Patullo was quickly chased up an alley and shot in the thigh. Both were arrested and convicted, though Counihan’s subsequent appeal succeeded on a legal technicality. He found so many free-speech victims in Pentridge that there was a large Marxist study class. Further arrests continued for another two months before the legislative amendment conceded by the chief secretary came into force. It was the campaign of the Free Speech League, a campaign involving both communists and Labor Party members, that determined the outcome: the subsequent dramatics were strictly an epilogue, a result of Blamey’s determination to win the battle of Phoenix Street and the resolution of the communists that he would not. A statue in Sydney Road now marks their ultimate victory. It is a bell-shaped cage, draped in a cloth, but above it a bird sings its freedom.25
In Sydney there was a similar campaign of even greater longevity against a ban on the sale of literature or collection of money at the Domain. Sunday afternoon at the Domain was a time-honoured fixture for espousers of causes in Sydney, its location on the edge of the city centre well suited to attract passing spectators. Communists had held public meetings there since the party’s formation, so the party took up the restrictive regulations introduced early in 1934 as a major challenge. International Labour Defence, the successor to the International Class War Prisoners’ Aid, organised a team of speakers who reached back into the party’s past: Jack Howie, now of the ALP, Jim Quinton, on behalf of the ALP’s Socialisation Units, Paddy Drew, still a communist but representing the Labor Council. It must have felt like old times as the police drew batons and made 25 arrests. For more than a year the campaign continued and the toll mounted. Jean Devanny was one of those who once more served time in the cause. ‘I’ll go again if the Party decides that way, Tommy’, she told Tom Wright, ‘but I dread the thought of it’. Yet again she was convicted, only this time the party paid her fine.26
A recurring motif in communist history is the spy. Ever since the party had come into existence the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, state police and employers’ organisations had gathered information by attending meetings and planting agents in party branches. In the desperate circumstances of the Third Period, when the party was waging the war of Class Against Class, this infiltration took on an augmented significance. Spies gave warning of activity that relied on surprise if it was not to be suppressed; they urged members to commit crimes, and they framed them for crimes they did not commit. Communists endured great hardship during the Depression. They accepted the physical danger attached to their duties and were prepared if necessary to break the law, but the presence of enemies within their ranks was peculiarly unsettling.
In 1930 the party executive discussed how to deal with a spy who had been discovered in Sydney. He was a Melbourne man named Mulholland, who had hung about the party bookshop with bottles of beer in his pocket, boasting of his contacts. ‘There are probably spies in the Party’, Herbert Moore allowed—and well he might, since he was one himself. ‘Some of them will be found out soon, some of them later, but no spy lasts very long.’27 Some were readily identified by their appearance. The policeman who turns up at an early conference of the UWM at the Trades Hall in Judah Waten’s novel, Time of Conflict, is a dead giveaway: ‘his sports coat was spotless, his trouser cuffs weren’t frayed and his open-necked shirt was white with a kind of whiteness no unemployed man in the single men’s house ever achieved’. Stan Moran, a leading member of the UWM in Sydney, claimed that he spotted an infiltrator when he looked down at his boot and saw ‘NSW Police Department’ stamped on it. Others came to light when an interstate comrade recognised them. The South Australian member Tony McGillick arrived in Sydney for the UWM conference in June 1930 and identified among the unemployed delegates billeted in the party hall a police spy who had secured a shop for Adelaide communists at cheap rental, which proved to be a police trap. Another, Constable Cook, disclosed his true identity when he appeared in court to give evidence against communists in the Clovelly eviction case of 1930.28
Others again betrayed themselves in a momentary lapse, such as a New South Wales policeman, Parsons, who joined the party in January 1931 and worked with Jean Devanny in Workers’ International Relief. He was energetic, punctual, cheerful, no task was too difficult, but as Devanny was travelling with him to a lunch-hour meeting and he asked her a question about an eviction the party planned to contest, she experienced a moment of revelation:
… out of the blue, absolutely without reason, there came over me a queer feeling. I turned and looked at him. Our eyes met—and in the depths of his, as plainly as if reflected in a mirror I saw him in the uniform of a policeman.
The feeling passed, the idea seemed ridiculous. Devanny reported it nevertheless to a district committee member and he laughed that next she would accuse him of being a spy. Moxon also claimed later that he had reported his suspicions of Parsons and been censured for ‘raising doubts about a good proletarian’. Then in June Parsons approached a comrade and suggested the party take reprisals for the police shootings at Bankstown by mining another house at Guildford with explosives. The Control Commission immediately expelled him. Some days later he turned up at the party hall in Sussex Street and was confronted by the aggressive Sam Aarons, whose parents had been founder-members in Melbourne and who had joined himself when the Depression ruined his chain of shoe repair shops in Sydney. Parsons drew a revolver, arrested Aarons for insulting language and made his final exit. Devanny claims that when next she saw him, on duty in uniform, he flushed and averted his face.29
It was at this time also that the party press began to carry lengthy reports of treachery in the workers’ state. Imperialist agents were destroying livestock to create food shortages. The great Five Year Plan for modernising Soviet industry was being sabotaged by foreign technicians. The founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, expelled from the party in 1927 and deported in 1929, was conducting a campaign of vicious lies against the party leadership. Former leaders such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were revealed as counter-revolutionary plotters. If these illustrious Old Bolsheviks could turn out to be traitors, how could the tiny Australian party remain pure?30
At least one other spy at Sussex Street went undetected. Alf Baker was the business manager of the Workers’ Weekly who handled its subscriptions and also kept the membership records of the party. He was a member of the central committee, though he seldom participated in its business, for he was one of those industrious, unassuming functionaries who are to be found behind the scenes of any voluntary organisation. He earned his living as a postal worker, and came and went according to his shift, working in a little office alongside the meeting room that was kept securely locked. Then one day in 1938 Baker failed to turn up, and was never seen again. He was, it transpired, a detective sergeant.31
The forms of organisation and activity the party assumed during the period of Class Against Class were shaped by the environment in which it operated. The rigid hierarchical structure, the iron discipline enforced by expulsions and reinforced by self-criticism, afforded some protection against the fierce hostility members encountered. The secrecy reduced the exposure to spies. The prohibition of dissent and ban on factional activity were checks on error or disruption. At the same time these devices perpetuated the beleaguered condition of the party, holding it in a state of tension where mistakes were repeatedly discovered and dangerous tendencies constantly had to be rooted out.
