BY TOM O'LINCOLN

This book was conceived in 1976, at a time when the Communist Party was conspicuously in transition from its traditional, pro-Soviet character to something else. It was widely believed that the transition was towards some sort of radical revolutionary perspective. My intention was to challenge this view, and to argue that the change represented an accommodation to the western political mainstream. When the book appeared in 1985, my argument was already being confirmed by the party’s endorsement of the ALP/ACTU Accord. Unfortunately it's not in digital form. I wrote this summary with an academic audience in mind, so it's less polemical, and therefore alas it is less compelling writing than the book itself. There are still copies of the book around; if you want one, write to me.

Communism was born as an attempt to unite the workers of the world, yet as I said at the outset of this chapter, "slogans are one thing and practice another". In the course of the 1920s, the international movement became a set of bureaucratically-run parties subservient to the interests of a particular ruling class: the Soviet bureaucracy. Stalin’s slogan "socialism in one country" replaced internationalism with nationalism, although of course the rhetoric of international class solidarity remained. In the post-war era, a further transition took place as many Communist Parties broke free from Moscow ¾ once again a nationalist phenomenon. This chapter traces the evolution of the international Communist movement from Lenin’s day, up to its effective dissolution in the 1980s

The early internationalist phase was ended by a combination of defeat in a series of European countries (several left insurgencies failed in central Europe), the isolation of the Soviet state and the destruction of much of the Russian working class itself through civil war and industrial collapse. The state bureaucracy and Communist Party filled the vacuum, with Stalin launching an ambitious industrialisation program alongside a reign of terror. The failed western CPs lacked the confidence to resist Stalin’s authoritarian make-over of the international movement, and the well known pattern arose whereby the parties in the west were "run by telegram" from Moscow.

To stop here, however, would be to miss an essential dimension. The parties were not just ciphers. They continued to have great social influence in some countries, and a significant trade union base even where they were relatively small. Thus their actions cannot be reduced to simple obedience to Soviet orders. In the thirties and forties millions of workers placed their hopes in the Soviet union, ignoring reports of show trials and concentration camps. This was not mere blindness; in a series of industrial conflicts at home they themselves had felt slandered by the press, so they were used to ignoring such reports.

Because they had a real base at home, the parties were not merely creatures of their Soviet patrons. They were potentially capable of regaining their independence, and indeed this began to happen after the Second World War. To understand the process, we must see the parties in a three dimensional context. Firstly, of course, they owed allegiance to the USSR. But secondly, they were a real force in their own right because they had a social base in their own national working classes. Thirdly, this base along with their role as representatives of the USSR brought them into conflict with ¾ but also at times into alliance with ¾ the national bourgeoisie of their own countries. It is this three-dimensional framework which distinguishes the analysis I advanced in this chapter from many other analyses of the Communist movement.

Stalin used the parties to further the national interests of the Soviet state. Frequently this meant forcing them into actions not in their own best interests. In the early thirties they were pushed into an extreme sectarian stance, denouncing the Labor and social democratic parties as "social-fascist" and thereby losing much sympathy among workers. Subsequently they were pushed into the opposite "Popular Front" orientation, in which they sought alliances with sections of capital, again alienating sections of workers. Both stances were dictated by the Soviet foreign policy at the time; the real purpose of the Popular Front, launched by the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, was to find capitalist allies for Stalin against the threat posed by Nazi Germany. This alliance came to fruition during the Second World War, when the Communist Parties in the west worked closely with the bourgeoisie and the state to impose labour discipline. Subsequently, the CPs were thrown into a new wave of aggressive struggles from around 1947 as the Cold War began, and because Stalin wished to put pressure on the western ruling establishment.

Yet the parties were not without leverage of their own. The international movement was important for Stalin as a means of putting pressure on western ruling classes. During the war, some of them achieved huge followings, mostly notably in Italy. In the immediate postwar years, before the Popular Front alliance broke down, Communists won a significant parliamentary presence and entered governments in a number of countries. They could also carry out mass mobilisations of their base, which were important in deterring western governments from attacking the USSR.

The immediate postwar years were the high point of Communist success world- wide. In addition to parliamentary successes in the west, the Soviet army created "people’s democracies" in Eastern Europe, Mao conquered power in China, and the left seemed to be on the march everywhere. Yet this was the point at which the hidden fault lines in the movement began to shift.

With the onset of the Cold War, Stalin moved to tighten discipline. Liberal dissidents were repressed in much of Eastern Europe. However the maverick Tito regime in Yugoslavia stood its ground. Tito had made his own revolution and had his own independent social base; he defiantly refused to submit to Moscow. This was the first nationalist revolt against the Soviets, and the significance of its success was not lost on Communist leaders elsewhere.

In 1953 the Soviet Union exploded its own hydrogen bomb. This too was a portentous event. As Birchall put it:

The CPs in the west were no longer needed by the Soviet regime as a trojan horse within the opposing camp; indeed overly aggressive behaviour on their part might jeopardise the emergence pattern of détente between the superpowers. From this point onwards, the Soviet leadership pushed the CPs consistently towards moderate policies and towards accommodation with the political mainstream. Having been bruised by cold-war polarisation and conflict, the parties were happy enough with this. Thus the relationship with Moscow still seemed healthy enough until 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s "secret speech" and of the Hungarian uprising.

