This is the fourth in a series of articles that were first published in 1995 to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Australia. Written by John Percy, co-founder and central leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), we share them to recall the rich tradition of struggle in Australia for a revolutionary party, and to learn from its successes and failures.

Parts One, Two and Three are available.

Communist Party growth during the Great Depression

The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) experienced its most rapid growth in the years 1930-1934, going from 300 to 3000 members. The misery and desperation of the depression years, with up to one-third of the workforce unemployed, pushed many to look for radical solutions.

CPA members showed determination and sacrifice in fighting the depression’s terrible impact. The CPA provided leadership and organisation for the unemployed through the Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM), and could point to the Soviet Union as a socialist alternative to the horrors of capitalism in the midst of crisis. They put themselves forward as an independent alternative to the parties responsible for administering the mess, the ALP included.

As the depression started to ease, many of the unemployed party members found work in industry. From this foundation, the CPA started to win leadership positions in key industrial unions and built a strong party with a significant working-class base. The Unemployed Workers Movement. The Unemployed Workers Movement was formed in April 1930, initiated by and under the leadership of the Communist Party. In around 18 months, it had grown to 31,000 members and continued to grow until 1936. In 1934 it claimed around 68,000 members in the Eastern states.

In 1935 CPA president Lance Sharkey told the Comintern that the CPA, through its control of the UWM, had effective control of the unemployed in NSW and Victoria. The CPA recruited a large proportion of its new members through the UWM. As Ralph Gibson says in his book The People Stand Up, when he joined, the CPA “was largely a party of the unemployed. Its numbers were not just talking about poverty. They were among the multitude who were deep in it.” 

There were other organisations of the unemployed created by the Labor Party and Trades Hall Councils. But the UWM, primarily due to the leadership of the CPA, outstripped these organisations, both in size and in activity. The UWM led struggles that contributed greatly to the militant tradition of the workers and the poor – anti-eviction battles, fights to defend free speech, demonstrations, dole strikes and campaigns for relief works to provide jobs.

In NSW the CPA was involved in the hunger marches from the northern coalfields, Newcastle, the south coast and Lithgow to press the claims of the unemployed. In Melbourne they led the heroic dole strike of the unemployed in 1933. The government introduced “work for the dole” in 1932. Ralph Gibson writes, 

‘Work for the Dole’ was something different from the ‘relief work’ which at first consisted of two or three months’ work for one of the Government departments and which, despite all its bad features, was paid in wages, and was partly an answer to the dire need of the unemployed for something in addition to food and groceries, – clothing especially. ‘Work for the Dole’ was work for so many hours a week to ‘earn’ the weekly voucher. It was part of the Government’s ‘economy’ drive (it could get work done for the dole for which it would otherwise have to pay wages), and it resulted also from a ‘moral’ campaign in church and other circles about the evils of getting sustenance without working.

In June 1933, when the unemployed in the inner-city area were issued a work for the dole call-up, the CPA decided to initiate a strike. The UWM conducted an 8-week strike of the unemployed which forced an increase in dole payments from 12 shillings to 20 shillings weekly for a married man. Intense organising throughout the city to win support for the strikers and collect food and money for their families ensured success. A second dole strike in 1935 forced rates up a second time. During the depression, many unemployed workers chose jail as an alternative. At least they got a roof over their heads and a feed. But sometimes it was more organised, a tactic to keep the prisons full to embarrass the authorities.

Edgar Ross, in his book Of Storm and Struggle, recalls the use of this tactic in Broken Hill. “The tactic of ‘Breaking into Gaol’ was part of a sustained campaign directed at forcing the rescission of arduous restrictions on the dole imposed by the anti-Labor Bavin government in NSW.”

The CPA was at the centre of many of the battles defending the unemployed against evictions. The Sydney Morning Herald described one such battle in Newtown, Sydney in June 1931. “The most sensational battle Sydney has ever known was fought between 40 policemen and 18 Communists … All the defenders were injured, some seriously.” Bullets flew; one man was hit. 

Entrenched behind barbed wire and sandbags, the defenders rained stones weighing several pounds from the top floor of the building on to the heads of the attacking police, who were attempting to execute an eviction order. 

