The onset of the Third Period brought a sharp change in the tactics and temper of the Communist International, one marked by internecine argument and recrimination as the capitalist democracies plunged into crisis. The new communist leaders accentuated the discontinuities to exorcise all remnants of reformism and opportunism. The abandonment of the Third Period, by contrast, came slowly and unevenly. There was no declaration of a Fourth Period, no repudiation of errors or replacement of those who had made them. Rather, as the Depression eased and levels of production and employment slowly recovered, communists reoriented their activity back to workers in the workplace. This recovery was fragile. The Depression had strained, perhaps irreparably, the institutions of the liberal order—an order marked out by progress, liberty, elected governments, free trade, peace, international cooperation—and many who abandoned those broken idols turned to the antithesis of liberalism, fascism. Communists had previously regarded fascism as a device to which capitalists resorted when the usual forms of constitutional government failed them, but as fascists stamped out freedom in one country after another, it became all too clear that there was indeed a difference between fascism and capitalist democracy. As the the fascist powers threatened to engulf the world in a new war, communists reoriented their politics from revolutionary opposition to progressive alliance. The policy of Class Against Class, with its vehement opposition to social as well as capitalist democracy, yielded to a united front for the defence of a people’s democracy.
Historians of communism locate this change as occurring between the years of 1933 and 1935, and key the new policy to the response of the Soviet Union to crucial international events. At the beginning of 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany. Within weeks he used the burning of the Reichstag to justify the suppression of the German Communist Party. The trial of its leaders and Georgi Dimitrov, the head of the European bureau of the Comintern, heralded a Nazi crusade against communism. After Hitler’s suppression of communists came the suppression of social democrats, and as early as March 1933 the ECCI called for an alliance to meet this right-wing assault on the left. Subsequent fascist coups in Austria, Latvia and Bulgaria magnified the threat to the Soviet Union on its western border, while the Japanese invasion of Manchuria created a new threat in the east. In France, meanwhile, there was an augury of a new alignment as communists joined socialists on the streets of Paris in February 1934 to throw back a fascist march on the Chamber of Deputies—this, the first demonstration of the effectiveness of the united front, prepared the way for similar alliances elsewhere. Later in the same year the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, which had been created in 1919 by the victors of the First World War to legitimate their division of spoils and was described at the time by Lenin as ‘a thieves’ kitchen’. In 1935 there were further Soviet accommodations to the exigencies of world politics, as Stalin called for the League to impose sanctions against fascist Italy because of its invasion of Abyssinia, and then entered into a mutual defence pact with France. At its Seventh Congress in 1935 the Communist International acknowledged the political corollary of these strategic changes: no longer social democracy but fascism was the main enemy of the workers’ state and of workers all around the world. The need to resist fascism required a united front of the labour movement, reformist as well as revolutionary, in concert with all progressive forces.1
In itself the call for a united front was not new. Throughout the Third Period communists had called for a united front from below that would detach workers in trade unions and social democratic organisations from their treacherous social fascist leaders. The qualification ‘from below’ was all important: those discredited opportunists who had been brought to account at the Australian party conference of 1929 were deemed to have pursued a united front from above, and thus to have perpetuated the reformist illusion. Herbert Moore had insisted at the 1931 congress that the chief blow must therefore be directed at the social fascists who posed as friends of the workers. This attitude was first modified at the party plenum at the end of 1932. Following the Twelfth Plenum of the ECCI held two months earlier under the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Australian party declared that social fascism was no longer the chief danger. Rather, the capitalist class was the main enemy, the social fascists provided its chief support and the correct way to expose them was not sectarian abuse but ‘clear, simple and concrete exposure of the reformist leaders’.2
Then came Hitler’s success and the Comintern’s call in March 1933 for a united front with the Socialist International. It was heavily qualified. The ECCI considered it ‘possible to recommend’ to its constituent units that they ‘refrain from making attacks on Social-Democratic organisations’ providing the social democrats joined in a campaign of resolute opposition to the common threat. The Australian party published the Comintern statement alongside its own. The capitalist offensive against working-class living standards, the repressive measures of conservative governments, the continued activities of the New Guard and the growing threat of war all required ‘a common united front struggle’. The Communist and Labor parties should organise joint committees of action and if the Labor Party agreed to abandon ‘all class-collaborationist policies’, the Communist Party would ‘renounce attacks on the Labor Party leaders during common action’.3
This initial Australian overture was perhaps even more grudging than that of Moscow. Given that the New Guard was rapidly dwindling into irrelevancy, it placed greater emphasis on economic and political circumstances that were hardly different from those that had been used to justify Class Against Class. It was directed both to the executive of the ALP and ‘to all Australian workers’, and its call for committees of action continued the emphasis on a united front from below. In the same breath that it appealed to the Labor Party for unity, the statement rehearsed at length the perfidious record of the Labor leaders in fomenting disunity. The party leadership was worried that the Communist International’s new line—and Miles recognised that it signalled ‘a very distinct change from the attitude toward the social democratic parties during the third period’—might cause ‘a lot of confusion in the Party’. Right opportunists would take comfort from it, the leftists who had so recently disrupted the party plenum would seize on it as a vindication of their allegation of a right danger. A week after it appeared, the Australian party made clear that while it would forego attacks on the Labor Party and unions during common action, communists would continue to criticise them if they shrank from what was needed. ‘We must distinguish between criticism and attacks’, the party stipulated. Nor were communists abandoning their estimation of the Labor Party and union leaders. ‘We continue to regard them as Social Fascists … and arising from this the task of the Party is to expose and isolate them from the working class.’4
It is hardly surprising that the ALP dismissed such a mealy-mouthed offer, just as the Socialist International rejected the appeal of the Communist International. Throughout 1933 the Comintern floundered as it sought to comprehend the nature of fascism, a generic term that it had applied indiscriminately across national and political boundaries and now attached primarily to the German National Socialists. Attempts to analyse the Nazi Party in class terms, as the last resort of finance capital as it sought to suppress the political contradictions of late capitalism, failed utterly to recognise the malign force of an ideology that subordinated class to race. The derangement that would culminate in the Final Solution lay outside the Enlightenment framework of progress that communism shared with capitalism. The Thirteenth Plenum of the ECCI at the end of the year still attributed the success of the fascists to the treachery of the social fascists. Hence at its own Fourth Plenum in April 1934 the Australian party declared that as capitalism intensified its assault, the Labor Party deceived and disarmed the working class. ‘This means that Communists in their propaganda, agitation and everyday work among the masses must direct the main blow against the Labor Party, which paralyses the working class in face of the advance of Fascism and the approach of war.’ Members should seize on anti-fascist and anti-war sentiments of workers to put forward proposals for united struggle, around the decidedly unrevolutionary slogan ‘lighten the workers’ burden’, but must appreciate that the united front led ‘to weakening not strengthening of reformism’. While the emphasis was still on the united front from below, in order to separate the workers from the social fascists, it was important to avoid ‘replacing of careful analysis with abuse of the Labor Party’. As Richard Dixon explained at a subsequent meeting of the central committee, when Labor Party members heard themselves described as social fascists, they were hardly amenable to a united front. It was not abuse that was needed but ‘a positive concrete programme’ that would more effectively serve the ideological struggle against reformism.5
This was the policy the Communist Party took into the federal elections of September 1934, in which it opposed 21 Labor candidates and helped defeat several of them as the conservative Lyons government renewed its majority. Yet a month later J. B. Miles announced that the party was again to approach Labor with united front proposals. Once more a joint campaign for improved living standards, opposition to war and resistance to fascism was proposed. This time the appeal was directed to the ALP Federal Executive and a meeting sought between the two bodies: ‘Comrades, we are addressing this appeal for united activity to you in all earnestness and sincerity, prompted only by the desire to advance the fight of the whole working class in its struggle against Fascism and war’. Almost immediately, however, the party had to explain to a puzzled correspondent that the proclamation did not signify that the Labor leaders had lost their social fascist spots. The purpose of the appeal was to win ‘reformist workers’ for joint action that would eventually draw them to accept the ‘full programme of the socialist revolution and the proletarian dictatorship’. The correspondent was not alone in his puzzlement. When Miles explained the new approach to the Labor Party at a meeting of the central committee, a leading Victorian member confessed that he would have to go back and remove a common misapprehension: ‘I think generally throughout the Party it has been considered only as a left manoeuvre to attack and expose the social fascists’. Miles corrected him. He added that while the previous campaign for a united front had lasted only a few weeks, this time it would have to be sustained in order to demonstrate to the workers who were the real splitters and disruptors of the labour movement.6
The ALP’s inevitable rebuff revealed a continuing uncertainty about whether the united front was to be effected from above or below. At a central committee meeting in February 1935 Sharkey said the object was a united front from below and the offer of a united front from above merely a device to facilitate it. Miles, who had recently returned from Moscow where the issue had still be resolved, said the purpose was to ‘disintegrate’ the Labor ranks in order to deliver its working-class members to the revolutionary movement. Subtlety was needed to widen differences within the Labor Party between its left wing (there was no more talk of left social fascism) and its right. Consequently the Communist Party decided to direct second preferences to the Labor Party—under the slogan ‘The Stronger the Communist Party the Stronger the Labor Movement’—in state elections held in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland during the first half of 1935. Furthermore, the Australian party began for the first time to signal its interest in building a broader class alliance ‘between the workers, farmers, civil servants, middle classes, intellectuals’ who would rally around the campaign against fascism and war.7
The final enunciation of the united front at the Eleventh Party Congress at the end of 1935 came, then, after an erratic series of swerves that moved towards and shied away from the ultimate destination, an accommodation with the nonrevolutionary majority of the labour movement. The Seventh Congress of the Communist International in August 1935, when Dimitrov laid down that ‘the main and immediate task of the international labour movement [was] to establish the united fighting front of the working class’, determined that the persistent reservations would no longer apply. ‘We have not to think of it in the manner we thought of it previously’, Sharkey, the chief Australian representative at the world congress, explained to the delegates at the subsequent national congress. The expectation that reformists would be won over to revolutionary communism continued, the duty to expose sabotage remained, but Australian communists were to work with, to seek affiliation to, and if necessary to send members into the Labor Party to secure the united front.8
No-one at the congress challenged the final flowering of this new strategy. Jack Loughran had observed imprudently at the central committee meeting in June that it marked a shift to the right, and was removed from both the Central Control Commission and the Number 1 District Committee as well as the congress. ‘I know Lenin as good as you’, he told Miles, who warned him that if he did not cease criticising, ‘his political corpse is going to be stretched on a marble slab along with that of Kavanagh’.9 The corpse of Kavanagh was an embarrassing presence in party discussions of the united front during 1935. Was not the adoption of the united front a belated recognition that he had been correct in 1929? Much ingenuity was needed to show that the shift to Class Against Class had been a necessary step in the creation of a real communist party and that it was only because the Australian party had established its independent leadership of the working class that it was now able to respond to the new circumstances. Even so, Miles was concerned that another laggard in Class Against Class, Fred Paterson, would think that he had been right in his ‘lesser evil’ arguments of 1932 and Miles had been wrong.10
Miles was always loath to concede errors. As one long-suffering comrade put it, a party member could have any opinion as long as JBM agreed with it.11 The maintenance of such inflexible rectitude in dealings with the Labor Party fatally compromised the united front from the outset. By the end of 1935 communists had cast off much of their former sectarian abuse of the Labor Party and the trade unions. They had come to appreciate that strident denunciation of Labor politicians and union officials alienated many of the activists they were trying to reach, and that some of those leaders of the reformist labour movement were themselves at least as advanced as the workers they represented. It was clearly impossible for the communists to erase the epithets they had levelled at the social fascists, but if Labor Party cooperation was to be obtained then at least some acknowledgement of those past excesses was needed. Far from apologising for past hostility, however, the party leadership suggested repeatedly as it moved reluctantly towards the new policy that it was simply a new means of achieving the old objectives. Communists grossly underestimated the legacy of ill-will and mistrust that they had incurred, and every state branch of the ALP remained adamant in rejection of the united front proposal. Thwarted in their direct approach, communists therefore relied on other avenues to build support. By far the most fruitful was the unions.
