This is the last 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.
Find Parts One, Two, Three and Four online.
Lessons for today
We can learn many lessons about practical trade union work from the CPA’s experiences in the 1930s: how to organise the militant unionists on the job, city-wide and nation-wide; the importance of politicising workers’ struggles, of injecting class politics into union activities; the value of industrial rather than craft unionism; the need for shop committees, uniting workers in the factory irrespective of the craft union they belonged to.
But the key lesson is the need for independent leadership, independent of the reformist misleaders of the trade unions, and independent of the ALP. Reflecting on this period and the CPA’s “independent leadership” policy, Dixon later wrote,
We saw in this the possibility of a whole new mass movement and of leadership in the anti-capitalist struggle. We were out to build unity on the factory floor, at the gate, and locally in unemployment committees. We were for workers electing leaders from their own ranks and keeping control of struggles in their own hands. This policy, despite its shortcomings, brought positive and lasting results for the workers. Attacks were made on them such as had never been known before but we rallied large sections of working people into the struggle.
Appendix: Lessons for Tomorrow’s Socialists
After the high point of the 1940s, the path was very much downhill. Membership declined through dropouts and splits, with only temporary respites from a recruitment drive in 1955, and a small influx of radicalised students in the early 1970s.
Certainly the objective circumstances were mostly unfavourable, especially during the Cold War period and the long post-war boom. But there were opportunities to grow, and opportunities to correct and overcome the mistakes of the past. Over the next three decades, the CPA had three main opportunities to do this; it faced three tests:
- In 1956, in response to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev’s secret speech to that congress, and events in Hungary later that year, the CPA was confronted squarely with the question of Stalinism.
- During the radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the party did start to come to terms with Stalinism, and responded to the new social movements, but faced a choice between developing further along a left path, or reverting back to an accommodation with Australian capitalism.
- In the late 1980s, there was a final choice for the CPA – the possibility for a New Left Party, and unity with others on the left, such as ourselves, or else unity with the right, a collapse back into the ALP, and dissolution.
Unfortunately, the CPA failed all three tests.
Failing the test in 1956
By 1956 the repressive regime in the Soviet Union and many of Stalin’s crimes were public knowledge. Some had been exposed by the Trotskyist movement. But CPA members were mainly closed to such reports, rejecting them as capitalist propaganda – Trotsky and the rest of the old Bolsheviks had somehow or other become “traitors and agents” of Berlin or Washington. “Fascist dogs” was one of the politer epithets.
But it was another matter when Khruschev himself exposed the crimes in the secret report to the 20th Congress. Khruschev’s bombshell had a dramatic impact on CPs around the world, even though it was planned to be confined to the top echelons of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Australian party, however, was one of the least affected.
As Eric Aarons admits in his memoirs, they “failed the test”.
Khruschev’s secret speech, of course, only went halfway. The purpose was to denounce Stalin in order to maintain the Stalinist bureaucracy. It detailed some of the crimes, the murder of the majority of the CC elected in 1934, Stalin’s own faction. But it didn’t go further back: the murder of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Lenin’s CC, the old Bolsheviks. It was a relatively mild exposure, shocking though it was to the audience and to CPs around the world. It was still only part of the truth.
These were crimes against the majority of the Russian communists, against the working class and peasantry, against revolutionaries around the world. They were not just blemishes on an otherwise good record, not just mistakes, political misjudgements. And they were not just problems of the “cult of the personality”, as it was explained by Khrushchev. It was a much deeper social problem, the usurpation of power by a bureaucratic caste.
The reaction of the CPA leadership was pathetic. Tribune at first maintained silence. Then they claimed that reports of the secret speech were a fake. Victorian secretary Ted Hill had been there, and knew it was genuine, and admitted so later, but the CPA persisted in maintaining its falsity. They thought they’d better not let the membership know about it.
There was only one principled voice on the whole Central Committee, Jack Blake. At the December 1956 CC meeting, according to Len Fox, after Sharkey’s report on the question of Stalin was delivered, “all the other Central Committee members stated that they endorsed the report. Blake didn’t mention it when he spoke. Sam Aarons rose to his feet and pointed out that everyone present had endorsed Sharkey’s report ‘with one exception’, thus challenging Blake to make his position clear. Blake did so, and when Lance Sharkey summed up, he blasted Blake as a ‘disrupter’. A few days later, Blake handed in his resignation from the Central Committee.”
