Communism and the Labour Movement During the Cold War – Mark Aarons

On Tuesday 24 May 2011, writer and former political adviser Mark Aarons joined former NSW  premier Bob Carr to address The Sydney Institute for a discussion on the left’s involvement in  the history of the Labor Party, in particular the influence of the CPA on Labor and development  of the Australian Communist Party. Mark Aarons was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1969-78. He worked as an ABC broadcaster and investigative documentary producer from 1973-1990 and is the author of five books, most recently The Family File.

COMMUNISM AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT DURING THE COLD WAR

Mark Aarons

Fifty years ago, trade union and Labor Party meetings and conferences right around the nation were riven with bitter divisions. It wasn’t uncommon for meetings to be punctuated by colourful denunciations, with cries of “Commo” and “Grouper” ringing out as adherents of the Left and Right fought with a hatred usually reserved for “Pig Iron Bob’s” Liberals or “Black Jack” McEwen’s Country Party. Of most immediacy were claims that, on the one hand, the Communist Party of Australia – henceforth the CPA – had infiltrated the ALP and was subverting it from within in order to promote Soviet-style revolution; and on the other, that the dark and “unseen hand” of Bob Santamaria’s National Civic Council (NCC) had secret cells in the ALP with the objective of turning it into a tame-cat “bosses’ party” run along on the strict teachings and principles of the “reactionary” Catholic Church.

There was considerable truth to such accusations, although the over-the-top language exaggerated the extent and effectiveness of the clandestine operations run by these organisations, which – it should be stressed – were both proscribed by ALP policy; the CPA from its inception in 1920 and the NCC in the wake of the Great Labor Split of the mid-1950s and the formation of the breakaway Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) which evolved into the Democratic Labor Party. The sharpest focus of dispute was in Australia’s trade unions. The ALP Right correctly accused sections of the Left of defying party rules and running on “Unity Tickets” with communists in union elections, resulting in the victory of CPA members who might otherwise have been defeated by a united Labor ticket. The ALP Left equally correctly lambasted sections of the Right for collaborating with the mislabelled “Groupers” to defeat good Labor men in union elections under the guise of fighting the “Commos”.

The term “Grouper” was originally derived from the by then disbanded ALP Industrial Groups, but 50 years ago (and even today in some circles) was incorrectly used by the Left as a general term of abuse against Santamaria’s NCC. More generally, these bitter feuds reflected where ALP members stood on a wide range of political, social and economic issues. Broadly speaking, the Left focused on the depredations of capitalism and Western imperialism, both at home and abroad, and advocated that the ALP should remain true to its founding ideals, especially the replacement of the capitalist system by socialism, although there were differences as to whether this meant a Marxist or a social democratic model of socialism.

The Left advocated that unions should not restrict themselves to the role of being a purely defensive arm of the working class and should instead adopt militant tactics, involving the rank and file in actions that would raise their consciousness and convince them of the need for a transition from capitalism to socialism. In practice, most left-wing union officials knew they had to first demonstrate their effectiveness in winning better wages and conditions and mostly had only limited success in achieving overtly “political” goals.

On the other hand, the Right were at best cool on the ALP’s “socialist objective” and tended to support Western democracy, especially the alliance with the United States and Britain, and to view the world through the prism of anti-communism, both in the fight against the CPA’s influence in Australian unions and more generally, and in opposing Soviet and Chinese communism which to one degree or another were inspirations to the wider Left, including many in the ALP. Right-wing unionists generally supported the conciliation and arbitration system and advocated that strike action should be used only as a last resort and never for “political” ends.

From the perspective of 2011, it’s hard to credit just how passionate these disputes were within both the ALP and the wider Labour movement. There’s almost no ideological debate of real substance in such circles today, and the most heated differences tend to be about internal reform and the structure and processes of the Labor Party, including the power exercised by a handful of union secretaries who preside over the dwindling base of Australian unionism but still dominate the party.

Indeed, it might be said that there’s more ideological dispute within the Liberal Party; for example, between those who believe that climate change is real and requires decisive action and the deniers and sceptics. Labor’s ranks, of course, contain some notable climate change-deniers, such as former NSW Treasurer Michael Costa, but most of the internal policy debates tend to be about practical issues, not ideology. In this, traditional Labor values dominate, such as preserving jobs in industries like coal mining, as exemplified by the stance taken by federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson.

