A response to “The legacy of 1968”

Posted on April 2, 2024 by c21styork

Platypus Review 165 | April 2024

On June 24, 2023 at Trades Hall in Melbourne, Australia, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel on the legacy of 1968.^[1] The speakers included Andy Blunden, Alison Thorne, and Arthur Dent. Barry York provides his response to the panel.

HERE ARE MY RESPONSES to the questions put to the panelists.

How were you aware that what you were doing was something new compared to that of the Old Left of the 1930s and 40s?

We were developing in rebellion against the Old Left, i.e., the old Communist Party revisionists who consistently tried to block our anti-imperialist “red” politics on the grounds that they would alienate people and lose support for the Australian Labor Party whose election they said we needed to support.

The generational aspect to the rebellion was also in play. The Old Left were elderly people, whom we could respect for their past sacrifices and struggles, but they were culturally different, compared to the permissive values of most of the young rebels.

It was not that simple, though, as there were communist leaders like E. F. (Ted) Hill who, for all appearances was an “Old Left,” short-haired “suit,” yet he and his Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA (ML)) keenly supported and encouraged our rebellion and revolutionary politics. This made him and his party all the more attractive.

We were aware that we were doing something new because the Old Left leaders usually opposed us, ostensibly on tactical grounds but essentially because they opposed revolutionary politics. This became clearer through debate with them during practical struggles and campaigns.

How was this task transmitted and transformed?

In a couple of words: by direct confrontation with the Old Left revisionists and developing our own positive policies and strategies that bypassed them. There is such a thing as the spirit of the times, a Zeitgeist, and we helped create it, along with all the other rebels around the world. We developed ways of doing mass work and promoting actions that were based on our own self-reliant organizations, with our own printing machines, etc.

On the campus where I was active, we often bypassed the official Students Representative Council (SRC) and held unofficial mass meetings. These were usually larger in attendance than the official SRC general meetings and the SRC general meetings might just have a quorum of about 300 and that meeting would supposedly speak for all students. Yet our unofficial meetings made no claim to speak for anyone other than those who attended and voted. Our biggest unofficial general meeting was more than a thousand students, at a time when the campus student population was 2,500.

Which forms of theory and practice did you reach for and why?

Most of us embraced Marxism, but there was a smorgasbord of groups offering different takes on it. In Melbourne, the most influential for a few years was an orthodox Marxism that had been developed through China’s revolutionary experience and leadership into a Maoist position.

The notion of “cultural revolution” and “bombarding the headquarters” resonated with those of us who came to understand the dead-end that was revisionism and who felt the “deadening conformity and alienation” of life under capitalism, as panelist Alison Thorne described it.

There were academic Marxists who had done heaps of reading but they tended to be disconnected from actual struggle. We understood that “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality.”^[2] The forms of our practice were varied — street theater, leaflets, banners, graffiti, general meetings, fund-raising for bail funds, and, of course, constant arguing with those in the movement with whom we disagreed. We spent a lot of time organizing and participating in rallies and street marches.

For those who identified with Maoism, such as myself, the notion of mass work was important. We wanted to be integrated with everyday life and people while also being revolutionaries. We wanted to learn from the people who weren’t like us, and we felt that we could better convey our politics and views to them. The theory and practice of mass work differentiated us from the counter-culturalists who, while sharing our alienation from capitalism, sought to opt out by building communes in the bush or smoking dope and, in my experience, they tended to regard the working class people with disdain.

Did the following decades vindicate your choices or were you proven to be mistaken?

A favorite quote of mine from Karl Marx is “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”^[3]

Those who understood the dialectical materialist approach were able to come to terms with new circumstances arising from the decline of the movement, which happened around 1972 in Australia (see below). I was one of those who could not understand the new circumstances; indeed I was completely tossed by them. This reflected both my weakness in Marxist theory, my dogmatism, and my disconnect from social life beyond university and Left circles. The balance for nearly all of us had been toward practice, daily action, and organizing. It was all intense and activism-based. I describe it as living and breathing political activism.

