The interest that led me to this subject began nearly 30 years ago when I was a postgraduate student. Like many of my generation, I was caught up in the radicalism of the 1960s. A whole range of campaigns and causes—anti-war protest, colonial liberation, removal of immigration restrictions, opposition to capital punishment, civil liberties, democratisation of the university—led me to communism. Both as a historian and a participant, I responded to the aura of communist tradition. For the best part of the 1970s, as the currents of twentieth-century history eddied and then turned, I joined with others who sought to empty the Stalinist cargo from the revolutionary vessel.
It was communist history that drew me into communism and now I return once more to that history, but in different circumstances. Communism is no more. It passed irrevocably with Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the overthrow of the people’s democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, and then the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. The communist parties of the West have dissolved, the ageing followers of the lost cause in Russia and elsewhere fall back on nostalgic nationalism, the last regimes that still lay claim to the title are mere mockeries of what communism promised. Communism collapsed under the weight of its failures. Its refusal of freedom created a barren tyranny. Its command economies were unable to adapt to changing circumstances of production and consumption; they became rife with inefficiency and corruption, until eventually they could not meet even basic expectations. As an official doctrine, communism ossified into lifeless ritual; as a system of government its monolithic one-party rule became a dead hand that snuffed out initiative and vitality. It fell not just because its critics swelled into an overwhelming opposition but also because its custodians finally lacked the will to defend it. It ended as much in inanition as in protest.
With its passing, communism has become almost unintelligible. I teach a course of contemporary history to first-year undergraduates, which takes as one its principal themes the competing doctrines of freedom that strove for supremacy in the postwar world. The one doctrine, freedom based on private property and liberal democracy, is represented by a passage from Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). The other doctrine, freedom as liberation from capitalism and imperialism, is introduced with a passage from Joseph Stalin’s speech to the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1952. My students find von Hayek instantly familiar and Stalin so strange as to be almost incomprehensible. That Stalin commanded the greater popular following at the end of the Second World War and that postwar events initially seemed to bear out his boasts, strikes them as preposterous.
It is not just that Stalin employed a vocabulary that no longer possesses meaning to these young people: such words as ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘vanguard party’ and ‘toiling masses’ have no purchase in their experience. More than this, their understanding of communism is so shaped by the events of 1989 that its earlier success seems akin to a dark age. In this they are encouraged by the triumphal anti-communism that currently prevails both in academic writing and the popular media, a set of assertions about communism that allow it no other meaning than tyranny. The end of communism is now taken as its beginning. From the Russian Revolution to Reagan’s Evil Empire, it was something hateful imposed by force and sustained only by fear. There is no indication that communism was also a popular phenomenon that people in all countries grasped as a spar of hope against other forms of oppression; that it gave meaning and purpose to idealists in a wide range of circumstances; and that it was not a simple divination of evil but a complex body of thought and action that altered over its life-course. It might have been expected that the extinction of communism as a historical phenomenon would allow some less Manichean evaluation of its consequences, and when the present body of anti-communists exhaust their exultations that re-evaluation is likely to occur.
It is unlikely, however, that it will so readily separate Stalinism from communism, as so many communists sought to do. Lenin, his predecessor and the founder of communism, warned from his sickbed in the winter of 1922 to 1923 against Stalin’s authoritarian ways. Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, denounced his crimes at a party congress in 1956. But Lenin had no solution to Stalin’s arrogation of authority, much less an explanation of how such a man should have become party secretary, and Khrushchev was unable to undo his legacy. Stalin undoubtedly bears responsibility for millions of deaths by execution or starvation, but to attribute these atrocities to one man and his -ism is to pass over the clear symptoms in earlier communist practice and absolve a movement that hailed him as the architect of socialism and leader of the world revolution. Any history of communism must ask what made Stalin possible and why it was unable to find a lasting alternative to his methods.
Like all other sections of the Communist International, the Communist Party of Australia succumbed to Stalinism. After a first decade of improvised, enthusiastic and generally ineffective activity, it became an utterly faithful follower of the policies and practices laid down by the Soviet leader. That evolution is one of the concerns of this history, and an explanation of it presents some striking challenges. It was both voluntary and imposed. Communism in Australia was a commitment made freely, without the sanctions that Stalin exercised in his own country. Those who joined and accepted the remarkable regimen that membership entailed, a regimen without precedent in the political culture of the Australian labour movement, did so of their own choosing. It offered few material rewards and demanded great sacrifice. The reasons for making such a commitment form one of the themes of this history. Equally, Australian communism spilled repeatedly into unanticipated directions. A hierarchical form of organisation imposed over a far-flung membership of strong-minded followers could hardly avoid heresy and error. Just as dealings between Moscow and the Australian party leadership during the 1920s were marked by mutual misunderstanding, so the constituent sections of the party threw up their own interpretations of policy in the 1930s, as they sought to apply it to obstinately intractable local conditions.