Blake and his wife Audrey, who also had been a CC member for many years, were now shunned. Sydney lawyer Jim Staples circulated the report in roneoed form. He was expelled. Those who had listened to or read a further copy of it were reprimanded or expelled. CPA intellectual Ian Turner argued that Stalinism was a social and not a personal problem, and the party should have another look at Trotsky. He was expelled.
Then, when the Russian army crushed the workers’ uprising in Hungary, more intellectuals left. There wasn’t nearly as big an exodus from the CPA as there was in the CPs in Britain and the USA. So in that sense the Sharkey leadership’s cover-up policies succeeded in the short term, at least earning a temporary reprieve. But the delay compounded the problem.
As Jack Blake wrote later:
The late fifties were years of crisis for the Communist Party. In a crisis the first need is a thorough study of its causes. Instead, the leaders insisted there was no crisis and denounced anyone who suggested that there was. The result was a steady process of deterioration. Having deprived itself of the intellectual resources capable of helping to diagnose and remedy its critical illness, the party began to slowly die. Dissidents and creative critical voices were silenced. Only when the process of decay had advanced so far that the party’s very existence as an institution hung in the balance were efforts made at the top to refurbish its image.
But 1956 was a twofold failure. The CPA didn’t grasp the chance to make an analysis of Stalinism, even the weak chance offered by Khrushchev. But they grabbed and ran with the public thrust of the CPSU 20th Congress, peaceful coexistence and the peaceful road to socialism, i.e., in Australia the ALP question again.
They got it wrong in both directions. They covered up on Stalin’s crimes and welcomed the peaceful coexistence reaffirmation of the popular front, a rejection of class politics, of a revolutionary perspective. It was all covered with a fair amount of bluster and fulminations against “revisionism” at times, but that was partly a blast at the intellectuals and others wanting a freer party and an honest response to the exposures of the Stalin era, and partly to do with the uncertainties of CPA allegiance as the Sino-Soviet rift unfolded.
Two Trends in the CPA
There was also another dynamic coming to the fore in this period. The CPA has suffered from contradictory pressures and pulls throughout its history. It could be said to have had a dual nature – revolutionary and reformist.
Alastair Davidson, in a talk he gave to a New Left Party meeting in Melbourne in 1987, identified two trends in Australian labour movement history – a populist, nationalist trend, expressed in the ALP, and a class struggle trend, generally identified with the CPA. I think this is a useful conceptualisation, and it can be extended to understand the dynamic within the CPA itself. There were three possible sources of reformist pressure on the CPA:
- Adaptation to the needs of the Soviet state (more accurately the narrow needs of the bureaucracy), in the form of a Popular Front line (popular democracy, the peaceful road…).
- Adaptation to the populist Australian culture (expressed in most state and political institutions, including the ALP).
- Adaptation to the milieu of the Australian trade union bureaucracy.
In the 1950s, this third factor began to come more into play. In the 1930s and 1940s, the CPA had two main features. Firstly, a growing base in the trade unions won by militant policies, that included both positions in the leadership of many unions and mass support among the ranks for militant policies, with many rank-and-file and middle-level union delegates and officials in the CPA.
Secondly, a political subservience to Moscow, following any new right turn by Stalin. In the 1950s both these factors underwent significant change. The party’s support in the ranks of the unions declined considerably, under the impact of the Cold War and the post-war boom.
And the situation in the world Communist movement changed – the Yugoslav ex-communication; the death of Stalin; the Cominform becoming inoperative; the Khrushchev revelations; the seeds of the Sino-Soviet split and the development of two centres. So there were fewer easy certainties in political life for CPA members.
A party of trade union officials
Taking both these developments into account, a picture emerges of a distinct change occurring in the dynamic of the CPA in the 1950s. It becomes an “Australian” party, yes, not a “foreign” party taking its line from Moscow, but the trade unionist dynamic of those CPA members in the leadership of trade unions now predominates. It could be said to have become an Australian party, but a party of a section of the trade union leadership.