The Soviet premier suddenly made a heated attack on Stalin, revealing that the worst horror stories about his regime were true. A few months later, Soviet tanks crushed an uprising in Hungary, indicating that Khrushchev himself was no saviour. It is difficult to overstate the impact of these events. The parties were suddenly cast back into political isolation. CP members were horrified at what they learned. The CP leaders had trouble answering these members’ questions, because they had not been consulted or informed about any of the Soviet moves ¾ for in the nuclear age, they were no longer of any real importance to Moscow. It was a galling experience for leaderships that, in some cases, commanded millions of votes in their own countries.

The incentives to follow Tito’s example were mounting. Indeed the Italians had already begun experimenting with ideas of "polycentrism" and now this accelerated. By 1961 they could write:

Around the same time, the conflict between Moscow and Beijing came to a head. The international movement entered a process of fragmentation which, in hindsight, can be seen as foreshadowing the Gorbachev era and the break up of the Soviet state itself. Into The Mainstream did not foresee the latter development, but by the time of its publication the fragmentation of the world Communist movement was an accomplished fact.

The CPs in the west had clearly begun to evolve towards a role similar to social democracy. Where they had traditionally operated between three poles ¾ the USSR, their own worker supporters, and the western capitalist mainstream ¾ now they were casting off the Soviet connection and taking on the traditional bipolar social democratic role of mediators between capital and labour. That process continues today, with most CPs now having changed their names so that the social democratic trend is out in the open.

It is possible to demonstrate the same general trend in the case of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which liquidated itself at the end of the eighties into the Labor Party or into political currents with a social democratic flavour. However when the book was undertaken, it was much less clear where the CPA was heading. This party’s development displayed some quite unusual specific features corresponding to its particular history as well as to the particular Australian context.

The first peculiarity of the Australian party is that, unlike most CPs, it did not become a significant force until the early 1930s. In the twenties it went through three identifiable phases: a period of squabbling in which various socialist factions tried to win the Comintern "franchise", then a short period in which the CPA gained a certain following by affiliating to the Labor Party but at the cost of watering down its Communist identity, and finally a longer time of isolation in which it could only engage in abstract propaganda to a very small audience. Thus whereas the period of "Leninist internationalism" was brief but significant in most parties, in Australia it hardly happened. The CPA first began to show some signs of coherence and effectiveness with the onset of the 1930s depression. Just as this point, a new leadership assumed power with the backing of the Soviet regime, to carry out a "stalinisation process". This imposed a fairly authoritarian discipline, but did also galvanise the party into more dynamic activity.

The earlier period of influence within the Labor Party is a study in one type of labour leadership, that represented by the Trades Hall union official and later ALP politician, Jock Garden. Garden was able to win leadership of the CPA for a time due to his skill in political maneuvering learnt in the mainstream labour movement, and by taking the party into the ALP he was able to create a certain following for himself. Yet this following had little political coherence. As we have noted, union officials and Labor politicians occupy an intermediate position between capital and labour, and tend to waver on whose interests they will represent. "‘Tactics’ seems to have become a disease" with Garden, wrote Queensland leftist J.B. Miles, meaning Garden was a political opportunist. (International Communist, 29 September 1921). This made him a successful mainstream politician later on, but it was little use in building a leadership for more militant sections of workers who wanted to fight for something.

Miles was one of the leaders who came to power at the end of the 1920s and led the party to its first real successes. He and his colleague Lance Sharkey initially represented a very different type of working class leadership, with a narrowly focused perspective based on hard line principles. The Soviet Union was always right, the Labor Party was "social-fascist", and the way forward for workers was mililtant struggle: "class against class". On this basis the party undeniably built a strong base among worker militants, yet as it did so the seeds were sown of deep ambiguities in the party line. The hard principles were not based on any sophisticated analysis, so that when circumstances changed. the party could rapidly lurch in another direction.

Circumstances did indeed change by the mid-thirties. Firstly, Hitler’s rise to power over the bodies of a divided labour movement demonstrated the problems with sectarian hostility to the social democratic and Labor Parties. The CPs had to stop calling them "social fascist", and Stalin rapidly moved toward a different policy. Secondly, this CPA’s very success had won it a number of union official positions, which meant certain key members were now in positions of authority. It is a characteristic of union officials that they play an intermediary role between capital and labour, and Communist officials were no exception. In the absence of a coherent political theory, relying only on dogmas taken from Soviet sources, the party now moved to a political stance which was as contradictory as that assumed by Garden ¾ although the contradictions took far longer to assert themselves, both because of the iron discipline Miles and Sharkey had established, and because of the highly polarised social environment in which Communists found themselves due to the rise of fascism and the advent of World War II.

As a particularly pertinent example, given the CPA’s growing union base, we can take the party’s assessment of trade union officials. In the "class against class" period, the CPA condemned all union "bureaucrats" who were considered to consistently betray the interests of workers. When asked for an explanation of this phenomenon, the Red Leader, newspaper of the CPA-led "Minority Movement" of rank and file unionists, offered this definition:

This definition identified bureaucratic behaviour patterns, but did not trace their material roots in social structures. Rather it was an essential moral critique. Consequently when Communists themselves (ipso facto perceived as morally superior) began to assume official positions, it could be readily overturned. Communist officials were acceptable and so, quite soon, were other officials with whom they began to ally themselves as the Popular Front strategy unfolded. By 1935 the party was arguing:

Over the following ten years or so, the CPA was to capture a sizeable section of the trade union apparatus, which placed them in the role of intermediaries between capital and labour, and hence seekers of industrial peace. During the Second World War they did so with special frequency, because Soviet policy was focussed almost entirely on ensuring the defeat of the Axis powers, and industrial conflict could not be allowed to interfere. More than once the party organised strikebreaking.