The party made demands that taxed even the most ardent. In an open letter to the communist parties of capitalist countries at the beginning of 1930, the ECCI observed that while the new tasks of Class Against Class would require some cleansing of the ranks, no general purge was required. Frank self-criticism and careful examination of the party’s ranks, from the top down, would be more appropriate since the difficult conditions that these parties were encountering provided ‘a fundamental guarantee against the entrance into the party of careerists and placehunters’.32 This was certainly true of Australia and yet the party took to the task of cleansing itself with profligate relish. Andy Barras, a member of the central committee, Gordon Kilpatrick, until recently organiser in Western Australia, and E. W. Paton, a prominent Sydney member, were all expelled early in 1930. Unlike another victim, Jack Ryan, they were not accused of political errors; rather, they were deemed to have failed in the tasks they were allocated. A similar fate befell Judah Waten, who had moved from Melbourne to Sydney to work on the staff of the Workers’ Weekly. He left Sydney, and was suspended for twelve months for not obtaining leave. Others were deemed to lack Bolshevik courage: one Melbourne member was expelled for cowardice when he failed to defend party speakers against ‘organised thuggery’.33 Even the indomitable Joe Shelley would fall victim to this allegation when, between prison terms, he failed to combat the right wing in Lithgow. Called before the Control Commission and instructed to offer self-criticism, he placed his party card on the table and walked out. The party removed him from the central committee and then allowed him to resume his exertions on its behalf on the waterfront. Within a year he was severely censured for a breach of discipline and sent back to Lithgow.34
These exemplary lessons in party discipline were imitated across the country. Districts and sections demonstrated their rigour by expelling members for any laxity in the performance of duties, any infraction of discipline. Indeed, the party units displayed greater severity than the national executive, which was more likely to extend clemency to an offender who expressed contrition. The pages of the Workers’ Weekly carried dozens of brief announcements sent in by local secretaries that recorded the expulsion of this coward or that traitor. The practice became endemic until Sharkey, the editor, announced at a party plenum in December 1932 that it should cease. ‘All these small, trivial expulsions do not improve the tone or level of the Party organ. As a general rule it is only when someone of mass standing in the movement has to be expelled or criticised that we should give space.’ The incessant purges also stunted the party’s growth, as the national secretariat noted in a review of progress in the three months after this plenum. In some sections the number of expulsions exceeded recruitments, and it was made clear that such indiscriminate bloodletting was to cease: ‘expulsions must only be resorted to in cases where comrades bring discredit to the Party or where they persist in carrying on a line in opposition to the Party line’.35
A similar tendency to go to the extreme bedevilled the other technique of party discipline, self-criticism. Initially employed for the condign punishment of right opportunists such as Ryan and Kavanagh, it was quickly given general application. Under the supervision of Herbert Moore, leading members outbid each other in proclamation of their errors, the better to establish their integrity. ‘Discipline presupposes the existence of conscious and voluntary submission’, Comrade Stalin laid down, ‘because only a conscious submission can become a discipline of iron’. To submit was to cast off all personal feelings of friendship or antipathy. A comrade who resented the authority of another, or allowed personal loyalty to come before duty to the party, or attributed his own treatment to malice, was succumbing to the heinous sin of petty-bourgeois individualism. ‘A Communist has only one supreme loyalty and that is to the Communist Party and the Communist International’, Sharkey insisted at a party plenum. ‘If he is doing something out of loyalty to other comrades, he wants to drop that point of view. We have no personal ties in the Communist Party.’ But excessive self-criticism could be just as debilitating as wholesale expulsions, a danger the party recognised when it warned against ‘the penitential form of the confession with its mea culpa, mea culpa’. In the ritualised form it so often took, self-criticism served also as a form of selfaggrandisement, the mock humility merely drawing attention to the refractory materials from which the party was constructed.36
In both these disciplinary devices the Australian party implemented the forms of Bolshevik practice and drew back from the full consequences of such a regimen. A similar pattern was apparent in the party’s response to official repression. The Third Period postulated a confrontation with capitalism in its hour of crisis. No alleviation of the misery of its victims could be expected. Social fascism, the twin of fascism, would throw off the cloak of democracy as discontent grew. In their direction of the revolutionary struggle, communists could expect no quarter and must be prepared to continue their struggle under conditions of illegality. With the election of the UAP federal government at the end of 1931 and the amendments to the Crimes Act in 1932, that prospect seemed imminent. The party prepared to go underground with a cell system of clandestine members, safe addresses, hidden printing presses, secret communications and other security techniques to avoid detection.37 Australians had scant familiarity with such ‘conspiratorial work’, as it was called, and little attraction to it. They found it hard enough to follow the limited security measures that were introduced into party life at the time: the use of pseudonyms, the frequent changing of meeting places and the discouragement of casual conversations among members. As the party recognised, such measures negated the efforts to popularise the cause and establish a communist presence in factories and working-class neighbourhoods. In smaller towns such subterfuges were in any case impossible, as a Toowoomba comrade pointed out to the Queensland district secretary in forthright terms: ‘Oh, don’t be so fucking stupid. Everyone knows my name’s Cliff Jones. How can I run round this town telling them I’m someone else? You must be bloody stark staring mad down in Brisbane.’38
The tight security also changed the character of the party. It reduced opportunities for general discussion and widened the gulf between the ordinary party members, who necessarily remained open in their activity, and the full-time organisers and leaders, who would periodically disappear from view and consequently became more remote, inaccessible, cloaked in an aura of mystery. Herbert Moore had introduced the clandestine procedures to the first of the party plenums, the enlarged gathering of the central committee that met every few months and lasted several days. Gil Roper, a recent Adelaide recruit who attended this new kind of national assembly in 1930, was astonished that each session reassembled at a new meeting-place announced at the close of the previous one. As party secretary, J. B. Miles tightened the format. Delegates were henceforth identified in minutes by letter or number (Miles was 1, Sharkey 2) and a neophyte who was so indiscreet as to carve a hammer and sickle on a table incurred his wrath. Some members relished their notoriety in an atmosphere of imminent illegality and proposed that the party should treat any prohibition on its activities with the same defiance members displayed when brought before the courts to answer individual charges. In fact the Australian party contested the federal government’s use of the Crimes Act, and made full use of the very legal system it denounced to restrict the impact of the legislation.39
The experience of the Australian party during the Third Period replicated that of other communist parties. They too embarked on the extreme policies associated with Class Against Class at a time of acute economic crisis, social distress and political instability, and they too encountered a heavy-handed response from the governments they sought to overthrow. All of them underwent a similar process of ‘Bolshevisation’, one that installed new leaders, new structures and procedures designed to ensure fidelity to the instructions of the Communist International. In Australia, the cumulative effect of its beleaguered condition and the iron discipline was to remake the Communist Party of Australia into a party like no other in the country’s experience of radical movements. Demanding absolute obedience, it treated anything less as treachery:
In a critical period such as the present when the Australian party is called upon to steel itself against the blows of the capitalists it is vital that the party preserves its unity and bolshevik fighting qualities by combating all those elements who attempt, through various activities, to carry on disruptive and provocative work inside the party.
