Honeymoon over:
The collapse of the left coalition
By Bob Gould
Introduction
Socialists and the Vietnam antiwar movement of the 1960 and
1970s
The recent movement against the imperialist war on Iraq was
the
biggest such movement the world has seen. There has been some dismay
that it seems to have ebbed as quickly as it appeared. The Vietnam
antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s also surged and ebbed
several times in the course of a very long struggle.
During that great upsurge there were many political
experiences,
arguments and conflicts, one of which we make available here: an
exchange between Denis Freney and myself in the pages of The Old
Mole,
a leftist underground newspaper that was published out of Sydney
University in 1970, at a crucial time in the antiwar struggle.
The Old Mole was frankly imitative of the London
newspaper of the time, Red Mole. Both names hark back to Marx's
image, first used in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
of the revolution as
a mole burrowing quietly below ground and breaking to the surface
occasionally, at which time: "Europe will leap from its seat and exult:
'Well burrowed, old mole!'"
The Old Mole Workers Council, which published the newspaper,
included Hall Greenland, Keith Windschuttle, Warren Osmond, Cathy
Crawley and others. The paper lasted eight issues, and was pretty
popular during its short life.
The exchange between myself and Denis Freney, along with the
open
letter about the organisation of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign,
reflects the tension between political struggle by various currents,
and co-operation in a common cause, that characterised the Vietnam
antiwar movement over a very long time.
The exchange was sharpened by the fact that Denis and I were
immediate contemporaries and old associates who had eventually fallen
out due to our different political trajectories.
Denis later wrote his autobiography, A Map of Days, in
the early 1990s, before his early death, which included a rather
unflattering view of myself. Denis was a good hater and he and I were
both pretty robust polemicists.
We later debated some of the issues in his autobiography at a
rather
rowdy meeting attended by about 200 people in the Harold Park Hotel,
which Anne Curthoys described in a witty article in Arena.
The political relationship between Freney and myself, and our
common
mentor, the veteran Australian Trotskyist Nick Origlass, is also
covered in Hall Greenland's exceedingly useful biography of Nick, Red
Hot.
Two alternative views of the complicated history of the
development
of the antiwar movement in Australia, from the point of view of the
official left, are left Labor MP Tom Uren's lengthy autobiography, Straight
left, and the recent biography of former Labor deputy prime
minister Jim Cairns by Paul Strangio, called Keeper of the faith.
Both of these accounts are heavily biased in favour of the
official
left view of the time, but taken together with other material they are
of some value.
This exchange between myself and Denis is of some historical
significance because it includes a detailed discussion of the internal
dynamics of the Moratorium movement, which grew into the largest
antiwar mobilisation up to that time, and was only recently surpassed
by the recent mobilisation against the Iraq war, on February 16.
Denis Freney, who sadly died prematurely in the early 1990s,
is
quite properly remembered most for his energetic and intelligent
agitation against the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 and his
support of the Timorese people in the years thereafter.
The Communist Party of Australia, of which Freney had just
become a
vigorous leader at the time of this exchange, had during the Stalin
period usually been on the extreme left of international Stalinism. It
carried on this tradition in its anti-Stalinist phase and became for a
relatively brief period the most leftist of the "Euro-communist"
parties. For a more complete view of the CPA's history and evolution,
see The
Communist Party of Australia in Australian Life and Stewart
MacIntyre's The Reds: A Review.
After this period of relative "leftism", some of it rhetorical
ultraleftism, the CPA swung over in 1978-82 to being the main
ideological inventor of the Prices and Incomes Accord between the
incoming Labor government of Bob Hawke and the trade union movement,
This dramatic shift to the right was effectively political suicide for
the CPA as a current, and those CPA leaders of the 1960s, such as Eric
Aarons, who are in some sense still politically active, now explicitly
reject the socialist project of the 20th century as a quixotic
aberration.
Nevertheless, at the moment of this exchange the CPA was still
a
powerful force, which recruited a layer of the more conservative
left-wing students, many of whom are now prominent in social service
organisations, academic life, government bureaucracies and the trade
unions.