At the same time the party became highly respectable, and its political line and tactics became far more moderate. As Menghetti puts it:

By the 1940s, therefore, the CPA was located between three social classes: the Soviet ruling bureaucracy, its working class base, and the Australian bourgeoisie. This contradictory social location was to put immense pressures on the party in the postwar decades.

In pursuit of the war effort many sections of society, including the CPA, attempted to suppress class conflicts. As the war’s end approached, these conflicts resumed. In the three years 1945-47 nearly 5.5 million working days were lost in strikes, as workers began seeking to redress the sacrifices made during the war.

This worker mobilisation initially lacked any coherent leadership. The Communists, who might have been expected to provide it, were initially held back by the continuing alliance between Stalin and the western states. They no longer opposed strikes, but neither did the party intervene strategically to build them. This fact is quite clear from a comparison of two union leaderships, those of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association (FIA). During the first major postwar industrial dispute, AEU leader Ted Rowe took a militant line throughout, whereas FIA leader Ernie Thornton "seemed to imply that the Victorian dispute had gone on too long, that union tactics had failed and that the strike should be brought to a speedy end." (R. Gollan: 170) Both men were members of the Communist Party, but they were responding to very different practical circumstances. The AEU was a relatively affluent body of skilled workers with substantial funds, whereas the FIA was a poor union whose members lacked special skills. Thus the FIA was in a much weaker bargaining position.

Continuing industrial polarisation, and the advent of the Cold War, changed the situation by 1948. In that year Communist-led unions around Australia acted together to back rail strike in Queensland, and there was a similar concerted effort by the unions during a dispute over Victorian Government industrial legislation. The CPA considered these actions fairly successful, and began to see itself as leading a left wing working class offensive.

However its leadership was to prove less effective than hoped. In 1949 the CPA led a disastrous strike in the coal industry. This was the first of a series of events that severely weakened the party’s industrial strength, and isolated it politically. The coal strike has been much studied both by political and industrial activists and also by scholars. In Into the Mainstream I summarised the conventional view as follows:

This conventional view has strengths, but it is overstated, and as with the arguments about bureaucracy discussed earlier, it has a moralistic tendency. Moreover it does not take into account the party’s contradictory location between three social classes (Soviet rulers, Australian workers, Australian bourgeoisie).

The CPA had certainly lost large numbers of members at the end of the war. Wartime recruitment had boosted numbers temporarily to 20,000 or so. Thousands of these were attracted by the temporary popularity of the USSR during the war; most of these were soon lost at the war’s end. And the downward trend continued: "In 1945 there were 16,280 members; in 1946, 13,450; in 1947, 12,108." (Davidson: 120).

However Into the Mainstream presented new evidence, and new arguments, suggesting that the party’s underlying strength had begun to stabilise as the level of worker mobilisation rose. For example in Sydney, the number of new members was higher for 1948 than for 1947 or 1946, and turnover of members fell from 23 percent in 1946 to 19 percent in 1947 and 11 percent in 1948. Thus the party’s optimism about its prospects does not seem quite so rash.

The party’s over-zealous behaviour is generally blamed on certain leaders, notably Jack Blake. However this behaviour was part of an international pattern, as Stalin called on Communists to take the offensive at the onset of the cold war. At the same time, my analysis points to serious problems of bureaucratic leadership style, an issue ignored in most scholarly accounts.

Firstly, the Communists were less than honest about what the miners were facing. Idris Williams told one meeting: "We are not asking you for a general strike. If members demonstrate they are united and strong, I think the authorities will settle this within a week." (Quoted in Deery: 217-8) Yet in reality the CPA was gearing up for a major battle. Secondly, at key turning points during the strike, the leadership avoided holding mass meetings for fear the miners would vote to return to work, even after the rank and file had begun circulating petitions calling for such meetings.

The party had acquired some of these bureaucratic habits during the war, when it had acted to impose industrail peace in aid of the common war aims of the USSR and the Australian bourgeoisie. Now as it pursued the new Soviet policy of conflict with the bourgeoisie, it behaved in a similar manner to promote industrial action. It did this in other cases, too, thereby undermining its credibility in the labour movement. Deery recounts CPA union leaders’ response to the jailing of an Ironworkers’ official, L.J. McPhillips:

None of this is to say that the coal strike, or other industrial conflicts, were caused by Communist conspiracies. It is however to identify the way in which the party’s contradictory social location was beginning to undermine its influence. It also begins to show how attempts to provide a coherent leadership for a section of the working class ultimately failed because of the effects of pressure from, and collaboration with, other classes. The next chapter returns to this theme.

The Communists cherished hopes that the coal strike would bring them leadership of the labour movement as a whole. In the event, its defeat signaled a long period of decline. As always with the Communist Parties, there was an international dimension: the Cold War created an extremely difficult climate for the CPA. At the same time the party had specific problems which help explain the setbacks it experienced after 1949.

If the Communists had been mobilising since 1947, so had the political right. The Liberal Party sensed the prospect of electoral victory against Labor (achieved in 1949); employer bodies mobilised against Chifley’s plans to nationalise the banks; and within the unions the ALP Industrial Groups were developing a campaign against the CPA specifically ¾ although they would later also become a threat to the ALP leadership.

The right wing’s first successes came in union elections such as those in the Ironworkers’ union, where they defeated Ernie Thornton’s Communist team. The attacks from the right then reached their peak with Menzies’ attempts to ban the party. The natural basis of Communist strength, workers’ industrial militancy, also fell away, partly owing to the contractionary economic impact of Menzie’s 1951 budget, which led to increases in unemployment and hence to a weakening of workers’ bargaining power.