Hence, in the stark formulation of J. B. Miles, ‘We do not allow dissension in the Communist Party’.40
It is clear how the practices of expulsion, self-criticism and secrecy assisted Miles to stamp out dissension, and it is tempting to see them as mere devices whereby he and his colleagues imposed an absolute authority over the membership. But this view hardly allows for the leaders’ own misgivings about the uses to which the practices were put, and it exaggerates the degree of control they were able to exercise in the early years of their leadership. Sharkey acquired eminence only after his return from the Soviet Union at the end of 1930; Miles’ pre-eminence began several months later. For some time afterwards they had to deal with criticisms and challenges. Arguments over the correct interpretation and implementation of Class Against Class arose at every major gathering of party members up to 1935. The leaders’ persistent recourse to self-criticism and expulsion was not simply a manipulation of party discipline to serve their own interests. The limits they imposed on its application suggest, rather, a recognition of the damaging effects of excessive zeal. It is to these internal controversies, with their interplay of ideology, aggrandisement and exigency that we now turn.
At the party congress in Easter 1931 the opposition was led by two members of the central committee, Jack Loughran and Esmonde Higgins, and two other leading party members, Ted Tripp and Charlie Nelson. Their chief grievance was the stifling of discussion under the dictatorial regimen imposed by Moore. Loughran’s animosity towards Moore was shared by Tripp, who had encountered him while in Moscow in 1929 and learned from American students at the Lenin School of his shady record and ultimate expulsion from the American party. Higgins’s contribution to the pre-congress discussion had been censored (it consisted of ‘lies and slander’, said Sharkey), while Nelson resented the threats of decapitation made against him. Their arguments against party policy were more muted. Criticism of the party’s campaign in the New South Wales state elections in October of the previous year, ostensibly on the grounds that 51 candidates were excessive and too many of them were of poor quality, was as far as they would take their doubts about the new line. In response they were accused of wanting the election of a Labor government, which amounted to right opposition to the new line. Most denied the accusation, though Tripp and Higgins argued that the return to office of Jack Lang did provide the party with opportunities to expose the illusions of reformism. This was the heresy of the ‘lesser evil’, which made them no better than ‘agents of the left social fascists’, according to one of the many delegates who denounced them. Duly admonished, they were then invited to offer self-criticism. All but Higgins did so and were restored to their positions, Loughran on the Control Commission, Nelson and Tripp on the central committee. Even Higgins, who was dropped from the central committee, took up an editorial post on the Red Leader.41
Some prescient delegates to the Tenth Congress discerned a left as well as a right danger in the party ranks. Moxon was the only representative of it identified at that time, but six months later—and after the Eleventh Plenum of the ECCI clearly warned against it—J. B. Miles found leftism to be rampant. It was apparent, according to Miles, in the failure of the UWM to take up the ‘concrete problems of the jobless’ (an early example of this dreadful adjective and many of his readers must have wondered if he was proposing to feed the unemployed from cement mixers), in its inappropriate use of revolutionary slogans and in sectarian attitudes that isolated communists from the masses. Miles’s criticism of the work of the UWM was aimed at Jack Sylvester, its charismatic national organiser. Sylvester was an English immigrant based in Balmain, educated, articulate and by no means submissive to the leadership. Miles did not name him and Sylvester did not participate in the ensuing discussion. But Jack Hitchen, a forthright south-coast miner, took the bait and suggested that the critics of the UWM were afraid of its revolutionary policies. Jack Kavanagh also weighed in with a criticism of any softening of unemployed militancy, and was duly taken to task: ‘Comrade Kavanagh is replacing his right views with the left variety, once again proving the close affinity of right and left deviations’. The campaign against sectarianism (by now clearly established as a synonym for leftism) widened to take in all areas of party activity, and district committees admonished themselves for their past failures.42
Number 4 District proved most prone to sectarianism; indeed, Victoria emerged at this point from its earlier torpor to become the region of fastest growth and greatest turbulence. The party there had attracted a number of young recruits of a particularly ardent disposition. Moore visited Melbourne during 1930 and found a district committee composed of young, inexperienced comrades who ‘in their enthusiasm were anxious to discover all sorts of real and imaginary right deviations’. Moxon’s subsequent spell of duty there did little to curb their enthusiasm. Early in 1932 the national leadership removed two of the most impetuous, Arthur Marshall (he used the pseudonym King) and James Higgins (he had led the raid on Trades Hall in September 1931 with the declaration, ‘There’ll be Soviet power in Melbourne tomorrow’) from the district committee. Under the cloak of self-criticism these former New Zealand hotheads were said to have demonstrated ‘anarchist dishonesty to try to discredit the leadership of the Party’. In April Marshall accused the central committee of ‘criminal right opportunism’. He and Higgins were expelled, along with Moxon who had persisted with his leftism. Hitchen followed some months afterwards when he said the party had become lost in a ‘jungle of left Social Fascist activity’.43
The Victorian district secretary, Dinny Lovegrove (he used the name Jackson), was the next to challenge the leadership. He had opposed the more reckless escapades of Marshall and Higgins, and was not responsible for the assault on the Labor platform at the Yarra Bank on May Day 1932; that was the work of Jean Devanny, a visiting speaker, and Les Cahill, probably a police spy. But he kept up a confrontational style of street action that the Sydney leaders increasingly discouraged, notably in the rally he organised to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in November 1932. In defiance of police commissioner Blamey’s ban on city demonstrations, the celebrants gathered in Melbourne’s commercial centre to sing ‘The Internationale’. Blamey met them with 22 mounted troopers, 30 police on motorcycles, 50 in plain clothes and 100 in uniform. As Ralph Gibson, the secretary of the Friends of the Soviet Union recalled, ‘there were enough Party members and non-Party stalwarts to require continuous police bashing from the starting-point outside the Capitol Theatre to the Temperance Hall in Russell Street, which was booked for the final rally’. Gibson was one of many arrested.44
