The fight for workers' power

Revolution and counter-revolution in the 20th century

Tom Bramble, Mick Armstrong

• Publisher: Interventions Inc
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780648760368
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

The horrors of 20th century capitalism threw up numerous challenges by workers and peasants, who rose up in their millions to fight the system. Inspired by the successful 1917 Russian Revolution, they repeatedly created their own institutions of collective power and in doing so demonstrated not just how to organise their struggles in the present but also how to build a world free of capitalists, landlords and generals.

But these revolutionary movements quickly confronted counter-revolutionary forces, both in the repressive machinery of the state and in the workers' movement itself - trade union and political leaders with no interest in seeing workers take power. Defeating such forces required that at least the leading militants be organised in revolutionary parties dedicated to seeing the struggle through. The victorious Russian revolution brought hundreds of thousands of working class militants together in new Communist parties dedicated to working class emancipation, but tragically the revolution's defeat at the hands of the dictator Joseph Stalin turned these parties into vehicles for betrayal.

From Britain to China, from Hungary to Australia, this book tells the story of these inspiring working class struggles and uprisings and recounts the fights within the workers movement over strategies and tactics to take the struggles forward.

STALINISM
AND
ANTI-STALINISM
AFTER
WORLD WAR II

15.

POST-WAR UPSURGE IN AUSTRALIA AND THE COMMUNIST CHALLENGE

After World War II, hopes were high among civilians and returned soldiers alike for a new world order in peacetime. There could be no return to the horrors of the Great Depression and its aftermath – the tens of millions thrown onto the scrapheap, the triumph of fascism and the butchery of war. These hopes were highest in those countries that had been occupied by the Axis powers (Chapter 14), but they were also widespread in the victorious Allied powers. In Britain, workers turned on Churchill’s Conservatives at the 1945 general election and delivered Labour a big majority for the first time. In the US, strikes swept the country. But Australian workers stand out for their militancy at this time. They fought for several years for shorter working hours, higher wages, improved annual leave and more control over work. Mostly, they won. Union membership soared.¹

The situation presented the CPA with big opportunities to win an audience among worker militants. However, the CPA did little to seize the moment; it gave a lead in some important strikes but did not launch a broader offensive. This changed in 1948 when, at Moscow’s behest, the party jagged left. In this later period, the CPA began to believe it could replace the Labor Party’s dominance in the working class by leading aggressive political strikes. This project was not realistic, even in the immediate postwar years. By 1948, however, in a Cold War environment and with a more confident right, victories were harder to win. The CPA’s ambition to overtake the ALP led it to overreach itself at a time when it was isolated in the labour movement. Its misorientation contributed to the defeat of a major battle in the coal mines which set back the workers’ movement and helped consolidate the rightward shift in Australian society.

The balance of forces in 1945

Historian Tom Sheridan gives a sense of working class attitudes at the end of the war:

All members of the work force retained vivid, and usually bitter, memories of the depression years. This meant not only that the victims of that economic disaster were determined that it should never happen again, but also that the attitude of organised labour was coloured by a desire for something akin to revenge, for a squaring of those industrial and social accounts left suspended with the outbreak of war. This time, it was felt, the bosses, the financiers, or however ‘they’ might be described, were not going to get away with it.²

The two main union demands were a 40-hour week and a rise in the Basic Wage. Coal miners had already won 40 hours in 1940 and in 1944, printers at Sydney newspapers struck and won shorter hours. Unions now pushed for a 40-hour week for all and an end to wartime wage restraint.

Bosses in private industry were in no position to withstand workers’ demands. With low unemployment and shortages of skilled labour, workers’ bargaining power was strong. Employers’ identification with the unjust prewar political and economic order only discredited them. With a few important exceptions, they were on the defensive, both industrially and politically.

Labor governments and the industrial tribunals were the main impediment to workers’ victories in the immediate postwar years. Prime Minister Ben Chifley committed to continuing wartime austerity, ignoring Labor conference resolutions to meet workers’ demands on pay and working hours and shunting union claims off to tribunals. The tribunals proved tortuously slow. Workers turned to strike action on a massive scale.