A determined grassroots campaign together with declared opposition to Menzies’ plans by ALP leader Evatt, achieved a "no" vote in the referendum over whether to ban the Communist Party. Even so the repression took its toll. Membership fell by half, from twelve thousand to six thousand. In an interview, Vic Williams, longtime Footscray section secretary of the CPA, remembered standing outside the party bookshop in 1952 and watching seven people walk by one after another ¾ all ex-Communists.

These external pressures would have been less effective had it not been for internal weaknesses within the CPA. One weakness, noted above, was the top-down style of leadership which at times took on the dimensions of a cult. When party secretary Lance Sharkey was jailed, the CPA produced a pamphlet comparing him to Lenin. John Morrison’s novella Black Cargo gives a feel for the elitist atmosphere surrounding Communist union officials. CPA union leader Manion is pictured looking at wharfies in the pub:

Given such attitudes, it is small wonder that the CPA sometimes resorted to ballot-rigging. Daphne Gollan, who worked in the Ironworkers’ office, finally confirmed this in print in 1978. (D. Gollan: 102)

The CPA leadership largely ignored this problem, preferring to explain its difficulties in terms of a hostile external environment and the "ultraleft" policies of the late forties. This "ultraleftism" was indeed a problem, but key leadership figures such as Sharkey avoided responsibility. Two other figures, Jack Blake and Jack Henry, were scapegoated for it. Moreover, in the absence of any reconsideration of the elitism and bureaucratism, attacks on "ultraleftism" tended to breed conservatism in the party, which in turn reinforced the bureaucratic tendencies.

The conservatism was a natural product of defeat, and an awareness that worker support for the Party was in decline. An internal CPA discussion document uncovered in my primary research lamented: "a lack of faith in the strengths and potentialities of the Australian working class ... [a feeling that ] They will not accept Socialism ¾ they may in the distant future after the capitalists have kicked their guts in." (CPA 1956: 11) If they felt that way about their fellow workers, the Communists would naturally be very cautious about undertaking radical initiatives

The caution was only heightened, ironically, by attempts on the part of the CPA leadership to ignore the difficult realities and indulge in wish-fulfillment, with talk of building a "mass party". Jack Blake later recalled:

Sharkey attempted to argue that the external environment was favourable to such efforts by predicting "growing political as well as economic crisis", at a time when western capitalism was in fact experiencing great economic prosperity and political stability. Such pronouncements produced a remarkable sort of behaviour among the membership. Some members no doubt simply laughed them off, and a number of others tried to act on the basis of them. The majority, however, inevitably became schizophrenic: in one compartment of their minds they accepted them, believed them, and would even sometimes defend them heatedly; at the same time, they did little if anything about them. They were articles of faith, not perspectives for action.

Thus the party was weakening steadily, not only in its numbers and influence, but in the morale of its cadres and a growing dogmatism among them. It was therefore vulnerable to further attacks, which took place from 1956 onwards.

However it is important not to overstate the case. Despite severe difficulties, the CPA was still capable of exercising leadership in sections of the working class. In the same interview cited above, Vic Williams remarked: "I’d pick up the paper when I was a Communist Party organiser and I’d be amazed; I’d see all these issues and I knew someone who’d be running them." Indeed the party was to rebuild its strength amongst union officials, though never back to earlier peaks.

The Party took the lead in a sizeable peace movement that managed to twice fill the Melbourne Exhibition Building, and its youth wing held a successful international youth carnival. The party also launched the Union of Australian Women (dealt with more fully in Rebel Women), a well as retaining great influence in a number of important trade unions. It would be all too easy to attribute the party’s defeats entirely to its internal weaknesses and bureaucratism, but for a left wing party, successful leadership is also a function of militancy among its wider constituency. Where this declined after 1949, the party slipped badly; but where there was a constituency willing to mobilise, it was still able to give a lead.

As noted above, the party’s international location between three different classes was also a factor. The following chapter returns to that theme.

Although badly damaged, the CPA survived the domestic Cold War pressures. One reason it could do so was that it placed much of its faith in the international movement, which appeared so successful for some years. When cracks appeared in the international Communist monolith, this was highly traumatic for the party and indeed set it on a course to its destruction. The most important milestones were Khrushchev’s 1956 Stalin revelations, the Hungarian events of the same year, the Sino-Soviet split around 1960 and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Unlike some other parties, the CPA responded to all of the 1956 events in repressive fashion, refusing to admit that Khrushchev’s "secret speech" was genuine, and seeking to suppress serious discussion of the Hungarian uprising. Its response to the latter was conveyed by a pamphlet entitled Basic Questions of Communist Theory, which defended all the Soviet actions uncritically, and by its actions in expelling dissidents. The story of these developments is a familiar one. A more original topic concerns the precise reasons why so many people left the party at this time.

The obvious explanation offered by party leaders was Cold War repression. Sharkey quoted Khrushchev in 1956 as saying that the parties in the west "had been passing through a most difficult and trying time" (CPA 1957: 68) Alistair Davidson rightly challenged this explanation, pointing out that many of the people who left at this point had already weathered the worst of the cold war successfully. He therefore argued that "the large number of defectors of the years 1956-58 ... left not because of persecution, but because of disagreement with the policy and organization of the party." (Davidson: 121) Into the Mainstream suggests that neither explanation excludes the other: probably many party cadres who had doubts about the Soviet regime and party policies stuck it out during years of repression out of established loyalties, but the 1956 events were the last straw and propelled them out of the organisation. Other important factors were pressure from the party’s wider constituency among workers, and political attacks from newspapers controlled by the bourgeoisie.

