With the opening of the Great Patriotic War, the history of Australian communism enters a new phase. Overnight the party became a supporter of the war, which it now proclaimed to be a people’s war against fascism and for a new social order. Profiting from the close relationship between the new Labor government and the unions, in which the party had a strong role, it quickly recovered lost ground. By the time its legality was restored, at the end of 1942, it had trebled its membership over that in 1940 and by the close of the war there were more than 20 000 Australian communists. This period of unprecedented prestige and influence was brief, however, and yielded soon after the war to further conflict and controversy. The onset of the Cold War returned Australian communism to a beleaguered state from which it never recovered. There would be a further round of hostilities against the Chifley Labor government, a resounding victory against Menzies’s second attempt to outlaw communism, and new accusations of treason. The party would assist colonial independence movements, contest the Western military alliance, justify every twist and turn of Soviet foreign policy. It would open major industrial campaigns, sustain a range of political and cultural endeavours, cultivate alliances and denounce rivals, suppress internal dissent, fall into disputation, divide and decline. The history of communism up to the Second World War is on an upward trajectory, that afterwards is one of protracted decline.
It is in the nature of history to disguise hindsight as inevitability. This history has emphasised the adverse circumstances, the problems that confronted Australian communists and the internal weaknesses that afflicted their organisation in its first two decades, conscious always that in the end they were unsuccessful. Furthermore, it is not just their eventual failure that overshadows this early history but the manner of their passing. For in the end they were not defeated but rather succumbed. Some fell by the wayside, to be sure, and some retreated into an imaginary world in which time stood still and Khrushchev had never revealed Stalin’s crimes, but the best of them remained true to their ideals, confronted the past as well as the future, and continued to organise and agitate. Whether or not they retained a formal connection, the CPA remained their party. Time did not so much vanquish the obduracy and ardour of these ageing comrades so much as it thinned their ranks, depleted their audience and removed the landmarks of their politics. As in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there was no last heroic stand but an accumulation of failures, a growing realisation that the cause could not be salvaged. They did not yield to their enemies, they terminated the party as defiantly as they had created and sustained it.
But if the crooked path of history had not swerved in 1941 to revive the prestige of the Soviet Union, if the Red Army had not prevailed over the German Wehrmacht and if Marshal Stalin had not survived to project his model of Soviet power onto postwar circumstances, then radical energies would surely have taken a different direction. If the Australian Communist Party had not continued past 1941, if like the Wobblies its wartime suppression had broken it up so completely that an alternative working-class radicalism emerged in its place, how might its activity up to that point be assessed?
The older way of writing communist history, as a story of virtue rewarded, error punished and paradise postponed, clearly will not do. It is now apparent to all but those impervious to reason that the communist project itself was deeply flawed, that it nurtured tyranny within its emancipatory scheme. It gathered its adherents from particular segments of Australian society, the ardent, the outcast, the restless and dissatisfied; it gave them companionship, hope, purpose, and demanded much in return. It channelled their energies into a politics that pursued freedom through discipline, sought to mend social division by means of class war, appealed to altruism and worked with ruthless single-mindedness. Some fideists would still attribute the failure of Australian communism to opportunism and error, misapplication of working-class energies and betrayal of socialist principles, but that diagnosis is now confounded by what has followed the dissolution of communism. Their immanent critique cannot explain the far more conclusive failure of all attempts to supplant or replace communism with an alternative form of revolutionary class politics, let alone the more general decline of the labour movement. Communism might well be implicated in the collapse of socialism, but it is hardly responsible for the dwindling of class loyalties.
It will not do, either, to place the blame on the leaders. The party’s hierarchical structure and subordination to Moscow, its rules of democratic centralism and intolerance of dissent, the authoritarian practices and personality cult that developed around prominent cadres, all undoubtedly disfigured Australian communism. Its lack of success has often been related in these terms. Thus Alastair Davidson presented it as the product of an indigenous radical tradition that succumbed to the deadening effects of Stalinism, which in turn committed Australian communists to modes of politics that were utterly inappropriate to Australian circumstances. Others have depicted the Communist Party of Australia as an army of lions led by asses, an organisation that attracted some of the finest men and women of their generation only to expend their enthusiasm in a tragic misapplication of effort. Thus Len Fox contrasted the ‘Warm, Human People’ who sustained the party and the cold, dogmatic ‘Men at the Top’ who directed them. There is much in the historical record and popular memory to support such a picture. So many of the recent memoirs set the courage, the generosity and exuberance of ordinary members alongside the cynical, grudging solemnity of those who directed them. So much of the history related here reveals errors of calculation and execution. From Earsman and Garden through to Miles and Sharkey, Australian communism seemed peculiarly susceptible to intriguers, adventurers and petty despots who stamped their own shortcomings upon the better impulses of the ordinary activist. My narrative has provided plentiful evidence of the failures of judgement, the squandering of opportunities and ruthless enforcement of discipline by the party leadership.