Mainstream union leaders were useless. The ACTU’s Albert Monk and Percy Clarey, backed by the Victorian Trades Hall Council’s Vic Stout and the NSW Labor Council’s Jim Kenny, were keener to defend the Chifley government and its state Labor counterparts than to fight for workers’ interests. Most union officials wanted nothing more than a quiet life; others were ideologically opposed to direct action. They preferred lobbying the ALP and making submissions to the industrial tribunals as a way of obtaining modest gains. But workers would not let them rest easy. Strikes broke out both in the traditional militant hotspots and also among usually quiescent groups, including waiters, bakers and postal and pastoral workers.

Nor were Communist union leaders leading the charge, although media coverage sought to blame them. The CPA was certainly a force in the labour movement. It reached the high-water mark of its influence in the unions in the immediate postwar years. It was well represented on the floor of ACTU Congresses and on its executive; it led five trades and labour councils, including the Queensland Trades and Labour Council. On one estimate, it counted 50 full-time and 250 part-time union officials in its ranks. The party had grown during the war and, while some recruits melted away fairly quickly in the last months of the war, it still had 16,000 members in the winter of 1945, a sizeable party by Australian standards. Membership fell further by 1947, to 12,000, but with the party’s fair-weather friends quitting, the CPA became a harder and more serious organisation, both in terms of its ability to intervene in industrial disputes and its commitment to Stalinism.

The Russian leaders, however, made no effort to encourage the CPA to use this influence in the unions to aggressively champion strikes. The CPA was hardly a priority for Stalin in 1945, given the other demands on the Russian leader’s time. More generally, though, Stalin at this time was attempting to maintain a working relationship with the British and US leaders to ensure that the agreed-upon division of wartime spoils went ahead smoothly. Russia had demonstrated its credentials during the war when it dissolved the Comintern in 1943 and formally renounced its call for revolution in the West. Collaboration between the wartime allies was still obvious at the Yalta conference in February 1945. Although relations between the Big 3 began to sour at the Potsdam conference in July, as the big imperialist powers fought over spheres of influence in Germany, Russia at this stage was not seeking to bring on a wider fight with its former wartime allies, as its intervention in Italy and Greece demonstrated (Chapter 14).

If the Russians were not pushing for a left turn in the Western Communist parties, they also wanted to prevent them from veering too far to the right and losing their identity as independent organisations. The risk was clearest in the US party where general secretary Earl Browder had taken Popular Front politics to their logical conclusion and dissolved the party, renaming it the ‘Communist Political Association.’ It was to act as a pressure group on the Democratic Party. The CPUSA also backed extending the wartime ban on strikes. In Britain, the CPGB argued that the wartime Conservative–Labour coalition should be returned to office at the July 1945 general election – when workers were preparing to sweep Labour to power in its own right. Forced by Labour’s smashing victory to modify its approach, the CPGB became virtually uncritical supporters of the Attlee Government.

This tendency by the US and British Communists to orient too closely to their ‘own’ ruling class rather than to Moscow was not helpful to Stalin. These parties, even if relatively small, could still serve as one more weapon in Russia’s diplomatic armoury. Stalin launched a campaign through a proxy, PCF leader Jacques Duclos, to fight this tendency, which resulted in Browder’s removal as general secretary in February 1946.

Such international factors helped to shape the thinking of the CPA leaders in 1945: neither to aggressively attack the Australian ruling class, nor to drift to the right. An attempt by FIA leader Ernie Thornton to liquidate the Australian party, on the lines of Browderism, was roundly rejected. Local factors came into play as well. The CPA had grown strongly during the war when it backed the Curtin government. From the perspective of CPA leaders, there did not seem to be any great advantage to be gained from breaking with this approach. ‘Constructive criticism’ of the Chifley government was emphasised, and the CPA continued to support the return of Labor at elections. When in March 1946, Victorian party secretary Jack Blake tried to steer the party to a more critical approach to the ALP, stating in the draft of a resolution to the state conference that ‘Workers will gain from Labor governments, only what they unite, organise, and fight for,’ he was condemned by the rest of the national leadership for his ‘left sectarianism’ and the offending sentence was struck out. The CPA’s industrial approach was also marked by moderation. Party members were urged to oppose any attempt to use strikes to break Labor’s wartime wages controls and labour regulations. The postwar strike wave was not, therefore, the result of any adventurism on the part of the CPA, despite media assertions.

The final element in the postwar alignment of forces was the Industrial Groups, set up in 1945 by the NSW ALP in a bid to challenge CPA control over important unions. Initially united only in their hostility to Stalinist control, they were fairly politically mixed. Members ranged from the Catholic Right of the party to Nick Origlass’s Trotskyist group ...