A useful and interesting biography of someone out of the CPA
milieu
of this period is Brad Norrington's biography of Jennie George, former
president of the ACTU, now a federal Labor MP.
One wing of the more leftist participants in the struggle
described
went on to the form the Socialist Workers League, which later became
the Socialist Workers Party, and then the Democratic Socialist Party.
Many of the people most closely associated with me went on to found the
Socialist Labour League, which operated successfully for about 15 years
until it more or less definitively imploded in 1986.
There was a moment in the mid-late 1970s when the CPA
newspaper, Tribune, still sold 6000-7000 copies, the SWP
newspaper, Direct Action, was selling a similar number and so
was the SLL newspaper Workers News,
which means between them socialist newspapers were selling about 20,000
Australia-wide. That approached the level of the CPA's sales of its
press at its peak during in the late 1940s.
One curious feature of The Old Mole was an article by
Keith
Windschuttle, now a propagandist for the political right, in which he
repeatedly describes the police as "pigs", in the uninhibited style of
that time. Maybe we'll put up that article sometime just to remind
Brother Windshuttle of his earlier views.
July 18, 2003
Honeymoon over:
The decline and fall of the left coalition
From The Old Mole, No 3, June 29, 1970
Just over a year ago, over the four halcyon days of Easter
1969, the
ultra-modern Teachers Federation auditorium in Sussex Street, Sydney,
was the scene of the optimistically titled Left Action Conference. This
intriguing gathering produced primarily by the organising genius of the
Aarons faction of the Communist Party, drew an audience of 700, mostly
student radicals, but including a couple of hundred working-class
militants.
Papers were delivered by a motley collection of leftists:
Laurie
Aarons (CPA secretary), Bob Gould, Jack Heffernan of the Sheet Metal
Workers Union (now ALP federal conference delegate), Dan O'Neill, Peter
Wertheim, Denis Freney (then Revolutionary Socialist Alliance
secretary, now Tribune journalist), Brian Laver, John Baker and
Laurie Carmichael of the Victorian Amalgamated Engineering Union.
"Franc Tireurs", Albert Langer and Darce Cassidy and their Bakery Battalions1
were prominent in the audience in self-inflicted guerilla role,
conducting People's War in their jungle greens against all and sundry
on the platform.
This weekend was the political debut of immaculately dressed,
self-proclaimed New Leftist Ken McLeod, who as conference organiser
dominated the proceedings with that finely modulated air of unctuous
omniscience that has since become so lovably familiar to activists in
the recent Vietnam Moratorium.
Verbal hot air
The most striking feature of this gathering was the
extraordinary
lengths to which the Aarons faction of the Communist Party was prepared
to go to curry favour with the student radicals. In particular, they
were enraptured over silver-tongued, charismatic Brian Laver, Brisbane
student leader, whose rousing speeches for "occupation of the
factories", "action committees as instruments of dual power", and the
like, were greeted with thunderous applause.
The following incident defined the atmosphere of the Left
Action
Conference perfectly. Laver moved a resolution that all future antiwar
activity should have as its central proposition: "Support the National
Liberation Front of South Vietnam".
Local Sydney bogeyman Bob Gould moved an amendment to this
motion
that the central proposition should be the withdrawal of all troops
from Vietnam. The Aarons faction overwhelmingly supported Laver's
proposition, strictly on the understanding, however, that it was only a
lot of verbal hot air at a left gathering, in the good old Communist
Party tradition.
As Max Ogden (CPA national committee member) retorted to
somebody
who was amused at the way he was voting: "Support the NLF is all right
at a left conference."
Communist Party hostility was reserved for groups like
Resistance
and the Monash Labour Club, and individuals like Bob Gould and Albert
Langer, who set themselves, from different points of the political
spectrum, in deliberate opposition the CPA, and are guilty of the awful
crime, in the eyes of the CPA, of having built independent political
structures separate from, and even in opposition to, the CPA.
Towards all the other radical student groups, no matter how
eccentric their political posture, the CPA at this time maintained an
attitude of total sweetness and light in the interests of trying to
co-opt them into the CPA.
The Revolutionary Socialist Alliance
At this time, most of the radical youth and student groups
were loosely associated in a ramshackle national coalition known as the
RSA, which was set up with high hopes in 1969.