These were liberal democratic dissenters, haunted by tales of concentration camps and chastened by TV footage of tanks in Budapest. However there was another dissent deep within the party: a Stalinist dissent. The leadership of the CPA had risen to power with support from Stalin’s regime, so that exposure of his failings reflected on them. They were also unhappy with the increasingly moderate policies urged upon the party by Moscow, such as an accommodation with the ALP. Some of the rank and file shared these feelings. Thus the behaviour of a foreign class, the Soviet rulers, had a direct impact on developments within the CPA in two quite different ways, both of which eventually led to severe organisational divisions.

An initial Stalinist grouping aligned itself with the Chinese Communist Party, which rejected Khrushchev’s critique of Stalin. As the Sino-Soviet split unfolded, this grouping supported Beijing. At first no less a figure than Lance Sharkey seems to have sympathised with China, though he eventually fell in behind the USSR when it came to an open schism. The "China-liners" were strongest in Victoria, where they could count on State Secretary E.F. Hill and several prominent union officials, as well as lower level functionaries. However even here their control of the apparatus was not matched by support from the majority of the rank and file.

Most rank and file members reacted against extreme Chinese rhetoric that virtually said nuclear war was inevitable, and which opposed international disarmament talks. The real reason was that Beijing’s ruling class wanted the bomb, but for international consumption the Chinese leaders posed it in terms of class struggle, and the argument that war was built into the western imperialist system. To justify an indifference to the nuclear danger, it was necessary to portray the world as being perpetually on the brink of revolution. Rank and file CPA members knew this wasn’t true, and they considered the campaigns against disarmament to be among their successes. Accordingly the pro-Chinese faction was defeated and left the party. The Victorian leaders were replaced by other figures, most notably Bernie Taft. Taft had developed an interest in the dissident ideas of the Italian party, on which more below.

Once the "China-liners" were gone, the party moved further towards political moderation. Leadership fell to the new national secretary Laurie Aarons, who replaced the ailing Sharkey in 1965. Two years later the CPA announced a new strategic concept: the "Coalition of the Left". At first, it did not seem to herald much of a change. The 1967 Congress documents mostly seemed to rehash traditional Communist ideas. They placed greater importance on a democratic notion of socialism that could appeal to Australian national traditions, but the CPA had done that before, beginning with the Popular Front strategy of the mid-thirties. The sophisticated Communist academic Lloyd Churchward thought that the new strategy was "clearly in the Dimitrov tradition". (Churchward: 92)

But actually, something very different was emerging. For the first time in decades, open discussion was possible in the party. Into the Mainstream drew on previously unstudied internal CPA discussion documents to trace this process right up to its culmination in the 1980s. The emphasis on democracy signaled moves to abandon the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which had been fundamental to Communist thinking for many years. We should noted that in Marx’s time the term "dictatorship" did not have its modern meaning, and was not incompatible with democracy. (Draper 1986: passim). Under Stalin, of course, it took on totalitarian dimensions, which had been exposed by Khrushchev’s 1956 speech. The new conceptions were sometimes given a Marxist veneer, but they did not represent a return to Marx’s own views. Rather they represented a move towards the political mainstream and thus an accommodation with the Australian bourgeoisie ¾ a fact noted by one of the rank and file contributors to the discussion, who complained: "the impression given to many comrades ... is that the Communist Party will become submerged". (Beechy: 47)

There were some who felt great unease at these developments. Not all the "stalinists" had been pro-Beijing. Others were resolutely pro-Moscow and had remained in the CPA, but they did not like what they heard now. Their dissent cristalised around the party’s response to the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia. When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, the Australian party leadership protested ¾ in public. The majority of members applauded on the grounds that the Czechs had the right to determine their own destiny. To traditionalists such as Jack Henry, on the other hand, this signaled open capitulation to the western capitalist enemy, a surrender to "the knights of darkness whose fortresses are in the quagmire of imperialism". (Henry: 52) Within two years the party had suffered a second split, with the departure of pro-Soviet elements who also rejected the ideas behind the Coalition of the Left.

Clearly, ideas were important in the party’s evolution. This true of any party, but for none so much as the Communist Parties whose ideological origins lay in Marxism, and whose guidance came from a totalitarian state. As the party made a transition between 1967 and 1985, from Soviet-line orthodoxy to social-democratic accommodation with the western mainstream, some leading figures had to re-jig their political theories. This process was complex, not only because the changes had to be notionally justified in terms of the Marxist classics, but also because in the years 1968-75 the CPA came under pressure from rival leftist factions arising from the radicalisation that accompanied the movement against the Vietnam War. Some of these were closer to the original thought of Marx, and most claimed to be so. In addition, these years saw very high levels of industrial disputation, lending increased credibility to classical Marxist theories based on class conflict. Thus in the realm of theory we encounter once again the peculiar triangular framework within which the party evolved: between the Soviet rulers, the western bourgeoisie and the working class. Accordingly, the process of theoretical reorientation was somewhat awkward.

