[Editorial note: The following is a talk given to a gathering of socialists in Melbourne during December 2024.]
The period of building a revolutionary party in Australia that I have direct experience of is from the late 1960s until today. There were a lot of experiences and learning in that time. Things that appeared obvious to us in the early 1970s have proven to be not so. I am going to try to use broad strokes to convey some of the experiences and learning. There will be many holes, so I hope others fill in the gaps.
Firstly, I just want to talk about a young bloke who I met in Perth a few months ago. One of the things that I said was that we hope to win the Australian working class to an anti-imperialist perspective, to international solidarity.
He said that he couldn’t see that happening.
So, I referred him to Nick’s article on the Black Armada on our website. He was astonished to hear Australian workers had been pivotal to the Indonesian nation winning its independence. Such a thing was totally alien to his experience of Australian culture. He had never been taught it in any history lesson at school. He is a politics student at university now and he still isn’t being taught that history.
That interaction is just one tiny example of why we need a revolutionary party. It’s only revolutionaries who will teach revolutionary history. And without the history of working-class struggle in your consciousness you can’t conceive of rebellions happening in the future. How on earth can young people be expected to pick up such knowledge if there is no revolutionary party to convey it? There is the internet, but that’s a dog’s breakfast.
But such revolutionary parties don’t just fall out of the sky. They must be consciously built.
The early attempts: Communism and Maoism
So, what happened to the mass-based, internationalist, anti-imperialist consciousness of 1945 to 1949 that produced the Black Armada?
Bit by bit the ruling class smashed it.
In 1948 there was an intense strike by railway workers in Queensland that became a standoff between the Communist leadership of the workers and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) state government. The workers won but the ALP was terrified of losing control of the trade union movement.
In 1949, coal mining workers went on strike and the Chifley Labor government related to it as a test of strength with the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). They gaoled unionists and raided CPA offices and eventually used troops to break the strike.
Having demoralised the working class, Labor lost the 1949 federal election and the Menzies government happily used the precedent of mobilising the armed forces against workers on numerous occasions in the 1950s.
The upshot of all this was that the CPA was put on the back foot and Australia entered a long, dark period of McCarthyism and general cultural repression. Then with splits happening in the international Communist movement, the CPA began fracturing.
In 1964 a segment of the Party split away to form the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist Leninist). They identified themselves with the Chinese leadership and twisted and turned every time the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) changed its line.
It became embarrassing to witness grown adults acting like puppets every time the political wind out of Beijing changed. One minute they were ferocious defenders of the Cultural Revolution and then when the Gang of Four, who led the process in the later stages and then fell from favour, they were like “Gang of four? Never heard of them.”
After the 1964 split with the Maoists, the majority of the remaining CPA became enamoured of the Italian Communist Party, which was on a path of taking its distance from the Communist Party of the USSR and eventually declared itself to be Eurocommunist.
With the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the CPA split again.
So, the CPA tradition ended up going in vastly different directions. Roughly speaking they were Beijing-line Maoist, Moscow-line traditionalist and eclectic, pseudo-Gramscist, trendy Eurocommunist.
As Wikipedia says of Eurocommunism such parties “expressed their fidelity to democratic institutions and attempted to widen their appeal by embracing public sector middle-class workers, new social movements such as feminism and gay liberation and more publicly questioning the Soviet Union.”
The CPA aspired to be respectably bourgeois-democratic while clinging to the Communist name so they could appear radical. The contradiction proved fatal over time.
All three Communist parties controlled significant unions and could make significant interventions. The Union of Australian Women was significant in establishing the women’s liberation movement in Australia and many CPA members played heroic roles in advancing the cause of Aboriginal people.
However, bit-by-bit their influence waned. As the CPA monolith shattered it opened the path for other left-wing tendencies to emerge, more youthful tendencies, namely the various Trotskyists.
New Marxist currents
In 1960s Sydney there was an unstructured, unruly social grouping that was known as the Push. It was a loose amalgam of the residue of the Trotskyist trade union movement that had dominated Balmain in the 1930s, their intellectual hangers on, various anarchists, bohemians and a bunch of kind of lumpen proletarian lay abouts.
Because the Push was basically a drinking circle with political and sexual libertarian colouration it’s impossible to say that anybody was actually a member of it. It’s best to say that individuals were associated with it.
Some of those associated were the Trotskyists Bob Gould, Slyvia Hale and Roger Barnes and the two young students they won to Trotskyism, Jim Percy and John Percy. The Percy’s were part of the Vietnam Action Committee at Sydney University.
Together they set up the Third World Bookshop in Sydney, which became the organising centre for the Society for the Cultivation of Revolution Everywhere (or SCREW, for short). In the atmosphere of the growing anti-Vietnam War movement giving an organisation a naughty name that referenced sex was considered revolutionary.