From its foundation this group was polarised into warring
factions
around a number of questions, the most determinant of which proved to
be relations with the Aarons wing of the CPA.
While no one in the RSA disputed that the political positions
held
by the Aarons faction were better than those of their neanderthal
Stalinist opponents in the CPA, the Resistance wing of the RSA
distrusted the depth of the Aarons faction's new-found anti-Stalinism
and doubted their political good intentions in view of the fact that,
for instance, the Aarons faction insisted that the Communist Party was
to remain monolithic, and that they were to remain the only legally
recognised faction in the party.
It follows from this view of the CPA that the role of the
revolutionary socialists (and the RSA) was to build an independent
organisation around a correct policy, essentially in political
competition with the CPA in much the same way, in fact, as Resistance
had been proceeding for some years, with a certain measure of success.
The opposition to this view was spearheaded by RSA secretary,
schoolmaster Denis Freney, the perambulating Gestetner of the left,
author of 231 separate open letters and other pieces of duplicated
ephemera. Freney argued that Stalinism in the Communist Party was now
definitively defeated and that the RSA should make a speedy junction
with the CPA.
He was supported in this, but less emphatically, and with some
qualifications, by his own group, International, and by Brian Laver and
the Brisbane RSA.
At the height of this political dispute, just after the Left
Action
Conference, a fruity old bricks-and-mortar conflict of interests
developed between, on the one hand, the Third World Bookshop-Resistance
complex and on the other the Young Socialist League (the then declining
and now defunct CP youth organisation) and Denis Freney jointly, over
the tenancy of a vacant building directly opposite the Resistance
premises in Goulburn Street, Sydney, on which the lease was shortly due
to expire.
Amid clouds of mutual abuse and recrimination, the Third
World-Resistance complex got the lease, this ensuring their continuity
in the Goulburn Street locality, which their previous two years of
subversive activity and busts by the cops had put on the map.
Needless to say, the SP was a bit peeved at not becoming
painless legatees to the desirable Goulburn Street address.
This dispute added a rather acrimonious touch to the already
existing conflict in the RSA, and the final national conference of that
body in September was a rather wing-ding, noisy affair, drawn up on
extremely factional lines, with the ultraleft politics of Brian Laver
receiving support from Freney, and a number of second-rank CPA leaders,
like Brian Aarons, who had by now joined the RSA.
Once again they voted against the vehement opposition of
Gould, the
Percy brothers and the rest of the Resistance faction, for the
proposition that support for the NLF should be the central slogan for
all antiwar activity.
After this conference the RSA quietly faced away, more or less
by mutual agreement, the roneod RSA communications from Freney becoming
less frequent, and finally ceasing in early 1970.
The Moratorium
The area of radical political interest now shifted to the
antiwar
movement. In Sydney in 1969 there had been a slow re-emergence of
antiwar activity in Sydney, primarily in the form of Sydney
University-based downtown marches. The most notable of these was the
Worker-Student demonstration of April 23 (also notable for being
ineffectually redbaited by Michael Cornelius Hetherington Karate Jones).
During this period the older, more conservative antiwar
organisations had been completely quiescent in terms of demonstrations.
The Resistance coalition sent out a call for a December
Mobilisation
Against the War in Vietnam on December 15 around the central slogan of
withdrawal of all foreign troops from Vietnam.
Predictably, they were attacked by Denis Freney and the Aarons
faction of the CPA for not making the central slogan support for the
NLF. What little publicity or subsequent coverage this demonstration
received from the CPA paper, Tribune, was quite hostile.
However, the demonstration was energetically organised and
publicised, and turned out to be the biggest antiwar demonstration held
in Sydney during 1969. The very definite emergence of a previously
unorganised layer of antiwar youth underlined the new possibilities for
the antiwar movement.
CPA somersault
After the December demonstration, all radical political groups
put
their efforts into preparations for the May 1970 Vietnam Moratorium,
which because of its extremely broad sponsorship, provided the
opportunity for a massive antiwar action.
Immediately preparations for the Vietnam Moratorium commenced,
one
of those quaint 180-degree turns, for which the Communist Party is so
famous, became apparent.