In their application of Class Against Class to industrial activity communists had regarded trade unions with the same animosity they had expressed towards the Labor Party. The Minority Movement kept up a constant criticism of all union officials for holding back workers from contesting the lay-offs, wage cuts and speed-ups that occurred in every sector of the workforce. But with few communists in employment, their attempts to lead such resistance through factory committees that issued violent denunciations of both the boss and the union in roneoed bulletins, and backed them with unofficial stoppages and walk-outs, ended almost invariably in sackings and victimisation.
Bill Orr, the organiser of the Minority Movement, continued during 1932 and 1933 to argue for greater attention to unions. Communists could not expect trade unions to serve the needs of the working class, because the reformist bureaucracy would use any means to retain control of them, but they should seek to win over the rank and file. Slogans that suggested unions were obsolete were counter-productive, and dogmatic ‘anti-official’ allegations were to be avoided. Orr took particular exception to those militants who attempted to exclude trade union officials from strike committees, and persuaded the Anglo-American Bureau of the ECCI to his position on a visit to Moscow in October 1932. The turn back to the unions was evident in the decision of the Australian politbureau at this time that ‘leading members be assisted to become financial and carry on work in the unions to which they belong’.12 Both the Workers’ Weekly and the Red Leader introduced columns that examined the job bulletins issued by party factory units and Militant Minority groups, praised those that offered practical leads and condemned others for indulging in random abuse. There were hundreds of these ephemeral bulletins, and they are an underused source of radical, demotic culture. Each consisted of a page of roneoed foolscap, issued irregularly, which mixed revolutionary exhortation with pithy anecdote and pungent commentary on the pretensions of the pannikin boss. Their very titles are as expressive of local and occupational identities as of industrial militancy: the Crib Can (Cessnock MM), the Darg (Richmond colliery group), Line of Load (Broken Hill party section) and the Plod (the South Mine group); the Red Signal (Brisbane railway group) and Railway Rebel (Jolimont workshop); the Newtown Footboard, the Punch and the Live Wire (tramways depot groups); the Galvaniser (Lysaght’s group) Never-Tyre (Goodyear’s factory MM), Borthwick Bovril (a meat-workers’ group) and the Abattoirs Blade, subtitled To Cut Deep into Capitalism and Expose its Rotten Inside.13
During this period the Minority Movement was able to report some successes as particular work groups began to offer resistance to employers. Textile workers struck against the new Bedeaux system, which intensified their work process; meatworkers came out in protest against introduction of the analogous ‘chain’ system of slaughtering; metal miners in several Queensland towns sought improved wages. Typically, militants initiated these disputes through mass meetings of the workers and spurned all compromise. Jack McCormack, who led the battle of Cairns in 1932, had served two months for blowing up a railway bridge to assist a successful wage claim by Queensland copper miners in Dobbyn and Mount Oxide earlier that year.14 More often than not, however, in the absence of durable structures capable of sustaining resistance, the strikers’ solidarity crumbled and the union regained control from the local body.
At the same time as the Communist Party first approached the Labor Party for a united front, in April 1933, the Red Leader published a similar appeal to the ACTU, the state industrial councils and all unions. While it would not ‘forego our right of critical analysis of the work of reformists in general’, the Minority Movement proposed cooperation between its rank-and-file committees and the unions in a joint campaign against fascism and economic hardship.15 The peak union bodies dismissed the proposal, as the ALP had done, but it was far harder for them to proscribe such alliances. Whereas the Labor executive could declare participation in the Communist Party or its various fronts incompatible with membership of the ALP, union rules did not usually allow that blanket proscription. Members of the Minority Movement were entitled to take part in the affairs of the union to which they belonged, and they increasingly began to contest elected union positions. With so few communists in unions, this proved a slow process. The national conference of the Minority Movement at the end of 1933 was attended by 123 union delegates, drawn from 43 unions. The party’s claim that they had been elected by 2000 unionists representing 30 000 workers revealed the hollowness of this modus operandi: militants either secured the mandate of a thinly attended union branch meeting or convened their own meeting at the factory gate to declare themselves delegates. These militants remained impatient with the irksome restrictions trade unions imposed on their members, the cumbrous structures of authority and subordination of members to full-time officials, as well as with the impediments that arbitration imposed on direct industrial action.16
Even so, the party was committed to building its presence in the unions. As economic conditions began to improve and wage-earners looked to win back the ground they had lost in wages and working conditions, the limits of reliance on workshop committees became clear: these unofficial groups of activists exhausted their energies in the initiation of disputes that the officials would then settle. Thus came the recognition that ‘The trade unions are the key to the whole present situation in Australia and we can capture a number of trade unions in this country’. Richard Dixon sought to put a Third Period gloss on the emergent strategy in a central committee discussion of industrial policy with his suggestion that communists should seek to achieve control in order to drive reformists out of unions. Orr disagreed: the object was to win over the reformists and defeat the reformist leaders. Hence his insistence that success in trade union and industrial work lay in the ability of communists ‘not to be carping critics as we have been in the past, but in our ability to properly study the conditions of the workers we are working amongst’. He spoke from a position of strength, and not just because Moscow shared his interpretation. At the beginning of 1934 he had been elected general secretary of the Miners’ Federation.17
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this breakthrough. It was achieved in a direct ballot of all members of the Miners’ Federation by 6321 votes to 4818 and attested to Orr’s assiduity—while Minority Movement organiser he rode his motorcycle to almost every pit in New South Wales. Beyond the revival of the left in its traditional strongholds, the northern and western districts of New South Wales, it signalled growing support in isolated and previously quiescent mining towns, such as Collinsville in Queensland and Wonthaggi in Victoria. It gave the Communist Party leadership of a major national union, consolidated later in the year when Orr was re-elected secretary and Nelson (who rejoined the Communist Party in 1933 at the instigation of Orr) elected president, and a corresponding influence in the wider labour movement. More than this, it validated Orr’s strategy of prosecuting vigorous, concerted campaigns around the immediate concerns of union members. Bread-and-butter issues was the standard formula, though crusts-and-dripping was perhaps a more apt description of the conditions suffered by miners and their families with low wages, speed-ups, accidents, large-scale unemployment and victimisation all common at this time.18
The new style of militancy was exemplified at Wonthaggi, an isolated town in rural Gippsland where more than a thousand men worked underground in a state-owned coalmine. They downed tools in March 1934 over the victimisation of union members arising from the insistent pressure of the management to reduce labour costs. The distinctive feature of this strike was the fusion of union militancy with communal forms of support. A large committee with wide representation of both moderates and Minority Movement members organised specialist subcommittees. The Propaganda Committee sent speakers out as far afield as Western Australia to explain the miners’ case. The Relief Committee collected thousands of pounds (Orr won the support of all union lodges, while other industrial organisations also donated funds) and gathered relief in kind, including that given by local farmers. A butchering department, a vegetable department, a boot repair depot, a sewing centre, hairdressing salons and foraging parties catered to residents’ needs. The Entertainment Committee held concerts, dances, socials and sports competitions. The women of the town formed their own committee in support of the miners. In the fourth month of the stoppage the union elections were held and the communist Idris Williams led a slate of successful Minority Movement candidates. Williams, a future national president of the Australian coalminers, had become a pit-boy in his native Wales at the age of thirteen and lost a leg in the First World War before coming to Wonthaggi. Just as Orr and Nelson brought with them the egalitarian zeal of the Scottish mining community, so Williams provided a tangible link to the radical fervour of the South Wales valleys. The Minority Movement itself expanded in the course of the dispute from 70 to 400 members. The state minister responsible for the mine was Robert Menzies, dismissive of the miners’ claims but increasingly anxious to settle the strike before he moved into federal politics. He pronounced the new union executive ‘more reasonable’ than its predecessor and capitulated in July.19
Communists made significant progress at this time in one other industry, the railways. The most radical state branches of the Australian Railways Union (ARU) were in Queensland, where railway workers had disaffiliated from the ALP in the 1920s, and New South Wales, under its redoubtable state secretary Arthur Chapman, though both had been subjected to communist criticism at the height of the Third Period. The Minority Movement worked in the railways through shop committees, which changed their orientation during 1933 and 1934 from independent activity to closer involvement in the union. They were rewarded in 1935 with the election of Lloyd Ross as state secretary in New South Wales after the death of Chapman. He was the elder son of Bob Ross and pursued a similar style of socialist fellowship as a tutor in the Melbourne Labor College and then the Workers’ Educational Association, before he took up the post. Ross explained his subsequent decision to join the Communist Party ‘partly because of being associated with them in being elected secretary, but mainly because they were the only group within the ARU that sat down and discussed the problems of the ARU’. Like Orr, Ross reinvigorated his union with campaigns to improve its organisation, efficacy and range of activities.20