Large numbers of high school students and university students joined. Pretty quickly there was a debate about having a more serious name and hence Resistance was born in 1967.
Resistance was a very loose, happy go lucky, but very active organisation in which everyone could have their own point of view. However, what that resulted in was the most experienced people came to dominate via a kind of unofficial star system.
Jim Percy and John Percy began arguing for a more democratic and formalised structure, which Bob Gould opposed. This led to the first political split in developing the movement, out of which the Socialist Youth Alliance (SYA) emerged.
SYA formally met in conference in 1970 and established a newspaper and a theoretical journal called the Socialist Review, which was edited by Slyvia Hale and Roger Barnes.
So, from the beginning the movement had a mass action perspective, revolutionary principles, an internationalist perspective and a strong intellectual culture. Most importantly, it was oriented towards young people. That meant it was active on the universities and high schools.
In 1972, SYA launched the Socialist Workers League as its party project. The SWL later became the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Establishing the Party led to a direct breach with Slyvia Hale and Roger Barnes who wanted to maintain Socialist Review as an intellectual project, similar to the New Left Review in Britain. They also wanted the new party to bury itself deeply into the ALP.
The basic difference was between the desire to maintain a talking circle and the perspective of building a party.
The Socialist Workers Party
The Party had certain features. Firstly, it was inclusive, it wasn’t a cult. It deliberately looked around for similar projects with which to amalgamate and there were many such fusions.
There was never the belief that the mass revolutionary party would be built simply by adding new members one-by-one to the existing structure. It was always said that different groups, with different traditions would have to get together and the Party culture would be renewed with every fusion.
I seem to remember in the 1970s and 1980s that we went through seven fusions and five splits. We said that fusions and splits are on the same level. That means you have to clarify through discussion and debate what areas of agreement and disagreement exist.
On one occasion, we fused with a group of Maoist refugees from Turkey. This meant that our national conference had to be conducted in two languages with simultaneous translation. That is an indication of just how seriously we took the question of left unity.
The Party was also democratic. It took debate very seriously. The internal discussion bulletins were significant publications in which even the most recent and raw recruit could say what they thought. And people would argue the toss.
The internal democracy meant that when decisions were arrived at everyone was expected to act in alignment with them until it was time to discuss the matter again. That included week-by-week branch interventions in mass movements or year-by-year strategic decisions decided at national conferences.
The culture of democratic centralism essentially meant this: if you lose an argument don’t harp on about it and don’t undermine the decision. You’ll have your chance again. And you have the chance to change your mind in the light of experience and nobody will hold it against you.
As numbers of cadre were accumulated from the universities, they took their political training into the workplaces. An early trade union campaign was for women to win the right to work as tram drivers in Melbourne.
Many of the victories for Australian women in the workplace were because of campaigns organised by the SWP. The most important was the Wollongong Jobs for Women Campaign that we waged for 14 years. That victory opened the way for women to work in any job in Australia.
The communist parties and nationalism
The internal life of the SWP contrasted with the three Communist parties. In the CPA (ML) and the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA), if you had a difference with the leadership, you were out the door. I once attended a meeting of the Maritime workers branch of the SPA where Jack McPhillips, one of the central leaders reported on a minority that had formed in their party. I was expecting a political analysis and Marxist argumentation, because that was what I was used to. Instead, he just slandered his opponents, and the membership went along with it.
In the CPA it was an open house for anybody to attend. I remember discovering anarchists as members of the CPA in Perth when I first got there. But that free-wheeling, open house within the CPA meant that the leadership were also free to think what they wanted. That is: they weren’t under democratic control. Especially the CPA trade union leaders went off on their own path. They eventually wrote the Accord for the Hawke Labor government in the 1980s. That was a disaster for the entire working class.
An early debate that I remember well in the Australian left in my time was on Australian nationalism.
The CPA(ML) launched the Australian Independence Movement (AIM) in response to the sacking of the Whitlam government. It was a mechanistic attempt to apply Mao’s theory of the Block of Four Classes to Australia. The Block of Four Classes may have had validity in China, I can’t comment on that. But applying it to an imperialist country like Australia was ridiculous. It meant denying that Australia is imperialist.
At first AIM was spectacularly successful. Anyone who had a gut reaction to the Governor General, John Kerr could sign up and they were given a Eureka flag.
Through AIM the CPA(ML) taught right opportunist theorising, equating the Soviet Union with US imperialism and practiced ultra-leftism. That left the ALP off the hook for its pathetic response to the 1975 coup.
The failure of AIM means that today we have no left tendency in the republican debate. When your republican movement is led by Malcom Turnbull you know you’re in trouble.