Trade union politics proved to have its own dangers for a revolutionary party”, one left CPA member wrote later. “Once elected to office, communists were forced to operate within bureaucratic frameworks and to fight the employers and the state with the weapons available within those frameworks. In consolidating their positions, elected officials often resorted to the same manipulative tactics as their opponents. The party’s preoccupation with gaining and holding official positions, together with its lack of political development, left it incapable of resisting its militants’ degeneration into economism and bureaucratism. Moreover, as the number of communist trade union officials grew, so did their influence within the party, which increasingly reflected their economist outlook and bureaucratic style.
These post-war developments had political repercussions in the party, especially in regard to the party’s orientation to the ALP. Of the two trends that had been present in the CPA since its inception:
- Seeing the ALP as fundamentally a capitalist party, with the task of any united front tactic being to win away the support of the working class, and
- Seeing the ALP as somehow a workers’ party, and the united front as designed to win economic and political reforms through parliament.
The second tendency came more to the fore. Here is how Bill Brown in his history describes this reorientation, favourably. (For him, the 1950s are the “highpoint”.)
Study of the three Congresses of the CPA held in the 1950s holds particular interest in regard to the development of the united front concept over this period. The programs carried unanimously by the CPA within this decade showed that, despite difficulties, important new developments were made in regard to building broader CPA-ALP unity.
… positive new steps were being taken to cut away the cancer of sectarianism that had been holding back the CPA from correct work with those Labor Party leaders and members prepared to join in areas of combined action or mutual discussion.
But it wasn’t just united actions and discussions on issues that were in question, but the overall orientation to the ALP. For example, in the foreword to a new 1957 edition of his 1952 pamphlet The Labor Party Crisis, Sharkey could write that the basis of the old reformism was decaying with the decay of imperialism. In these conditions, if the ALP adhered to its pledges, a new Labor Government “would be a progressive government and not one of the betrayal of the people’s vital interests”.
It’s similar to the line of the CPGB they polemicised against in the immediate post-war period. It’s easy to see the support for these positions in Khrushchev’s report to the CPSU 20th Congress in 1956. He maintained there was now the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism, due to the increased strength of socialism and democracy, and the increasing weakness of capitalism.
In these circumstances, he claimed, the working class is in a position “to capture a stable majority in parliament and transform the latter from an organ of bourgeois democracy into a genuine instrument of the people’s will”. In the same issue of the Communist Review that carried Khrushchev’s report, Sharkey wrote approvingly:
The statement of Khrushchev about the workers gaining control of Parliament is of vital significance to us. It is even more significant because of the trend within the ALP, that is, when our immediate policies are approaching towards each other.
I think an accurate analysis of the process at work in the CPA is given by Robin Gollan in his book Revolutionaries and Reformists.
By 1955 the Communist Party had regained much of the strength in the unions which it had lost in the previous five years. But it had paid a high price for its recovery. The price was that it had sought to assimilate itself as nearly as possible to the traditional Australian labor movement. Communist union officials, except for issues involving the Soviet Union or Soviet interests, were hard to distinguish in their words and actions from other union officials.
The membership of the Communist Party had steadily declined to between 5 and 6 thousand by the end of 1955. But those who remained were experienced tacticians in the politics of the labor movement. In 1956, when the publication of Khrushchev’s secret speech precipitated the exodus of dissident intellectuals, it became even more a party of the trade unions.
In the 1940s the CP had set out to lead the labor movement. But by 1955 it was clear that any triumphs which it had had… reveal many of the characteristics of Jonah’s triumph over the whale.
Not only didn’t the CPA grow in periods when it pursued its supposedly “correct united front approach to the ALP”, but it declined and posed a challenge to its own existence. If you’re trying to build a party just a little to the left of the ALP, supporting the ALP, with a gradualist, parliamentary perspective, then workers might sensibly ask, why join such a party, why not join the ALP directly?
The DSP and the CPA
The second important test for the CPA came during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was also the period of the origins of Resistance and the DSP, in the student and youth revolt of the 1960s and the mass campaign against the Vietnam War, and so it was a test for us as well.
After the Sino-Soviet dispute, when the CPA had to switch from its leanings towards Peking [i.e., Beijing], and following the split of the pro-Peking supporters of Ted Hill in 1963, the CPA was cut adrift from some of the old certainties.