All over Australia, despite their primitive rhetoric about
support
for the NLF, the CPA (and Denis Freney) emerged as among the most
articulate exponents of the extremely sensible proposition that the
Moratorium's central slogan should be withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.
Predictably, those radical student groups that had been so
ardently
wooed by the CPA over the previous 12 months with the CPA's rhetorical
support for the NLF line, were at first somewhat perplexed by the CPA's
cynical, extremely swift and, it must be said, opportunistically
shrewd, somersault.
To make the student groups' outrage even more intense, in the
factional struggles that developed during the Moratorium, the CPA took
advantage of the unpopularity of the pro-NLF rhetoric of the radical
student groups, played extremely subtly on the resentment that this
engendered among trade unionists, liberals and pacifists, and almost
effortlessly elbowed the radical student groups aside.
In Queensland, Victoria and South Australia they ensured that
the AICD, CICD and CPV2
— structures based on left-wing trade union leaderships, and academic
and religious liberals, and within which the CPA was the only really
politically organised force — took complete physical control of the
running of the Moratorium.
In all these states, AICD, CICD and CPV offices were the
offices of
the Moratorium, but in Victoria this organisational fact was not quite
so significant because of the enormous role played by the independent
intervention of the Victorian ALP and the personal role of Labor MP Jim
Cairns.
Only in NSW did the AICD structure and the CP feel too
insecure to
force the issue of AICD running the Moratorium, largely because of the
vociferous demands for an independent coalition-type Moratorium
structure, put up by the NSW youth groups. These groups had a much
bigger mass base in the antiwar movement due to their initiative in
this sphere over the previous five years, and because they had
successfully fought against being forced by the CPA to use support for
the NLF as a mobilising slogan.
The Moratorium in NSW acquired a separate office, with some
full-time staff from organisations other than AICD.
The Moratorium, given a massive impulse, as it was, by the
Cambodian
events, was a tremendous political success, both in terms of the
enormous number of people who turned out and the way this forced itself
on public consciousness through the spectacular occupations of the main
streets during peak hours on Friday in Sydney and Melbourne.
However, the negative side of the Moratorium experience, in
the
relative inability of the revolutionary groups to effectively present
anti-imperialist politics to the vast numbers of people who had taken
the first step of opposition to the Vietnam War, dominated
post-Moratorium analysis among the revolutionary youth groups.
The CPA congress and the Socialist Scholars Conference
At the CPA congress3,
fortified by their complete control of the party apparatus, the Aarons
faction virtually wiped out their opponents in the leadership and
adopted innovating documents, which were an eclectic mish-mash of just
about every "new idea" floating around the radical world.
However, the CPA hung on brutally to the prerogatives of
monolithic
leadership of the party, spelled out that no factionalism would be
allowed, and in all the congress was a pretty dreary affair that
alienated the large numbers of non-CPA student radicals who were
invited to it.
Several of these published criticisms of the CPA after the
congress,
and in the event the sole notable recruit the CP gained in the
post-congress period was the ever-optimistic former Trotskyist Denis
Freney, who was appointed a full-time journalist on Tribune at
the same national committee meeting that ratified his admission to the
CPA.
During this period, the final kick of the dying CPA youth
group, the
Young Socialist League, took place. The sole functioning YSL branch in
Sydney was instrumental in setting up a new headquarters in Glebe,
known as the Radical Action Centre, or Barricades, in a large, old
building with a shopfront.
No sooner had the headquarters been set up than a dispute over
perspectives erupted, with the activists in the RAC and most of the
residents of the premises (who it might be noted had been some of the
CPA cannon-fodder in the crazy zigzags over support for the NLF) in
conflict with the YSL leadership and the CPA.
The RAC activists wished the centre to become primarily a
local radical community action centre in coalition with other radical
youth groups.
The CPA and part of the leadership of the YSL wished to use
the
centre as a base to maintain the fiction of the YSL's existence as a
national youth group in opposition to the other youth groups.
The minority of the RAC, however, were heartily sick of the
way they
had been used in the past by the CPA in factional warfare with other
youth groups.