Both Lovegrove and Thornton were young, unemployed zealots who took readily to the rigours of Class Against Class. Both combined courage and organisational flair with a hectoring manner that brooked no contradiction. Lovegrove’s erratic judgement and autocratic manner caused the Sydney leadership increasing concern during 1932. He expelled his chief local rival, Ernie Thornton, along with Thornton’s supporters in the Yarra section of the district, based on Richmond and Collingwood, where the party had made greatest progress. Tom Wright came down from Sydney to investigate the numerous complaints against Lovegrove and tried to mediate the dispute, but Lovegrove derided the central committee as too respectable and timid.45
On behalf of the entire district committee, Lovegrove and two other Victorians took a comprehensive bill of charges against the central committee to a plenum at the end of 1932. It accused the Sydney leaders of failing utterly to take advantage of the splendid objective conditions to build the party, of persistent opportunism, of liquidating the UWM, of capitulation to capitalist legality in their response to the Crimes Act prosecution of the publisher of the Workers’ Weekly and, among many other sins, of disgracing the party’s reputation with the Saturday night dances it held in the Sussex Street hall. The hall was described as ‘little more than a brothel’ that attracted the lumpen-proletariat, beer and prostitutes. Leading Sydney members were even alleged to have brought their pyjamas with them to the dances—the reasons for such modesty are unclear. The description of these dances given in Judah Waten’s novel, Time of Conflict, suggests they did indeed attract the larrikin pushes from nearby Pyrmont, Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, and it is possible that he had taken back such stories when he returned to Melbourne at the end of 1930.46
The Victorians gained no support from the other delegates, and offered abject self-criticism before the plenum concluded. Yet upon returning to Melbourne, Lovegrove retracted his retraction. J. B. Miles and two other members of the central committee then convened a special meeting of the district committee and expelled Lovegrove along with five other members of that state executive. ‘These waverers and fainthearts, these opportunists and slanderers’ were duly denounced in the party press and cast into outer darkness. It was an extraordinary performance, both by the Melbourne rebels in so comprehensively misjudging the mood of the national delegates, and on the part of the central committee in affording them such publicity. ‘Why do we give so much space’, Workers’ Weekly asked, ‘to these relatively unimportant people who are already discredited?’
The answer is that such discussions of deviations and opportunist distortions have a very great educational value, clarifying the Party line and raising the political level of the membership, exposing the basis of the different deviations that occur from time to time and carrying on the ideological fight on two fronts, against right and ‘left’ opportunism for the Leninist line of the Comintern.47
As well as providing educational value, such episodes reminded members of the constant need for vigilance against error. It was by no means easy to steer a middle course between the left and right deviations, for to avoid the error of left adventurism was to risk lapsing into the error of right tailism (tailism was another of the neologisms introduced at ths time to suggest lagging behind the revolutionary masses). At one moment the party suffered from bureaucratic inertia, at another from excessive spontaneism. An enlarged meeting of the central committee during 1932 saw so many errors laid bare that one comrade suggested, ‘We have surely exhausted the possibilities of making any new ones’.48 Errors were generally evident in retrospect, when a shift in the line turned adherence to the line into deviation from it. Since, by the rules of the party, discussion was limited to the application and implementation of policies that were binding on all members, disagreement was seldom expressed openly but rather suggested obliquely by placing stress on particular phrases and judging other malefactors against them. The chief lesson of these public challenges, with their associated self-criticism and expulsions, was that a prudent member backed the line of the central committee.
Some of those expelled from the party during this period lost contact with it and with left-wing politics altogether. Others found their way back in, for with all its faults it offered an organisational framework and sense of revolutionary purpose they could not find elsewhere. In 1933 an alternative became available when a group of former communists established a Workers’ Party of Australia (Left Opposition). Jack Sylvester was its principal figure. Recently expelled, the former national organiser of the UWM retained a strong following in his own suburb of Balmain, and he found additional support among the unemployed activists in Glebe angered by the party’s failure to support the casualties of the unemployed protest campaign there. That failure in turn was a result of the CPA’s insistence on absolute control of unemployed activism: unable to control the Glebe branch of the UWM, it left the members to their fate. One of Sylvester’s followers was Laurie Short, also expelled from the Young Communist League in December 1932 for corresponding with another YCL member in Melbourne in support of Ernie Thornton when he was expelled during the Victorian factional conflict—a remarkable pairing since the political careers of Thornton and Short would remain entwined for a quarter-century, the one as the communist secretary of a major trade union, the other as his anti-communist nemesis. At this time Short was friendly with Jack and Edna Ryan, who lent him radical newspapers from America, including those produced by followers of Leon Trotsky, the former colleague of Lenin defeated and deported by Lenin’s successors. In exile, Trotsky’s left opposition to the Soviet leadership gave rise to Trotskyism, a doctrine that linked Stalin’s abandonment of the ideals of the Russian Revolution to betrayal of the world revolution. Trotskyists regarded the Communist International as a sham, an organisation dominated by authoritarian opportunists who slavishly followed the Soviet leaders. These ideas formed the basis of the new Workers’ Party’s manifesto, and in its monthly newspaper, the Militant, it sought by constant criticism to provide a revolutionary alternative to an Australian communist party ‘floundering in a morass of political ineptitude’.49
If the Workers’ Party had been able to attract even a modest proportion of those driven out of the Communist Party at this time, it would have presented a formidable challenge. In the event Ted Tripp and Arthur Marshall were its most notable recruits. The Ryans, Jack Kavanagh and Esmonde Higgins followed it with interest but did not join. (Kavanagh’s statement at a meeting of the Friends of the Soviet Union (FOSU) that he did not consider Trotsky ‘an absolute counter-revolutionary’ was the basis of his final expulsion from the party in 1934.) Dinny Lovegrove and James Higgins formed their own Trotskyist group in Melbourne and achieved some success with the Dole Workers’ Union they organised as an alternative to the communist UWM, but that soon faded away and Lovegrove eventually moved into the Labor Party where he would become a formidable anti-communist organiser. In Western Australia an unemployed activist, Sid Foxley, planned a Workers’ Party upon his expulsion from the Communist Party at this time, but that also came to nothing.50
