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Frank
Farrell
International
Socialism and Australian Labour: The Left in Australia 1919-1939
Hale
& Iremonger, 284pp., 1981.
Reviewed
in Bowyang, number 6, 1981,
pp. 41-43.
“No
movement”, wrote Engels in 1887, “No movement absorbs so much
fruitless labour as one which has not yet emerged from the status of a
sect. At such times, everything turns to sandalmongering”. Frank
Farrell’s study of the Left in Australia between the wars shows how
the Communist Party of Australia moved from the status of a sect to
become, in the 1930s, “the only remaining significant internationalist
influence in the labour movement”. The processes by which that change
took place have been discussed in earlier books, but never before with
Farrell’s quantity of primary research or with as much appreciation of
the difficulties overcome by the participants. There is no doubt that
Farrell has made a significant advance over previous commentators such
as Alastair Davidson (1969) and Robin Gollan (1975). It is this advance
which allows us to see that the whole truth lies beyond Farrell’s
version which, for all its scholarship and subtlety, repeats the
longstanding academic view that the crucial years from 1928 to 1933 were
marked by a strategic mistake and by countless errors and crimes. Here
is Farrell’s temperate conclusion:
For,
adding to the problems of depression politics, were the Comintern’s
third period policies which divided the labour left and made unity and
concerted socialist initiatives impossible. In this process, the
mainstream left lost the sense of purpose and working-class unity that
it had attempted to sustain in the difficult years of the 1920s. The
CPA fought with all means at its disposal to assert itself as the only
voice of militancy and class-conscious internationalism in opposition
to all other segments of labour. In so doing, it framed fighting
policies which the unemployed could follow, and which the official
union tended to overlook; but, at the same time, it succeeded not in
moving the mass of workers forward, but only in hindering the wider
growth of radicalism within the organised labour movement.
What one thinks of
these policies will depend in part on what role one sees for a Communist
Party.
In July 1928, the
Sixth Conference of the Communist International rightly predicted a
major economic collapse for capitalism and argued that this depression
would provoke renewed revolutionary action, the third such period since
1917. Communists were ordered to ready themselves for this upsurge by
distinguishing themselves from their erstwhile allies in other
working-class organisations whose leaders, the Comintern said, would
become openly counter-revolutionary. Hence, these alternative leaders
were to be designated as “social fascists” – socialist in name but
fascist in their actions. Communists had to build their own mass
organisations by creating a united front from below.
The first thing that
needs to be said about this policy is that it was not forced on
unwilling local comrades. Plenty of communists here had learned from
experience that ALP pollies could be as vicious as any outwardly
capitalist politician. So the Comintern line was welcomed for Victoria
and Queensland, but the then national leadership of Jack Cavanagh and
Jack Ryan maintained an “exceptional” stance towards New South Wales
where the Party continued to work through and around the Trades Hall
Reds led by Jock Garden. In Farrell’s most significant discovery, he
shows that Cavanagh’s “divergence” was tacitly endorsed by the
Moscow-based Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern). Indeed,
when the CPA expelled Jack Ryan in 1930, Moscow re-instated him.
Farell approves of the
Communists when they continue the work of the Victorian Socialist Party
and act as a ginger group upon the ALP – more or less like a far-left
Fabian Society. Thus, he favours the attempts by Jock Garden and the
Sydney Trades Hall Reds to influence Union officials and, through these
contacts, the political labour movement, especially the ALP. One area of
Communist success at this deep ideological influence was the painfully
slow wearing down of the “White Australia” policy within the Labour
movement. But Farrell’s position is awry if the Communists’ aim was
to establish a distinct party of their own, one capable of leading a
proletarian revolution.
To pose the choice in
terms of reform or revolution is to risk playing with abstractions. The
question needs to be placed in the precise historical context for a
practical answer to be attempted. Farrell fails to provide this
environment, first, because he underplays some issues to the point of
omitting them and, secondly, because he has arranged his material in a
narrative rather than in a thematic way. Drawing heavily upon the
material that Farrell provides, this review now raises some of the
issues by-passed in Farrell’s method.