Over the May vacation the disputatiously named Socialist
Scholars
Conference took place in Sydney. This gathering, which attracted more
students and academics than the Left Action Conference, but less
industrial workers, was organised on a totally independent basis by
Phil Sandford, a rather taciturn independent Marxist who was deported a
year or so ago from the US for his activities in Students for a
Democratic Society.
From the start, the SSC was the subject of mild disfavour from
the CPA because of Sandford's determination to import as keynote
speaker for the conference Ernest Mandel, Belgian Trotskyist economist,
who he heard at the American Socialist Scholars Conference, and who had
impressed him.
The CPA was really rather hostile to the idea of any such
gathering
taking place other than under its control, an attitude that only served
to accentuate the incipient tendency towards independence on the part
of the SSC.
The conference, which had a number of structural weaknesses,
was a
rather rowdy affair. The most striking feature of it was the rather
ultraleftist, voluntarist, activist mood of the bulk of the student
participants.
Intellectually, the keynote of the gathering was the brilliant
"system building" a joint tour de force by Bruce McFarlane and Humphrey
McQueen, who launched a far-ranging attack on all existent left-wing
intellectual achievements and sketched out an extremely voluntarist
version of Marxism, which in a half-digested form proved immediately
popular with many of the student activists.
An extremely important polemic developed between them on the
one
hand and people such as Geoff Sharp, Bob Gollan and Bob Gould, on the
question of Marxist method.
One striking feature of the SSC was the complete isolation of
the
CPA as a political current among the student vanguard. CPA leaders
seldom spoke, and came in for constant criticism from all directions by
participants in the debates.
The SSC, despite its defects, was the largest and most serious
intellectual exchange between the major currents in the Australian
student vanguard had yet held, and the CPA was clearly not a major
current in this context.
CPA pulls out the hatchet
The CPA's reaction to all these events was more or less
inevitable.
In all the post-Moratorium comments in Tribune, a
major motif
was denunciation of student ultraleftists in the Moratorium, including
such coy Stalinist amalgams as the one used by Eric Aarons in an
article in which he bracketed unnamed anarchists with an unnamed
"Fourth Internationalist" who was accused of saying: "I don't care
where I fucking well go, as long as there is violence".
A rather despicable broadside was launched against erstwhile
pin-up boy Brian Laver in the June 24 Tribune,
which along with political criticism contained the filthiest attack
this writer has ever seen in an allegedly working-class paper, ie an
assertion, clearly based on the employer's account of events, that
Laver was sacked from a job not because of Moratorium activities but
because the workers asked the boss to get rid of him (an argument that
labour movement militants will recognise as one not infrequently used
by employers).
Bernie Taft of the Victorian CPA wrote a long attack on the
Socialist Scholars' Conference repeating, without acknowledgement,
methodological criticisms of McFarlane and McQueen made by others,
mainly opponents of the CPA, at the conference, and accusing all and
sundry present of anti-Communism for their political attacks on the
CPA. Taft also bewailed the fact that the student activists didn't
display the slightest interest in the CPA's eclectic congress documents.
The first day of Freney's new Tribune job witnessed
the appearance in Tribune
of a rather bizarre full-page article denouncing Resistance, Student
Underground, university Labour Clubs, Third World Bookshop and Bob
Gould for numerous political crimes.
A rather interesting feature of this petulant article was the
assertion, tacked on the end, that all the revolutionary youth groups
opposed to the CPA were objectively counter-revolutionary, and the even
more interesting promise of more articles to come on other
counter-revolutionary youth groups.
The latest Australian Left Review contains another
equally
petulant article by Eric Aarons, bewailing the fact that no one had
joined the CPA since the congress and attacking Resistance, Socialist
Review, the International group, Osmond, Rowley, the MLs and assorted
others.
The Aarons faction, having defeated its opposition in the CPA,
is
preparing to expel them when they produce their own ultra-Stalinist
newspaper, which is about to appear.
To that end, Tribune has been full of denunciations of
the
pro-Russians for the awful crime in the Stalinist CPA of
"factionalism". This very desperate thrashing about in all directions
has two causes, one of which is the physical decline of the CPA.