A crowd hostile to the police, numbering many thousands … threatened to become out of hand … When constables emerged from the back of the building with their faces covered in blood, the crowd hooted and shouted insulting remarks.

Gibson writes that: 

Our propaganda for socialism met with considerable response. Events had made many people more receptive to socialist ideas. Witness the large audiences that would gather to hear any returned visitor from the Soviet Union, the record sales of the Dean of Canterbury’s ‘Socialist Sixth of the World’ (later in the thirties), and some of the Communist Party election votes (O’Day’s 2500 in the small electorate of Carlton in 1932) or my 4750 in a large outer suburban-cum-rural Federal electorate in 1934, for example). Particularly in the acute crisis of 1929-33, we talked a lot about capitalism and socialism and the contrast between the two.

Percy Laidler, close friend of the party, was constantly giving two lantern lectures at meetings called by suburban and country branches of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. Both lectures dealt with capitalism in a fundamental way and from a Marxist standpoint. They were entitled ‘Cold and Hungry’ and ‘Poverty and Plenty’.

Numerous free speech fights took place. The CPA challenged the bans on meetings. In Brunswick, Melbourne in 1933, dozens of CPA members were jailed, including Ralph Gibson. (John Sendy, Ralph Gibson, An Extraordinary Communist.) CPA member and artist Noel Counihan addressed a crowd from a cage on top of a truck. Police had to cut him out, to the jeers of the crowd, as he continued speaking.

There were clashes with the New Guard in NSW, a semi-fascist outfit patterned on the storm-troopers of Europe, that was set up to smash communist, socialist and workers’ meetings and demonstrations. It was led by Colonel Eric Campbell and initially made up of middle-class empire loyalists demanding subservience to “King and Country”. In 1931-32 it became more menacing as its membership swelled to 50-100,000. Similar organisations sprang up in other states. The CPA set up its own defence guard to defend meetings and demonstrations.

The success of the CPA in this period can be gauged by their membership figures. At the start of 1930, they had 300 members. By May 1931 they’d grown to perhaps 1200 members, and then to a boasted 2329 later that year. And they’d grown to nearly 3000 members by 1934 (some say by 1932). There was a high turnover, but those who stayed were trained as disciplined activists. The CPA paper The Workers’ Weekly had sales of about 2000 in 1928, but by 1931 this had risen to 10,000, then went higher.

Through the leadership change in 1929-30, and the substantial growth during the Depression, the CPA was remade. Some even describe it as a “re-founding.” But it was now a loyal Stalinist party, taking its lead from Moscow, and brooking no dissent. There was much less discussion and independent thinking from its members, but an enthusiasm for the first workers’ state in Russia and dedication to the revolutionary struggle in Australia. 

Few of the founders from 1920 were left. Many of the leaders, members of the CPA central committee in the ‘20s, had been forced out or expelled. Many of them ended up in the ALP, such as Jock Garden and other “Trades Hall Reds”. Dinny Lovegrove, the CPA Victorian state secretary expelled in 1933 along with most of the state committee, became a supporter of Bukharin for a while, and later the deputy state leader of the ALP.

Why did the CPs grow?

Why did the CPs grow, while their opponents, often the former leaderships, with policies closer to those of the Bolsheviks under Lenin, and with an explanation for the contradictions and bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union, remain tiny groups? Workers valued unity and saw any criticism of the Soviet Union as disrupting that unity. They still had illusions in the Stalin leadership. They looked to the Soviet Union as the first workers’ state and were loyal to that first victory. They saw the gains and rejected the stories of repression as capitalist propaganda. The Stalinist propaganda and fabrications, despite the rebuttals by Trotsky and others, held sway. The prestige of the Russian Revolution and the first socialist state reflected on the local communist parties. They even benefited from some material assistance.