For those who did have a stronger theoretical understanding, and who were much better at undertaking investigation of reality, some progress was made. The publications of the Red Eureka Movement (REM) in the late 1970s and early 80s stand up well today and are in the spirit of the 1968 rebels. I was opposed to REM, not due to their politics but because of an obedience and blind loyalty to the leaders of the CPA (ML) who assured us, among other things, that one of the REM leaders was a CIA agent. (I regret going along with that, but the bigger problem was that I had stopped thinking. I wasn’t alone, unfortunately.)

We weren’t entirely “mistaken” but there must be a reason as to why 1968 Marxism has not led to anything in the same spirit for about 50 years. It’s not just about the spirit but also the Marxist approach and politics. Postmodernism and “identity politics” seem to have won the day quite easily — for now.

How are today’s Left still tasked by the unfinished work or the new work handed on by the New Left?

The question assumes that there is a Left today. One of the things that attracted me to the Platypus Affiliated Society was an early item I received that declared: “The Left is dead! Long live the Left!” That’s spot on.

There are people calling themselves Marxists all over the place but few who are consistent with Marx’s enthusiasm for expanding human potentialities, for unleashing the productive forces from the constraints of capitalism, and for reaching for the stars. I read something by David Harvey some years ago, and he shocked me by claiming, on one hand, to be a Marxist, yet, on the other, advocating for “zero growth.” What a strange Marxism. No wonder Marx said, in 1862, that he was not a Marxist.

A Marxism that does not support material progress is hardly Marxist; so too with a Marxism that fails to unequivocally take the side of people who are fighting fascist regimes and imperialist aggression. In 1968, we celebrated the Vietnamese victory of the Tet Offensive. Today, Leftists support the Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, and we support the Russian people in their struggle to overthrow the Putin regime. There is no need for “mental gymnastics” that on one hand support the Ukrainian people but on the other hand demand that NATO, their most effective military ally, gets out of Europe. This is not “nuance” or dialectical thinking. It’s bizarre and reactionary. It effectively allies with Putin, with the Russian fascist regime, who would love to see NATO withdraw from Europe.

Perhaps a real Left will be built from the solidarity with Ukraine around the world and through the struggle against those who claim to be Left but cannot bring themselves to support Ukraine’s democratic revolution and the only military force that can effectively assist the Ukrainians to victory.

The Ukrainian people are fighting for democracy — bourgeois democracy. They are not fighting for socialism. I refer again to the terrific point made by Marx about how people don’t make history according to their wishes. The Left is unequivocal in its support for democratic struggle against fascist and autocratic regimes. It always has been and always will be.

Does the task of social emancipation today appear more or less obscure as it did in the 1960s and 1970s?

I don’t know what is meant by “social emancipation.”

Politics generally is depressing today, but I find hope in the amazing scientific and technological advances that are being made. They transform the way we live and help create preconditions for something better. Arthur Dent mentioned how the internet was created on the basis of a communist mode of production.

Another strange quality to what passes for Left-wing today is the caution and concern about new technologies. Apparently, like the women in the communist party who were told they’d have to wait until after the Revolution, humanity is supposed to wait until after the Revolution before encouraging further research and development in technology.

Marx said that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”^[4] What does the internet bring? Or, for that matter, AI?!

In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx described the organizing principle of the communist society of the future: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”^[5] That was in 1875. We are now in 2024. We need to add “and dreams and fantasies” after “needs.”

There is much more I could say, especially about the period of decline in the mid and late 1970s and 80s, but I will leave it there. My thoughts on the legacy of 1968 are below.

On 1968

Thanks to the Platypus group for organizing the discussion of the legacy of 1968. Good to have different perspectives and a debate that was structured in such a way as to ensure that each person had a fair say and could respond to one another, with time for questions from the floor too. The latter is especially important.

