Index
Contents: This Issue
Search CHNN
CHNN Home
The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality
Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality,St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998, ISBN 1 86448 580 9: xii & 482pp, Australian $49.95.
In some ways the writing of the history of a communist party has become more straightforward. Though research costs can be prohibitive, the Moscow archives are easily enough worked once one gets to them and the business of empirical extraction has already expanded enormously our knowledge of the Comintern period. As a result, basic narratives and data are now more accessible for the communists than for many other social movements that were better supported. This first volume of what promises to be a comprehensive history of the Australian CP thus takes its place among a new crop of national party histories which are authoritative in ways previously unattainable.
Methodologically, the issues are not quite so simple. The very abundance and obsessiveness of this Comintern documentation can defy any sense of historical perspective. Descriptive accounts are made that much easier, but their meaning and wider relevance can prove obstinate and elusive. The rationale for institutional histories, though the footnotes lie there just waiting to be written up, is undermined as much by changing historiographical agendas as by the diminishing significance attached to the lines and pronouncements of these institutions in particular. The high politics of parties that never got very high will not bear infinite exploration. The task of addressing the wider challenges of a labour, social or cultural history, and yet doing so within the narrative framework of a 'communist party history', is truly a formidable one.
That Stuart Macintyre nevertheless succeeds in this objective testifies both to his own accomplishments as a historian and perhaps to the relatively manageable dimensions of his subject. To those interested in British communism he is familiar as author of two seminal works, both of which enlarged the scope of British CP history while setting exacting standards for its future practitioners. To this breadth of approach Macintyre adds a commanding knowledge of the sources for Australian CP history, and thus the ability to use with discrimination and a real sense of historical context the distinctive perspectives of the Moscow archives. As well as drawing on numerous memoirs and a wide range of oral, printed and archival sources, his account is enlivened by what was evidently a flourishing literary culture and by a generous provision of contemporary illustrations. Although the structure is largely determined by the customary strategic landmarks, the discursive approach he adopts allows unhurried explorations of specific locales and milieux, and the movement's social texture and human motivation are captured with an impressive sense of empathy and engagement. That approach could easily have made for a meandering and putdownable read. It is a tribute to Macintyre's considerable literary skill that the opposite is the case.
While any Comintern historian will gather much from this book, it will have a particular interest for British readers. Migratory movements between the two countries, mainly of course into Australia, combined with certain evident comparabilities of social and political context to provide a number of fascinating parallels. In its relative affluence, the apparent violence of its industrial relations and the centrality to the labour movement of the issue of race, Australia perhaps bears more fruitful comparison with the US, and the CPA, like the US labour movement, was confronted with its own indigenous theory of 'Australian exceptionalism'. On the other hand, in its relations to a dominant Labour Party, a unitary trade union movement and a palpably non-revolutionary situation, the CPA confronted many of the same dilemmas as the CPGB. That they very often hit on comparable strategies and vocabularies obviously says something of the common world leadership to which both parties deferred, and there are striking moments of synchronisation that need some explaining if one is to stress the indigenous determinants of formal communist policy. Conversely, there are just as clearly evident patterns of cross-fertilisation which both predated and in some measure survived the less spontaneous networks of the communist era. One notes for example the existence in Australia as well as Britain of a Plebs League and labour college movement, with which both communist parties wrestled in the 1920s, and the use even in CP education of the texts by Mark Starr and the Webbs. Evidently it was by much the same sort of process that the expatriate Scots and Geordies of the CPA's Lithgow branch, one of its strongest, initiated a Miners' Minority Movement on the British model. One of them, Bill Orr, whose Lanarkshire mother had declared 'what a fane meenister oor Wullie would have made', subsequently became the Minority Movement's organiser (and later secretary of the Miners' Federation), where his tendencies to trade union legalism were abetted by Harry Pollit's one time associate, Esmonde Higgins. That is just to take a single example. More generally one could maybe posit a common labour movement orientation by which both the Australian and British parties were arguably distinguished from some other sections of the Comintern. Both, at least in the 1920s, proudly affirmed their proletarian composition, and both admitted, as a defining virtue or shortcoming depending on the party line, a 'grim patience in trade union detail work' (p.131).
These are questions which, as John Manley suggested in the last Newsletter, would bear more detailed consideration. At the CPA's tenth congress in 1931, almost as many delegates had been born in Britain and Ireland as Australia, and the special prominence of Scots makes for some interesting comparisons with the Canadian examples given by Manley, reinforcing his case for a study of the 'radical British diaspora' of the inter-war years. In Australia, as Macintyre clearly shows, these linkages and common origins were not invariably productive of fellow-feeling alone. Like others in Britain's colonies and dominions, the CPA's leaders could resent the assumption by the CPGB of metropolitan prerogatives and it was even mooted that their party be relocated from the CI's Anglo-American secretariat to the Eastern secretariat which included Japan and China. That relationship, strangely paralleling the British party's resentment at the superior posture of some European communists, makes the British party an intriguing case: peripheral in some ways to the larger parties of continental Europe, but also a possible channel of funding and directives to what it could too easily assume to be its own sphere of influence.
With this fascinating and densely documented history, I had just one difficulty. Just because it is so useful for the communist historians elsewhere, it is a pity that it rather takes for granted an Australian readership. Maps and statistical tables would have provided a helpful reference point for the discussions of membership, electoral performance and geographical distribution, and a sense of the distinctive and not so distinctive traits of the CPA would have been easier to grasp if relevant data had been brought together in summary form. Perhaps that it just this reviewer's confession of ignorance as to Australian labour history. Certainly it doesn't detract from what is an achievement of the highest order, which will again set a daunting standard for any comparable treatment of the CPGB.