The most important issue directly related to domestic politics was the post-war economic boom. Communists had expected a new Depression after the war, and it is fair to note that many other commentators had thought the same. However the party clung to these forecasts after reality had overtaken them. In 1958, attacking dissidents, Sharkey wrote: "In the light of the growing crisis of capitalism we can only hope they will realise the erroneous character of their views." (Quoted in Barcan: 15)

The boom was accompanied by a decline in industrial disputation. Strike levels had been up to two million days lost in 1950; in 1951-56 they averaged around one million; then from 1957 to 1967 they were well below that. This was part of a general conservative trend in society. Such conditions naturally favoured theories according to which Australia was a classless society, capitalism was no longer prone to crisis, and Marxism was outdated. The party, equally naturally, had opposed such theories but in a dogmatic fashion; for example its view of the working class was generally limited to stereotypical images of the blue collar employee, whereas by this time the number of white collar workers was considerable. The latter confusion could be, and was, fairly easily overcome, but other issues proved harder.

In the sixties the CPA did finally accept that there had been an economic boom, but under the influence of mainstream theories it invested the boom with a permanence it did not in fact possess. Victorian CPA leader Bernie Taft suggested that the new economic prosperity was "likely to be with us for a long time, possibly for the transition period between capitalism and socialism". (Taft: 4-5) This was a portentous idea. Marxism envisaged socialism resulting from crisis and class conflict, and therefore taking a revolutionary form. If one thought in terms of socialist transition occurring amidst prosperity, however, one quickly arrived at ideas of gradual and evolutionary change. In one sense this merely brought theory into line with practice. Yet in another it created dilemmas, precisely because Communist theory was tightly constructed. To overturn one aspect was to throw new light on all the others.

The emerging leaders in Melbourne and Sydney had rather different intellectual backgrounds. Taft looked to the Italian party. Eric Aarons had experienced cadre training in China. These might appear to be poles apart, yet they had a common feature. Both the Italian and the Chinese parties were in the process of breaking with Soviet tutelage, and both had presented a liberal face. The Italians were finding their way into the western political mainstream. The Chinese had a quite different agenda: they were applying Communist theory in a totally new context and, in particular, had to find ways to appease a huge peasant class that was too big to be repressed as Stalin had done in Russia. Consequently a considerable pragmatism had crept in. This atmosphere was not to last; Mao was to stamp it out during the Cultural Revolution. But in the meantime people like Aarons had their eyes opened.

Thus it was Eric Aarons who undertook a serious reappraisal of the party’s theory, in a book called Philosophy for an Exploding World. Aarons’ book is presented as a Marxist work. Into the Mainstream identifies the important non-Marxist features so that the underlying accommodation with the western political mainstream becomes clear.

Aarons argued for a set of universal values, and explicitly moved away from seeing the working class as the central force for socialist advance. Having completed this task, Aarons moved to a second and highly sensitive question: the nature of the Soviet Union. In the course of the sixties various figures in the party had begun to toy with critiques of the USSR. Initially these were cautious and partial. However Eric Aarons, along with his brother Laurie who had succeeded Sharkey as party secretary, was prepared to dig much deeper. In their search for answers they did something previously unthinkable: they considered the ideas of Leon Trotsky. They read the works of Isaac Deutscher, and held discussions with tiny Trotskyist circles in Sydney.

Trotsky’s own theory, it should be said, was classically Marxist; he had called for a workers’ revolution to overthrow the Soviet rulers, whereas the Aaronses were moving away from both revolution and class analysis. Conveniently, however, some of the Sydney Trotskyists were moving in a similar direction, and the works of Deutscher took much of the radical edge off Trotsky’s thought. Deutscher repeated Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin’s totalitarianism, yet he insisted that stalinism had been a historically necessary phenomenon. Great revolutions had a heroic phase represented by personalities such as Lenin and Trotsky, but then they must be consolidated; for this a Napoleon or a Stalin was required. The consolidation led to a loss of some of the original progressive content of the revolution, and a loss of democracy. That was regrettable but unavoidable. Later generations would rectify it. (Deutscher 1966: 14, 612-14).

This was far more palatable than Trotsky’s ideas. It suggested reform rather than revolution was needed in the USSR, and allowed Communists the consolation of having been part of a historically progressive movement even at the height of Stalinism. On this basis the CPA was able to define the USSR and similar societies as "socialist-based" rather than "socialist". It was an ambiguous halfway house between accepting and rejecting the Soviet model, however, and left the party prey to internal tensions which found their expression in the second split mentioned above.

Events in Chile raised another dilemma. The Allende Government had, on the face of it, implemented moderate reform strategies somewhat like those proposed by the Aaronses. General Pinochet had ended the experiment through a military coup, lending credibility to traditional Communist notions of revolution. This temporarily threw the CPA leaders into confusion, with Eric Aarons responding lamely: "The most one can say is that a combination of all available means, with flexible shifting from one to the other as occasion demands, will probably emerge." (Aarons 1973: 4) However within a few years the impact of Chile had faded, and Aarons published a second article arguing that modern capitalism had democratised the state so that it did not need to be frontally challenged by revolution. (Aarons 1978) In the theoretical realm, the CPA had now laid the basis for its integration into the Australian political mainstream.

This integration took place in a particular context, which made its implications very unclear for a time. The social mainstream itself was moving markedly to the left, with a radical movement campaigning against the Vietnam War, high levels of trade union activity, a large Socialist Left emerging inside the ALP, and significant sections of the intelligentsia showing an interest in Marxism. Thus the party’s initial evolution was also towards the left, creating the superficial impression that it was moving back towards the classical Marxism associated with the early years of Communism.

Firstly, the party’s trade union leaders were involved in major industrial upheavals, of which we may note the two most notable. One was the semi-general strike surrounding the jailing of a Victorian union official for non-payment of fines under the Penal Powers (federal industrial laws). The strike made the Penal Powers a dead letter. The other was a series of actions in the NSW building industry around environmental concerns, popularly known as Green Bans. The latter were associated with a workers’ control movement which challenged management prerogatives on building sites, the power industry, and other places where the party had influence.