The collapse of the YSL, the revolt at Barricades, and the
oppositional attitude of the radical student groups all block the
Aarons faction from getting real influence in the youth and student
movement.
On the other hand, although defeated by the Aarons faction
within the party apparatus, the Clancy
faction4 has the overwhelming sympathy of
the majority of the old, rather conservative, full-time left-wing trade
union officials and left-wing activists in the trade unions.
This layer has quietly separated itself from the CPA over the
past
year or so, and this withdrawal of support from Aarons by the previous
major base of CPA industrial support will become more or less complete
when the new ultra-Stalinist newspaper appears.
For instance, financial support for the CPA has dried up on
the
Sydney waterfront, at one time the party's major financial base in the
Sydney district, and no doubt most of that finance is now going towards
the Watt-Ross group5.
The only optimistic sign in the CPA's heaven is the political
gain
they have made out of their intervention as the most "sensible"
radicals in the Moratorium.
The payoff for this was shown, for instance, at the rather
well-attended AICD general meeting in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. The
Aarons faction pulled off the rather interesting feat of both vastly
expanding its public face on the AICD committee (new CPA committee
members elected include national committee members Mavis Robertson,
Jack Mundey, Laurie Carmichael and the ubiquitous Mr Freney) defeating
a number of candidates the CPA did not entirely trust, including
Building Workers Industrial Union president Frank O'Sullivan and BWIU
office worker Jenny Healey.
The CPA also persuaded influential non-CPA liberals, including
Sydney Morning Herald journalists and, for the first time
ever, two Catholic priests, to serve on the committee.
The vastly increased Aarons faction contingent is the only
organised radical group on the AICD committee.
At the Moratorium level, the Aarons faction has launched a
vigorous
struggle to ensure that the office for the next Moratorium, in
September, is located in the small AICD building.
However, the obvious nature of the Aaron's faction's push for
AICD
to assert full hegemony of the next Moratorium has produced widespread
alarm and opposition among the youth associated with the Moratorium.
A campaign launched by an Open
Letter to Moratorium Sponsors has been started to see that the next
Moratorium is organised by an open coalition, not dominated by the AICD.
This open letter, signed by a wide range of Moratorium
secretariat
members, activists in youth organisations, and by the editor of Honi Soit6
and Student Representative Council presidents at Sydney and New South
Wales universities, generated a tremendous response at the last
Moratorium sponsors' meeting in Sydney, attended by more than 150
people. The meeting was almost equally divided on the questions in
dispute.
The outcome of the developing trial of strength between the
Aarons
faction of the CPA and the revolutionary youth groups will depend, in
the final analysis, on the speed at which the revolutionary youth
movement can throw off the anarchistic spontaneism and elitism towards
the labour movement and the working class, which are the adolescent
deliriums of the radical youth movement.
The way in which the youth and student vanguard, in Sydney at
least,
has been able to shed some past errors and mediate existing factional
antagonisms sufficiently to erect a very determined common front for
democracy and independence within the framework of the Moratorium is an
excellent omen.
More than this, however, the vanguard youth groups desperately
need
to understand how to shed the radical rhetoric of the student movement
and commence a serious orientation towards the working class and the
labour movement, wherein lies the real answer to the problems of
building a revolutionary leadership in opposition to reformism and
Aarons-style Stalinism, and capable of leading Australia to socialism.
Denis Freney's response to Bob Gould, The Old Mole,
No 4, July 20, 1970.
Notes
1. The Bakery was headquarters for the
mainly
Maoist Worker Student Alliance, the main personalities of which were
Albert Langer, Darce Cassidy and Mike Hyde. It was a former bakery in
the inner-Melbourne suburb of Prahran.
2.Association
for International Co-operation and Disarmament (Sydney), Centre for
International Co-operation and Disarmament (Melbourne), Committee for
Peace in Vietnam (Adelaide)
3. The Easter 1970 congress of the
CPA.
4.
The Clancy faction was the extreme pro-Russian faction in the CPA that
supported the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, grouped around Building
Workers Industrial Union leader Pat
Clancy.
5. The Watt-Ross group was another
faction in the CPA that supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
6. Sydney University student newspaper.
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