Champions of inexpediency, dogmatic to a degree, the Australian Trotskyists spent as much energy in internal disputation as they did in invigilating the errors of the Communist Party. For the time being Trotskyism remained more a term of abuse for CPA members than a serious challenge. Communists accused Sylvester, Tripp, Short and Marshall of offences ranging from pimping for the police to sexual depravity. During 1933 the Workers’ Weekly dwelt so insistently on their crimes that it eventually conceded, ‘Some comrades may wonder if we are not giving too much space to the insignificant clique of renegades’. As deviators they were contemptible, as informed critics of the Soviet Union they were intolerable. Hence communists were instructed to ‘place your heels on the heads of these snakes’. The analogies between communists’ own status as political pariahs and the treatment they accorded the Trotskyists passed unacknowledged.51
One of the few adherents of the Workers’ Party was John Anderson, professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney. Anderson is best known as a libertarian, Andersonianism as an intellectual tradition mistrustful of all doctrines of secular meliorism and especially the tyrannical egalitarianism of Marxists. But in 1927, when Anderson arrived in Australia from his native Scotland, he was strongly sympathetic to communism. Writing as A. Spencer, he contributed articles to the Workers’ Weekly and the monthly Communist from that time. At the end of 1929 he lent clear support for the turn to Class Against Class and subsequently attended the party plenum of Easter 1930. An admiring Moxon declared him the party’s ‘Theoretical Adviser’.52
Such sympathies brought conservative odium but Anderson displayed courage in the face of threat of dismissal from the university. His close association with Moxon, however, antagonised other communists. Kavanagh, Moxon’s predecessor at the helm of the CPA, resented the professor’s prestige with the fierce resentment of a proletarian autodidact. Miles, Moxon’s successor at the party helm, suspected him with a self-righteousness fully the equal of his compatriot. He pounced on articles Anderson contributed during 1932 to the magazine of the Labour Club at the University of Melbourne, Proletariat, for their unproletarian qualities. Anderson, never one to duck a challenge, responded with citation of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? to remind Miles of the role of intellectuals in the revolutionary party. He also contrasted the open discussion that had occurred in 1929 with the distortions, personal abuse and suppression of dissent that accompanied the eclipse of Moxon—or rather, which were introduced by Moxon, Kavanagh observed in his annotated copy of Anderson’s remonstrance. Finally, Anderson suggested that the party was exhibiting a ‘fear of spontaneity’ that was ‘a sign not of leadership but of bureaucracy’. Miles instructed Lovegrove, then the Victorian district secretary, to suppress this further contribution to Proletariat. To Anderson’s allegation that he was ‘playing the schoolmaster’, Miles insisted that the party was ‘teacher and leader’, and had to be safeguarded from the impositions of ‘university men’. ‘How dare a mere proletarian’, he continued with heavy irony, ‘tell a university student, graduate, or what not, that he is in the baby class?’ Having published his suppressed article as a pamphlet, Anderson became a founder-member of the Workers’ Party. He continued to denounce the Stalinist betrayal of revolutionary socialism and to uphold Trotsky’s fidelity to the emancipatory project of communism until some years later when he concluded that both Lenin and Trotsky were themselves complicit in the despotism of the party. Like Short and Lovegrove, his initial enthusiasm for Class Against Class produced a subsequent reaction into first left and then right opposition to communism, but always marked by their distinctive intolerance of the politics of the broad left.53
Anderson’s unrepentant intellectualism was a singular instance of resistance to the insistently proletarian temper of communism during the Depression. The appearance of communists at the University of Melbourne signalled the first stirrings of a new constituency; the title of their magazine and the criticisms it drew from the party leadership testified to the suspicion of these new adherents. The earlier inconstancy of Guido Baracchi was recalled when his application for readmission was rejected in 1932, even though he was conducting classes for the party and frequently dipped into his pocket to assist it. Esmonde Higgins, who also ran party classes and edited the Red Leader, was removed from the central committee in 1931. These intellectuals with their precious consciences were inherently unreliable, their training in bourgeois knowledge a source of confusion and error. The theory that the party esteemed was a theory grounded in practice, a working-class doctrine accessible to workers who applied themselves to its mastery. ‘Where did I get my knowledge from?’ Miles asked at a national plenum in 1932. ‘Amongst the workers and from books … I did not have the advantage that you people have got. It is not a question of a different brain box, but a question of determination to get to know.’54
The middle-class recruit to communism underwent a testing ordeal. It was a perilous business to declare your commitment, as the University of Melbourne communists discovered in 1932 when three of their number were thrown into the lake by right-wing hearties. In the same year communists appeared on the Sydney campus as guests of that university’s Labor Club to show a film, In Lenin’s Country, on the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, only to be chased down Parramatta Road by loyalist undergraduates.55 The student radicals encountered a daunting hostility. To be middle-class and become a communist was to give up comfort and leisure, to incur social ostracism and jeopardise a career. This experience of crossing a line, of making an irrevocable choice, is exemplified in Ralph Gibson, the son of the professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne and with his own expectations of an academic life. The comfort and prestige mattered little to Ralph, who was the most selfless of men and all the more impregnable to doubt in his luminous intensity. Yet after he rejected the offer of a university lectureship late in 1931, he sat in front of the postbox for twenty minutes before he finally inserted his letter of application for party membership.56
The Melbourne physician Gerald O’Day described his conversion, also in the depths of the Depression, as the result of a search for understanding of why hunger and hardship afflicted so many of the patients he treated despite the country’s natural wealth. He had come to the party through the FOSU and lost a position at St Vincent’s hospital and much of his private practice when he did. ‘Aided by the knowledge of five languages, and the scientific instruction that had enabled me to gain the degree of Doctor of Medicine’, he pressed on to discover the answer in the writings of Karl Marx and the example of the Soviet Union.