Secondly the CPA sought to capture influence in the student and antiwar movements of the time. Here it faced serious competition from rival political factions ¾ Maoist, Trotskyist and anarchist ¾ as part of the wider phenomenon known as the New Left. These prided themselves on being more radical than what they saw as a tired old Communist Party. The ALP left was also, in some cases, more radical than the CPA, which was clearly being outflanked. The party’s National Committee therefore decided in 1968 to enter the "hurly-burly of the left" to refurbish its image. Posters featured pictures of revolutionary heroes, and the party paper Tribune appealed to the young activists with a front page on reading "It’s May Day, man". (On much of this see Robertson.)

The CPA sponsored a Left Action Conference, which attracted nearly 800 activists. It also made similar efforts to respond to the Women’s Liberation movement which emerged around 1969. While CPA members had been involved in launching the movement, the party as such stood aloof at first, seeing it as extremist. However as the movement gain in strength, the party swung around and supported it.

The net result was a sharp move to the left on the part of the CPA, which concealed the underlying trend towards an accommodation with western capitalist society. Into the Mainstream made a close analysis of party publications and documents to identify the limitations of this left turn. The party was succumbing to a series of superficial fads; Tribune for example offered a favourable review of Jerry Rubin’s hippie anarchist philosophy, prompting one letter writer to ask: "Boy, I can hardly wait, when does Hugh Heffner take over as editor?" (Tribune 5-11 June 1973)

The workers’ control movement blurred a distinction essential to the distinctively Marxist approach, that between reform and revolution. A major article by Denis Freney argued that: "Workers’ control, in general terms, is something as old as the labour movement itself. The right to strike and to form unions are forms of workers’ control, limiting the bosses’ power." Freney did believe it could be extended further, going beyond the workplace and becoming a movement for "the general social self-management of all aspects of economic, social, political change." His model was the struggles of May-June 1968 in France. These, however, had not put an end to control by the capitalist ruling class, and Freney did not explain exactly how this was to be achieved. This was the most radical version of party policy, as one might expect given than Freney came from a Trotskyist background. In practice, the party’s implementation of workers’ control ideas was very moderate indeed, with its union activists calling merely for a "voice in the management of industrial undertakings". (Freney: 3-4; CPA 1971)

In the area of class analysis, the party’s theories also remained far from classical Marxism. Thus the CPA’s 1972 election broadsheet dealt with inequality as follows: "The rich have become still richer; the really poor have increased and become poorer still; the majority in between find it harder to keep abreast of rising prices..." (CPA 1972) This was similar to conventional western sociology which identifies a large "middle class" in between "upper and lower" classes. It contrasts sharply with the Marxist view of a working class making up the majority of society and potentially contending for power. (On the latter see Fieldes, passim.)

Thus Into the Mainstream argued that the party’s ideas were only superficially moving leftwards, responding impressionistically to the atmosphere of the times. As the Vietnam era radicalisation faded, the party could readily drift rightwards again. Indeed there were elements within the party preparing the ground for such a rightward shift. These included the Victorian party leaders, whose lack of enthusiasm for the more radical trends went back to the time when pro-Soviet elements had broken away. The split had not been so serious in Victoria where the Taft leadership was closer to these elements; and both were politically moderate. In 1973 John Sendy, one of Taft’s colleagues, produced a letter expressing their views.

Sendy attacked the national leadership for "standing aloof from the problems of the ALP government" and for thinking that many of the more conservative party members were "not much good". Critical views of the CPA’s past were brushed aside. "This is sheer nonsense. No matter what the mistakes of the past, the Party has always been the most relevant revolutionary organisation in Australia." (Sendy: 233-4).

The Victorians made a fight around these questions in 1974, and again in 1976. In 1974 the Aarons leadership resisted, but in 1976 it accommodated the Victorians. The reflected a change in the political climate, after the defeat of the Whitlam Labor Government in the 1975 elections. From around this time, Australian society began moving rightwards. Just as it had followed the general leftward trend up to 1974, the CPA now followed the political mainstream back to the right.

This was evidenced in the industrial realm by its role in three industrial conflicts: the union response to the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975, the Medibank campaigns of early 1976, and the Latrobe Valley power strike which dominated Victorian politics in late 1976. In each of these, prominent CPA union leader John Halfpenny played a moderating role that was in great contrast to the heady days of Green Bans and workers’ control. This is dealt with more fully in Years of Rage (see below).

It also found expression in the appearance of the Australian flag on the Queensland branch’s State conference booklet, and in the new CPA program adopted in 1980 which moved away from traditional Communist formulations about the "dictatorship of the proletariat", calling mildly for "Expansion, through mass action and extended democratic rights, of popular control over the government and economic machinery." (CPA 1980)

The party was moving back towards more conventional politics. Yet it still faced one major obstacle to becoming a conventional western political current: its identity as a Communist Party. More than the name was involved; there were also a long history, traditions, political enemies and so on. The final chapter traces the resolution of these remaining issues.

The final stages of the CPA’s history were closely intertwined with the advent of the Hawke Labor Government. Consistent with its increasingly moderate approach to social conflict and change, the CPA was heavily involved in moves that led to the formulation of the ALP/ACTU Accord. The party’s own thinking along these lines began with the concept of the "social wage". Pointing out that union wage campaigns did not address all areas of workers’ economic and social needs, the CPA argued that "concern about income distribution should be the entry point into economic policy in general". (Tribune, 27 November 1982).