The party’s new approach to industrial work, which brought initial success in the mining and rail transport unions, was uneven in its application and results. Those industries that employed large groups of manual workers who had traditionally sustained a class-conscious solidarity were still quiescent, the numbers of trade unionists reduced well below their former strength by the combined effects of unemployment and the owners’ preference for non-union labour. The party made little headway in the Waterside Workers’ Federation and efforts to loosen the grip of the existing leadership of the Seamen’s Union proved unsuccessful when the Commonwealth government joined with the shipowners to crush a strike organised by a communist rank-and-file committee in 1935. The Pastoral Workers’ Industrial Union was going backwards, the building trades were rife with non-unionists, the Meat Industry Employees’ Union was crippled by its earlier defeat. More encouraging were the advances in the public transport industry, with gains in the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Enginemen paralleling those in the Australian Railways Union, and a strong showing of Minority Movement activists in the Victorian branch of the Australian Tramways Employees’ Association.21
Elsewhere the growth of communist influence was slower, uneven, appreciable in local campaigns that are difficult to summarise, but cumulatively of decisive significance. By holding down wages and refusing to restore the cuts imposed earlier in the Depression, wage tribunals encouraged local forms of disputation. In exploiting their strategic advantages during the Depression, employers created the conditions for a more aggressive approach to industrial relations that transformed previously conservative trade unions. In the metal industries, for example, the Amalgamated Engineering Union pursued wage claims with increasing militancy. The Federated Ironworkers’ Association (FIA), so weak in the early 1930s that a member described it as a ‘secret society’, began to challenge conditions in the Newcastle and Port Kembla steelworks. Communists established their influence in these unions at the branch level, seeking election as delegates before they contested executive positions. Ernie Thornton’s election as Victorian organiser of the FIA in 1935 marked their progress, as did victories in the craft unions in both Newcastle and Port Kembla.22
By 1934, then, the Communist Party was committed to extending its influence in unions. The example of Wonthaggi, the first major victory since the onset of the Depression, demonstrated what could be achieved when strike action initiated by party members was backed by a union executive and sustained by the broader union movement. Conversely, the party observed that in other disputes where militants were able to initiate a stoppage, reformist officials would quickly reimpose control. Strike committees were ‘temporary and episodal’, Dixon observed, unions were ‘permanent’. He and other party leaders chastised the Minority Movement for its continuing neglect of unions. Orr estimated that as many as half of the Minority Movement’s 3000 members were not financial members of their unions, and many still gave the impression that they were ‘out to destroy the trade unions’. These rebukes and those of the Comintern and RILU raised concerns about the Minority Movement. It was designed to appeal to all militants but made the same demands of recruits as of party members. It was meant to extend the party’s influence—to serve, as Richard Dixon put it, as ‘a transmission belt through which we can connect the Party with the class’—but its active membership was in fact no larger than that of the party. Miles drew the obvious conclusions. The Minority Movement was too narrow and sectarian, the very ‘absurdity of the name’ suggested that it had outlived its purpose. Dixon explained that communists no longer wanted a militant minority movement, they needed a ‘majority movement’. This ‘dialectical change from quality into quantity’, as he described it, rendered the Minority Movement superfluous. The party itself assumed direction of industrial activity and supervised the efforts of members organised in factory units and trade union fractions. The Red Leader, its very title judged unsuitable to the majoritarian aspirations of the united front, ceased publication in July 1935.23
The task of transforming the Minority Movement into a majority movement proved difficult. Its workshop committees, originally focal points of militant agitation against both the bosses and the trade union bureaucrats, had to be redirected into ancillary units that would link the party to the union. Instead of fomenting discontent, they were to channel workers’ demands into union campaigns. Rather than contest union elections where they lacked majority support, they were to support candidates from outside the party and even the Minority Movement if need be: ‘We must run people on their merits’. As the groups achieved majority support in their workplaces, they were instructed to affiliate union branches directly to the movement and end their separate existence. In Wonthaggi the results were disturbing. A Minority Movement group of 400 was liquidated. The Communist Party branch of 52 members itself fell away to 33 in the absence of a forum for communist activity in the union.24
The turn to the united front in their industrial work posed new difficulties for communist activists. They were to take up the immediate concerns of their workmates but not to foster economist illusions. They were to encourage proletarian solidarity at home and abroad, to take up the dangers of war and fascism, but not to move too far ahead of the union membership. They were to combat conservative, defeatist officialdom without lapsing into sectarianism. A historian of British communism has described the stance as revolutionary pragmatism, and it certainly required communist unionists to stay light on their toes as they balanced shopfloor activism with the wider culture of trade union loyalties, wresting advantages out of the capitalist system they proposed to abolish.25 They achieved success in struggle yet suffered their most serious reverses when an ill-judged industrial campaign ended in defeat. The trick was to find the auspicious moment when a lead appropriate to the particular circumstances might find a response.
Such a moment came on the canefields of northern Queensland in 1934. The sugarcane industry employed several thousand canecutters and millhands, who were covered by the Australian Workers’ Union. On the eve of the 1934 season party workers began agitating for the cane to be burned before harvesting to prevent the transmission of Weil’s disease, a lethal illness spread by rats urinating in the plantations; the growers opposed burning because it reduced the sugar content, and scaled down the pay for cutting burnt cane. In the absence of union activity, local rank-and-file committees were formed and by striking they achieved higher cutting rates. The AWU retaliated with threats to expel the communist leaders of these committees, Jack Henry and Jim Slater of Tully, Les Sullivan of Goondi, Doug Olive of Ayr, Carl King of Mourilyan and Pat Clancy of Ingham. All were impressive organisers, none more so than Jack Henry who combined industry, acumen and presence. A large, imposing man, he commanded attention in any company. The local party leaders wanted to break with the AWU, but the central committee insisted they carry on the fight within the union.26
This proved extraordinarily difficult. The AWU dominated the Labor government in Queensland, and used both the state industrial court and the police against the rank-and-file committees when the campaign resumed in the 1935 season in response to the union’s refusal to seek burning orders. This time the strike committees had broadened to include representatives of the Italian canecutters (whose presence in the industry was resisted by the AWU) to organise distribution of relief and sustain morale. ‘Bandiera Rossa’ accompanied ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘The Internationale’ in the strikers’ concerts. ‘War On All Rats!’, declared the banners they carried on marches. Women’s auxiliaries assisted with relief activities and helped to break down the sexual tensions generated by the high numbers of single men and exacerbated by ethnic jealousies. Jean Devanny’s novel Sugar Heaven suggests how erotic and political desire flowered in the lush tropical paradise and how the flames of political activism consumed the detritus of capitalist impurity. In the end, however, the AWU divided the strikers and defeated them. After six months of defiance, the last districts capitulated at the end of 1935.27
‘The main lessons we learned from the strikes’, Jack Henry reported to the party congress in the immediate aftermath, ‘is that immediately we must attack against the union, exposing them to the mass of workers … and we must have a broad central leadership’. The mistake, Carl King suggested later, was to have established a Sugar Workers’ Rank and File Committee, ‘which made the AWU more bitter against us because they thought we were going to tear a lump out of the AWU’. Both appraisals testify to the difficulties of pursuing a united industrial front with a hostile partner. The central committee had in fact intended to lead the sugar workers out of the AWU if it could unite them.28 The insistence of party leaders that they were offering the reformist trade unions a united front from above in order to facilitate a united front from below, and that they reserved the right to oppose class collaboration, was belied by the disparity in size between the two parties. Well might the AWU dismiss the party’s proposals at this time for an agreement between its pastoral division of 30 000 members and the PWIU’s 500, especially since the very raison d’étre of the PWIU was to offer an alternative to the AWU.29 For other unions to entertain seriously such an alliance it was necessary for the communists to build their strength by undermining the very officials with whom they sought an accommodation. The united front thus involved both criticism and reconciliation; through local campaigns around immediate issues, it brought an uneven but perceptible accretion of influence. Sharkey’s formula of offering a united front from above in order to achieve a united front from below captured only one aspect of the industrial policy that the party adopted by 1935: in practice Australian communists were also pursuing the united front from below in order to facilitate a united front from above.
The success of the united front is commonly represented as broadening the ambit of communism from the narrow confines of the Third Period. An oppositional sect of mostly unemployed workers in the first half of the 1930s is contrasted with the larger, more diverse movement that reached out in the second half of the decade to engage with progressive groups in a range of common concerns.30 It is undoubtedly true that the united front took the party into new associations and that growth enabled it to sustain a level of activity beyond its earlier capacity. In relating the transition in these terms, however, there is a danger of oversimplification. Third Period communism carried proletarian struggle into a number of fields of practice. The richness of activity around the united front was always constrained by party control. The move from the one to the other brought significant reorientation that closed off certain political forms while it opened up new ones.