Did the Trotskyists make mistakes that otherwise could have altered the balance of forces? In those early years, they must have made many. They suffered from all the problems of a small group – the isolation, the in-fighting, the inevitable sectarianism. They underwent many splits. In later years, the Trotskyist movement institutionalised many errors. For example, they converted into a permanent principle the tactic of entry into the ALP, submerging themselves into it to try to win members or the party as a whole to a Marxist perspective. They suffered from the misconception that in spite of the ALP’s political program and record of commitment to the preservation of capitalism and its institutions, it was somehow still the workers’ party.

This permanently shackled the Trotskyists. But there were also positive things that the CPA did, apart from the advantage of identification with the Russian Revolution, and starting with the existing organisation, its strength and resources. During the crisis years of the Depression, their line was to organise the oppressed in struggle and energetically build a political alternative.

Independence from the capitalist parties running the system was crucial, and their critical stance to the ALP was key. The Communists also won support through their efficient organisation. Their members were trained through the struggles of the unemployed, and on the industrial front later on. And most importantly, the commitment and dedication of the CPA ranks achieved many successes in the mass movements and in building the party and won them authority among militant workers.

Lance Sharkey, speaking of the early 1930s in his speech to the CPA’s 12th Congress in November 1938, observed that “there was a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, and it would not be all a bad thing if we were able to recapture some of the energy and enthusiasm, perhaps ‘fanaticism’ of that period.” That energy and enthusiasm certainly need to be remembered and recaptured for the building of a strong socialist movement in the future.

The CPA and the unions

The Communist Party of Australia developed a strong base in important industrial unions during the 1930s. As the depression eased, CPA members recruited from the unemployed and trained in action through the struggles of the Depression, had got jobs in industry. This working-class base, which became the core of the CPA, grew and was consolidated during the 1940s.

The work of party members in unions was well organised. CPA union leaders became astute tacticians, learning how to organise union struggles and how to win strikes. They developed strong working-class support and respect as workers’ leaders. The CPA’s trade union work in the 1930s and 1940s holds many useful lessons for socialists today and for the future. 

At its formation the CPA also had a union base, but its strength was greater in the labor councils than in the unions themselves. Jock Garden was secretary of the NSW Labor Council, and most of his executive joined the CPA. In 1921 the council had 30 communist union delegates. The secretaries of Newcastle and Brisbane labour councils were also CPA members. Fifteen per cent of the delegates at the 1921 trade union conference, which recommended that the ALP adopt a socialisation objective, were communists.

But Garden’s boasting at the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922 that the CPA “had control of 347,000 trade unionists” was not based on real communist support in the working class. As Alastair Davidson wrote in his history of the CPA, “The CPA policy of concentrating activity in the labor councils resulted in its neglect of rank-and-file activity in the unions and its failure to attempt to capture positions on union executives”. 

After a few years, the CPA lost its initially quite good position among workers. This was partly because of the ebb of the post-war revolutionary sentiment, but it was also a result of the mistakes of the Garden leadership. There was a tendency to substitute revolutionary phrase-mongering and sloganeering for the building of a rank-and-file base. For example, the party made a stupid intervention in the 1923 coal lock-out calling for a general strike against the wishes of the miners and the Miners’ Federation leadership. With the departure from the party in the mid-1920s of Garden and many of the trade union and labor council officials, the CPA’s connections with the union movement were greatly reduced.

The Militant Minority Movement

The foundations for the very impressive gains made by the CPA in the trade unions in the 1930s were laid by its work amongst the unemployed, and in the Militant Minority Movement (MMM).

As Australia entered the Depression, the old union leaders proved incapable of adequately defending the workers they were supposed to represent. Trade unionism, on its own, proved totally inadequate to even fend off the bosses’ attacks. But as the economy slowly improved, militancy was stepped up, and fighting leaderships were elected in some powerful unions. A number of these militants were members of the MMM.

The MMM, the movement of rank-and-file trade unionists formed by the CPA in 1928, was based on the British MMM model. In 1930, the CPA started paying more attention to organising through the MMM. It aimed to win a hearing for revolutionary views, to recruit to the party, to organise the ranks and sometimes the community, and to eventually replace the old, incompetent leaderships of unions with communist union officials and organisers.