The collapse of meaningful ideological dispute within the Labour movement is the story of the collapse of the socialist ideal, both social democratic but more specifically the Marxist-Leninist theory of proletarian revolution and the role of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in building socialism and its inevitable transition to what Marxists proclaimed would be the highest form of human development – communism.

The theory and practice of Australian communism during the Cold War – the 45 years that roughly began around 1946 and ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 – is the centrepiece of tonight’s discussion. But to understand that period, it’s also important to sketch in some of the details of the preceding quarter of a century.

The CPA was formed in 1920 as an amalgam of existing socialist groups, former members of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) and various trade unionists, including some senior officials. To gain entry into the Communist International, or Comintern, all adherents had to demonstrate total commitment to both the organisational and ideological principles of the Bolshevik Revolution and the “workers’ state” that it had created.

Thus, from the very beginning, the CPA’s theoretical and practical framework was in rigid conformity with the emerging Soviet Communist Party, which in reality dominated the Comintern. Stalin’s rise to unchallenged dictatorial power in the Soviet party and state soon extended to Stalinisation of the international communist movement, including the CPA.

The CPA remained largely on the political fringe for its first decade, with a tiny membership of at best a few hundred but with continuing influence in the union movement, including the sheet metal workers’ and seamen’s unions. The onset of the Depression in 1929 invigorated communist activities and the CPA’s membership grew steadily in the 1930s. This was largely due to militant activism in unemployed workers organisations; resisting evictions in working class areas; anti-fascist struggles – including support for the Spanish Republic and fighting far-right groups such as the New Guard – and effective agitation among rank and file unionists.

As the worst of the Depression eased after 1935 and the unemployed started to find jobs, such campaigns paid dividends for the CPA, especially in the unions. Starting around 1935, the CPA began to win elections in many key unions, covering mining, maritime, engineering, steel manufacturing, clerical and many other important sectors of the workforce.

These victories were achieved largely through the hard work and organisational capacity of a wave of talented unionists who had flocked to the CPA in despair at the collapse of militant unionism and the ALP’s apparent inability to provide leadership during the depths of the Depression. They also reflected the disciplined, highly focused – sometimes even ruthless – organising framework that had been inculcated from the Comintern over the previous fifteen years.

The CPA’s success in taking control of many of Australia’s key unions was a major challenge to the ALP, in which unions had assumed a decisive, even controlling influence ever since conscription had ripped the party asunder in 1916-17. Clearly, if a competitor party controlled large sections of the union movement this could have major impacts on the nature of the Labor Party itself.

The ALP had adopted a hostile stance to the CPA from its inception. Unlike the latitude shown towards other revolutionary socialist groups, such as the Victorian Socialist Party in which future Prime Minister John Curtin played a major part, membership of the CPA was proscribed for ALP members and a combative position was adopted against communist policies.

The CPA fluctuated – often wildly – in its approach towards the ALP: sometimes proposing affiliation, even amalgamation, but mostly denouncing it as a two-class party committed to “reformism”, that’s to say, its objective of achieving socialism through gradualism and by winning parliamentary elections, as opposed to winning the “masses” to revolution.

For the first half of the 1930s the CPA followed the Comintern’s ultra-leftist line that social democrats were actually “social fascists”. When the dire consequences of a divided Left became apparent with Hitler’s victory in Germany, a new line gradually emerged. The seventh Comintern congress of August 1935 overturned the previous ultra-left line and adopted Dimitrov’s “united front” policy. The CPA then embraced the ALP as part of the “united front” against fascism, although this was not reciprocated and Labor remained fundamentally “isolationist” regarding foreign affairs.

From around this time the CPA began to attract considerable support from among ALP ranks and slowly a system evolved of dual membership, in which ALP members hid their allegiance to the CPA in order to attain positions of influence. The most notable of these was Jack Hughes, a Clerks’ Union official and senior ALP figure. In the mid-1930s he approached the CPA and asked to join, but while he was accepted, he was ordered to also remain in the ALP.

It’s important to say that the real communist position towards Labor wasn’t so much to subvert it from within by this tactic, but to smash it by winning the mass of workers away from “reformism” to revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. By having strong voices within the ALP it was believed that this task would be made that much easier.