An early casualty was communist work among the unemployed. It was noted in Chapter 8 how the party leadership moved as early as the end of 1931 from a style of confrontational activism, now deemed ‘sectarian’, in favour of attention to the ‘concrete problems of the unemployed’, especially questions of relief. The Unemployed Workers’ Movement yielded to a series of organisations more closely modelled on unions (the Relief and Sustenance Workers’ Union was one of these), which employed analogous methods of collective representation to press the authorities for a better deal. The party abandoned its reckless street demonstrations and paramilitary support of eviction resistance. More than this, it discouraged the acts of defiance whereby the militant unemployed drew attention to their plight. The smashing of city shop-windows, the ordering of an expensive meal in a restaurant and then instructing the proprietor to charge it up to the premier—these demonstrative exercises in political street theatre were now condemned as anarchism, symptomatic of the insubordinate temper that had overtaken Sylvester, Lovegrove and other renegades. Those households of single unemployed, such as Sylvester had encouraged in Sydney’s Balmain as an experiment in alternative communal practices, lapsed. The constantly moving army of men and women on the track were no longer flag-bearers of proletarian revolt; they were maimed victims of capitalism, to be redeemed by the discipline of wage labour. ‘The Communist Party cannot be based on bagmen’, Miles told the Eleventh Congress. The Number 2 District organiser insisted that all members, even those on the dole, must keep themselves ‘clean and presentable’, and remember the party was not a ‘philanthropic society for the rehabilitation of the demoralised’. Tom Hills, a Port Melbourne activist who lost his job as a wharfie in the 1928 strike and did not get it back until 1937, put the change of policy more succinctly: henceforth it was ‘faces to the factory and arseholes to the unemployed’.31 The unemployed workers became a substratum of the working class, their lack of employment an injury that maimed them as much as it disgraced the society in which they lived.
The change in mood is apparent in the writing of Eleanor Dark, who was perhaps the most politically sensitive of the novelists of the 1930s. The daughter of a Labor politician, she initially explored the predicament of the educated woman imprisoned by domestic responsibilities in loveless marriages. Waterway, a novel located in the same setting as Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, connects this search for fulfilment to the politics of the recovery. It takes a day in the lives of a group of people living in Watsons Bay: a reactionary businessman, his dissatisfied socialist wife, her irresolute, searching younger sister, a rich hedonist suitor, and his embittered, unemployed childhood friend. It is a novel of movement, along the waterway to the city, and of dislocation, between idle pleasure and desperate squalor. There is a quickening interest in new possibilities, captured in snatches of conversation overheard on the ferry (‘You get a man like Lenin once in a …’) but the older forms of proletarian protest occur offstage as the shouts of an unemployed demonstration invade a beauty salon, until the demonstrators are caught up in a society wedding and violence erupts.32
As if anticipating this outcome, the party drew back from the Depression excesses of unruly women and returned female comrades from the streets to more circumscribed sites of activity. Through the Women’s Department of the central committee, which replaced the Militant Women’s Groups in 1930, and its newspaper Working Woman, female organisers had sought to mobilise women around the issues of employment, unemployment and domestic life. The paper’s title and the pamphlet that publicised the decisions of the Tenth Congress, Women in Australia: From Factory, Farm and Kitchen, stressed the class character of this programme. It was vehemently opposed to the middle-class women’s organisations. At the same time it asserted the special needs of working women, calling for comprehensive social services, including day nurseries, and for access to birth control and abortion. Working Woman also published selections from Alexandra Kollontai’s Communism and the Family, which argued that the emancipation of women from economic dependence on men would liberalise marriage and free women in their family and personal lives.33 Endeavours to promote such a programme were sporadic, however; indeed it received most publicity from conservative feminists who put sexual immorality at the forefront of their anti-communist crusade. The number of female communists remained pitifully small, just 200 at most, and as a proportion of the party membership they actually fell. The Women’s Department organisers, Annie Isaacs, Jean Thompson and Hetty Weitzel (no longer Ross as she had reverted to her maiden name) complained regularly at party plenums of the neglect of work among women; the male district secretaries would just as regularly offer their excuses and do nothing. Working women’s conferences lapsed after 1932; the women’s section of the UWM collapsed in the same year.34
A new emphasis was apparent at the Fourth Plenum in 1934, where Jean Thompson linked recent Comintern statements to the revival of work among women in the Australian party. She also corrected past errors. ‘Many weaknesses and wrong ideas were in evidence among the women during the textile strike’, which had recently swept through the industry in New South Wales and Victoria, ‘particularly in their attitude towards the men, which led to division in their ranks’. Her cryptic remarks have to be supplemented with an editorial in the Red Leader, criticising the Minority Movement’s rank-and-file committees, which had initiated the walk-outs from the textile factories, for their sectarian antagonism to male union officials.35 This kind of separate industrial activity, applauded by Working Woman when women textile workers had previously employed it, was now discouraged. The rank-and-file committees of women workers were displaced by women’s auxiliaries, first formed in the ARU in 1934 and then extended to the mining and other unions. The woman as militant worker relapsed into the helpmate supporting her husband. Working Woman changed in the same year from a newspaper to a magazine, more domestic in orientation, less concerned with industrial campaigns than with life in the Soviet Union and the issues that affected women as wives and mothers.
‘Why is it that so few comrades have drawn their wives into the Party?’, asked the Victorian party paper at the end of 1934. The most common answer, it reported, was that women were too busy with household tasks to become involved, and that many were hostile to a cause that robbed them of their husbands to the detriment of family life. Such comrades should learn that ‘their wives are just as important to the Party as themselves’. They should take on some of the domestic duties in order to free their wives to participate. This exhortation was characteristically directed to the man as the mentor; and while it sought to break down domestic inequality, it assumed that the domain of politics lay outside the home.36
At the 1934 plenum Thompson also criticised the ‘tendencies in articles on birth control clinics to neo-Malthusism’—the fallacy, attributed to the English economist Malthus, that capitalist crises could be solved by family limitation. Kollontai’s emphasis on sexual liberation gave way to Clara Zetkin’s interview with Lenin, reprinted in the Communist Review in 1935, in which he admonished Kollontai for suggesting that in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires would be as simple and perfunctory as drinking a glass of water. The central committee sent out a circular, drawing attention to Lenin’s rebuke—‘Will the normal man in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips?’—and warned against ‘loose practices’. Miles repeated the warning at the Eleventh Congress in 1935: ‘Bolshevism demands a steel-like character and that has to apply on sex questions as well as on other questions’. Just as the party had cleared out ‘those who had become degenerate through unemployment’, so it had cleansed its ranks of bohemians with their ‘pseudo-advanced ideas’. The party Edna Ryan had known at the beginning of the decade, one in which sexual freedom was practised and a drag queen was welcome as a member, gave way to one in which any leading member had to consult the central committee before entering or leaving a relationship. In place of libertarianism there was now a double standard that blamed the female for irregular sexual liaisons—or failure to submit to them, as one young comrade discovered when denounced by a male comrade she had rebuffed; the central committee refused her appeal as it was based on ‘personal matters’. Jean Devanny, who witnessed the case, remained defiant in her insistence on sexual autonomy, but she herself had to submit to the strictures of her secret lover, Jack Miles.37
The party’s youth work followed a similar course. Third Period communism regarded the young as an important constituency, and well it might with so many school-leavers unable to find a job. During the early 1930s the Young Pioneers encouraged children to challenge authoritarianism in schools, communist Sunday schools offered a secular alternative to the teaching of the churches, and the Young Communist League defied conventional mores with campaigns against the ‘patriotic bunk’ of the Boy Scouts.38 All these organisations remained tiny in membership (though for communist children such as Laurie and Eric Aarons they served as a political nursery), not least because of the vigilance of their gatekeepers. When 15-year-old Audrey Blake applied to join the YCL in 1932, three young men interrogated her on her ‘social origin’ and attitude to Trotskyism. She did not understand the first question and was relieved to hear that her father’s job as a sheetmetal worker qualified her as proletarian.39
The stern oppositional stance and rigorous invigilation of members softened with the turn to the united front, though member numbers still remained small. Miles returned from a visit to Moscow in early 1935 with instructions to build up the YCL as a broad-based organisation of young workers, only to find that its journal, the Young Communist, had expired in his absence. Sharkey also called for a broader approach through campaigns on such issues as bathing dress regulations, and castigated the YCL for regarding these as ‘beneath the dignity of Marxists’. The new organiser agreed that the YCL had isolated itself from the ‘normal life of youth’; there was too much discussion, too little sport, games and entertainment.40
Third Period communists also paid greater attention to the issue of race. Earlier, the Australian party had endeavoured to comply with Comintern instructions to oppose the White Australia policy, but this was as much a therapeutic as a strategic directive, intended to break down the conservative isolation of the Australian working class. With the onset of the Third Period, Moscow stressed the need to provide assistance to oppressed colonial peoples in their struggle for independence. Among the catalogue of oppression publicised through the League Against Imperialism, the party stressed the misdeeds of the Australian colonial administration in the mandated territory of New Guinea. Above all, Australian communists concentrated on their own internal colonialism. The programme entitled ‘Struggle Against Slavery’ that the party published in 1931 defined the Aborigines as the most exploited Australians, the ‘slaves of slaves’. They were the victims of ‘mass physical extermination’, abused by pastoralists and police, denied the most basic human rights by their official protectors. Previously the revolutionary movement had overlooked their plight, henceforth ‘no struggle of the white workers must be permitted without demands for the aborigines being championed’. The party’s immediate demands were of two kinds. One was emancipatory, demanding full equality of economic, social and political rights, equal pay, abolition of the protection boards and an ‘absolute prohibition of the kidnapping of aboriginal children’. The other involved recognition of Aboriginal autonomy with land rights, separate social services controlled by Aborigines, and preservation of ‘native culture’.41