A similar thing was attempted in 2010 and 11, initiated by a few “unreconstructed Maoists” in Melbourne. It was called “The Monthly Argument.” The best exponents of opposing sides to an issue were brought together to argue their case, respond to one another, and then face the floor. The debates ranged from free speech to Syria and nuclear energy.^[6]

The masthead for The Monthly Argument website has a quote from Christopher Hitchens: “The progress that’s made in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation.”

It’s important to have a culture in which confrontation, debate, and argument can happen freely and without persecution. An expression of how the culture has changed since 1968 struck me when, during the 80s, people became more interested in consensus than in argument. Fundamental disagreement was seen negatively, something to smooth over, rather than a healthy way of challenging ideas and having one’s ideas challenged. This was a profound change, and, in Australia, it was represented well by the Labor government headed by Bob Hawke whose main objective was “to bring everyone together” in a type of corporate state.

Back in 68, at our best, it was different: lots of debate and argument between us and the overt reactionaries or within and among the broad Left and the communists. This dynamic pushed things forward, and, in Melbourne where I was active, allowed for good revolutionary politics to be heard and to exert significant influence at a critical time.

***

I agree with Andy Blunden’s skepticism about vanguard parties. This is largely born of my own experience in one of them — the CPA (ML). I roll my eyes when I hear people talk today about how their particular small group — or sect? — is building a new party, linking internationally with other small sects, but it will all work out because of “our Marxism.” It is delusional, dogmatic (non-dialectical) twaddle. Sorry, but “committees for revolutionary international regroupment” strike me as Monty Pythonesque. We need fresher thinking than that.

I am aware of how the comrades at Monash University in Melbourne operated, and they were an inspiration to those of us making revolution on the campus I attended, La Trobe University. We were not as good at it — we lacked the deep theoretical understanding and the charismatic leaders — but things moved forward, for a few years, because our party organization, our cell, encouraged argument and wider debate in the Labour Club, which was the main Left organization. We never took militant action without the endorsement of a general meeting of all students, where further debate occurred outside the club. And, most importantly, like the Monash comrades, we put forward demands that were winnable. We were out to win, not just protest.

It all went wrong when dogma set in and we stopped thinking and became followers of the Party leaders, the old veterans like Ted Hill and Ted Bull. The worst part was that some of us, myself included, started to ingratiate ourselves with the leaders, as happens in a religious organization with members of the inner sanctum of the congregation wanting the reward of a blessing for obedience and good works. It was the opposite of a Maoist approach.

Another example of the quasi-religious nature of the Party was its insistence on collective study of Marxist classics. I agree with Arthur that it needs to start with individual reading/study, but this isn’t what happened in my party branch, at least not during the second half of the 1970s. Rather, we would sit around with the selected text and go around the room with each person reading a few paragraphs, sharing the reading. We could discuss it afterwards, which was a saving grace, but I regret to say that there were some works that I never read for myself, and I learned very little from “collective study.” (I don’t recall how we collectively studied in the late 60s / early 70s, but I do recall doing a lot of my own reading and then discussing with comrades informally).

***

The comfort of dogmatism started, I think, around 1972 when key demands of the movement were being met and the movement declined: the Australian government withdrew its ground troops from Vietnam at the end of 71 (following the process of U.S. withdrawal under Nixon) and, for those of us on campuses, universities had agreed to demands for things like greater student representation on governing bodies. Moreover, the remnants of the old “Victorian Era” culture were being overtaken by a new, permissive, youth-consumerist one. Nonetheless, for many of us who embraced revolutionary politics, the new situation was incomprehensible. How could it be that after such an exciting and rapid building of a movement, of such intense, always-upward activism, it all suddenly changed? The spirit of the times transformed, it seemed, from one where revolutionary politics were taken seriously to one in which people were pinning all their hopes on the election of a Labor government.