This tactic foundered at the beginning of World War Two, when Stalin forced the CPA to renounce its initial support for the war effort and denounce the West’s fight against Hitler as an “imperialist war”. The strength of the CPA’s position in the NSW ALP was demonstrated at the 1940 conference when its supporters pushed through the “Hands Off Russia” resolution, resulting in federal intervention and the communists pulling out their considerable forces and forming the breakaway State Labor Party of NSW.

By the end of the war, the CPA believed it was well on the way to achieving its goal of replacing the ALP as the party of the working class. Indeed, communists were so confident that in 1944 they had amalgamated with the breakaway Labor Party, seriously weakening the Left’s position in the ALP.

The thing that convinced communists that they were winning the fight against “reformism”, however, was their powerful position in the trade union movement. At war’s end the CPA either directly controlled, or indirectly influenced, just under half of the union movement, so that at the 1945 ACTU Congress there was an effective Left majority of around 90 votes.

The CPA’s over-confidence led it to disaster. When Stalin decreed that communists worldwide should go on another ultra-leftist offensive immediately after the war, the CPA unwisely stepped up to the plate, leading a series of strikes that saw several important industrial victories, but also caused its support base to shrink rapidly. It should be stressed that many of these strikes sprang from legitimate grievances, but when the CPA-led Miners’ Federation launched the 1949 coal strike it culminated in a victory for “reformism”, not the rallying of the working class to revolution’s banner.

1949 was also the year that the CPA’s union base began to unravel. Communists had gained an invaluable insight into the forces that were marshalling against them in late 1945. In something of a cloak-and-dagger scene, a man quietly entered the Melbourne CPA office and leaked to them a printed copy of Bob Santamaria’s ultra-secret report to the September 1945 Bishops’ conference. There is still mystery surrounding this leak but according to the senior CPA official who received it, the original source was a dissident Catholic who was probably opposed to the Church’s direct involvement in politics.

Santamaria’s explanation for the leak was that Brisbane’s Archbishop Duhig had left his copy of the report under his pillow after reading it on the overnight train to Sydney. According to this account, it was discovered by a CPA supporter in the Australian Railways Union who handed it over. None of the CPA officials involved in the affair believed this to be true, although the possibility exists that a printer sympathetic to the CPA was the source, as for some inexplicable reason the report had been professionally printed.

Whatever the origins and motives of the leak, Santamaria’s report revealed to the CPA that the Church had now backed the founding of “a disciplined national organisation” that was “modelled completely on the Communist Party and which will work on the same principles of organisation”.

Bob Santamaria’s ultra-secretive “Movement” (the Catholic Social Studies Movement) had been officially endorsed at the 1943 Bishops’ conference, and the 1945 report confirmed that official Church policy was to use the ALP as the vehicle to defeat communist power in the unions. After careful investigation, the CPA concluded that the leaked document was genuine and promptly published extracts, but without apparently understanding its true significance.

The dynamic that would dominate the Labour Movement for the following four decades had, however, been brought into the open. One of the most revealing aspects to the Bishops’ document was the overt way in which it proclaimed the intention to use the ALP to achieve the Church’s goals.

For almost a decade that formula proved effective: the major forces in the Labour Movement were aligned completely against the CPA, with the ALP Industrial Groups coming into being in 1945 and working in perfect harmony with the Movement. Together they won a string of union elections that reduced communist power to a core of nonetheless powerful unions, mainly in the maritime, transport, engineering, manufacturing and construction industries.

Between 1945 and the Labor Split of 1955 the CPA lost about half of its union strength and declined from around 20,000 members to 5,000. It was isolated in the wider Labour Movement – even from most of the ALP Left which it had neglected for much of the 1940s and early 1950s – and under siege in the wider community. Even in its strongest union bastions it was under challenge from the coordinated campaigning of the Santamaria Movement and the ALP Industrial Groups.

But all of that changed in 1955 with events that resulted in a dramatic realignment of forces within the Labour movement. After he became leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party in 1951, Bert Evatt worked closely with Santamaria against both the ALP Left and, more particularly, the CPA. As the host of tonight’s forum revealed in his book Mr Santamaria and the Bishops, by 1952 Santamaria believed this relationship was so strong that he had the numbers to turn the ALP into a Catholic party, based on his own narrow conceptions of a largely rural-based society functioning according to very conservative Catholic social doctrines.