The membership of the MMM often overlapped with that of the Unemployed Workers Movement, according to Bob Gollan in Revolutionaries and Reformists. “One reaction of unionists and their officials was to avoid the unemployed like the plague – they constituted a threat to their own jobs. By contrast, the UWM and the MMM stated a class position: that all workers had common interests which could be protected only by united action.” 

MMM members participated in anti-eviction battles, free-speech fights and community self-help projects. Thus “individual communists emerged as popular leaders, experienced in political struggle, who later moved into positions of authority in the labour movement, in particular in the unions”.

The MMM published the Red Leader, a weekly newspaper, of which more than 9000 copies were being sold each week by 1934. At its peak it had over 30,000 readers. The MMM was initially strongest in the traditionally militant unions; it was strong on the NSW coalfields and at Wonthaggi in Victoria, and also on the waterfront and in the railways.

In the early 1930s it was able to win positions at a local and state level, for example in the Victorian Tramways Union, and the Victorian Federated Engine Drivers’ and Firemen’s Association. Discussing the work of the MMM during the long miners’ strike at Wonthaggi in 1934, Richard Dixon, CP assistant secretary and later party president, wrote that 400 of the local miners were members of the MMM. A retired miner who participated in the events claimed that 700 Wonthaggi miners eventually belonged to the MMM.

Trade union base

Communists Bill Orr and Charlie Nelson were elected as federal secretary and president of the Miners’ Federation in 1933 and 1934. This first significant communist union election victory was a direct result of the strength of the MMM. Ralph Gibson writes in The People Stand Up that the unemployed of the early 1930s provided from among their leaders “many who later filled important trade union positions. The highly democratic grassroots organisation of the unemployed threw up many talented new leaders. Many of these moved into industry as the depression began to lift and more jobs became available. This was a period when new militant personnel were badly needed in the unions. Many of the union officials at this time were not only right-wing, but incompetent, and it was urgent to fill their places. Leaders of the unemployed, largely Communist Party members, commended themselves to their fellow unionists as people who could do the job required.”

Thus Ernie Thornton of Collingwood Unemployed, became the state, and then federal secretary of the Ironworkers’ Union in 1936. George Frank, of Richmond Unemployed, finished as federal secretary of the Carpenters’ Union (later called the Building Workers Industrial Union). Jim Munro, of North Melbourne Unemployed, became an organiser of the Timber Workers’ Union. Tom Hills, who led the unemployed in Port Melbourne, was prominent in Waterside Workers’ Federation activity. Brand, leader of the Brunswick Unemployed Single Men’s Group, became president of the Victorian Branch of the Ironworkers’ Union when Thornton transferred to the national office in Sydney.

“Looking round the Trades Hall Council chamber any Thursday evening in the 1930s”, Gibson commented, “one would see a great many faces familiar from the days of the unemployed battles, mainly much younger faces than the Trades Hall average.” Dixon, writing in 1970 about the party’s industrial work in the 1930s, estimated that, “By the beginning of 1937 there were more than 20 Communist trade union officials and upwards of 1000 Communists holding executive or local union positions throughout Australia”.

Tom Wright, CPA secretary in the late 1920s, was elected NSW secretary of the Sheetmetal Workers’ Union in 1935. In 1937 Jim Healy was elected secretary of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. In 1938 Don Thompson was elected secretary of the Building Trades Federation in Victoria. Between 1939 and 1942, Elliott V. Elliott became federal secretary of the Seamen’s Union, a left leadership won control of the NSW Clerks Union, and J.J. Brown was elected Victorian state secretary of the ARU. By 1942, Communists led by Sam Lewis more or less controlled the Teachers’ Federation.

The workers’ movement was significantly reorganised and strengthened by the Communist Party’s successes. The unions with new Communist leaderships were winning some gains in the second half of the 1930s, trying to restore what had been lost by workers during the Depression.

Ralph Gibson states in his book The Fight Goes On, there were two great infusions of members into the CPA: “First came the Party members who organised the unemployed in the depression. Many of these later became a leading force in the trade unions as they entered industry with the partial revival of employment … “Then there was the infusion in the war years 1941 to 1945 – a double infusion of factory workers influenced by the changed political climate and of members of the armed forces.”