Communism put down its deepest Australian roots in the organised working class. But communism was always something more than a union movement. Its revolutionary mission extended into a whole range of emancipatory projects: the abolition of sexual inequality, freedom for Aborigines and all other colonised peoples, the removal of the White Australia policy and full acceptance of national minorities were just some of them. It connected Australians to the outside world in new ways that broke with older colonial linkages and went beyond the normal reference points of the Anglophone diaspora. It engaged in a wide range of educational and cultural activities: party classes, workers’ art, literature, music and theatre. These activities were at once oppositional and affirmative, exploring new modes of activity that would put knowledge and feeling at the service of the working class. Communism entered into the intellectual and cultural history of twentieth-century Australia as an alternative source of value.
How should its history be written? There is a large body of internally directed and homiletic literature that uses the past for inspiration and instruction. Such works typically distinguish truth from error by demonstrating the perfidy of reformists and revisionists, and extolling the heroic efforts of the faithful. In treating the fortunes of the communist movement itself, they establish a lineage of correct theory and practice that provides a warrant for future success. In later years, as Australian communism splintered into competing sects, their leaders put forward their own alternative accounts in order to lay claim to legitimacy. Conversely, Trotskyist histories of Australian communism explained its failure in departure from their exemplar’s insights.1
Apart from their self-serving and partisan character, such histories exhibit a common tendency to treat the fortunes of communism as a reflex of appropriate endeavour. Victories confirm the wisdom of the party, defeats are attributed to factionalist deviation from the correct line by left adventurists or right opportunists. The historical process they record is highly schematic, the party treated as a responsive instrument, the flux and contingency of human frailty regarded as a mere epiphenomenon of impersonal class forces. Insofar as such communist history considers questions of motivation, it employs a model of heroic effort. The Australian communist who emerges from these accounts is resolute, capable, fearless, indefatigable, purged of all weakness and doubt. The party constructed this model comrade in instructions and reports, as well as in fiction and in graphic art; and veterans employed the same imagery when they recounted their experiences or memorialised others in such works as Reminiscences of a Rebel, Of Storm and Struggle, Comrades Come Rally! and Solidarity Forever! Such works evoke the world of the communist in a record of constant engagement, a celebration of commitments, beliefs and hopes set down in a form that leaves little room for doubts or uncertainty, let alone critical reflection on what went wrong.2
Not that Australian communists eschewed the lessons of the past. On the contrary, they were convinced historical determinists who enlisted Comrade History as one of their most valuable recruits, and they applied themselves to analysis of their own country’s historical record through the lens of Marxist historical materialism as attentively as communists elsewhere sought to gauge their particular circumstances. Leading interwar communists such as Esmonde Higgins, James Rawling and Lloyd Ross pioneered research in Australian labour history. After the Second World War, when a new generation of communist academics established labour history as a scholarly discipline, Lloyd Churchward, Miriam Dixson, Bob Gollan, Ian Turner and others grounded the history of Australian communism in studies that traced the rise of an organised working class as a force for national progress. After them came other academics who built up a very considerable literature, consisting of books, articles and theses that treated various aspects of communist history, whether by region, period, occupation or sphere of activity. Sometimes critical and sometimes celebratory, such work is predominantly sympathetic and merges into the local and thematic histories produced from within the communist movement.