Most of us were frustrated and confused, but the ready-made dogma, the formula-thinking, brought comfort and allowed us to pretend otherwise. On the front page of Vanguard, the newspaper of the CPA (ML), for each year of the 70s, the headline assured us that “Revolutionary struggle reaches new heights,” or words to that effect. But the frustration was still there. This disconnect from reality grew worse, though there were notable individuals who did seem to understand the change and its process. By the late 70s, some of these people had grouped together as the REM.

Another terrible outcome of this dogmatism and obedience was that we became cynical. It was the opposite of our genuine commitment, our investigation of reality, our arguments, and optimism of 68. It’s what happens when you stop thinking critically, stop thinking dialectically, drop the willingness to “bombard the headquarters” and just go along with what the leaders tell you. Its consequences are not pretty. It’s easy to keep identifying as being Left-wing, or Marxist, or Maoist, or whatever, but I learned that it is also easy to slip into a type of Left-fascism.

There’s an excellent article “Fascism and the Left” (1980) by Arthur that I shared at the C21st Left blog.^[7] I’m embarrassed to admit that I can identify with what he describes; at least where I had ended up by the mid-1970s. Some of my old comrades, who were so good in the late 60s / early 1970s, today openly take the side of the Assads and Putins and, of course, Xi Jinping, just as they took the side of the fascist Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

When women rose up recently in Iran, an old former comrade shared a post on Facebook pointing out that U.S. imperialism was behind the “uprising” – with “uprising” in inverted commas. The reason for this, he said, was because Iran has joined the Shanghai Cooperative Organisation, thus challenging “U.S. hegemony.” Conspiracy theories flow naturally from formula-thinking, because such dogmatism tries to force the world into an ideological schema. When the world doesn’t cooperate with the schema, there must be a conspiracy involved.

So, it wasn’t a case of the “1968” leaders being “tamed” by cushy jobs, though Alison makes a valid point that what were previously voluntary movements became professionalized as NGOs. This too is not straightforward, though, as some of the NGOs allowed for good work to continue and for some of the leaders / activists to earn a living for doing good stuff.

The late Jim Bacon was a comrade of mine. We went to China as part of an Australian delegation in May 1971. He was a very effective Maoist leader. He then became an official in the Builders Labourers Federation and moved from Melbourne to Tasmania, where he became prominent in the Australian Labor Party. In 1998, he was elected Premier of Tasmania. Some old comrades regarded this as selling-out, but Jim never reneged on his past, and simply pointed out that he became sick and tired of waiting for the revolution. He did some good things as Premier and showed that “we” can govern.

***

Andy Blunden says, “The unfinished work of the New Left is to learn how to practice solidarity,” but “Marxists still say ‘Follow us.’” My only disagreement is this: people who say that are not Marxists, and I am more comfortable with those who say, “Question everything!” That is the Marxism that appealed to me back in the late 60s / early 70s, and that needs to be revived.

***

I put “68” in inverted commas because, even though that year was the highlight for the Left internationally and is yet to be matched, the period we’re talking about is roughly 66 to the early 70s. In other words, in Australia and the U.S., the period when Vietnam was the central issue. The system of compulsory military service made Vietnam a life-and-death question for every young man who had to register with the Department of Labour and National Service when they turned 18. While conscription only applied to men, the issue obviously also closely affected women who were mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends. It was no coincidence that “Save our Sons” was the most prominent women’s group opposing the U.S. war at the time.

“Vietnam” quickly became the number-one issue for the Left and no other issue at the time mobilized such large numbers. The secondary issue was probably apartheid in South Africa, around which another mass-based campaign was launched and grew into a mass movement.

The Indigenous Australians’ struggle was perhaps third on the list, and I remember one “black nationalist” being upset with all the activity around South Africa, arguing that we should focus more on what was “happening in our own backyard.” But apartheid took up much more of our time and energy than the Aboriginal issues. It’s interesting that the main issues were internationalist ones, in which we acted in solidarity with people fighting injustice and tyranny a very long way from Australia’s shores.

