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A Veritable Dynamo
Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo — Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour 1901-1987, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1996, pp.xvii and 196.
Lloyd Ross was born into a socialist family and spent his life in the Australian labour movement. His political record defies conventional categories - a member of the Communist Party during the second half of the thirties, he later became a thorough anti-Communist. But this was not a simple case of 'The God that Failed'. Stephen Holt's biography provides abundant material on a complex figure.
In the 1920s Ross's socialist idealism had to come to terms with the pessimism on the Australian Left precipitated by the divisions of the War and the subsequent establishment of conservative supremacy. Influenced by the Welsh socialist and educationalist, Mark Starr, he studied in England as a post-graduate, worked in New Zealand as an adult-education tutor, and then returned to Australia at the start of 1933. His innovative approach and sheer vitality as a tutor for the Newcastle Workers' Education Association attracted the attention of Left activists. His espousal of the strategy of a broad anti-fascist coalition strengthened left support in his successful candidacy for the secretaryship of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Railway Union in September 1935. Shortly afterwards he joined the Communist Party, motivated in part by the indifference of several leading labour figures to the challenge posed to progressives by the Abyssinian crisis.
Holt emphasises Ross's achievements in the ARU and plays down his Communist membership. Railway workers had lacked industrial confidence in New South Wales since the defeat of the 1917 strike; in the late thirties Ross pursued a strategy of seeking advances on specific issues and combined this with a firm advocacy of the United Front against fascism. This combination ensured the support of the left within the ARU, but it began to unravel as the Communist Party shifted away from its initial pro-war position. Initially Ross expressed doubts to just a few friends, but following the fall of France, his concerns about the Communist position deepened and were complemented by an assessment that the ARU was weakened by controversy over the war. Most fundamentally, he felt that labour unity had to be maintained, an acute consideration in New South Wales with its record of factionalism and splits. By September 1940, Ross had been expelled from the Communist Party; profiting from factional realignments in the ARU, he used all the resources of his office to marginalise former allies.
His political model had become British intellectuals, such as John Strachey, who had abandoned support for a Labour-Communist alliance, and instead saw the war as the springboard for a radical social reconstruction. Ross placed his hopes in the federal administration of John Curtin and in September 1943, having left the ARU, he became Director of Public Relations in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction. His hopes that Labour post-war strategy might promote far-reaching reforms remained unfulfilled; he found the Party's agenda lacking both coherence and radicalism.
As post-war difficulties increased and some unions became more combative, Ross moved to a more combative anti-Communist position. He found shared values with the social catholicism of Bob Santamaria and moved closer to the Industrial Groups, committed anti-Communist factions within individual unions. He worked with the ARU leadership to help undercut the 1949 miners' strike — a tactic that brought him into open conflict with his Communist brother, Edgar, the editor of the Miners' Federation newspaper. It all seemed like the classic trajectory of the Communist renegade, especially when Ross's subsequent Presidency of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom is included.
Yet the saga contained two further twists. As the leadership of the Australian Labour Party became more hostile to the factionalism of the Groups, Ross refused to support a breakaway party. He reacted to the Democratic Labour project in 1956 as he had reacted to Communist inspired fragmentation in 1940. Moreover, in 1952, following the ending of his public service post, Ross, now backed by Groupers, regained his ARU position. Gradually members became frustrated by a relative decline in wages and reacted to the threat of job losses through technical change and rationalisation. Ross responded; by the sixties he was canalising and articulating militant sentiments, although unlike the thirties, the union did not shift politically to the left.
The detail of Holt's account is impressive, but the narrative does not address the key analytical questions. Were Ross's political shifts the result of opportunism, vanity, principle? It is salutary to read a biography which suggests that viewing the past through conventional political boundaries may make the past seem more tidy than it was; but it is certainly the case that as Ross knew all too well, those who repeatedly ignored boundaries, were typically anathema to former comrades. The account suggests little about Ross's motivations; he remains something of an enigma, viewed very much from the outside.
There remains the issue of distinctiveness. Such intellectual journeys were not unique. John Strachey is one obvious case; Clifford Allen, pacifist, ILP intellectual and supporter of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 is another. In neither case, does a simple claim of apostasy fit. Ross, nevertheless, differs in one critical respect — his trade union activities. Arguably it was his work in the ARU in the late thirties that contributed most effectively to a United Front with significant, albeit local, achievements to its credit; and from 1952 his further involvement in the union helped to ensure that his politics moved back to the centre of the labour movement. It is perhaps in the insights offered by this idiosyncratic figure into trade union factionalism that this book makes its most significant achievement.