Laurie Aarons replaced Lance Sharkey as general secretary in 1965. The party was affected by the stirrings of Eurocommunism from the Italian CP. They raised concerns over the treatment of Soviet dissidents, protesting in 1966 about the imprisonment of Sinyavski and Daniel. Communist Review became Australian Left Review in 1966. They started to break from their Stalinist past.
The CPA was also affected by the youth radicalisation of the 1960s and attempted to orient more to the radicalising youth and the “new movements”. It was centrally involved in the anti-Vietnam War campaign, the Moratorium, with the usual contradictions, both some good work and political errors. New political forces were developing – ourselves in Sydney, the student Maoists in Melbourne, anarchists and left social democrats in Brisbane and Adelaide. The CPA attempted to catch up. But its youth organisation, the Eureka Youth League, was totally unattractive to radicalising youth.
Did we make mistakes in relation to the CPA? Could we have rescued more from the wreckage? In our early years we were hindered by our own newness, our organisational weakness, and the sectarian errors and wrong politics we’d inherited from our Trotskyist origins.
Our biggest problem was our wrong analysis of and strategic approach to the ALP. We got this question very wrong. Our main criticism of the CPA then was that they wouldn’t enter the Labor Party. We had elevated what might be a possible tactic in a particular situation to a general strategy.
We also tended to have a preoccupation with the purely organisational side of things, rather than the political (a partially understandable consequence of the battle with the anarchy, disorganisation, anti-Leninism of the members of the old Trotskyist group that recruited us). Our early analyses of the CPA suffered terribly from these two errors.
But we had an active orientation to the CPA. In the 1960s, we tried to influence CPA members, having some success with members of the EYL. When Resistance was formed in 1967, it was actually an attempt to build a broad youth organisation that included the CPA. (In fact, the first organising meeting was held at Brian Aarons’ house.)
We attempted joint work where possible – their organisational sectarianism was usually the biggest problem. With the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the CPA took a decisive step, publicly opposing Moscow. We held a joint protest with them on the issue in Sydney. But its moves to break with its Stalinist past also contained a dynamic moving in the direction of the right-wing political strategies of the Eurocommunist parties, rejecting Leninism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and giving in to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion, becoming anti-Soviet in many of its attitudes.
On the Labor Party question, it was confused. The Coalition of the Left (their description for their new political strategy), adopted at their 1967 Congress, was interpreted by some as an approach to other left forces outside the ALP; it was interpreted by others as an effort to seek an alliance with the ALP, one of the tendencies at play throughout CPA history.
What were the roots of their Eurocommunism? It was partly triggered by the schism in the international Communist movement, the Sino-Soviet dispute. The Australian party had initially been seen as in the Chinese camp. Many party leaders had been to long schools in China in the 1950s. The split in 1963 with Ted Hill and the formation of the CP-ML gave a push to the new Aarons leadership towards Eurocommunism.
It was also a partial response to the challenge of the new movements and radicalisation. But its main roots were in the conservatisation of the trade union base of the party. How ideological, how conscious, was the change? There was certainly the Italian influence, but the ideological justification probably came more after the event.
By 1970, Eric Aarons, in his book on Lenin’s Theories of Revolution published in 1970, questions Lenin’s theory of the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1972, in his Philosophy for an Exploding World, there’s a full-blown infatuation with “values”, promoting humanism vs Marxism.
Similarly, with Jack Blake’s book Revolution from Within, published in 1971. It was not CPA policy but was reviewed favourably. It was one more expression of retreat. But his thesis that the necessary organisation of workers led to Stalinism, that a Bolshevik-type revolution was not possible, foreshadowed the final disillusionment of the CPA leadership and winding up of the CPA over the next two decades. (Jack Blake himself seemed to draw back from the worst implications of his book – self-criticism in Arena 63, p.139.)
Should we have entered in, tried to change the CPA in the late 1960s, rather than building Resistance and an independent party? That was the approach of Denis Freney, the former Trotskyist who joined in 1969-70. He published his memoirs a few years ago and died this year. He was totally assimilated, even used as the hatchet man against the left, inside the CPA and outside. It was a sorry experience.