In this and subsequent statements the party worked with a particular conception of the Aborigine that was both racial and cultural. Even though there were communists of Aboriginal descent in both Sydney and Perth, they were not identified as such. To have done so would have been considered discriminatory and inconsistent with the principles of working-class equality. Equally, there is no evidence to suggest that Aboriginal party members sought such identification. The identity was reserved for those indigenous Australians in the rural hinterland and far north of the country, who were denied such incorporation into the labour movement. Communists understood these Aborigines as lying within the ambit of revolutionary politics as a special kind of victim of capitalism, a ‘doubly exploited worker’, mistreated even by the white worker. From this understanding they proposed the two lines of political action, though seldom recognising their divergence. One line would remove the barriers between Aborigines and other victims of capitalism to absorb them as proletarians within the revolutionary movement. The other would accept and preserve their special status. The reasons for this duality lie partly in the evolutionary historical logic of Marxism and partly in the particular understandings of the members who took up Aboriginal issues. Moxon initiated the 1931 programme. He found immediate support from Norm Jeffery, whose work as rural organiser had brought him into contact with Aboriginal activists; from Mick Sawtell, a former Wobbly now based in Sydney who had worked in the Northern Territory; and from Tom Wright, whose interest had begun when he had worked in the bush and was rekindled by correspondence with Olive Pink, one of A. P. Elkin’s anthropology students undertaking fieldwork in central Australia. Communists set great store by anthropological knowledge. Just as the Soviet Union was deemed to have recognised, honoured and reconciled its constituent nationalities, so a Soviet Australia would use the science of anthropology to preserve its native race’s ‘primitive culture’.42
The party’s agitation was shaped also by the diverse forms of Aboriginal politics. In the 1920s an Aboriginal organisation based in northern New South Wales had put forward demands for land rights as the basis of economic and cultural independence, and its influence was apparent in the party’s 1931 programme. During the 1930s new Aboriginal groups began to contest the discriminatory regime with demands for full citizenship. Tom Wright had closest contact with these activists and rallied support for them within the New South Wales Labor Council. Meanwhile, in the Northern Territory, there was a series of frontier clashes between whites and Aborigines that raised different issues. Communists in the south joined with anthropologists, church leaders and humanitarians to arraign the hypocrisy of a capitalist order that unleashed police expeditions and imposed capital punishment on natives ‘steeped in their own tribal organisation’, who ‘from their own understanding had committed no wrong’. A public campaign in 1934 against one notorious case in 1934 brought Mick Sawtell and the organiser of the party’s International Labor Defence organisation onto the platform with Mary Gilmore, an Anglican canon, Professor Elkin and a solitary Aboriginal representative. Party members in Western Australia also assisted Aboriginal groups with their submissions to a state royal commission in the same year.43
Yet the party was not free from racism. While Richard Dixon was at the Lenin School in Moscow, and worked during the summer of 1932 on a collective farm, he remarked that he was ‘as black as a nigger’ and was hauled over the coals for his linguistic lapse. In 1934 the Workers’ Weekly rebuked ‘Comrades [who] still use the terms “Pommie”, “Dago”, “Nigger” and so forth’. It was a party of increasing ethnic diversity in which such language no longer passed without censure. There were growing links between Australian communists and radical associations formed by southern European immigrants, such as the Melbourne Greek Democritus Club and Italian Matteotti Club; the former supported a Greek party unit and the latter gave way at this time to a Gruppo Italiano contro la Guerra e il Fascismo. In Melbourne and Sydney Jewish settlers from eastern Europe formed branches of the Gezerd, a support organisation for a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union, and many of them were drawn into the Friends of the Soviet Union and had other contacts within the party.44 Newcomers such as Itzhak and Manka Gust, who came to Australia from Poland via Palestine and Belgium at the beginning of the decade, gravitated quickly towards the Melbourne branch of the FOSU. While their secular anti-Zionism was atypical of most Jewish immigrants from Central Europe, this beleaguered outpost of international communism provided them with an immediate point of reference for their political sympathies as well as unqualified acceptance—Itzhak’s memoirs suggest the complete absence of anti-semitism.45 More generally, fascism’s glorification of racial purity imbued anti-fascism with a strong internationalist tone. The party took a strong stand against xenophobia in the Weil’s disease strike in north Queensland. Its Western Australian members showed particular courage in defending Italian and Yugoslav miners during the Kalgoorlie race riot of 1934.46
The campaign against fascism changed in character during the first half of the 1930s. Initially the party’s domestic offensive against social fascism was of primary significance, and auxiliaries such as International Class War Prisoners’ Aid and Workers’ International Relief ministered to its casualties. With the conservative resurgence at the end of 1931, the party established a United Front Against Fascism (UFAF) and, as the new federal government unveiled its battery of measures against the party, there was an Anti-Illegality and Workers’ Press Defence Committee. The ICWPA and UFAF in turn merged during 1932 into International Labor Defence. Alongside these bodies, all domestic in orientation despite their qualifying adjectives, were the League Against Imperialism (LAI) and the Friends of the Soviet Union (FOSU). The LAI conducted campaigns of denunciation of the bloody record of the major capitalist powers in their Asian and African colonies; the FOSU provided an international counterpoint, celebrating the achievements of the workers’ homeland.
With the fall of Germany to the Nazis and the mounting international tension, the LAI turned itself into the Council Against War. The change was consummated at a National Anti-War Congress in Sydney from 30 September to 2 October 1933. It was a conspicuous success, by far the most encouraging exercise so far in the emergent strategy of the united front. Trade union leaders and prominent church figures joined more than 500 delegates at the Paddington Town Hall to denounce the warmongers. At this point the opposition to war had a sharp revolutionary edge, indeed the indignant denial by the conference organisers that it was simply a communist front was scarcely assisted by the president’s opening call that delegates sing ‘The Internationale’. ‘This council is not pacifist’, insisted the president, the railway leader Arthur Chapman. ‘It realises that war may be thrust upon us and does not object to fight for the workers …’47
The Movement Against War and Fascism began in 1933 and quickly attracted greater support than other communist front organisations. This early poster sees the threat of war as primary, the British Empire as its chief impetus. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2263)
The party’s continued attachment to the strategy that the Bolsheviks had employed in the Great War, one that had turned an imperialist war into a revolutionary war, handicapped the Council Against War after its initial success. Most Australians construed proletarian internationalism as unpatriotic, the Leninist doctrine of revolutionary defeatism as treachery. But that doctrine lapsed as the Soviet Union sought protection from the German threat in collective security arrangements with its former enemies. The Communist International now drew a distinction between the fascist and non-fascist powers. It was the fascist regimes that were the instigators of war and workers might be justified in defending their countries against the fascist aggressor. The redesignation in 1934 of the Council Against War as the Movement Against War and Fascism (MAWF) signalled this new orientation, as did its formation of a Returned Soldiers section. Previously those comrades who had fought in the Great War had kept quiet about it. There were some exceptions, most notably Katharine Susannah Prichard’s husband, Captain Hugo Throssell, VC, who in the immediate aftermath of the war renounced his martial glory, but he was a genteel cuckoo in a proletarian nest. Persecuted anti-conscriptionists were the radical heroes of the 1920s; military service was regarded within the left as a sign of gullibility, suggesting you had been duped by jingoism. Now party members came forward with their battle honours: John Simpson of the central committee was revealed as John Simpson DCM MM and the leader of the communist Returned Soldiers section; Jack Zwolsman, an unemployed stalwart in Adelaide, was once again Sergeant-Major Zwolsman MM and a champion breast-stroke swimmer.48
Even so, the MAWF struggled during 1934 to establish its credibility. Belligerent in its anti-war propaganda, dismissive of pacifists, contemptuous towards those who suspected its intentions, at the end of the year it even threatened to turn on its most prominent church supporter, Ernest Burgmann, for his insistence on the ‘renunciation of war as an instrument of political policy altogether, both international and inter-class’.49 It was revived by its opponents. The MAWF planned a second National Anti-War Congress for Melbourne in November 1934 to coincide with the visit of the Duke of Gloucester and an entourage of imperial dignitaries to open the Melbourne Shrine as part of the state centenary. Police Commissioner Blamey was determined to frustrate the plans and twice pressured municipal councils to cancel bookings for hire of their town halls; eventually the Victorian Council of the MAWF secured the use of the Port Melbourne Town Hall. Blamey also learned through a police spy that the World Committee Against War was to send a delegate, a man apparently called Ewart Risch. The Commonwealth Investigation Branch established from British sources that Risch was in fact Egon Kisch, a prominent Czech writer and publicist, who played up to his soubriquet of ‘The Rampaging Reporter from Prague’. Acting on this information, the minister for the interior made a declaration of exclusion against Kisch under the Immigration Act. Kisch was prevented from landing when the ship on which he was travelling reached Fremantle in October. At Melbourne he jumped onto the wharf, broke his leg, and was put back on board. At Sydney he was released as the result of a court application, rearrested and given a dictation test (under the Immigration Act an applicant for entry could be tested in any European language and since Kisch was fluent in several, he was tested in Gaelic). Having failed the test he was charged with being a prohibited immigrant and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. After he was released on bail, the High Court set the conviction aside (on the grounds that Gaelic was not a European language). Further proceedings resulted in a sentence of three months’ hard labour. Again he was released on bail and negotiations with the Commonwealth resulted finally in remission of the sentence, payment of his costs and voluntary departure on 11 March 1935.50
The Movement Against War and Fascism was twice refused the use of town halls for its congress in 1934 before it secured that at Port Melbourne. The John Bull figure in the top segment of the illustration signifies the British military advisers who attended the centenary celebrations; the destitute family below is their victim. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2258)
While the Australian government’s attempt to exclude Kisch was initiated by the minister for the interior, it fell to Robert Menzies as attorney-general to pursue it through the courts. At the end of 1934 Menzies succeeded John Latham (who went on to the High Court bench) as the federal member for Kooyong and the champion of the Melbourne establishment’s stern and unbending conservatism. Both men had risen from modest origins through success at the bar, and both acquired a deep reverence for the law as a force for certainty and stability, a tangible expression of the derivative English traditions that they had absorbed, and a bulwark against the levelling change and disorder they came to associate with communism. Both affected a patrician style, Latham colder and more aloof than the urbane Menzies. In this early test of his federal ambitions, however, Menzies was humiliated. At every point the judges had rejected his strategems. To add injury to insult they found a distinguished group of Caledonians in Sydney to be in contempt for their denunciation of the High Court’s determination that Gaelic was not a European language. Menzies departed Australia before Kisch to seek solace in the Royal Jubilee celebrations in London. First the Wonthaggi miners, now this foreign red-ragger: Menzies’ antipathy to communism was developing into a feud.