I’d like to mention, as an aside, that the first Australian history book to offer a nation-wide overview of Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion and settlement of Australia was the work of individuals who identified as or with Maoists. The book, The Black Resistance: An Introduction to the History of the Aborigines’ Struggle against British Colonialism, was published by Widescope International in 1977 and was co-edited by Fergus Robinson and yours truly, with chapters by Fergus, me, and four others. Prior to our book, the widely accepted view was that Indigenous Australians had been passive recipients of the changes wrought by dispossession and massacres.

Another example is the solidarity we showed with the rebellions in the “Eastern bloc” or Soviet satellite countries, especially Czechoslovakia in 68 and Poland in 70. There were pro-Soviet remnants who identified as being on the Left but, in the main, they were marginal and persuaded no one but themselves that they were right. Few young people identified with that line — they were mostly fuddy-duddies, out of touch with the Zeitgeist and with the politics that helped define it.

Of course, the uprisings in Paris in May of 68 were inspirational. I loved the graffiti — “Society is a carnivorous flower,” “It is forbidden to forbid.” My favorite remains “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“Beneath the pavement, the beach”). It was the spirit and style that moved me, and millions of other young people around the world. The Paris uprising indicated that workers and students could unite in struggle. It defined the May rebellion. In Australia, a Worker-Student Alliance was organized in 69. Some of us — “Maoists” — went to work in factories over the three-month university vacation period in order to learn from the workers — and to earn a bit of money! A few even became full-time factory workers (or builders laborers) after graduating from university.

***

The other significant event that had a big influence on the “1968” movement was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China. The mainstream media reported on it negatively, emphasizing chaos and destruction — much the same as today’s supporters of the dictatorship of the billionaires in China do.

Ted Hill gave a speech about the GPCR at La Trobe University in 69. It was easy for those of us who were rebellious to identify with what was happening — the youthful challenge to old authority and traditional ways that kept people in their place. That this was happening against the bourgeois elements within the Communist Party of China was also something we could grasp. But what really “blew our minds” was that China had a leader who was encouraging rebellion, including against the “new emperor” mindsets and behaviors within the governing party. No other world leader had declared “It is right to rebel.” On the contrary, the others, like the Australian Prime Minister John Gorton, were saying, “We shall tolerate dissent so long as it remains ineffective.”

Today, there is a consistency in the attitudes of some of my old former comrades who once supported the GPCR to identify with the social-fascist regime and other dictatorial and autocratic regimes around the world. They now advocate the line that the GPCR was erroneous and held back China’s progress. There are, however, scholarly books that provide a different view, such as William Hinton’s The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China 1978–1989 (1990), Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (2008) and Dongping Han’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution (2008). I wonder if these make it to the reading lists in universities today.

The Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989 should have left little doubt in anyone’s mind as to the nature of the post-Mao regime but, again, among some of my old former comrades, it was attributable to “foreign agents” who were behind the protests. More recently, they tell me that “errors were made on both sides.” I have no idea how anyone can regard this as “Left-wing.”

***

It puzzled me, given our correct understanding of the Soviet and Eastern bloc satellite regimes as social-fascist back then, that when the “Wall” came down in November 1989, some of my old comrades who had got it right in the late 60s /early 70s were now expressing doubt — or outright angst — about the collapse. Most said they still didn’t like the regimes — but U.S. imperialism would benefit in its quest for world hegemony, and that those social-fascist states, like them or loathe them, were a force against that hegemony. It was weird because we had always been anti-fascists first and anti-imperialist second. After all, the Left supported the anti-working-class, “war monger” (as the Mosleyites^[8] described him) Winston Churchill — a representative of the world’s worst imperialism at that time, namely British imperialism — against the Nazi appeasers like Neville Chamberlain. An anti-imperialism that serves fascist regimes is hardly worth having.