The dimensions of this literature are indicated by the bibliography prepared by Beverley Symons. It lists nearly 200 books wholly or partly concerned with Australian communism, more than 600 articles and a further 200 theses, the great majority produced in the past quarter-century.3 The variety of subjects they traverse is striking, but more striking is the fact that there has been no general history of communism since Alastair Davidson’s The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History appeared in 1969. That work was based on a doctoral thesis on the early history of the party submitted in 1965, and was assisted by the new party leadership of the 1960s in a spirit of critical reappraisal that accompanied the party’s break from monolithic conformity. Its argument, that the party was making ‘a stumbling, groping, limping move back to Australian traditions with the weight of past errors’ on its shoulders, pleased neither the liberals nor the diehards.4
Davidson worked mostly from the published record. Many major archival sources have since become available but so far remain largely unused. The reasons for such neglect are partly to do with the changed interests of historians. Davidson’s was a political history that concentrated on policy and its implementation. The more recent work listed by Symons has moved from political history to social and cultural concerns, emphasising history from below, lived experience, radical imagery and textual representation. This in turn registers a loss of confidence in politics, a growing realisation that the communist project had failed and a corresponding intention to connect certain forms of communist activity to the concerns of the new social movements and the circumstances of postmodernism. Hence we have studies of communist encouragement of early Aboriginal activism, communism as a precedent for community campaigns, communism as a mobiliser of women, communism in a multicultural mode, anti-communism as a discourse of surveillance. Such studies present a far richer appraisal of communism’s presence and effects, if one that some of its legatees are loath to acknowledge, but these studies leave communism itself as an unexplained phenomenon.
The final decline of communism has produced another kind of writing that returns once again to the first person from the third, this time in a more intimate register. These are the memoirs of former communists looking back on a lost political cause. They write retrospectively in a familiar autobiographical mode that traces the journey from innocence to experience, a transition intensified in their case by the fact that they lost their faith before it was taken from them. For the writers of these memoirs rejected the authoritarian dogmas of Stalin in advance of the collapse of communism—as is suggested by the title of Oriel Gray’s memoirs, Exit Left, and Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card. They therefore look back across a double rupture to their youthful enthusiasm, and seek both to affirm and to question the cause that illuminated their lives without the self-justificatory insistence of most political autobiography. For the most part they write in an informal, highly personal style that admits elements excluded from the older communist autobiographies, the very elements that communism denied—hence Daphne Gollan’s memoirs of ‘Cleopatra Sweatfigure’, Bernice Morris’s Between the Lines and Amirah Inglis’s The Hammer & Sickle and the Washing Up. The opening up of subjectivity is a particular feature in the recorded testimony of communist women, as in Taking the Revolution Home or Bread and Roses, but it is also an important dimension of Bernard Smith’s evocation of The Boy Adeodatus or Roger Milliss’s intergenerational ‘autobiographical novel’, Serpent’s Tooth. Such remembrance extends from drama, as in Dorothy Hewett’s Chapel Perilous, into film in Children of the Revolution, and is frequently revisited in the lifestyle sections of newspapers, since many of these former communists remain active in public life. Irony and humour mitigate the loss, but all of these reflections share an elegiac poignancy. This genre of communist remembrance is far more noticeable in Australia than in Britain, the United States or elsewhere.5
The present work seeks to apply the insights of such remembrance to the early history of the party. It was conceived as an account of communism in Australia that would seek to narrate it, describe it, explain it to readers who know little or nothing of its forms. I wanted to show how it was that Australians became communists, what that meant, what they sought to do, how far they succeeded, as well as suggest the far-reaching consequences of their endeavour. In writing it I have combined a systematic account of the party’s organisation, doctrine and practice with more descriptive passages of social and ethnographic detail. In relating the party’s activities I have tried to capture the idiom of Australian communism and have paid particular attention to its local forms. I have dwelt on the experience of party members, and perhaps laid too much stress on their foibles and idiosyncrasies, in order to suggest the diversity of human qualities that lay behind the hard outer shell. I have tried to evoke the milieu of Australian communism and have at the same time tried to stand outside it and grasp it as a historical phenomenon.