Evatt apparently cared little if the ALP took that direction, just as long as he became prime minister. He entered into an unlikely understanding: if Santamaria delivered Evatt the Catholic vote at the 1954 election – in which Evatt was confident of victory – Santamaria could win control of the ALP and implement Catholic policies. To cement this understanding, Evatt offered to introduce several of Santamaria’s most cherished policies if he became prime minister.

1954 didn’t turn out the way either man expected. The roots of this, ironically, went back more than a decade to Evatt’s time as Australia’s External Affairs Minister. In mid-1954 Vladimir Petrov defected from the Soviet Embassy in Canberra and Menzies announced a Royal Commission into Soviet espionage. ASIO had been formed in 1949 precisely because of powerful American and British evidence of a spy ring operating, among other places, in the Department of External Affairs. This evidence had been gained from the decryption of previously unbreakable Soviet radio codes, a tightly guarded secret until the mid-1990s. Among other things, this intelligence revealed that classified British material that had been shared with Evatt’s department had been passed by a senior CPA official – Wally Clayton – to his KGB controller.

The “Petrov Affair”, as it became known, destroyed Evatt’s chances at the looming poll and he subsequently became absorbed in trying to prove that there had been no Soviet espionage in Australia and that the affair had been concocted by Menzies and ASIO. He also unwisely represented some of his personal staff at the Royal Commission, refuting allegations of their involvement with either Clayton’s spy ring or the CPA’s wider activities. The affair and Evatt’s reaction, combined with his defeat at the election, shattered his previously close relationship with Santamaria.

It also shattered the ALP. In the following year the CPA was replaced as Evatt’s “enemy number one” by Santamaria’s Movement, which was said to be clandestinely plotting to take over the ALP. The Industrial Groups were rapidly disbanded and Evatt turned to the Left for support.

This development provided the springboard for the CPA to recover from what had seemed its impossible position. Over the following five years it slowly shored up its union base and even made minor come-backs in some areas by developing “Unity Tickets” with Left ALP unionists, many of whom had been previously involved in the Industrial Groups’ bitter struggles to oust communists.

The split that rent the ALP was not a simple Left-Right divide. The Right itself was also bitterly divided: between those who adhered to Santamaria’s line that the ALP was hopelessly compromised by its soft stance on communism and that a new party was therefore required; and those who wanted to maintain a united Labor Party as a powerful electoral force capable of forming governments. The latter became known as the “stay in and fight” faction, that is, people who shared Santamaria’s anti-communism but chose to remain in charge of the old party rather than join his breakaway and hand the ALP to the Left.

 In NSW, in practice this meant some key anti-communist figures were prepared to work closely with the ALP Left – even some suspected of being secret communists – in the battle against Santamaria’s forces. Key among these was the AWU federal secretary Tom Dougherty, who cooperated with the senior figures of the left-wing Steering Committee to organise for Evatt in ALP branches.

The result of the Split was that Labor lost power in Victoria and Queensland (where Santamaria’s forces were strongest), but retained it for another decade in NSW. On the other hand, the Left won control of the Victorian Labor Party, while in NSW the Right remained dominant.

The CPA, having pulled its forces out of the NSW ALP in 1940 in support of Stalin’s pact with Hitler, gained room to move in the Labour Movement through alliances with the ALP Left. This was assisted by the secret influence of people whose real loyalty lay with the CPA, although it should be stressed that, as Rodney Cavalier has observed, there simply weren’t enough communists to effectively dominate the ALP Left.

As we will see, Dougherty’s cooperation with the Steering Committee was not the only occasion when the Right was prepared to deal with sections of the Left, even communists.

The consolidation of the CPA’s position was short-lived. Just as it seemed to be recovering from some of its set-backs, the Sino-Soviet dispute consumed the international communist movement. As the CPA struggled to come to terms with the realities of Stalin’s crimes in the wake of Khrushchev’s series of revelations that began with his “secret speech” at the Soviet Party’s 1956 Congress, Mao Zedong launched his campaign in defence of Stalin.