The Labor Club at the University of Melbourne established its magazine ‘Proletariat’ in 1932. Noel Counihan’s powerful cover illustration for the second issue employed the common device of a declamatory militant male worker, one fist raised, the other cocked. The girders of the construction site suggest the building of a new order. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2114)
For all these reasons I deemed it my duty to join the Communist Party; and with all my power to aid the liberation of humanity from the economic slavery that prevents the full blossoming of the precious individuality of each and every one.
Within twelve months he was confessing his failures to the party plenum. Charged with offensive behaviour for his part in the Melbourne march to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he had failed to carry out the instructions of the district committee on the conduct of his case and instead had withdrawn his allegations of police thuggery. ‘As a bourgeois intellectual’, he conceded, ‘I have tendencies towards individualism, right opportunism and being undisciplined’.57
University-educated communists such as Gibson and O’Day were rarities in the early 1930s. The ferment of war and revolution, which had drawn such middle-class rebels as Prichard, Jollie Smith, Baracchi and Higgins to embrace communism, yielded in the later 1920s to a febrile stability. As initial expectations faded and the party retreated into the familiar rituals of a sect on the fringes of the labour movement, it lost its wider appeal. Those children of the middle class who rejected the conservatism of their parents turned to various forms of modernism or bohemianism, but not to the drab rigidities of communism. Now, with the onset of profound capitalist crisis, communism appealed to a new generation of dissidents. They included James Rawling, an arts graduate from the University of Sydney; Dave Morris, a bachelor of engineering from the University of Queensland; Ted Bacon, a part-time arts student at the same campus; Len Fox, a Melbourne schoolteacher; Joan and Alan Finger, respectively MA and MBS from Melbourne; and Lloyd and Edgar Ross, sons of the veteran socialist Bob Ross: like Esmonde Higgins, Lloyd Ross was a Melbourne history graduate. Such recruits brought valuable skills to the party. They had technical expertise. They could write, some were effective public speakers, with an appropriate adjustment of diction to a working-class audience, and most could be entrusted with organisational tasks. Bill Orr first encountered Ralph Gibson on a visit to Melbourne and judged he posessed ‘certain organisational and administrative abilities that can be utilised for the Party’. Those who became full-time party workers tended to be assigned to front organisations—in Gibson’s case the Friends of the Soviet Union, which flourished under his control and reached out to progressive circles beyond the organised labour movement—and excluded from central political or industrial responsibilities. They were expected to demonstrate their credentials, to accept hardship and danger, to undertake whatever was demanded of them. ‘Gibson was loyal, but that was about all you could say’, Miles opined when he went down to Melbourne to expel the Loveday group. Tom Wright thought him a ‘good fellow, always working’, and regretted that Lovegrove’s successor was inclined to dictate instructions to Gibson just as Lovegrove had bullied O’Day. They also made effective election candidates: O’Day attracted more than 2500 votes in a by-election for the Legislative Assembly electorate of Carlton in 1932, and 27 309 as the Senate candidate in Victoria in 1934 in the same election in which Gibson polled nearly 5000 House of Representative votes in the federal electorate of Flinders.58
Even in this electoral activity, however, the non-working class communist was unreliable, and none more so than the Queenslander Fred Paterson, who in 1944 would become the party’s only member of parliament. From straitened origins, he had proceeded by scholarships to the University of Queensland, where he was a champion athlete, and then after First World War service, to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. There he abandoned theology and on his return in 1923 joined the Communist Party. He left it in 1925 (for similar reasons as Baracchi, namely that the CPA was so weak that it was better to concentrate on the ALP) but remained active in the left; stood as one of the left-wing candidates in the 1929 Queensland state election; and rejoined the party shortly before he was tried for sedition in 1930. By then he was completing legal studies, and he represented himself as well as many of the victims of official repression in Queensland in the following years. Both as a lawyer and a communist, Paterson retained the high moral principle and service of others that had seen him train for the Anglican priesthood—and perhaps the same need to hold to a faith, however much he might question points of doctrine. Shifting to Townsville in 1932, Paterson built up a strong personal following that was apparent in the growing number of votes he attracted in successive municipal, state and federal elections. But he remained resistant to the electoral implications of Class Against Class. In his view a Labor government was preferable to a conservative one, if only because ‘the quickest and most effective way of destroying confidence in the Labor Party was to be obtained by the return of Labor to power’. On the eve of the 1932 state election Paterson even suggested the party offer to exchange votes with Labor to defeat the conservative government there. He admitted that the Labor executive would reject the offer but argued that in doing so it would commence the process of detaching sincere workers from the bureaucratic leadership.59
This was the argument of the ‘lesser evil’, the very argument that had brought the old leadership undone in 1929, and Paterson was ordered to retract it. He did but was criticised by his district committee for right opportunism and failure to denounce social fascism with sufficient ardour. This he would not do to the party’s satisfaction, not even when J. B. Miles travelled north to instruct him to engage in self-criticism. The district plenum met in 1933 and repeated the call. Still Paterson persisted with his ‘usual petty bourgeois, individualist, liberal defence of not being convinced and feeling hypocritical if he spoke against his convictions’. That he was allowed to remain in the party was probably due to a combination of circumstances: local popularity, distance from Sydney and the fact that he did not propagate his heresy. ‘We considered that by putting him forward as the candidate we would reach thousands of people we would not reach if we put forward someone else’, was how the district secretary explained the decision to run Paterson for the mayoral contest in Brisbane in 1934, but ‘we are watching closely for any deviation’ and ‘explaining his errors to the workers’. Paterson remained adamant and discreet, a solitary instance of the irrefragable communist intellectual.60
The party cultivated an identity of proletarian virtue. Its forms of reportage, the stories it told about itself in the party press and the vocabulary it used to tell them, built up a composite self-image of resolution, solidarity, endurance. The communist both shared and transcended the circumstances of his class, responded to hardship and maltreatment with anger and channelled that anger into purposeful collective action. Persecution only hardened him. This codification of masculine capacity and masculine control raised problems of class and gender that the circumstances of the period aggravated. In depriving so many men of their status as breadwinners, the Depression took from them the very basis of their class identity and imposed heavy strains on the established gender roles within the working-class family. Women and children fell back on charitable assistance. The inability to provide robbed a man of his pride, his companionship and even his very manliness.