Yet I have also observed that the apparent conformity was far from complete. Australian communists did not simply take orders from Moscow; they drew support and guidance from the Communist International, they appealed to it and they used it to settle their own disputes. They did not merely imitate the Soviet model; they projected onto it their own aspirations. Nor did the leaders of the Australian party invariably direct the members to sectarian abuse or hold them back from practical endeavour; at crucial junctures we have seen the central committee tempering the excesses of doctrinaire local activists. Furthermore, the leaders did not command the absolute obedience that the party’s rules suggested. The fact that the national executive had to keep intervening, straightening the line, replacing cadres, attests to the persistence of powerful contrary tendencies. The stress on a monolithic organisation characterised by iron discipline is indicative not of a docile obedience but rather of its composition of activists inclined to communism by a spirit of rebellion—determined, headstrong and refractory men and women who did not easily receive orders.
The communist party was a party of a new type, a disciplined army of the active members of the working class involved in every aspect of its collective effort and educated to see its true nature and implications. It was not a mere aggregation of groups and individuals but a unified whole, a collective intelligence capable of understanding and guiding the working class in its immediate situation, as it performed the necessary tasks towards its appointed historical mission. This communist party as conceived by Lenin was utterly remote from the Australian experience of the trade unions and Labor Party. The story of Australian communism in the 1920s is of a small, localised organisation that sought to create such a role for itself and repeatedly failed to do so, kept alive only by its association with an international movement and the periodic influx of new leaders with new strategies. In the 1930s there was an appreciable extension of membership and influence as communists found a role, first among the unemployed and then in the workforce. The party itself achieved an organisational coherence and stability that enabled it to transmute the directives of the Communist International into effective action. But by this time communism was no longer a politics of Leninist revolutionary internationalism, it was rather a Stalinist instrument of Soviet state power and strategic policy. The Australian party was not a fusion of theory and practice, it was a structure led by full-time communist functionaries and trade union officials.
In the course of its growth and consolidation Australian communism altered. It began in the socialist demi-monde, operating out of a shabby hired hall and reliant on open-air gatherings to spread its message; by the end of the 1930s there were communist headquarters in every city, hundreds of suburban branches conducted their regular ‘cottage meetings’, and major political initiatives were launched in town halls. Initially the party produced a four-page weekly newspaper; after less than two decades it outpublished any other Australian political party. In 1920 it had a toe-hold in the Sydney Trades Hall; by 1939 it was an active presence in every major union, and communist-led unions were far ahead of non-communist ones in their capacity for research, publicity and in industrial effectiveness. The early meetings of the Communist Party of Australia heard musical performances and songs from the Russian choir; soon it sustained a whole spectrum of alternative cultural activity. Its domestic and international concerns, at first barely programmatic, touched almost every aspect of public life.
With augmentation of capacity came changes in composition, practice and self-understanding. Communism found its initial support within the familiar social constituency of Australian radicalism, where the ranks of the unskilled, casual and often itinerant workers met the radicalised craft worker or self-employed tradesman seized with dissident purpose. The early communist activist might be a militant agitator fresh from the Wobblies, or a salaried union official attached to the Trades Hall Reds, or even one of the younger, middle-class and university educated enthusiasts such as Baracchi, Higgins and Jollie Smith. He, more often than she, was likely to be an immigrant estranged from the national exclusiveness of the Australian labour movement: all but one of the six party secretaries during the first two decades had reached adulthood before coming to the country. We might describe this early communist movement as a combination of outsiders—battlers, dissident labour activists, the déclassé petit-bourgeoisie and newcomers. The volatility of such a combination was apparent in the recurrent, acerbic and typically personal divisions over the party’s purpose and policy. Two decades later, however, there was general agreement that the coalition had consolidated into a monolith, a stable proletarian party with a measure of middle-class support.