Naturally attracted to Mao’s form of communism, the CPA leadership at first hesitated, moved tentatively towards Beijing in the late 1950s and finally returned to Moscow in the early 1960s. This precipitated the first of two bitter splits, as a group of hard-line Stalinists led by Ted Hill in Melbourne walked out and in 1964 formed a new Maoist party, taking some key union leaders with them.

The CPA’s influence in the Labour movement was damaged, but not fatally. Membership fell slightly and the bitterness of the split spread poison, especially in the unions. Worse followed a few years later.

Just as the CPA was getting over the split and embarking on a new course that in effect was a declaration of independence from both Moscow and Beijing, the Kremlin’s neo-Stalinists repeated the catastrophic error made in Hungary in 1956.

The CPA leadership had warmly embraced Alexander Dubček’s “Socialism with a Human Face” which commenced in early 1968. Dubček’s ideas and policies reflected many of the evolving positions of the new, younger leadership that had emerged in Australia in the mid-1960s. Moscow’s military intervention to crush the Prague Spring in August 1968 led to yet another split. In 1971 a third, pro-Soviet communist party came into existence, which took with it a very significant section of the party’s remaining union officials.

Ironically, it was during the post-1965 period of major internal re-thinking and reform that the CPA embarked on some of its most creative and enduring work. Its influence in the Labour movement waned, but its impact was vastly disproportionate to its size. To mention just a few areas of work that fall under this general heading:

• Green Bans, which brought together the emerging conservation movement with the traditional working class base of the Builders Labourers’ Federation;
• Supporting the emergence of the modern Indigenous movement, from the 1965 Freedom Ride, through the Gurindji and land rights struggles to a range of campaigns for equal rights and social justice;
• Involvement in the modern feminist movement that fundamentally altered the way women are viewed within the workforce and the family, and bringing together unionists and middle class women in campaigns for equal pay for equal work and changing attitudes towards abortion and contraception;
• Developing important initiatives to expand the concept of democracy through a Charter of Democratic Rights;
• And major initiatives around international solidarity, including the anti-Apartheid movement and supporting East Timorese independence.

The split with the pro-Soviet minority also saw the emergence of a very strange alliance: between the hard men of the NSW ALP Right and the union base of the breakaway group, the Socialist Party of Australia, or SPA.

Labor Party and trade union leader John Ducker was the key to this development. One of his motives was to undermine the Green Bans by successfully courting the pro-Moscow leadership of the Building Workers’ Industrial Union. This helped to isolate the leaders of the Green Bans and ultimately assisted in the destruction of the leadership of the NSW Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, although the Green Bans movement persists in various forms to this day and is recognised worldwide for its pioneering contribution to the environment movement.

Another critical part of Ducker’s manoeuvre was to use secret dual ALP-SPA members to try and defeat the mainstream ALP Left Steering Committee in key ALP ballots by directing right-wing support to SPA-supported candidates against those supported by the CPA.

In pursuing this otherwise “unholy alliance”, Ducker went as far as proclaiming at a Trades and Labour Council meeting that the hard-line, pro-Soviet SPA was the “genuine Marxist” communist party”. Strange bedfellows indeed.

In closing, it’s interesting to also reflect on the split that took place among Santamaria’s forces in the early 1980s. By then, Santamaria had concluded that the problem was not just communists in the union movement, but unions themselves. His focus had returned to many of his earlier interests, including a longing, backwards look at rural life and as the 1980s progressed an increasingly virulent attack on the iniquities of modern capitalism, especially globalisation and market economics. In this he joined forces with the Left, some of whom reconciled with him after a lifetime of bitterness and hatred.

In this context, Santamaria found he had no further use for the union leaders who had fought the “good fight” against the CPA and, in their turn, the splitters split. Against the bitter opposition of the Victorian ALP Left, the four key NCC-controlled unions in that state returned to the fold and in so doing returned the branch to the situation that had existed before the 1955 split, with the Right again dominant.

The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 occurred at a time when almost all the old-time CPA union officials had either reached the end of the careers or were close to retirement. The forces that had brought a powerful communist presence into the Labour Movement from the mid-1930s onwards had well and truly exhausted themselves. Most were replaced by Left ALP officials, returning the union movement to its traditional, pre-CPA position with the main divisions being between the Labor Party Right and Left factions.