In its response to these strains during the first, most reckless, phase of Class Against Class, the party seemed to fracture conventional boundaries of male and female activity. The Sydney women who were so prominent in the street protests of 1930 were trespassers, their turbulence deeply disturbing of conventional expectations of feminine decorum. In holding their own demonstration in November of that year they created pandemonium: the public spectacle of women wrestling with police amidst city traffic, resisting arrest and shouting their defiance, was profoundly iconoclastic. By their unruliness both then and later in prison they were challenging codes of masculine chivalry, forcing the authorities to employ the same severity against them as it used against men. The circumstances of the Third Period allowed a new role. Women were no longer supporting men in industrial dispute, though that conception of the female activist as an auxiliary who sustained and assisted the militancy of her husband still persisted in the women’s department of the party and restricted its appeal. Instead, these women engaged in the campaigns against fascism and social fascism in their own right. They took up the protest against unemployment as a phenomenon that affected them directly and they underwent the same hazards in their activity. Prominent party women, such as Joy Barrington and Jean Devanny, gained a reputation as firebrands, undaunted by repeated convictions, uncompromising in their militancy. Joy was the larger and better able to acquit herself in physical confrontation. Jean was more frail and perhaps more daunting in her fury.
They were also notorious for their transgressive personal lives in a party dominated by men with sexual double standards. After an initial flurry of controversy, the early Communist Party avoided discussion of sexual politics. Initially it had responded to anti-communist allegations of the nationalisation of women with its own claims of capitalist debauchery, whether in Adela Pankhurst Walsh’s denunciations of sexual commerce or Bill Thomas’s illustrated warnings of veneral disease; but these quickly gave way to an uneasy silence. On the one hand there was the predatory behaviour strikingly demonstrated by Bill Earsman, on the other the repressive avoidance best illustrated by Bob Ross when he congratulated Guido Baracchi on his marriage: ‘Well, I suppose it solves the sex problem’. It didn’t, either for Guido or many other party members of the 1920s who sought a freer, less circumscribed morality based on sexual equality. That generally tacit and informal ethos was repudiated in the 1930s, as the party proclaimed a far more conventional morality, and yet men continued to use their authority and prestige to establish claims over younger female comrades. A Queensland communist woman has recalled how Jack Henry, the district organiser, used to ‘pick off’ female recruits at party dances; when she taxed him with this behaviour he replied that ‘what he did outside was his own business’. But his business was also party business: applicants for membership in Queensland were asked not just about their class origins but whether they had venereal disease. Furthermore, when Jean Devanny inserted a priapic and readily identifiable Jack Henry into the manuscript of Sugar Heaven, he threatened to resign unless it was altered.61
This aspect of Australian communism would rigidify as Miles and Sharkey imposed their own libidinous sanctimony on the party during the 1930s, but was evident even while Moxon’s madcap approach held sway. He warned delegates to the Tenth Congress of ‘wrong ideas about freedom’ that resulted in ‘promiscuity in sex relations’. Since women were more politically backward, he held, such ‘degeneracy’ discredited the party. His own subsequent defection was attributed to the influence of his wife who was said to have insisted he quit the party—in fact she remained an active member long after he left. Lindsay Mountjoy, an equally ardent enthusiast for the Third Period, employed similar conceptions of female licence and feminine restraint in her speech to the congress. She said that the sexual indiscretions of party women caused working-class wives to stop their husbands from joining the party: ‘We must remember the Communist Party is not a bohemian club’. Several years later, when her husband was organiser in Western Australia, she lamented his philandering with party women.62
A similar pattern of licence and control marked the party’s attitude towards single men. The strains that the Depression imposed on the family increased the incidence of separation and desertion; young men without a job were unable to establish households of their own and were often forced out of the parental home. The party recruited from such resentful outcasts, and used them as its ‘shock troops’, as one UWM organiser put it, in more desperate endeavours. ‘They were daredevils, political bushrangers, so to speak, but for a worthy cause.’ Some established communal households in inner-city terraces, and were available to protect speakers from attack or to offer resistance to eviction against police assault. These were the barracks of the Workers’ Defence Corps, which the authorities regarded with particular alarm. Through their relief regulations the state governments employed strategies of isolation and dispersal to break up congregations of unattached, unemployed men. It confined them to labour camps on the outskirts of cities or despatched them to rural areas where they could draw rations on condition that they keep moving.63 Such circumstances brought out the best and worst in human nature. Rejection and constant hardship stripped away the outward forms of civilisation.