The feud between Menzies and Australian communists began even before he entered federal politics in 1934. As Commonwealth attorney-general, he introduced amendments to the Crimes Act in 1935 that would have imposed new press controls; the legislation was abandoned in the face of public protest. Counihan places Hitler on a plinth alongside Menzies and both give the Nazi salute. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 25 February 1936)
Menzies’s entry to federal parliament was made possible by the retirement of John Latham to the High Court. In October 1935 he became chief justice. Counihan recalls in this cartoon that as attorney-general, Latham revised the Crimes Act in 1926 and 1932 to facilitate prosecution of the Communist Party. Behind him, Hitler appears envious of the prim Australian’s success. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 27 March 1936)
His inept handling attracted far greater publicity than the MAWF could have hoped for. Kisch’s dramatic entry made frontpage news. The draconian use of the law brought widespread criticism (the respected Congregational minister, Albert Rivett, died after addressing a protest meeting at the Sydney Domain in November 1934, in what a supporter called following ‘the Galilean to the end of the last mile’), and once the courts freed Kisch on bail, he addressed large audiences all over the country. There was also another banned congress delegate, the New Zealand communist Gerald Griffin. He entered Australia behind sunglasses and under the assumed name of Dodds; later he travelled from Melbourne to Sydney disguised as a Salvation Army officer. At an overflowing meeting in the West Melbourne stadium—secured by the MAWF activist Mary Wren from her father John, who had usually employed his considerable influence in the labour movement against the left—Griffin stood up to briefly reveal himself. The police pounced, only to arrest the wrong man. The campaign on behalf of Kisch and Griffin was undertaken by Christian Jollie Smith and served by the radical lawyers A. B. Piddington and Maurice Blackburn; it attracted able young journalists such as John Fisher (son of a former Labor prime minister), Edgar Holt and T. M. Fitzgerald. A Kisch Reception Committee, headed by Katharine Susannah Prichard, included E. J. Brady, Louis Esson, Vance and Nettie Palmer, and gave rise to the Writers’ League. The reception concerts featured contributions from Greek, Italian, Yugoslav, Jewish, Russian and Aboriginal performers, emphasising the internationalism of the campaign against war and fascism. The Victorian Council Against War and Fascism drew in students from the university, a development that was noticed when an organiser took a stencil down to be roneoed by the South Melbourne organiser of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. ‘Why can’t the fuckin’ Anti-War Movement get a bloody duplicator of their own? They’ve always got plenty of the sons and bosses of the bloody Boss class hanging around their office.’51
This was hardly fair to Len Fox and Dorothy Alexander, who assumed organising positions in the Melbourne office. Both came from comfortable families, and were educated at private schools and university; neither showed any regret for the sacrifices they made as they abandoned professional careers. Rather, they worked with extraordinary patience and good humour to build a united front broad enough to encompass working-class organisations and what were now described as the ‘progressive’ sections of the middle class in the face of conservative vilification and proscriptions imposed by the Labor Party.52 Maurice Blackburn and Catherine Clarey, the wife of the president of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, were among those expelled from the ALP for their association with the MAWF. Neither were the MAWF organisers helped by the party’s close invigilation of their activities. They were expected to follow every twist of Soviet and Comintern policy. Rawling, MAWF national secretary, was carpeted for resisting the turn to the League of Nations, when the Soviet Union called for League sanctions against Italy for its invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. There is some evidence to suggest the central committee was anxious to wind up Kisch and Griffin’s protracted legal challenges, and that it was the secretary of the International Labor Defence who stood out in defiance; this stalwart who preferred mass pressure to lawyers was expelled from the party in 1936.53
There was a further consequence of the mounting communist alarm about the war danger. While the Soviet Union sought collective security from the threat posed by the fascist powers, it harboured a deep suspicion that it would be left isolated to fight a new war. If so, what was to prevent the capitalists and militarists from joining in an anti-communist alliance and turning their own armed forces on the workers? To guard against these perilous possibilities, the Communist International instructed member parties to infiltrate their countries’ military forces. Agitation and organisation of the ranks would provide a safeguard against their use for foreign aggression or domestic repression. Just how seriously the Australian party took these instructions it is difficult to establish. While the party’s plans for underground operation included military infiltration, its archives provide no evidence that this was accomplished. The Australian armed forces, on the other hand, took the threat very seriously. In calling on the government in 1934 to outlaw communism, the army chief of general staff alleged widespread subversion. So, too, the Investigation Branch of the Attorney-General’s Department claimed in its regular reports that a special apparatus of the Communist Party was gathering military intelligence for transmission to Moscow. It named Miles, Dixon and Sam Aarons as the controllers of the operation, with Joe Shelley as the courier. But this is inconsistent with all that is known of communist espionage: such prominent leaders would not have been associated with so risky an enterprise, while Shelley was far too unreliable to be entrusted with so important a responsibility—his notoriety and German origins made him a plausible villain but an implausible agent. Not for the last time, it seems that the communists and their professional adversaries had a mutual interest in exaggerating their common concerns.54
The first issue of the magazine produced by the Sydney branch of the Workers’ Art Club. The linocut illustration combined an anti-war message with defence of the Soviet Union. In contrast with similar images in the 1920s, the mood of the demonstrators is more subdued, their politics more defensive. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/1979)
The reverse cover of the first issue of ‘Masses’ uses a Leninist epigraph and the motto of the Workers’ Art Club: ‘Art is a Weapon’. Against an artist’s palette, a worker holds aloft the torch of knowledge. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/1967)
The familiar figure of the worker with hammer, reworked in 1932 for the first issue of the Melbourne Workers’ Art Club Magazine, ‘Masses’. The aesthetics of the body are now of greater concern, despite the anatomical impossibility of the stance, and the grip half-way up the shaft robs the gesture of menace. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/1958)
A final illustration of the reorientation effected by the united front is offered by changes to the experiments in proletarian culture initiated during the Depression. In 1927 Judah Waten had organised a concert in the party hall in Melbourne to mark the centenary of the death of Beethoven. Three years later he wrote the manifesto of a new revolutionary magazine, Strife, that was to be launched at the demonstration of the Melbourne unemployed in October 1930:
‘STRIFE’ is another force added to the world-wide movement to uproot the existing social and economic order of chaotic and tragic individualism … ‘STRIFE’ is an organ of the new culture, destructive and constructive, a culture ploughing deep into the roots of life, and, as such, condemns and rejects all manifestations in form and content of the social disorder we oppose.
