BY JONATHAN STRAUSS
SYDNEY — The 70 people who attended a seminar entitled "The Communist Party of Australia: Lessons for the 21st Century" on October 22 agreed that an anti-capitalist movement can be built: the September 11-13 (S11) protests in Melbourne against the World Economic Forum were fresh in their minds.
The seminar was organised by the Search Foundation, which has held the CPA's assets since the party's dissolution in 1991, and the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH). None of the four speakers, and few in the audience, grasped the significance of the CPA's history for the confrontation with capitalism today.
Nearly all present were older than 40 and most had been members of, or worked with, the CPA. They expressed opposition to the need for a revolutionary party, an attitude which has contributed to the weakening of the anti-capitalist movement from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Former joint national secretary of the CPA Eric Aarons summed up these ideas. He counterposed a struggle for radical reforms to outright revolutionary change. The aim of radical reforms, Aarons said, was to alter the direction of events and the relations of power within the existing system.
Carmel Shute, a historian and CPA member from 1974 until its dissolution, said the CPA's Stalinism had killed support for socialism in Australia. "The Leninist party is also dead", she proclaimed.
According to Shute, the CPA never abandoned the "Leninist model", equating Leninism with Stalinism. The CPA considered itself a "vanguard" organisation, Shute claimed. This involved a top-down organisation of discipline, sacrifice and meetings.
Shute conceded that the CPA had gathered and trained activists across generations, classes and the divide between city and country. A CPA-like formation could have brought the trade unions into S11, she stated.
Jack Mundey, former CPA president and leader of the militant NSW Builders Labourers Federation in the 1960s and early 1970s, said ecological socialism was possible and necessary and that the need for a political organisation to the left of the ALP was obvious. The Greens could be that organisation, he suggested, although it lacked a commitment to ecological Marxism as the means of integrating struggles. Mundey did not define "ecological Marxism".
This raises the question of how the CPA's role, history and organisation differed from that of the Greens. Unlike the CPA, the Greens as an organisation does not, outside of parliamentary and electoral politics, participate in campaign organisations and the preparation of political actions.
Consequently, discussions among radical activists in the social movements and unions about the movements' aims, orientation and forms of activity are influenced by the Greens' perspective only via party members as individuals. As a result, the experiences of the social movements are not the collective experience of the party, and they seldom learn from each other.
All the speakers agreed with the CPA's increasing rejection of organised party involvement in the social movements from the 1960s. In the same period, the CPA also rejected the concept of the revolutionary party. Mundey stated the last 30 years of the CPA's existence had been its richest period, upon which weighed its "previous" Stalinism.
What was missing from the speakers' presentations was an examination of the CPA's strengths, which could provide lessons for activists after S11. The formation of the CPA was not simply an expression of solidarity with and a desire to emulate the 1917 Russian Revolution, as Aarons claimed, but flowed from a growing understanding of how the Bolsheviks had organised to give political direction to the social movement there.
The consolidation in the 1920s of the CPA as a revolutionary party involved in a range of struggles to which it sought to bring its party perspective, coincided with the consolidation of Stalinism in the Communist parties around the world. The CPA was soon Stalinised as part of this. Even so, the CPA was a key influence in the social upheavals of the following decades.
The CPA dissolved itself because its members, according to various seminar participants, thought it no longer served the purpose for which it had been created. One person stated that the lesson learned was not to push for a party — if one was needed it would exist.
A revolutionary party cannot come out of the anti-capitalist movement without conscious effort. A revolutionary party, as part of the present movement, must also be concerned with preparing the future of the movement. An organisation that emerges immediately from the struggle would not be ready for future challenges.
Those who want to see the movement unleashed by S11 become one that can change the world need to unite in a democratic, collective organisation to be more effective.
[Jonathan Strauss is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party and a member of the ASSLH.]