Yet to write the history of communism is to be drawn into its arcane complexities. It was a form of politics more closely controlled than any other. The hierarchical form of organisation, the prescriptive language and authoritarian procedures present the historian with an official record of daunting opacity. From the end of the 1920s stenographers attended every party assembly of significance to record a verbatim transcript of proceedings. Meetings of the central committee alone, at which leading state officials and organisers of the various party auxiliaries reported on their work in sessions stretching over several days, yielded typed documents of hundreds of pages every few months. The purpose of these records was invigilation and their effect was to impose a verbal uniformity. A reader of these documents is thus confronted by an esoteric code in which every new turn in policy finds apparent acceptance, differences have to be gleaned from subtle shifts in emphasis, and actual results are hidden under an overburden of dutiful rhetoric. The overwhelming bulk of this material has not been used before, and there is no alternative but to work with it since it provides a far more detailed and systematic record of the Communist Party than earlier historians have possessed. I have tried to use it critically and not succumb to its clichéd formulations, its self-validating framework of reference, but any history of communism that enters fully into its subject matter cannot wholly escape its effects.6
Much the same holds for the equally voluminous record compiled against the Communist Party by government agencies. The Australian Archives holds thousands of files compiled by the Investigation Branch of the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, which had principal responsibility for official surveillance of communism in the 1920s and 1930s. Its agents provided reports on communist activity, copies of correspondence and even original versions of party documents. The accuracy of the documentation is generally high, the picture of Australian communism it provided is seriously deficient. Coming at a time of turmoil and disorder, the Australian intelligence service construed the formation of the Communist Party of Australia as a sinister plot. In digests and summaries it presented a pathology of cranks and rogues, utterly immoral and self-seeking, who exploited the gullibility of the labour movement. The Investigation Branch grossly exaggerated the dimensions of this movement to augment its own activities. It gathered much of its information for the purpose of criminal prosecution under laws designed to combat the communist menace. I have consulted a large number of intelligence files but by no means all of them. They provide corroborative and supplementary details of the movements, the actions and even the statements of individual members in reports that are always coloured by their own provenance and purpose.
Australian communism consumed an extraordinary quantity of paper. By the 1930s it sustained a national newspaper, published twice a week, four state newspapers, and a score of magazines and periodicals. Its presses issued a constant flow of books and pamphlets; its bookshops distributed as many more foreign publications; local branches and auxiliary units produced hundreds of their own roneoed bulletins. There never has been a political movement so committed to the printed word. Then there is the unpublished record of the party. The archives of the central committee are deposited in the Mitchell Library in more than 200 boxes, augmented by a subsequent deposit of material from the first two decades that was long thought to have been lost: it includes full proceedings of the national conferences and congresses, minutes of all the important subsidiary committees, correspondence and subject files. Similar archives of some state committees are held in state libraries, along with major collections assembled by individual members. In 1991 a microfilm copy of the relevant archives of the Communist International was deposited in the Mitchell Library. It consists of ten reels and reproduces many Australian party documents as well as records of the deliberations of the Communist International on Australia. To these party sources can be added the records of trade unions and other organisations in which Australian communists played a significant role, as well as those of rivals and opponent organisations, and the extensive personal papers of such assiduous anti-communists as John Latham and Robert Menzies, both deposited in the National Library. There are some very large collections assembled by historians of communism. That of James Rawling runs to 17 shelf-metres and nearly 2400 items. It is held in the Noel Butlin Archives at the Australian National University, along with substantial collections assembled by Ian Turner and John Playford.
Confronted by these dispersed mountains of print, typescript and holograph material, I have had to read selectively. I have studied all the national serials and consulted state newspapers and journals less comprehensively. I have used the national and Communist International archives in their entirety, and trawled through some of the state and personal ones. I have read the party’s major monographs and pamphlets, and much of its ephemera. In making these choices, I was guided partly by leads offered in secondary studies and partly by the picture I assembled in the course of the research. My own emphases of treatment are by no means the only ones that might have been made, and many other thematic and case studies would be possible, but some selection is inevitable in a work that already tests the reader’s patience. I have tried to bring out regional and local variations with consideration for the party’s centres of gravity, and the strong concentration on the eastern seaboard at the expense of South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory reflects the distribution of the party’s strength in its first two decades.
Most of all, I have tried to make this a history of communism and communists as well as the Communist Party. Communism and anti-communism had a significance beyond the ambit of the party in interwar Australia. For a few dissidents, the Australian party betrayed the revolutionary cause, and I summarise their critique of it, but these dissidents were scarcely a significant presence until the Second World War. For many conservatives, the spectre of international communism far outweighed the efforts of its local practitioners, and I have made some references to this anti-communist mentality. But any history of communism in these years is necessarily a history of the party.
Communism is no more, and some might feel that such a lengthy history of its first two decades in Australia is redundant. Others allow such history only if it condemns its subject. I make no apologies for treating the history of Australian communism as fully and as seriously as I have. It was a small outpost on the very margins of the Communist International, and even in the late 1930s had only a few thousand members; but it had a much larger following and influence. In the middle decades of this century it presented a palpable challenge to the existing forms of Australian national life. The foundations for its successes and failures were laid in the 1920s and 1930s when it gathered up a disparate range of enthusiasts and led them into new forms of activity against overwhelming odds and in conditions of utmost adversity. Such a history has a drama and a pathos that is worthy of remembrance.