Strife never appeared—a blasphemous poem by Brian Fitzpatrick caused the confiscation of the issue—but the editorial signalled a new political aesthetic among young artists and writers. They provided the impetus for the Workers’ Art Club, formed in both Sydney and Melbourne in 1931, which took as its slogan Lenin’s dictum, ‘Art is a weapon’. The club offered literature readings, art and drama classes, film and lecture evenings to a predominantly unemployed audience. The approach was strongly influenced by the experiment in Proletcult conducted in the early years of the Russian Revolution, at once liberating culture from the rarified forms imposed by the capitalist division of labour, and placing it at the disposal of a revolutionary movement. Hence club members assisted with the design of factory bulletins and painted banners for street marches, such as the heavily stylised portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that Noel Counihan created for the 1932 May Day march in Melbourne.55
The Workers’ Art Club was quickly beset by dispute. In Sydney Jean Devanny ran afoul of the central committee in 1932 for allowing George Finey, the club’s art director whose biting renditions of hardship in Smith’s Weekly still shock the viewer, to mount an exhibition that portrayed unemployed workers too pessimistically. A similar attitude is apparent in the response of Tom Wright to Noel Counihan’s early drawings of the unemployed as maimed victims of capitalism: ‘Why don’t you draw something beautiful?’ Beauty was scarcely the primary objective of the cartoons that appeared in the party press at this time, which depicted massive proletarian heroes with superhuman physiques in violent acts with fist or sledgehammer. Counihan’s response to the grim reality of the Depression would be reworked in later canvasses, such as At the Start of the March, 1932 (1944), in which a bedraggled man, woman, child and babe-in-arms stand before a line of static, sullen figures while the crumpled banner is raised off to the far corner. The twisted, malnourished anguish of the child, the mis-shaped, burdened but enduring adult bodies are portrayed with a compassion that orthodox communists found difficult to accept. One dismissed the Melbourne members of the Workers’ Art Club as ‘a pack of petit-bourgeois degenerates’.56 In Sydney a party critic condemned as politically naive the production by the club’s theatre group of two plays written by Nelle Rickie. Devanny appealed for greater sympathy and argued that a recent dramatisation of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, that deeply pessimistic English novel of socialist martyrdom, was itself ‘politically incorrect’ (in what appears to be the first use of that phrase in this country). After other members of the club weighed in with their estimations of communist theatre, the party pronounced that Devanny was too ‘liberal and conciliatory’ in her attitude towards ‘artistic sectors of the middle strata’. She remained unrepentant: ‘Until our movement learns to welcome and utilise the technique of sympathetic fellow-traveller [a very early Australian example of that term also] artists, our art will remain maimed and halt’.57
This photograph of hunger marchers from Cessnock was made into a postcard. A small group of men with their belongings slung over their shoulders make their way off a ferry on the road to Sydney. (Source: CPA collection, Mitchell Library, Pic Acc 6604)
An unemployed march through the streets of Sydney in November 1930. The banner of the International Class War Prisoners’ Aid draws attention to the heavy toll of arrests, which by the end of the month saw most of the party leadership in gaol. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2344)
A press photograph of the ‘beef riot’ in Adelaide, January 1931, when police and unemployed marchers fought a pitched battle in the city streets. (Source: Jack Kavanagh papers, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU Z400/3)
Shanties of the unemployed on Sydney Harbour. This photograph appeared in the Sydney ‘Sun’, 4 May 1931. (Source: Jack Kavanagh collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2348)
Communists used typewriters and Gestetners to produce hundreds of local bulletins. ‘The Tocsin’ was the ‘official organ’ of the Balmain branch of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2027)
Most bulletins used a simple bannerhead, some were more ambitious. This one, the work of a party factory group at Bonds’ factory, evokes the work-skills of the industry. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/1952)
During his Australian tour in the summer of 1934-35, Egon Kisch became familiar as a stout, middle-aged man with a bristling moustache and voluble demeanour. In this portrait painted some years earlier by a German artist, Christin Schad, he is clean-shaven, watchful and covered in lurid tattoos. The girders behind him heighten the effect. (Source: Hamburger Kunsthalle)
Kisch’s last speaking engagement was on the Esplanade in Perth. At the end of a dry summer, Kisch perches on a conventional podium flanked by calico banners. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2353)
The success in the Miners’ Federation built on extensive activity in the local lodges. The occasion and location of this display are unknown. The banner copies the earlier depiction of a proletarian hero striking the chains from the globe and quotes the closing words of the ‘Communist Manifesto’. Note the ropes to stabilise the banner. (Source: Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU K2472)
The Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 was the first of a series of incidents of international fascist belligerence that culminated in the outbreak of World War II. In this Sydney demonstration, the banner depicts a composite representation of Italian and German militarism. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2355)
In September 1936 Ralph Gibson attended the World Peace Congress in Brussels, and returned to publicise the International Peace Campaign in Australia. He was seen off from Melbourne by two stalwarts of the Movement Against War and Fascism, Len Fox (in the middle) and Dorothy Alexander, whom he married upon his return. The banner suggests he was bound for Geneva, but the Congress was subsequently transferred to Brussels. (Source: Gibson papers, National Library of Australia, MS 7844)
Australians in Spain, some carrying flags and some wearing berets. From left to right, Jim McNeill, Charles Mcllroy, Charlie Riley, Charlie Walters, Jack Franklyn and Joe Carter. (Source: Laurie Aarons)
Four Australian nurses, en voyage to Spain, were met at Melbourne in October 1936. The nurses, from left to right, were Una Wilson, Mary Lowson, May MacFarlane and Agnes Hodgson. A.F. Howells flanks them in the right of the picture. Behind them can be seen Len Fox, Helen Baillie, Dorothy Alexander, Joyce Metcalfe and Nettie Palmer. (Source: Laurie Aarons)
A group of Australians in Barcelona, December 1936. The four Australian nurses are joined here by Aileen Palmer (far right), and John Fisher (the taller of the men) to farewell Jack ‘Blue’ Barry (third from the left). Barry was killed on the Madrid front soon after. They stand before the Hotel Colon, which displays portraits of Lenin and Stalin, on the Plaza di Cataluna, the headquarters of the combined Socialist and Communist Party of Catalonia. (Source: Amirah Inglis)
George Finey’s cartoon for the ‘Labor Daily’ portrayed a worker tortured by capitalists. A singular figure, he is powerless to prevent the draining of his life force by sinister, knife-wielding plutocrats. An exhibition of Finey’s work at the Workers’ Art Club in 1932 was criticised by the central committee for depicting unemployed workers too pessimistically. (Source: ‘Labor Daily’, 8 October 1931)
But already the party was reaching out to precisely such sympathisers and moving from a sharply oppositional conception of proletarian culture to a more generalised idea of culture as a progressive force. As it did so, the artistic experiments of the early 1930s gave way to the more conventional forms of social realism. In the first issue of Strife, Judah Waten had stressed the iconoclastic immediacy of revolutionary writing:
Facts are the new literature. The proletarian writer will break with the sickly plots, tremulous love chirpings, ecstasies, love triangles and individual heroisms of the writers of the past. He will work with facts. He will not worry too much about form; he will transcend the antiquated forms of the past, to create a new form based on facts.
Other contributors to the publications of the Workers’ Art Club had explored a different kind of prose to portray the effects of the Depression. Here the derangement of human lives produced a fragmentary and disjointed surrealism:
A strange madness is this chasing of phantom dreams, and the shadows of unreality dim the eyes of the dreamers. Somnambulists treading softly in a busy thoroughfare, muttering incoherently of the night at high noon.
The verse forms were declamatory, violent in their obliteration of human kindness:
Now work for the dole, you bastards,
Take that gleam of hope from your eye.
Just work for the dole, you bastards
Or watch your children die.
We’ve got batons and bullets, you bastards,
We’ll see you all toe the line.
But we’d keep you down much better
If it weren’t for these communist swine.58
Now challenge softened into portrayal, art as a weapon gave way to art as homily, and there was a turning back to literary traditions. The enlistment of Henry Lawson as a popular writer was an early example: it was stated in 1934 that he lacked a clear understanding of class struggle but depicted working-class life with ‘sympathy for toilers’. The same claim also indicated a growing interest in the Australian experience as a site of cultural politics. The Workers’ Art Club was replaced by broader bodies such as the Writers’ League, formed during the visit of Egon Kisch as the Australian section of the Writers’ International. The League stressed its ‘broad and non-sectarian nature’, and pursued a united front with progressive liberals in campaigns such as that conducted by the Book Censorship Abolition League during 1935.59
The Third Period party had applied the principles of Class Against Class to a range of sexual, racial, international and cultural issues. On each of them it took up a revolutionary stance that was starkly confrontational, juxtaposing capitalism’s manifold evils with a communist solution in order to expose and polarise two alternative orders of value. With meagre resources to support its endeavours, the articulation of this comprehensive proletarian position was necessarily programmatic, but even in its beleaguered isolation there could be no mistaking the party’s intention to replace one form of class rule with another. The united front brought a more pragmatic, less confrontational approach based on strategic alliances as a different kind of politics, an approach that sought common ground both within and beyond the labour movement, and replaced the earlier revolutionary separatism. Communists did not abandon their aspirations to leadership of the working class or their conviction that the workers must prevail over their class enemies, but they now saw those goals as the correlates of campaigns for peace, freedom, emancipation of the oppressed and enrichment of human life. Defensive in its historical origins, affirmative in its purpose and manipulative in its execution, the change affected them as much as their new allies.
The change called for a different style of party work, less declamatory and more persuasive. It demanded additional qualities of its members beyond the reckless courage of the street activist or the indomitable defiance of the shopfloor activist. A leading Bolshevik elucidated the expectations:
The most valuable quality in a Party worker is the ability to work with enthusiasm in an ordinary humdrum situation, and overcome, day in and day out, one obstacle after another; the ability to preserve his enthusiasm in face of the obstacles with which practical life confronts him daily, hourly, and to let the humdrum, cumbrous obstacles develop and strengthen his zeal; the ability in this day-to-day work to keep in mind and never lose sight of the ultimate aims for which the Communist movement is fighting.60
The party’s leaders sought to build a membership of sufficient size to sustain the united front, sufficient patience to attend to its practical, everyday tasks and sufficient ardour to ensure its communist character. They paid close attention to both numbers and provenance of members, using this information as an index to evaluate the work of the district committees. Statistics were kept for male and female members, those in work and those who were union members, those in factory and those in street units.