To appreciate the
impact of the “Third Period” it is essential to recognise that the
Communist Party existed in name rather than in fact before the 1930s. It
is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Communist Party was
founded in 1928-81 rather than in 1920-22. The organisation formed in
the early 1920s either withered or, if it survived, it was a localised
outgrowth from the mainstream labour movement. Guido Barrachi’s 1926
motion for liquidation of the CPA was a statement of fact as much as it
was a proposal for the future: the CPA did not exist as a Leninist
organisation. The IWW survived as the main extra-parliamentary
opposition to the ALP, and the CPA’s membership in the late 1920s was
an ill-disciplined few hundred. They were fewer without being better.
The parallels with 1981 could hardly be clearer.
The next matter that
needs consideration is whether or not the ALP leaders were in fact
“socials fascists”. The evidence that Farrell provides demonstrates
beyond doubt that many of them were social fascists, though he never
asks this question. He quotes Chifley attacking the agitation to save
the U S anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti; there were ceaseless ALP bans on
united front actions; there was the wage-cutting treachery of the
Federal government, whose leader, Scullin, was saved from ratting only
by the fact a cabal of Melbourne businessmen bought his caucus
colleague, Joe Lyons, and installed him as leader of the next-non-Labor
party. If further proof were needed, Farrell reprints a January 1929
cartoon from The Worker, the
journal of the AWU, which dominated the ALP. The cartoon pictured the
CPA above the caption: “Here’s a stick mate. Use it good and solid
every time he raises his head”. If that is not the voice of fascist
violence, what is?
In the mid-1930s, the
ALP was divided between the supporters of Franco and Mussolini on the
one hand, and those who kept quiet, or even opposed Collective Security
so as not to antagonise their fraternal pro-fascists in the ALP. In
addition, there is the matter of the ALP’s outright corruption as
leader after leader was caught with his hand in the public till, in
ballot boxes, or in John Wren’s pocket. Farrell does not pay enough
attention to this corruption as a factor encouraging the CPA to treat
the ALP leaders as “social fascist”. For these reasons, Farrell is
misleading when he criticises “the policy of ‘social fascism” (as)
… a self-fulfilling prophecy”.
On the experience of
building the “united front from below”, Farrell does not investigate
at this ground level and so cannot tell us very much. He reports
conferences but does not follow through rank-and-file activities. A more
complex situation emerges from Nadia Wheatley’s M.A. thesis on the
resistance shown by the unemployed. Farrell is right about the
Third-Period CPA when he sees it as a party of the jobless. He should
have underlined this fact and spelt out its significance for the
sometimes reckless militancy within the CPA at a time when to be
employed could be seen as a form of scabbing. Farrell acknowledges the
existence of violence within the Labor movement and sees it as an
inevitable consequence of the conditions of life. Unlike some current
Left historians, Farrell does not suppose that working-class discourse
apes the tearooms at Cambridge.
The internal life of
the CPA is not followed through in Farrell’s study which needs to be
supplemented by the wealth of information in Peter’s Morrison’s
Ph.D. thesis (Adelaide) on the CPA between the wars. What Farrell can
tell us is well worth knowing. Despite his criticism of the Third Period
he accepts that:
By May 1931 (the
CPA) had reached perhaps 12000, the highest figure for a decade, and
party members continued to grow to a boasted 2329 later the same year.
To sum up this
consideration of Farrell’s account of the Third Period: his
conclusions are unsatisfactory because they fail to marshall a number of
issues such as the true nature of the ALP leadership; the internal
workings of the CPA; and the activities of the CPA in united fronts from
below. Until all these factors are assembled, the basis for a judgement
of the Third Period will not exist.
Nonetheless, certain
consequences of those five years are clear. The CPA emerged thoroughly
revitalised and organised as a disciplined fighting body along Leninist
lines from April 1931. Farrell argues that this new era was centralised
and undemocratic:
Democratic
centralism was made to work by controls and restrictions on party
links at the lower level. Cells were instructed not to communicate,
thus facilitating almost total control by the CPA bureaucracy. Party
control was even more closely centralised by the election through the
Political Bureau of a mini-secretariat in charge of communications
between the Central Committee and the ECCI. By being place in key
positions in the Moscow-linked Secretariat, the Political Bureau, and
the Central Control Commission, the new leaders of the CPA were secure
and impossible to remove so long as they stayed friendly with Moscow.
