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E. F. Hill Australia’s Revolution: On the Struggle for a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTORY BACKGROUND The history of the Communist Party in Australia is inseparable from the history of Australia’s development. In this booklet, some of the background of Australia’s development appears as foundation material for developments in the Communist Party. The Communist Party was founded in Australia in 1920. By that time, Australia had a long history of thousands of years of its black people and 132 years of the dispossession of the black people by British white settlement. The booklet does not deal with the details of this historical background. Conventional history tends to present an accumulation of raw facts and devotes much attention to historical personages without investigating all sides of the social process that produced the facts and personages. This booklet will attempt to make its starting point the proposition that it is social being that explains social consciousness. Therefore this introductory chapter will attempt to summarise something of Australian history, and present material which explains some of the assumptions upon which much of what follows is based. The Australian black people lived in the state of society known as primitive communism and were at the stone age level. Their primitive communal life arose from the very primitive methods they had of eking out an existence. They were compelled by the difficulties of nature to band together in tribes, each person being essentially dependent upon his or her fellow tribesmen. They were the only inhabitants and they roamed their tribal grounds unchallenged. They developed primitive tools, primitive art. They knew no written language. But still they were the unchallenged occupiers of Australia. It was they who were dispossessed from their tribal lands at the time Britain occupied Australia as a penal colony in 1788. Subsequently the legal status accorded Australia was that of an uninhabited colony acquired by settlement. As white settlement developed, so did the dispossession of the black people. Thus the black people were the very first to fight against British imperial encroachment on Australia. The fact that groups of them fought heroically against the British authorities and against the seizure of their land is suppressed by almost all historians. It remains a fact. The black people have a splendid tradition of resistance to the British seizure of their land. But it was at that time an unequal fight. In consequence, the black population estimated or rather guessed at as being something between 100,000 and 300,000 at the time of white settlement, was gravely reduced. In Tasmania, the black people were completely exterminated. Throughout the history of Australia the black people in one way or another have maintained their resistance to the British authorities and their successors. Despite vicious discrimination, vicious use of the law against them, police discrimination, job discrimination, seizure of their lands, they have maintained struggle. The evidence of their position is provided by the most solemn Australian legal document, namely its constitution. The infamous Section 127 of the Constitution, which said: “In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted” stood in the Constitution till 1967. Its existence only expressed in a legal way the utter degradation inflicted on the black people. Reality was and is worse than this legal form. The repeal of this section occurred as a result of a referendum of Australian white people; the black people had no say whatever. Voting rights were confined to white people. However, it represented an advance in the struggle of the black people that even this had to be done. It was a measure of the strength of black people. It has not altered the vicious reality but the black people are carrying forward their struggle. They are an important component of the whole struggle for independence of Australia from imperialism. From the very inception of the Australian colony, conflict arose with the British authorities. That conflict went through many forms. It assumed more definite anti-British shape as capitalism itself in Australia took shape and the number of free settlers grew. The existence and development of capitalism demands a “free” working class. Workers must be available. Convicts did not provide that free working class. The export of convicts to Australia by Britain in the end became a barrier to the development of a “free” working class, the labour of which could be bought. The abolition of convictism became one of the demands of the local capitalists, landowners and free citizens. By the late eighteen thirties, the demand became so insistent that within a few years transportation was ended. The thread that runs right through Australia’s history from white settlement to the present time is the struggle for independence from imperialism. The first representative institution in 1823 and the first supreme court in 1823, were the product of struggle by the embryonic Australian bourgeoisie for some say in their own affairs rather than those affairs being directed by the British imperial authorities 12,000 miles away. Representative institutions were extended throughout the 19th century. So-called responsible government was established in most of the Australian colonies in the 1850’s. This followed the influence of Chartism, the influence of the 1848 European revolutions, the struggles that culminated in the Eureka Stockade in 1854. The embryonic capitalist class and embryonic working class joined in these struggles. They had a common interest in wresting self government from the British imperialists. Class struggle persisted in Australia but the common enemy was British imperialism. By the end of the century, the growth of struggle in Australia dictated the need for British imperialism to make big concessions. The concession of the British Imperial Act of Parliament entitled: “The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act” assented to by Queen Victoria on July 9, 1900, was made. The struggle to obtain it was largely led by the Australian local capitalist class. It represented a compromise which maintained substantial British hold in Australia while making big formal concessions to Australia’s independence. The struggle for national independence certainly did not end with the Commonwealth Constitution of 1900. Even in the formal legal field the British Imperial Parliament and authorities retained considerable hold in Australia. Their real hold lay in the tremendous investment by British imperialism in Australia. As the result of the independence struggle of various British colonies, the British Imperial Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster in 1931. This statute authorised “Dominion” governments legally to go further still on the path to independence. It involved curtailing still further the authority of the British parliament over the dominions including Australia. It was not to operate in its most important respects until it was adopted by the parliaments of the dominions. In fact, Australia adopted it by an Act which came into force on October 9, 1942. But in Australia there are still (1973) ties to the British authorities such as the Crown, the flag, the anthem, various reserve powers, and the Constitution itself remains an Act of the British parliament. In the several states, the ties to the Crown are even greater. Again this all reflects British imperialist hold on Australia. One may characterise Australia’s history as the struggle for national democratic revolution for independence and freedom from imperialism. In the first place, the central target of this struggle was British imperialism. Because capitalism develops unevenly, the world domination of Britain gave way to that of the U.S.A. In turn, the world domination of U.S. imperialism is challenged by new rivals. So far as Australia is concerned, these include Japanese imperialism with Soviet revisionist imperialism a much later competitor. Thus the enemy changes and may change still more but the stream of the national democratic revolution goes on. It will go on until Australia is completely independent and ruled by its own people, all imperialists having been expelled. This national democratic revolution underlies all Australian history from 1788. It embraced black and white people. It involved many strata of people. It gathered way as the imperialists were compelled to build up capitalism in Australia, giving rise to a working class and a capitalist class. The national democratic revolution of necessity developed from small beginnings and is a revolution by stages. It reached a high stage in the 1850’s witnessed by armed rebellion at Eureka, still another stage by the end of the century, still another stage as the aftermath of World War I, and by World War II and the post World War II period, still another stage. Now it is part of the strivings of many countries for independence and revolution. Today countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people are demanding revolutionary changes. This has become an irresistible trend of history. The position of the main classes in Australian society historically has undergone change. In the national democratic revolution, two classes particularly have a deep interest. These are the local capitalists and the workers. The main leaders of the national democratic revolution up to 1900 were the capitalists. But the development of the working class is inexorable. As capitalism develops inexorably, the working class assumes greater and greater importance. Before the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the Australian national democratic revolution was led by the bourgeoisie. But the October Revolution and its history made it clear that the bourgeoisie could no longer lead national democratic revolutions. Nor was there any room in the world for new capitalist states; they simply could not arise or survive in the imperialist world.

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