But there was an important left current that developed in the CPA, the Left Tendency in the early 1970s. From 1968, the CPA had a refurbished left image. Following the departure of the hard-line Stalinist faction that supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia and split in 1971 to form the Socialist Party of Australia, it was seen as having decisively broken with Stalinism. In the 1970s it related to the many new movements and new campaigns – the women’s movement, the famous BLF Green Bans, campaigns for workers’ control, the campaign against the Springboks tour, anti-racist struggles, campaigns on environmental issues, on homosexual rights, East Timor solidarity and so on.
It did succeed in attracting student radicals in the 1970s. It did recruit women. Some went in as conscious revolutionary Marxists, hoping to influence the party to the left. Some of these from Melbourne were initially organised around the magazine Intervention. In 1972, a group in Adelaide, the Adelaide Revolutionary Marxists, formerly Students for Democratic Action, joined and became the SA leadership, with Rob Durbridge as state secretary. Inside the CP, these lefts formed the Left Tendency.
One of its members, Terry O’Shaughnessy, wrote a very thorough account of the development of the Left Tendency and the inner party fights in the 1970s. Another member, Winton Higgins, wrote an optimistic article for the 1974 Socialist Register, Reconstructing Australian Communism, analysing the development of the CPA, which was seen as most advanced among CPs around the world at the time.
There were three factions in the CPA in the early 1970s after the departure of the SPA: the Left Tendency, the centre, which was the main leadership led by The Aarons’, and the right, based in Victoria, and led by Taft and Sendy. The question of the ALP was at the core of the differences. The Left Tendency, in essence, had a correct Marxist analysis (much better than ours at the time). Taft had a tailist position toward the ALP. Aarons and the majority were initially looking for new strategies and encouraged the new current.
The debate on the ALP arose in earnest in 1974, in the lead-up to the 24th Congress. An extensive position paper was prepared by the left – it became known as the Adelaide document, or the pink document. An intensive debate took place in their discussion bulletin Praxis and in self-published pamphlets and letters. At the Congress, the centre’s positions were endorsed, with the left supporting them.
But the right was still pushing its line, so that by the 25th Congress in 1976 there was a clear shift to the right. The left was thoroughly defeated; the line of Taft and Sendy and Mavis Robertson was de facto adopted by the Aarons leadership. Factions were banned. Eric Aarons, Mavis Robertson and Joe Palmada became joint national secretaries. They moved to further conciliate the right, and over the next three years the CPA put into practice the perspectives Bernie Taft and the Victorian leadership had advocated.
The hopes of the new recruits who’d looked for a left turn, a new-type CPA, after the 1970 and 1972 congress decisions, were dashed. Thus the CPA failed that second test, arising from the 1960s radicalisation and formal rejection of Stalinism – a chance to assert a non-Stalinist, and non-reformist political line.
Should we have had a more active orientation in the early to mid-1970s? Should we have helped the Left Tendency? Would it have made a difference if we’d merged with the CPA and added our weight? The result was that they were swallowed, were defeated. We continued on, built our party, and are still here today.
A more successful orientation at that time would have required more foresight and tolerance and flexibility on the part of the CPA leadership, as well as from the Left Tendency. It would have required us to have got a clearer position on the ALP, been sharper, and ditched the entryism shibboleth properly, which we didn’t manage until the 1980s. It would have required us getting greater clarity on the dynamics of revolution, the Russian Revolution, and ditched Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution distortion earlier than we did, in the 1980s again.
The Victorian Taft leadership split away in 1984, even though their line had in fact been adopted. They were just moving a little in advance of the rest. The victory of the right-wing line in the mid-1970s ushered in a series of increasingly class-collaborationist projects and documents by the CPA.
The People’s Economic Program, Australia Uprooted, Australia Reconstructed, Australia Ripped off, etc., etc. They paved the way for the Accord disaster. The CPA was the brains behind the Accord, and in the person of Laurie Carmichael its midwife also.
Our sharp criticism of this class-collaborationist disaster was essential. We made some impact but were not big enough to have real effect in the trade unions, and deter the ACTU and the ALP from this course. We hammered away at the CPA though, in the unions, in our newspaper Direct Action, with leaflets and pamphlets.