The Popular Front

Well, what happened between these two infusions? The CPA gained more influence in the trade unions, as outlined above. It built and consolidated its organisation in all states. The party press was better established by 1939: Tribune‘s circulation was 20,000; the Victorian Guardian, 10,000; and the North Queensland Guardian and the People’s Star of South Australia, 5000 each. Many successful campaigns were organised, such as the Movement Against War and Fascism and the Friends of the Soviet Union.

But most CPA historians agree that the party grew only slowly between 1935 and the outbreak of war. At the party’s Twelfth Congress in November 1938, it was claimed that membership was 3000 in 1932 but had only risen to 5000 by 1938. However, a major political somersault – the Popular Front – had been ordered by Stalin. Dimitrov launched the new line at the Seventh (and last) Congress of the Comintern in 1935. Stalin had started to change tack in 1934 following the disasters which resulted from the application of his third period or “social fascism” line – the smashing of the German working class and the coming to power of Hitler.

But in trying, belatedly, to counter the monster that had been unleashed, Stalin introduced a major revision in Communist theory. The new line went far beyond a united front of workers’ parties to fight fascism, which Stalin had rejected for Germany. It not only proposed the inclusion of capitalist parties in the popular front; it went even further and sanctioned the participation of Communist parties in capitalist governments. The basis for this line was Stalin’s determination to subordinate everything to the diplomatic needs of the Soviet Union even though this did not achieve the desired result. It did not provide the best defence for the Soviet Union, and it also meant that the needs of the revolutionary struggles in other countries were put way down the list of priorities.

The immediate results of these policies, in the strategic countries for which they were intended, were disastrous; the working class in France and Spain suffered major defeats. In countries on the periphery of world politics, such as Australia, the same popular front line was adopted. CPA propaganda increasingly adopted a vulgar nationalist character. An election leaflet in 1937 warned of the danger to the British Empire. Some CPA anti-Japanese literature even took on a racist character. The CPA trailed behind the ALP. In the 1937 elections the party talked about electing a “fighting Labor government” which would legislate “a better life” for the people. “It is a gross error”, party secretary J.B. Miles said, “to see the Labor Governments as administrations which never benefited the workers or always betrayed the workers”.

In addition to the pressure of the Australian labour movement bearing down on the CPA – its tendency to adapt to the ALP, to cave in to what were seen as “Australian traditions” or “the Australian reality” and to support the ALP for other than tactical reasons – a second factor came into play and was formalised with the popular front line. From then on, this became the new orthodoxy in the Communist movement, and it conflicted with the traditional Leninist views on the state and the class struggle dynamics of the revolutionary process. In many Communist parties such as the CPA, both positions could coexist side by side, sometimes even in the same document.

But in the CPA for the next 30 years the norm in practice was the popular front line rather than the class struggle line. This was the fundamental impact of Stalinism on the CPA; it was a right-wing influence, not an ultra-left impact, as some writers have tried to maintain. The third period line was an exception. For example, John Sendy in Comrades Come Rally goes even further than most and identifies the party’s supposed errors as Leninist. “The attitude of the CPA towards the ALP, while marked by chops and changes, has been immature and impatient and heavily influenced by the tactics adopted by the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks.” 

But the lack of any significant immediate results stemming from the application of the new line in Australia is a bit awkward for orthodox CP historians. The party didn’t grow much! Bill Brown, in his The Communist Movement and Australia, puts forward the excuse that “sectarian tendencies were not adequately eradicated in the immediate years” after the Seventh Comintern Congress.

CPA writers sometimes point to the growing number of positions won in the unions. But it’s clear these victories were the fruits of the previous period, from the successes in the UWM and the MMM and the strength the CPA developed in the ranks of the unions. They weren’t the result of the rightward turn, the popular front line instituted from 1935, or from using the code words – “a correct united front approach to the ALP” – adopted by the CPA. There’s an important lesson here which is ignored by most of the fake left union officials from the 1950s on – the need for unity in struggle, rather than unity in inaction with the ALP leadership.

Read Part Five here.