***

None of the speakers mentioned the fact that the Australian economy was doing well in the 1960s. There was economic growth, real wage increases, expansion of infrastructure, plenty of jobs, and big demand, after the War, for Australia’s agricultural produce and mineral resources. We were not rebelling against economic crisis, so it is remarkable that we were questioning and challenging capitalism. We were a product of alienation, an understanding of how capitalism was exploitative, and an awareness of suffering elsewhere in the world, rather than direct economic hardship arising from crisis; though those of us who studied Marx understood the nature of crises as periodic — until the “big one” would come. But we’ve been waiting a long time for the big one. Certainly things are bad at the moment, and most projections by mainstream economists say things will worsen, so maybe the big one really is imminent now.

What would happen if it did come?! Where is the economic understanding, not just of what is happening, but of how to build the new social system? Arthur pointed out that the Left wasn’t interested in economics. That tallies with my experience and, unlike him, I am one of those who had little interest in the subject. Like many of my comrades, I was the “arts” type, interested in ideas, political philosophy, and polemics. I tried reading Capital and I think I waded through Volume 1 (1867), but couldn’t proceed to the other volumes. What I knew about Marxist economics, I really had learned from the lectures we all read such as Value, Price and Profit (1865). In a letter to Engels, Marx had said “You cannot compress a course in political economy into one hour but we shall have to do our best”^[9] — I don’t think he expected so many of us to be satisfied with going no further.

***

Environmental issues were rarely taken up in a significant way. I recall the far-Right League of Rights going on about “the despoilation of Australia’s environment by foreign companies,” but it was rare for the Left to give much priority to those issues. Vietnam, and apartheid were the main issues. The “green” movement didn’t so much arise from the 60s movement as emerge after its decline; though it’s true that many of the activists who, as Alison pointed out, were now becoming “co-opted,” supported the new green movement. Perhaps it’s a case of political philosophy abhorring a vacuum, just as Nature does. By the early 80s, when Graham Richardson, of the Labor government’s Right faction, started to promote a major national green issue to oppose the building of a dam in Tasmania, it was clear that the new, growing, green movement’s leaders were not the people who had put their heads on the line during the Vietnam solidarity period. This was a different leadership and a different kind of politics and political philosophy. The campaign to save the Franklin Dam in 1983 was the birth of the green organizational movement.

It goes without saying that Leftists opposed air pollution, which was a significant environmental issue in the 70s. I recall being involved in a campaign against lead content in petrol. The campaign was successful but did little, if anything, to promote socialism, let alone communism. And lead was removed from petrol by legislative mandate — under capitalism. It’s strange to me — a disconnect from reality — when individuals who identify as Leftists say that something is a product of capitalism, that capitalism needs a particular injustice, but then don’t seem to draw any lesson when the issue or injustice is remedied within the framework of capitalism.

The Left’s problem with green political philosophy was based on the Marxists’ historic and traditional commitment to unleashing the productive forces. “Nature worship” — the idea that humanity should live in harmony, or sustainably, with Nature rather than “conquer” or “decouple” from Nature — was where the line was drawn. Indeed, it was a line of demarcation between a progressive and a reactionary outlook. The Nature worship outlook was, and still is, openly advocated by the princes and popes who have a better understanding of its content and purpose than those who believe one can be a Marxist, in support of progress, while at the same time believing that the planet has already exceeded its capacity for further growth and development.

***

A great progressive movement that can be said to have emerged from the “60s” movement was the women’s liberation movement. It was most notable in the early 70s in Australia, and, indeed, some of its activist women were pissed off with the male chauvinism in organizations of the Left and of being told by men, as Alison points out, that their liberation is something for after the Revolution. It was understandable that women established their own organizations and consciousness-raising groups. However, they had much bigger problems than male chauvinism on the Left, given that our society was still so backward when it came to women.