By the time of the Broad Left Conference at Easter 1985 in Sydney, they were not so confident about it. Although they had 1500 people attend, they suffered a political defeat on the Accord, on the Victorian BLs, and we and others had an interesting alternative meeting in Glebe Town Hall, Sydney. The Broad Left Conference was really the swansong of the CPA, its last big fling.
New Party – A third test, the final chance
In 1986, having been responsible for the Accord, and having defended its disastrous results until then, the CPA took a little veer to the left, with a mild criticism of it. We responded. We took up their call for a New Left Party and were prepared to unite with them and others in a new formation.
The CPA’s contemplation of unity with the DSP was possibly their last chance, and the third big test they failed. In 1987 at Sydney University we held a joint conference, although not many of them turned up. But the CPA leadership took fright. They drew back politically. Perhaps they realised we had a lot of young active cadres, and even though they would have had a numerical majority in the New Party, the majority of the energy would have been with our tendency, and our political positions were likely to win in the long run.
By the Melbourne Charter conference for a New Left Party in November 1987, it was clear they’d taken a decision against a genuine new left organisation, and at least some of them had decided we would be excluded. The CPA demanded right of control of any new party.
They’d also retreated from their mild criticisms of the Accord. In the changed political situation, they were now looking to the ACU, a rump split from the SPA of the most right-wing, pro-Accord trade union officials. The Aarons leadership preferred unity with them on the basis of support for the Accord. And they played up the role of the “independents”, the guarantors of their right-wing line. But unfortunately, half a dozen rather lacklustre, not very energetic, right-wing independents were about all they could bring along.
This was probably the last chance for the CPA. They balked at it. They cut off negotiations with us and went ahead with a rump NLP, which only lasted a year or two before being scrapped, and the CPA was finally dissolved in 1991, over the objections of the remaining left-wing groups in the party.
The result of the promise of the early 1970s was the taming and incorporation of the left tendencies, the new generation of radicals. They were even incorporated in the leadership. But there are many individuals out there, former members, frustrated, still with some ideals and hopes for a socialist future.
The CPA remnant from the NLP debacle by the end of the 1980s was politically demoralised about Australian perspectives. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was the final straw. It completed their demoralisation, and they closed down the CPA in 1991.
Conclusions – the heritage
But their efforts won’t have been totally in vain if we’re able to retrieve the positive heritage and experience of the CPA, in particular:
- The inspiration and the goals of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary Marxist tradition of the Bolsheviks;
- The class struggle tradition and aspirations of the Australian workers’ movement.
And repudiate the negative experiences, especially:
- Stalinism, in the Soviet Union, and its projection here;
- Tailing the ALP, popular frontism.
Lenin wrote, in Left-Wing Communism:
“The attitude of a political party towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest criteria of the seriousness of the party and how it fulfils in practice its obligations towards its class and towards the toiling masses.”
Who will inherit the best traditions of the CPA, the inspiration and ideals of the original founders? Who can learn from, and look back with respect at the highlights, the militant traditions, the unemployed battles, the bitter strikes, the dedication and enthusiasm? Certainly not those who’ve given away the fight, become cynical about socialism, thrown in their lot with the status quo.
And we’re able to learn the lessons, avoid the mistakes. It’s impossible to build a new mass revolutionary socialist party without this, and without an understanding of the betrayals, the mistakes of Stalinism, in the Soviet Union and here; without an understanding of the nature of the ALP; without an understanding of the nature of the state, the need for fundamental change; without understanding the need for a party with internal democracy, able to act in unison.
Such a party needs dedication, commitment, seriousness, enthusiasm. It must be a party that builds a base in the working class, the youth, that fights for women, blacks, gays, other oppressed, for the environment, and all cases of injustice, here and around the world. It must be a party that’s internationalist.
So there’s both continuity and breaks in the communist tradition here. We should see it now as the CPA-DSP tradition. The youth, the new generation of activists, are carrying that tradition forward.
Postscript
The Communist Party of Australia referred to in these articles should not be confused with the current CPA. This organisation traces its origins to the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA), which split with the CPA in 1971. At its 8th National Congress in 1996, the SPA reclaimed the name CPA – eds.
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