Such a statement is neither radical nor moderate in itself, it depends on the practical implementation. The statement on the social wage seemed at one point to take on a revolutionary flavour, suggesting that "a challenge to the ruling class in Australia can emerge" but the general flavour of the text was more Keynesian than Marxian; it referred to "intervention into government economic policy to encourage industrial expansion" and also to "union cooperation in labour-market planning". (Tribune 27 October 1982) There was no mention of industrial action. Around the same time, Laurie Carmichael spoke of calls for "tripartite conferences between employer organisations, government and the ACTU." (Tribune, 13 October 1982) Carmichael was an official of the Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union and closely associated with the CPA. He was to emerge as a key intellectual figure behind the ALP/ACTU Accord, which is discussed more fully in Years of Rage. During the government’s first years, the CPA eagerly defended the Accord. The Communist Party was no longer politically distinct from the Labor Party in any fundamental way.

The Party was also increasingly reconciled to the women’s movement. This movement had been quite radical in its earliest years, but by the 1980s it had become more established and generated a moderate wing consisting of professionals such as "femocrats" and academics. These elements increasing articulated theories that were hostile to Marxism, and focussed on liberal reforms (not coincidentally, such reforms mainly benefited these same professionals.) Logically, therefore, the party’s accommodation to feminism also accelerated its move towards liberal reformism and further away from Marxism. In the realm of theory, Joyce Stevens pioneered both trends with a 1983 article that denied "that the working class is or can be a unified group" and expressed regret that "Marxists still accept working class struggle as the motor force for social change." She advocated "not a small revising of Marxism, but rather of really basic notions of Marxist theory" and argued that the various social struggles of the time could not be accommodated within "any single practice or theoretical development." (Tribune, 4 May 1983). Communist tradition had looked to uniting workers and the oppressed in struggle against the ruling class by means of a coherent theory and leadership. Stevens’ embrace of latter-day feminist theory tended to undermine all of that.

Thus in the case of two important social movements, labour and women, the CPA was closely associated with trends towards reconciliation with mainstream political ideas (feminism was becoming mainstream by then). In terms of its social location, it was now situated between two social classes (Australian workers and the Australian bourgeoisie) rather than three. Now, however, there was no avoiding the awkward question of its organisational form and notionally Communist identity.

From 1982 voices began to be heard suggesting that the party change its name, since the term "Communist" no longer reflected the reality of the CPA’s politics. In itself this might not have been too difficult to do, but the issue of the name raised a more sensitive question: was there really room for such a political organisation as the party had become? After all, there was already a very large party poised between a working class popular base and establishment politics: the ALP. With the CPA’s industrial strength far weaker and its political influence minimal, the ALP was now the only meaningful leadership of the working class ¾ especially as the CPA was effectively supporting the Hawke Government. It did make criticisms, but no more so than elements within the Labor Party itself.

The problem increased with the ever more difficult external political environment. The union movement, held in the tight embrace of the ALP/ACTU Accord, was fairly quiescent. Social movements were more moderate in their tone. For example, the militant Movement Against Uranium Mining had been succeeded by nuclear disarmament campaigns that were large but rather insipid. People whose taste in demonstrations consisted of marching behind religious leaders on Palm Sunday were unlikely to join something called the Communist Party of Australia.

Accordingly new debates broke out within the CPA, the logic of which was spelt out by Pete Cockcroft of the party’s NSW South Coast organisation:

Various proposals were advanced. On the right wing of the discussion stood the Melbourne leadership group around Bernie Taft and his son Mark. The Melbourne organisation had the strongest links with union officials and the ALP, and hence the Tafts had the connections to achieve some sort of regroupment with sections of the union officialdom and Labor Party. They soon became the strongest partisans of liquidating the existing Communist Party, though this was not argued directly. Rather they called for a new broader socialist organisation with informal links to the ALP. In practice, however, few observers doubted that they would end up inside the Labor Party, as indeed they soon did.

The Sydney-based national leadership around Laurie Aarons had much less enthusiasm for entering the Labor Party, so when they spoke of a new socialist party they meant what they said. However the proposal was based on unrealistic hopes about the external environment. Thus some claimed that "in many ways it would be true to say that in Australia the Left is growing while the CPA is declining"; they cited the women’s, environmental, black and peace movements. ( CPA 1983: 34) These were relevant arguments, but not sufficient. Firstly, the movements were no longer growing; secondly they were moving in a moderate direction consistent with ALP politics ¾ which once again pointed to the dilemma the CPA faced in attempting to sustain an independent organisation of any kind. That would be only be possible for a tight organisation whose members were strongly committed to an alternative political vision. The Communist Party no longer possessed these characteristics.

As the Aarons group moved toward winning a majority for their proposals, the Victorian leaders suddenly led their followers out of the party in 1984. This created a crisis, forcing the central leadership to call a special conference ¾ which in turn duly endorsed the proposal for some kind of new left party. It was at this point that I prepared Into the Mainstream for publication. The book left open the possibility that the new party might manage to make some modest headway, but said it was "unlikely that such a new party would be qualitatively larger than the CPA, or wield qualitatatively greater influence." (p. 188) In fact I was far too generous: attempts to launch a New Left Party were a complete failure, precisely because of the more fundamental point I made in conclusion: "the former Communists will end up in that mainstream toward which they have been striving so long. They will be part of it because they have liquidated themselves into it politically."

At the end of the 1980s, during the Gorbachev period, the CPA officially expired, but by that time it was only a formality.

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