As Australian communism redefined its social base, so its language and imagery changed. Initially it presented itself as the champion of the oppressed, giving guidance and inspiration to the downtrodden wage-slave, calling on men to reclaim their manhood, and women to refuse the moral degradation of capitalist exploitation. The emphasis here was on the class war to repair the injuries of class, to restore and make whole. With the onset of the Depression the temper of Australian communism shifted from vulnerability to defiance. After the defeat of the labour movement in the strikes and lockouts of the late 1920s, mass unemployment brought a tone of irreconcilable difference, a rhetoric of unbending resolution and violent confrontation. Then, with the movement back into work and the growth of communist union activity, the language of defiance shifted once more to a language of power. The party was now an agent of improvement and advance, providing practical leadership for wage-earners and speaking for the Australian people in the defence of their freedoms. In their trade union work as well as in campaigns for a popular front against fascism and war, communists cultivated alliances that would increase their own capacity to direct and control.
The party that emerged from these changes was larger, broader and stronger than the tiny, beleaguered organisation formed twenty years earlier. Although it lost some adherents in the course of its transformations, it held most and gathered in many more. By the end of the 1930s the essential features of its membership were clearly established. It was a party of workers in which all other social groups played a strictly subordinate role. While the salaried, the self-employed, the farmers and shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, writers and artists who attached themselves to it had their own spheres of activity, which in turn served the purposes of the popular front, they were expected to accept the leading role of the working class. Australian communism had some impact on interwar cultural life, but little on the country’s intellectual institutions, for the number of university educated members was tiny and the party absorbed all their energies. Ralph Gibson and Lloyd Ross taught for the Workers’ Educational Association before they joined the party, Esmonde Higgins did so after he left, but there were no communist academics other than John Anderson, whose ill-starred intervention into the party’s affairs confirmed members’ suspicion of halls of learning. It is noticeable that those Australians who contributed to Marxist theory at this time, such as V. G. Childe and Jack Lindsay, went overseas to do so. Not until after the Second World War would Australian communism enter into academic life here.
This is not say that the Australian party neglected theory. On the contrary, it regarded itself as the informed intelligence of the working class, channelling instinctive desire into understanding and action. It did so on the basis of Marxist theory as grasped and realised by Lenin, then codified by Stalin. That an originally critical analysis degenerated into dogma never entirely negated the potency of this cognitive process. Against the older forms of working-class organisation, the trade union and the Labor Party, whose pragmatism bound their deliberations to the logic of the market and the ballot box, communism provided a powerfully coherent alternative. It was crudely instrumental, often specious and opportunist in its rationalisation of sudden changes of the line, but it proceeded from a process of systematic deliberation that worked from its own texts, its own vocabulary and knowledge.
The party’s growth sustained and enclosed the membership. From the very beginning its oppositional role imposed strains on adherents that were most likely to be withstood by supportive networks of comrades. In the first decade, only Sydney maintained an organisational continuity and it was in the inner suburbs of Sydney that these patterns of comradeship first developed: contiguity, friendship, shared interests, mutual assistance. The Saturday evening dance in the Communist Hall that so affronted the Melbourne puritans provided more than financial support. During the 1930s similar networks developed in other cities and regional centres, and the growing range of party activities and pastimes, the housewives’ groups and youth centres, the Workers’ Sports Federation and the New Theatre, provided popular front communism with a broader locale. The autonomous forms of party life both connected members and separated them. They were at once community leaders and yet different from their workmates and neighbours, exemplary workers and atypical enthusiasts. The Leninist model of a unified, disciplined body of revolutionaries acting as organic working-class intellectuals produced the figure of the Australian communist who enjoyed respect as a wise, disciplined outsider.1
Yet by 1939 it was apparent that this Australian communist was not in fact a revolutionary. The growth of the party, its strong presence in the trade unions and extensive participation in a whole range of public activities made it a part of civil society. It continued to contest exploitation and injustice, to agitate for change and improvement, to counterpose Soviet achievement against capitalist barbarism, but it did so from within, seeking to extend its own disciplined unity to the rest of the working class and thereby bring order and purpose to the whole of national life. By background and temperament, the Australian communist was a radical and a militant, a nay-sayer and a troublemaker; by training and conviction that person was an organiser and improver. The party channelled the spirit of rebellion into obedience, banished transgression, imposed regularity: of all sins in the communist lexicon, that of anarchy was the most reprehensible. Its emphasis on unity, firmness and control, its mistrust of spontaneity and local initiative, gave it a formidable capacity to direct campaigns and to withstand campaigns against it. The very qualities that enabled it to withstand illegality during the Second World War fatally compromised its revolutionary mission. Unlike the Wobblies, those unbending rebels who owed allegiance only to their principles, disdained all subterfuge and were ground under the iron heel, the Communist Party of Australia tied its fortunes to a foreign dictatorship, persisted with its own iron discipline and survived. Embattled and defiant, it still expected to keep its appointment with history.