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The Marxism and Strategic Concepts of the Communist Party of Australia 1963-1972

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The Marxism and Strategic Concepts of the Communist Party of Australia 1963-1972 THE MARXISM AND STRATEGIC CONCEPTS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF AUSTRALIA 1963-1972 Ken Mansell Thesis submitted as part of the Final Honours Examination in the Department of History, La Trobe University, 1980. This thesis is my-own work containing, to the best of my knowledge and belief, no material published or written by another person except as referred to in the text. 14 November 1980 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKJ.'JOWLEDGEMENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE: THE STALINIST ORTHODOXY 7 PART TWO: THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF AUSTRALIA 1963-1967 28 CHAPTER ONE: 'THE NEW LOOK' - THE BREAK FROM ORTHODOXY 28 CHAPTER TWO: 'THE NEW LOOK' - TOWARDS THE 'COALITION OF THE LEFT' 43 PART THREE: THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF AUSTRALIA 1968-1972 61 CHAPTER ONE: SOCIALISM ON THE AGENDA - CONFRONTATION AND,CHALLENGE 61 CHAPTER TWO: SOCIALISM ON THE AGENDA - NEW BOTTLES-OLD WINE 81 CONCLUSION 109 APPENDIX A i APPENDIX B iv BIBLIOGRAPHY vii ERRATUM xxxii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my supervisor Dr Peter Cook for his advice and support during the preparation of this essay and Shirley Gordon for her assistance in converting a ha.,dwritten manuscript into presentable form. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS A.C.P. Australian Communist Party A.L.P. Australian Labor Party A.R.M. Adelaide Revolutionary Marxists A.R.M. Australian Revolutionary Marxists B.W.I.U. Building Workers' Industrial Union C.G. I .L·. General Confederation of Italian Labour C.P.A. Communj,st Party of Australia C.P.A. (M-L) Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)· C.P.C. Communist Party of China C.P.G.B. Communist Party of Great Britain C.P.S.U. Communist Party of the Soviet Union P.C.F. Communist Party of France p .c. I. Cormnunist Party of Italy R.S.A. Revolutionary Social�st Alliance S.D.• A •. Society for Democratic Action S. D.A. Students for Democratic Action S.P.A. Socialist Party of Australia S.W.P. Socialist Workers Party U.S.A. United States of America U.S.S.R. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1. INTRODUCTION I In an essay devoted to the 'special complications' of Communist 1 Party historiography Eric Hobsbawm argued that national pressures determined the direction of communist parties as much as intemational pressures transmitted by national leaderships beholden to the world movement. It followed that communist history also had to be written 'from below'. Alastair Davidson, author of the only full-length his,tory 2 of the Communist Party of Australia, e�ployed an entirely different method. Davidson wrote, in an attempted rebuttal of Hobsbawm, that the history of a Communist Party was in the first place the 'history of its directive group and of the relationship between this group and the world 3 movement. The theoretical framework used by both Hobsbawm and Davidson and based on the counte:rposition of the. abstract terms 'international context' and 'national context' is useful. The term 'autonomy' for instance describes the aspiration of a Communist Party to independence from Moscow. At the same time however the formalism of the term obscures the political and, more particularly, the strategic content of the party's policies. Davidson has been criticised for his Kremlinological approach of ignoring the national socio-political context and concentrating exclusively on the internal organizational history of leadership factions and their 1 E. Hobsbawm, 'Problems of Cmmnunist History',. Australian Left Review 23 (February-March 1970), �P• 9-12. 2 A. Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, Hoover, 1969. 3 A. Davidson, 'Writing the History of a Cornrnuni�t Party', Australian Left Review 27 (October-November 1970), p. 77. 2. 4 d.isputes. A more important criticism that can be levelled at Davidson's history is that it was constructed in terms of the party's own,.,.self-consciousness and thus assumed an ideological character. Davidson accepted at their face-value the euphemistic categories used by Australian Communist leaders in short histories justifying Stalinism 5 and Soviet control, and so his own history obscured the class and . 6 strategic content o f CPA po 1·icy. Firstly, Davidson exonerated Stalinist 'strategy' by blaming Leninism for the failure of Australian communism. Secondly, his interpretation of the orientation of the Aarons­ led CPA in the sixties in terms of. a return to an 'Aus.tralian' tradition of socialism, obscured, and thus legitimated, the strategic character o f th.is orient. ation.. 7 8 After Davidson's essentially factual and schematic account the 4 See D. White, 'Australian Communism: A Political History', Arena 21, 1970. See also E. Aarons,· 'Alastair Davidson's "The Cormnunist Party of Australia" - A Review', Australian Left Review 25 (June-July 1970) • 5 C�tegories such as 'internationalism', Bxceptionalisrn', 'revisionism' and 'the united front'. See L. Sharkey, An Outline History of the Australian Communist Party. E. W. Campbell, History of the Australian Labour Movement - A Marxist Interpretation. R. Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party. The 'united front' attempted in the national sphere what Stalin had set out to achieve at the international level: the tactic of playing one part of the ruling class off against another. Davidson also accepted the 'Bolsheviza­ tion' legend. According to Sharkey and Campbell, the CPA had been Bolshevized in 1930. In reality, Stalin had intervened to install a sycophantic l�adership. 6 Davidson's work abounded with euphemistic expressions such as 'national autonomy', 'taking national peculiarities into account', 'efficiency' and 'moderation'. 7 Davidson favoured a continuation of the moderation of CPA policy. See A. Davidson, 'Views of an Un:,ttached Socialist', Discussion 1, March 1967, pp. 47-49. 8 Davidson's account was schematic in th.e sense that he simplistically. presented the CPA's histo:cy as an oscillation between two rival loyalties - the loyalty to Russia and the loyalty to an 'Australian socialism• • 3. field was still devoid of .an interpretation concer.1ed with the transforma­ tion of the CPA's str?).tegic thinking in relation to its own immediate environment. The challenge of reconstructing the political content of the party's national .road was taken up by Winton Higgins in an article 9 in the 1974 Socialist Register. Higgins advanced beyond the point reached by Davidson because he was not blinkered by Stalinist categories and placed the post-war development of the CPA in the framework of its break with the political and organizational heritage of Stalinism. He convincingly refuted the metaphysical view according to which the CPA · 1 is necessari· 1 y permanentl y compromise· d by a s+=-li'ni'·� st esse-nce. 0 Higgins interpreted the post-1965 evolution of the CPA as_ a move to the left and argued that the Twenty-Second CPA Congress, in adopting the 'strong solution' based on radical, advanced demands, signified that the party had broken with the gradualist strategic perspective and was capable of formulating and implementing a viable overall strategy for socialist - 11 revolution. This was a questionable conclusion because, in the first place, Higgins had equated gradualism with an adherence to a democratic first-stage 'revolution' and seemed to be unaware that the perspective may assume other forms_. 9 W. Higgins, 'Reconstructing Australian Communism', Social Register 1974. Higgins joined the CPA in 1972. See ibid., p. l72. 10 See ibid., p. 177. Higgins may have been referring to the categorical statement of the Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers League. See Political Committee of the Socialist Workers League, 'On the History of the Communist Party', Socialist Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (May 1972). 11 See Higgins, op.cit., pp. 173, 185. 4. II The hypothesis to be tested is that the CPA did not bre.ak with the gradualist perspective of transforming the capitalist state and . 12 capita. 1·1st prod ucti�n relations. The vestiges of Stalinism were sh·aken off but the underlying theoretical assumptions of Stalinism, one of the most important of which is the perspective of gradual transformation, were not questioned. The party adhered to gradualism, albeit in an altered form, even during the period following the Twenty­ Second Congress that Higgins interpreted as marking the beginning of an orientation to a revolutionary perspective. To test whether in this area there had been substantial continuitT· with the past the thesis will concern itself with the development of the Cornrnunist·Party's strategic concepts, contrasting them with the theory of the tasks of the revolution in relation to the state propounded in 13 its original classical form by Marx. 12 'In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into different relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage of their material forces of production. The totality (Marx's emphasis) of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society.' K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow, 1970, p. 20. Capitalist relations of production are distinguished from the relations of production of previous epochs in that they are characterised by generalised cornrnodity production, with labour power and the means of labour having themselves become commodities. 13 Higgins interpreted the 'values revolution' that became the vogue with the CPA leadership as an aberrant feature of an otherwise progressive development of the party. The thesis will investigate the possibility that this ideological aspect expressed a general development in the direction of a social-democratic µutlook. It wil 1 not however attempt to strictly categorize the CPA as a social-democratic party in an all-round sense. 'CPA leadership' refers, except when noted otherwise, to the dominapt leadership 'faction' in the CPA - the 'faction' led by Laurie Aarons. This is a somewhat arbitrary designation because the 'factions' have not been clearly delineated or homogenous in reality, but it is necessary for analytical purposes.
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