The SWP and rejection of Trotskyism
From the beginning the SWP was a Trotskyist party, a member of the Fourth International. By the mid-1980s it was obvious that the Trotskyist movement was essentially moribund.
From the beginning our current was oriented towards the struggles in the countries that are ground down by imperialism. It might sound ridiculous to say this, but it wasn’t until around 1985 that we admitted to ourselves that none of the revolutionary movements that we were supporting like in Vietnam and Cuba were Trotskyist.
This my personal summation of the great Stalin/Trotsky divide: Leon Trotsky was a great revolutionary and there is a great deal of value in the things that he wrote and did and there is value in parts of the Trotskyist tradition as well as rubbish.
But the bottom line is this: people struggling against imperialism have put every political tendency to the test and none of them found their way to Trotskyism.
The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua showed us many of the failings of Trotskyism. We began to re-think and turned to Lenin.
We established the Party School to retrain ourselves. I attended the second School in 1981. My School lasted six months. Later ones lasted five months.
There were ten of us living together in a big house in Sydney. The timetable required us to read about 100 pages of material every day, basically Marx, Engels and Lenin. After lunch there was a seminar where an experienced comrade led the discussion and we talked it all out.
We took it in turns to cook evening meals and wash up. On Saturday we cleaned the house and comrades were rostered to do the shopping. On Sundays we had a day off.
The Party School operated for over a decade. A large proportion of the Party membership went through the School, probably a few hundred people.
This deep rethinking process allowed the SWP not only to break with Trotskyism but understand and reject the theoretical shibboleths associated with it such as “Permanent Revolution” which was, and remains a key theoretical plank of Trotskyist sectarianism towards Global South revolutionary struggles, like Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam and others.
The party’s School was key in establishing the SWP as a serious and independent thinking Marxist organisation with a well-studied membership and leadership.
But we were not for establishing a party of “scholars” or armchair know-it-alls. In fact, it set us up for a very dynamic period that followed.
In the 1980s the SWP engaged in a series of ambitious projects aimed at uniting the existing socialist and class struggle forces. We were deadly serious about building a real working-class fight-back and making serious attempts to unite the left. The projects aimed at actually winning over LARGE sections of the working class away from the ideological domination by the capitalist class convincing them of socialism.
We engaged in a series of left unity projects. Starting with the Nuclear Disarmament Party (NDP) in 1983. This was a left-wing break from the ALP and the SWP threw itself into the NDP fully.
We attempted to create a New Left Party in unity with the CPA. We built the Social Rights conference in Melbourne with the CPA(ML) and the SPA to form a collective campaign against the Accord. Tony Albanese addressed that conference.
We attempted to fuse our Party with the SPA, without success. The SPA later changed its name to the CPA. So, it has no connection with the Eurocommunist CPA tradition.
As you can see, we started to listen to the more established Marxist groups and worked as closely as we could with them. The unity projects didn’t pay off, but each one strengthened us and deepened our knowledge.
Following the collapse of communism
In the 1990s, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the growth of the Green political movement around the world we established the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and the Green Left newspaper, which was also a unity attempt in its initial years.
The DSP established a proud tradition of working in solidarity with the revolutionary democratic forces in Indonesia and in South-East Asia in general.
And the Party grew. At its height it had about 400 militant members. It was well-organised and serious. It had significant assets like buildings around the country operating as organising centres.
It had interventions into various trade unions and also helped to lead major campaigns like the mass action campaign against Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party when it was first establishing. We campaigned against the Jabiluka Uranium mine, in defence of the MUA and in 2000 the DSP was key to the success of the blockade of the World Economic Forum meeting at Crown Casino.
By far the biggest asset and key to the success of the party was its youth organisation Resistance. Even as the party leadership became more experienced and older, by maintaining its vibrant youth organisation generations of young people were organised on Campuses and high schools. They replenished the ranks of the revolutionary party and strengthening it.
The DSP also built respectful links with revolutionary parties around the world. The DSP refused to attempt to colonise other parties. We studied their experiences and shared ours with them. That was in stark contrast to the Trotskyist tradition.
In summary, I am proud of the fact that I have gone through all these experiences. I’m 71 now and I’ve been a revolutionary since I was 14.
It’s very easy to take comfort in a particular shard of the Marxist tradition and if you look around you can see plenty of people do that. It’s far more challenging to put yourself into the mortar and pestle and reconstitute your thinking after facts have proven your beliefs to be wrong.
It’s doubly difficult to do that in conjunction with others. But that is what the tradition of which I am a part did. And it is that experience that I bring to the table in Red Spark.
Source: https://red-spark.org/2025/01/13/when-there-was-a-revolutionary-party-in-australia/