At the end of 1932 there had been 1929 members on the books. By mid-1934 there were 2371, and the congress at the end of 1935 enumerated 2873, though only 1674 were financial. Number 1 District based on Sydney remained the largest (1048 in 1935), but the Victorian Number 4 District (683 in 1935), the Hunter Valley Number 2 District (317 in 1935) and the new Number 9 District created in north Queensland (361 in 1935) were expanding most rapidly. In the same year Number 3 District in south Queensland (255) and Number 6 in Western Australia (130) showed signs of growth; South Australia (57), Tasmania (21) and the Northern Territory (no return) still languished. The composition of the party was revealed by the preponderance of what it called ‘street units’ over factory units. A census in mid-1935 found that there were 230 of the residential groups and only 118 factory units. Less than half the membership was employed, just over a thousand belonged to trade unions and only half of these belonged to factory units. There were just over 200 country members and about the same number of women.61
The performance in parliamentary elections offered some encouragement. The party’s 21 candidates won 47 499 votes for the House of Representatives in 1934 against 8511 for its ten candidates in 1931, and 73 506 votes for six Senate candidates, more than double the earlier tally. In state elections in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria during 1935, the CPA achieved significant increases on the 1932 results, with greatest support for candidates in the coalfield districts of New South Wales and northern electorates in Queensland. But the Senate performance, where communists won 2.23 per cent of the national vote (3.26 per cent in Queensland), was the highest aggregate percentage and represented a meagre return on the 400 000 manifestos, 500 000 how-to-vote cards, 15 000 posters and the heavy expenditure of effort such election campaigns entailed. Since the primary purpose of electoral activity was to build the party, the gap between voters and members emphasised the magnitude of the communist task.62
It is difficult to discern in these figures a clear vindication of the party’s new direction. The auxiliary organisations of the united front did provide fertile ground for recruitment, but turnover remained high. It was estimated that half of those signed up in these years were lost almost immediately and the central committee rebuked those comrades who ‘appear to think that the party is a big sieve’. Yet the party’s procedures required that new members serve a term of probation, and it was the secretariat that purged the ranks with periodic instructions that all unfinancial members be struck off the books—a South Australian delegate told a plenum in 1934 that if the requirement were enforced in his state it would liquidate the party. Finance remained a constant problem. The larger part of members’ dues went to the district committee and the central committee, leaving units with a constant battle to make up the funds needed to sustain their activities.63
Despite these difficulties there was an appreciable growth of the party’s presence and level of activity. In 1934 it shifted the national headquarters from the dingy hall in Sussex Street to new premises in George Street and then around the corner to Hay Street, only a short distance for members to carry the tables, chairs and office equipment but an expressive move away from the old associations with the ‘Hungry Mile’ along Darling Harbour to the bustle of Central Railway Station. The party now maintained offices in each of its district centres, along with separate premises for the auxiliary organisations. The Anvil Bookshop in Sydney was joined by the International Bookshop in Melbourne, the Anvil in Brisbane, the Radical in Perth and a crop of suburban Workers’ Bookshops that sprang up from the middle of the decade.64
In 1933 a publishing company, Modern Publishers, was established to produce local editions of communist works that were prohibited by the Commonwealth customs. At that time Itzhak Gust was the Australian agent for the Soviet English-language publishers, and distributed a range of magazines and books. In 1934 the party acquired the agency from him and the import restrictions eased to allow party bookshops to distribute a growing range of Soviet, British and American material.65 The party specialised in the production of pamphlets, which were especially suited to its purposes. Cheap, portable, timely and pointed, they circulated in bulk. In 1934 a new monthly theoretical journal began, the Communist Review, filling a gap that had been left with the discontinuation of the earlier Communist in 1928. Some districts even began publishing their own papers. The Western Australian Red Star appeared first in 1932 as a roneoed news-sheet to circumvent the ban on mail and railway distribution of the Workers’ Weekly; it became a printed paper from August 1933. Victoria established the Workers’ Voice in September of the same year. South Australia over-reached itself with Struggle, which began in November and lasted only a few months. The Workers’ Weekly itself obtained an expensive new press and typesetting machine in 1934 and from 1935 appeared twice a week.66
Changes in layout and content of the newspapers followed the new orientation. In 1933 and again in 1934 the Communist International criticised the Workers’ Weekly for a lack of accessibility. Leaving aside the logistical constraints (members outside Sydney often complained of the neglect of their news, while the editorial staff grumbled of the infrequency and late arrival of interstate reports), the publication at that time was not so much a newspaper as a party bulletin. Miles acknowledged that it carried ‘certain articles necessary for the Party that cannot be put in very simple language that would appeal to workers’. By 1935 those internal needs were met through the Communist Review and an improved system of organisational circulars. The redesigned Workers’ Weekly was pitched at a broader readership. A lighter typeface and bolder headlines, and a less crowded page with more illustrations set off the more buoyant tone. There was irreverent commentary on topical events and greater coverage of sport, mainly boxing. The paper still carried lengthy reports of meetings and resolutions, and occasional rebukes and admonitions, but now they were flanked by reports of success in this union or swelling support for that campaign. A gallery of prominent party activists was created, each with a standard photographic portrait, the collar-and-tie or neat open-necked shirt favoured by Queenslanders, well-groomed hair and resolute expression conveying youthful vigour. Conspicuously absent were the arguments, the doubts, the reports of expulsions and other signs of difference. The same appearance of purposeful unanimity was served by the growing use of communist ritual on public occasions. The party song ‘The Internationale’, the salute (the clenched fist), the use of agitprop chants and other distinctive devices affirmed the esprit de corps of a disciplined army of class warriors.67
With the growth of the party in the 1930s and its cultivation of the popular front, the heavy banner on ‘Workers’ Weekly’ became more restrained, the hammer and sickle stylised as a semi-tone. (Source: ‘Workers’ Weekly’, 17 May 1935)
Perhaps the most telling sign of growth was the increase in the number of full-time organisers. Even South Australia, a district of 80 members teetering on the edge of insolvency, had four of them in 1935. The Communist Party, now fully Bolshevised, was a cadre organisation. The cadres (the term was military in origin, meaning an establishment of officers) played a crucial role in transmitting the decisions of the central bodies to the local units. Each was assigned a particular area of responsibility but during these transitional years moved frequently from one district to another—thus Jack Blake took up work in national headquarters after returning from Moscow before shifting to Melbourne in 1934, where he joined Len Donald to take charge of Number 4 District. It was Donald, himself with a newly minted name, who met the former Fred Airey at Spencer Street Station with the news that henceforth his name would be John D. Blake. Jack asked what the ‘D’ stood for. Desmond. ‘I said, for Christ’s sake, I draw the line at that.’68
Blake and Donald were two of a dozen or so Australians trained during the 1930s at the Lenin School in Moscow, in a wide-ranging syllabus that included political economy, historical and dialectical materialism, the history and practice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the International. Jack flourished at his studies, Len hated them; on one occasion Jack had to retrieve the copy of Marx’s Capital that Len had thrown out the window. Len Donald was a wild man who, whenever he could lay his hands on a few roubles, would take Jack out to buy some ‘peasant’s nightmare’ and get stuck into it; drink would eventually get him into trouble as district secretary. But he was doggedly loyal and his organisational capacities were well matched to Blake’s incisive intelligence. Working under them was a dozen or so cadres with specialist tasks, in a pattern followed in other districts. Since the party had yet to establish its own national school, most cadres prepared with a stint of supervised work at the party headquarters in Sydney.69
Miles and Sharkey attached the utmost importance to the cadre ranks of the party. One persistent problem was their financial support. Some received a ‘sustenance grant’ from the party that was never generous and always uncertain. Others relied on public sustenance, and were liable to go back to paid work at the expense of their political duties. There was a tendency also for the organisers to spread their energy too thinly and to shift from one activity to another in response to Sydney’s latest instruction. This habit of acting as a ‘fire brigade’, as one organiser put it, drew condemnation from Richard Dixon, the assistant secretary who in his colourless efficiency reinforced the party’s turn to a more bureaucratic routine. He was now third in seniority and bereft of both the vices and virtues of his two superiors, a loyal functionary trained in Moscow with no prior political experience and no engagement in activity beyond the ambit of the organisation. It was Dixon who insisted that organisers had to know how to delegate. ‘If you go into a factory you do not find that the boss does all the work’, he observed in a disturbing analogy, ‘but we have this position in the party’. The cadres stood at a crucial intermediate position in the hierarchical structure of the party. They attended the plenums and enlarged meetings of the central committee to report on how they had implemented previous instructions and to learn new ones. There was a tendency for them to disguise lack of success with fulsome support of the party line. Miles coined the phrase ‘fossilised bureaucrats and chatterers’ at one such gathering to describe this tendency—and the term was immediately parroted by those at whom it was levelled.70
The turn to the united front was completed at the Eleventh Party Congress in December 1935. Miles and Sharkey had clarified the Australian party’s line in visits to the Soviet Union. The worldwide threat of fascist belligerence and the need to defend democracy made working-class unity imperative; the party was to seek affiliation to the ALP and launch a public campaign to overcome the resistance of the Labor leaders. As part of this campaign Miles would have to come out ‘before the party and working class as leader of the party’. For more than a year he had been underground, appearing only at closed party forums and working mostly from home, with Jack Simpson acting as go-between for the party secretary and the cadres. This reclusiveness allowed Lance Sharkey to steal a march at the earlier Congress of the Communist International where he represented the Australian party. The Australians were to have a member of the new Comintern Executive Committee, a high honour indeed and the first time it had been paid them since Garden and Kavanagh’s brief moments of glory. Sharkey convinced the other Australian delegates, Ted Docker and Stan Moran, who were in Moscow at the Lenin School, that Miles was a family man who couldn’t travel, so he should fill the position. An astonished Comintern official asked, ‘What, is there a split in your party?’71
Miles was now to play a different role, that of the general secretary, a position equivalent to Comrade Stalin. This new status required a strong and resolute figure who could be invested with the exemplary qualities of a proletarian patriarch. A similar cult of the leader had already arisen around the general secretaries of other communist parties, such as Harry Pollitt in Britain and Maurice Thorez in France. Jack Miles lacked their physical presence and could match neither their qualifications as industrial activists nor their patriotic status (anyone who heard him could detect his Scottish origins) but the Australian central committee determined he ‘has these characteristics that are essential to a leader of the working class’, and subsequent party publicity provided him with them.72
The cultivation of a public face of Australian communism did not obviate the need for secrecy. Whereas Third Period communism had sought to achieve the greatest possible impact, making up for its lack of numbers by shouting its presence, united front communism pursued a quiet effectiveness. In 1930 Moxon had instructed members thus: ‘If a number of young workers leave a trade union meeting together, they should march in closed ranks, sing revolutionary songs, cheer for the revolution, and if curious passers-by stop and join them, then one of the comrades should make a speech’. In 1935 Miles laid down as an elementary rule that members should ‘come to a meeting place on time and get right into it, when it is dispersed go away in small numbers and get right away’. The change registered a reorientation of tactics, methods and expectations. Adversarial communism yielded to affirmation, confrontation to the patient cultivation of alliances; and recognition that workers in dire distress were not necessarily the most advanced, altered the whole style of party work.73
The Party congress accepted all these changes without demur. Jack Loughran, the sole dissident, had been excluded and was dismissed in his absence by Miles as ‘a silly old man’. The congress was notable also for the allocation of time limits to speakers. Sharkey was given an hour for his report on the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Miles two hours for explaining the tasks of the Australian party. Politbureau members and officials of the larger districts had 30 minutes, lesser district representatives and central committee members twenty minutes, and all other delegates just ten. At the opening session Jack Blake announced the composition of the praesidium that would guide the election of new officials. It had three honorary members: Comrade Thälmann, the German party leader ‘whose name is symbolical of the spirit of the German working class and toiling people of that country against fascism’; Comrade Dimitrov, who had defied Hitler from the dock of a Nazi court, was now president of the International, and ‘whose name is inseparably connected with the struggle of the working class throughout the world against fascism and against war’; and finally ‘he whose name is connected with the strivings of the working class throughout the world … the great leader of the Bolshevik Party, Comrade Stalin’. The delegates stood to applaud.74