Opposition could be easily isolated and dealt with by the leadership
at any level. So long as the Secretariat correctly interpreted
whatever was the current Moscow line it was immune from change.
Anyone with the
slightest knowledge of the history of parties will know that these evil
practices did take place and that they are still present albeit under
new guises – often behind the mask of ultra-democracy by which no
decisions are taken so that the self-perpetuating leadership can make
all the decisions. When Farrell descries the 1930s scene at the
leadership level as “grubby”, the 1981 reader has more than enough
reason to fear that nothing has change. If intra-party disputes in
Australia have not resulted in physical liquidations of opponents, the
only reason for this reserve is that the Party has lacked the state
power to get away with judicial murder. In its justifiable efforts to
guard against spies and agent provocateurs, the Communist parties here
have been tempted towards what another writer has labelled the “police
conception of history”. The problem remains one of distinguishing
security from secretiveness and discipline from dictatorship.
In the fifty years
since the Communist Party was Leninised, its leaders have proven
themselves capable of both planning victories in new situations and of
turning instant somersaults whenever the leadership of the “socialist
motherlands” overseas changed its line. It would be dangerous to
discuss the one without admitting the other. Historians can more easily
criticise party leaders than Communist can carry out their daily tasks,
with the result that the successes that have been won are too readily
forgotten by writers who want to demonstrate their own purity by
labelling as “Stalinist” everything that went wrong. Trotskyism
today is a sociological manifestation, not a political movement, and is
drawn from the intelligentsia who want to bathe in the glory of all the
good things that have been done in the name of socialism but who angrily
refuse to accept any responsibility for the mistakes and crimes. This
Trotskyite division of labour is politically terrifying because it
places all blame outside one’s own ranks and thus leaves the way open
for a repeat of the same excess. If such disasters are to be minimised,
Australian revolutionaries have to begin by accepting Stalinism as part
of our inheritance instead of using Stalin as a devil theory with which
to get rid of all they things they dislike.
Elsewhere in this
issue the matter of Wilfred Burchett is raised. Like lots of leading
Australian Leftists, Burchett became radicalised during the anti-fascist
period and for the next thirty years he supported progressive
nationalist causes throughout the world, displaying creativity and
courage far beyond the ordinary. Now he is an apologist for Soviet
imperialism. While remembering his positive past and exposing his
current position, it is also necessary to ask “Why did he go wrong?”
It is a question which needs to be asked about leaders in many political
organisations. Past good work cannot hide current errors, though old
ways of work can help to explain why leaders fall behind the new
circumstances to become content with stock phrases whereas they for so
long had thundered with the appreciation of new things.
As the movement for
Australian independence faces the 1980s, it again needs to deal with
many of the problems that arose in the 1930s. Does it go for
parliamentary and trade union action, or for mass organisation? Are we
on the slide into yet another major depression and world war? No
political work is purposeful unless such issues are decided. And those
decisions still require taking up an attitude towards the Communist
Party. Despite its many and often serious weaknesses, Farrell’s book
can help us to make these decisions. It is not a matter of being wise
after the event and thereby misapplying lessons from the past to a
transformed present. What has to be done is to recognise the living
survivals of those past practices in today’s Left. There is no point
in recognising that in the past the CPA came to be seen as Soviet agency
if we do not use that knowledge to ask why the CPA (M-L) got itself into
the same predicament over China.
The one
over-riding lesson that Bowyang draws from all these experiences is that
Australian revolutionaries owe our allegiance to our own people and not
to Russia, China or El Salvador. The fight for national independence
must include a battle against the colonised mentalities that encourage
the Left to live off other people’s revolutions. To contribute to
internationalism is to secure the Australian nation against all foreign
takeovers, ideological as well as economic. |