At the party congress in 1931 Charlie Nelson complained that a comrade sent from Sydney to Lithgow to stand as parliamentary candidate in the 1930 state election had made a poor impression because of his impoverished appearance. He did not even possess a shirt. A former Wobbly observed at that time that the party leaders in Sussex Street seemed to believe that the use of soap and water amounted to a ‘bourgeois deviation’. This image of the party under Moxon’s leadership as a ‘a party of the unwashed’ suggests the problematic character of the Depression communist. For those formed in an earlier tradition of working-class radicalism, the activist commanded the respect of workers through an exemplary self-respect. Unemployment weakened that moral order, refashioning its victims as rejects and depriving them of both the capacity and the desire for such respectability. Jack Kavanagh’s pride in his personal appearance made some think he looked like a businessman; Moxon’s larrikin style was deemed that of the lumpen-proletariat. The term was German in origin, lumpen meaning rags, used by Marx to signify the vagrant or criminal underclass who were uninterested in collective revolutionary endeavour. The issue that troubled communists was whether the army of single, itinerant, unemployed men constituted an advanced segment of the working class, the unemployed workers as they were designated, or a distinct stratum of rootless and refractory outcasts. The problem the party faced in concentrating its work among them was how to speak in their idiom without succumbing to their indiscipline. It was a problem nicely captured in Frank Hardy’s semi-fictional account of the battle of Cairns, where the daredevil agitator Jack McCormack provokes the townspeople and the party member Snowy Hall deprecates his speech as sectarian. Snowy wants an organising committee, Jack is ‘a bloody anarchist’ who insists on self-management. Jack hoists a red flag, Snowy seeks a compromise. But they both stand together in the final confrontation and they both get a beating.64
Under the direction of Miles and Sharkey, the party moved away from the confrontational style of unemployed agitation cultivated by Moxon. ‘The workers got the impression that in order to get into the UWM you had to bash and you had to be bashed’, Miles observed of the earlier dispensation. The forms of activity he encouraged were more orderly, more closely tied to immediate needs, directed more to the unemployed worker and his family than to shifting assemblies of homeless men. Just as party members were to be scrupulous in sexual conduct, so they were to attend to their personal appearance. Such bagmen as Jack McCormack came to be seen as deficient in the qualities the party needed as the Australian economy slowly recovered, leaving a residual core of long-term unemployed. Their very rebelliousness unfitted them for party work, Richard Dixon told the central committee. Like the libidinous women, these men manifested a ‘degeneracy’, except that in this case the symptoms were not hyperactivity but work-shy torpor. They had been deprived of work for so long that they had lost the vital qualities of the worker. Thus Dixon’s conclusion: ‘We have to recognise that any individual who is working under a boss has to work quickly, etc., and in his party work he carries the same method into the work and also the discipline that he learns in the factory’.65
Discipline was an essential feature of the Depression communist. The British Marxist Perry Anderson has observed that ‘The Comintern remains to date a sociologically unique phenomenon, as an organisation which commands an absolute loyalty, a disciplined fidelity, amongst its constituent national sections’. From 1930 the Communist Party of Australia adopted an iron discipline that was alien to the indigenous political culture, one that subordinated it to a nominally international organisation that was itself subjected to the control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Stalin’s dictatorship was enforced through purges, show trials, executions and state terror. But in Australia communist discipline was exercised in circumstances where its distinctive sanctions were absent. As Anderson asks, ‘What is the nature of a Stalinist party in a society in which that party enjoys no form of political coercion, administrative power, or any other form of physical duress over its membership?’66 An answer has to account for a relationship between party and membership that was at once voluntary and obligatory, imposed and accepted.
The structure, machinery and essential techniques of party discipline have already been considered. The rules of the Australian party mirrored those of the Comintern, creating a hierarchical organisation that subordinated members to leaders and placed careful restrictions on the election of the leaders—but no one had to become a member. The operation of the party demanded absolute obedience and left no room for disagreement or debate—but as Lenin’s term ‘democratic centralism’ indicates, it was the members who legitimated their submission. Any infractions incurred the sanctions of self-criticism or expulsion—but no one was prevented from leaving. Those who did leave attracted stories of personal weakness or scandalous misconduct. The charge of cowardice levelled at Kavanagh was an example; embezzlement was a more common allegation, used against both Moxon and Tripp—but a party as small and isolated as the Australian one could scarcely ensure that such calumnies achieved the wide circulation on which their efficacy depended.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this disciplinary regime is the acceptance of it. There were very few prominent party members who willingly parted company with the party as it entered into draconian excess during the Third Period. Tom Wright, Norm Jeffery, Hector Ross and Hetty Weitzel were among the discredited exponents of the old line who quickly yielded to the new. Jack Kavanagh resisted longer, but submitted to discipline more than once before he was finally pushed out. Joy Barrington performed her penance, Esmonde Higgins accepted his demotion. Jack Ryan made three attempts for readmission but was debarred by his cursed personal pride, Edna Ryan tried to hang on. Old warhorses such as Joe Shelley and Jack Loughran endured their humiliation; even Young Turks like Jack Sylvester and Ted Tripp did not abandon the party until all hope of rehabilitation was gone.
Why did such aggrieved victims persist? It was certainly not for comfort or advantage. Party duty was onerous, demanding, constant. The new leaders affected a hardness, an impersonal driving rigour that made few concessions to personal needs or human warmth. An unemployed activist who joined the party at this time had occasion to admire a sunset and was advised by a member of the Victorian district committee: ‘Comrade if you’ve got time to watch sunsets you’re not doing as much Party work as you should be doing’.67 The anecdote, related 40 years afterwards, uses a different tone from contemporary parlance. The form of communist reportage during the Depression, the vocabulary of the platform and newspaper that carried over into minutes and even private correspondence, allows for only a certain kind of political response to the demands and impositions. It praises defiance, rebukes failure, judges individuals as they conform or fail to conform to expectations in a limited range of settings with predetermined roles. It says little of the peculiarities of those who perform those roles or of their human capacities.
Among these communists there are very few of the memoirs wherein those who saw that frame of reference collapse rethought the impulses that moved them in their earlier enthusiasm. The nearest account of this kind we have for the Depression communists is the autobiographical account of Jean Devanny, begun in the early 1940s when she was expelled from the party, completed in the 1950s when she had resigned after rejoining. Her perspective is different from the outlook of those who adapted to the Bolshevised party, for she was one of the Third Period recruits. She arrived in Sydney from New Zealand in 1929. Her children, Pat and Karl, joined the YCL, her husband Hal, the Communist Party. Pat travelled in 1931 to the Soviet Union for training at the communist youth school. Jean hung back, all too conscious of the demands that membership would make on her as an experienced speaker and how those demands would take her from writing. It was her participation in one of the street demonstrations in November 1930, and subsequent conviction and imprisonment, that impelled her to apply for party membership. She was told she would be on probation for three months because she was a writer: writers were a ‘declassed element’. Her wealthy friend Marion Piddington warned her, ‘Jeanie, you are not tough enough for them. They will break you. Mark my words, they will break you.’ Eventually they did, as the narrative relates, but the need to join prevailed and the pleasures of belonging sustained Jean Devanny through hardships imposed on her and difficulties of her own making. To one of her many stories of such exploitation, she appends the explanation: ‘The sense of consecration was still strong within me—and I still hugged to myself that warm, wonderful feeling of belonging’. So did others, tougher but no less compassionate than her.68