Anti-Revisionism in Australia

Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Anti-Revisionism in Australia

Anti-revisionism as an organized force in Australian communism dates to the early 1960s, to a split in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). During the 1950s, a large number of CPA cadres went to China for extensive training and they returned to Australia heavily influenced by what they had learned. When the Sino-Soviet split became public, a number of Australian Communists quickly sided with the Chinese. By 1963 a split was inevitable and on March 15th of the following year the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA (ML)) was founded. About 200 ex-CPA members, almost all from Melbourne, joined it, including some prominent trade union officials.

The leading figure in the breakaway group was Edward Fowler (Ted) Hill, a Melbourne barrister who had been Victorian State Secretary of the CPA. Other noted figures were Paddy Malone and Norm Gallagher of the Builders Labourers Federation; Clarrie O’Shea, secretary of the Tramways Union and Ted Bull of the Waterside Workers Federation. Indeed, a group of “rebel unions” inside the Victorian trade union movement coalesced around CPA (ML) leadership. The Building and Construction Workers/Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF), Painters And Dockers Union, Waterside Workers’ Federation, Tramways Union, Clothing Trades Union and twenty-two others, represented a so-called “class struggle” wing of the movement for several years.

During the early 1970s, the CPA (ML) attracted some following among radical students at some Australian universities, notably Monash University and La Trobe University in Melbourne and Flinders University in Adelaide. Students began to challenge university authority and several Maoist students – Albert Langer, Brian Pola, Barry York, Fergus Robinson – were imprisoned for violation of university orders which banned them from campus grounds.

The CPA (ML) in 1970 initiated a broad mass organization to expand this work – the Worker Student Alliance (WSA). It has been estimated the WSA came to have 500 Melbourne members, with 150 in Adelaide and smaller groups in Sydney and Perth. The WSA’s most notable student leaders were Albert Langer (later a party Vice-Chairman) and Jim Bacon (Bacon later renounced communism and became Labor Premier of Tasmania). Some academic figures, such as the historian Humphrey McQueen also supported CPA (ML) policies, even if they did not become party members.

From the beginning, the CPA (ML) closely followed the Chinese Communist Party line. During the Cultural Revolution, the Party newspaper, The Vanguard called for world revolution, railed against the “modern revisionists” of the Soviet Union and denounced the CPA as “the Aarons revisionist clique.” However, changes in Chinese policy in the early 1970s, particularly after U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visited to Beijing caused major disaffection, particularly among the party’s student following. The Worker-Student Alliance collapsed in 1973 and the party lost its leading position in the student movement.

With the development of the “theory of three worlds,” which the CPA (ML) ardently supported, it began to actively promote “Australian independence” and the need for Australia to join an international front against the two superpowers as the first stage in the struggle for socialism. The CPA (ML) formed the Australian Independence Movement (AIM) and used the blue Eureka Flag as its symbol. AIM attempted to woo “patriotic” sections of the national bourgeoisie to the cause of Australian independence, the struggle against the two superpowers, and increasingly over time, to a campaign against the Soviet Union. This approach led to a split in the party, with those opposed to the direction of the new “nationalist” line leaving in 1978.

The dissidents formed the Red Eureka Movement (REM) in 1977/1978 with Albert Langer as its leader. REM accepted the need for Australian independence but objected to what it saw as the CPA (ML)’s erroneous strategic line on this question. It accused the CPA (ML) of pursuing a one-sided approach in attacking “Soviet social imperialism”, while ignoring the obvious connections between the Australian State and U.S. imperialism. It was one thing to say the Soviet Union was the rising imperialism, and correct to notice it had interests in Australia, they argued, but it was not the dominant imperialism in the world and certainly not in Australia.

REM also criticized the CPA (ML) for its effective abandonment of the struggle for socialism within the pro-independence movement:

The Independence Movement... is far wider than AIM and similar organizations. The way to build strong, genuinely broad mass organizations for independence is not by watering down our line in the hope that masses will come and join us... but by taking our line of revolutionary Independence and Socialism out to the masses...

REM formed its own group, the Movement for Independence and Socialism (MIS) to rectify these deficiencies.

During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s various other dissidents left the party or were expelled, founding groups that disagreed with the analysis of the CPA (ML). Supporters of the cultural revolution that left included the Clarrie O’Shea backed Committee to Reconstruct the Communist Party of Australia founded in 1984 and which later changed its name to the Committee for a Revolutionary Communist Party in Australia, and the Marxist Workers Party of Australia. The last major split in 1988 resulted in the formation of the National Preparatory Committee of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Australia by supporters of Norm Gallagher.

Ted Hill’s retirement in 1986 and death in 1988 left the party with no recognized public figure. The current Chairperson of the CPA (ML) is Nick G.. The party maintains a website and issues a pdf version of its newspaper Vanguard. Its members are active on a number of fronts but continue to organise as a largely undergound party. This organisational principle, the iceberg principle, is explained here.

Section Index (in alphabetical order)

Committee in Defense of Marxism-Leninism Mao Tsetung Thought

Committee for a Revolutionary Communist Party in Australia

Committee to Reconstruct the Communist Party

The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)

The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) in International Polemics

The Red Eureka Movement

The Struggle Against Revisionism in the Communist Party of Australia, 1962-1963