Helen Reddy’s anthemic song “I am Woman” (1971) sums up all that was great about the spirit of the old women’s lib movement: its rebelliousness, which was very much in keeping with “68,” determination to win, and the absence of any ideology of victimhood. Had anyone dared to tell those women that they were “victims,” the response would have been “Not any more!,” possibly followed by “Go jump in the lake!” Victimized — yes — but victims — no!

Over time, new generations of feminist activists emerged and, it seems, there has been fragmentation, and today it is rare to see or hear the spirit of the 70s women’s lib people. “Identity politics” has taken over, with the support of the institutions of the state (including the universities), and socialist feminists are usually of the older generation, who were steeled in the struggles of the women’s lib period. A worrying aspect of a current significant faction of feminists is what Camille Paglia called “sex-negative feminism.” This is the puritanical streak that wants to ban pornography. The late Right-wing English morality-crusader, Mary Whitehouse, would applaud them but she was a target of much ridicule by “pro-sex” feminists and Leftists generally — those in the 68 tradition, that is.

***

I was lucky to be 17 in 1968; I was able to be a conscious part of the chaos, the dangers, the fun, and the politics that believed in a better, winnable future and that, at its best, questioned everything. It was exhilarating being part of a mass movement that was gaining support, that went beyond reformism and asked why the issues existed in the first place. There was something joyous about challenging nasty authorities, pointing out their hypocrisies and their perpetuation of injustices. When I look back on that period, 1966–1972, I think that while we didn’t overthrow the ruling class, we certainly gave their most reactionary members and representatives a very hard time. That in itself justifies the movement, I reckon.

I was fairly conservative socially but not politically. At the age of 15, in 1966, I’d cycle from my home in Brunswick, Melbourne, to the large front roller-door at the entrance of Pentridge Prison in the adjoining suburb of Coburg, to protest against the death penalty and the hanging of Ronald Ryan. On one occasion, the protest turned violent, and I remember men running at the huge roller-door, leaping up and kicking at it. (Any wrestling fans will be familiar with the flying dropkick maneuver.)

In speaking with other activists of my generation, I’m surprised at how many others also became active as teenagers because of the issue of capital punishment. I’m sure I joined an organization opposed to capital punishment but I don’t recall its name. At this time, I learned how to give out leaflets. I also learned how to argue about an issue. There were key debating points and, on one occasion, I wore a badge that displayed the words “I am against capital punishment. Please talk to me about it.” I nervously wore it on one of my tram rides into the city and was extremely relieved that nobody wanted to talk about it.

***

The counterculture was a significant part of all this questioning. Its members were treated far more sympathetically by the media and the Establishment than we — activists with a political direction and understanding — were. I didn’t agree with the notion of setting up communes in the bush under capitalism, nor with drug taking, but I loved and still love the music of the time: the rock pop songs that we could embrace as anthems, songs like Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” (1969), Nina Simone’s revolutionary version (1969) of The Beatles’ reactionary “Revolution” (1968), and The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (1965). The latter was hugely popular with the U.S. and allied soldiers in Vietnam but the lyrics are metaphorical: “this place” can be capitalism, an alienating system that in the advanced industrial societies, in the main, had long outlived any former progressive qualities. In a later version of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” the singer ad-libs with “Out of the factory, out of this place, out of the kitchen, out of this place.” Love it. The good music brought “hippies” and Marxists together; though the Old Left was associated more with folk music. I never related to folk music. It seemed too whingey, always complaining, gently melodic without a back beat driving it relentlessly forward.

Like others who identified with, and as, Maoists, I was critical of the counterculture, even though some of its members had proven to be reliable comrades in action on the campus of La Trobe University in Melbourne where I was enrolled in 69. So, I concur with the speakers who point to the diverse nature of the “60s movement.” You name it — it was there! The reactionaries were threatened by it and sometimes resorted to state violence to try to curb it and intimidate its leaders, especially those who were effective in encouraging militancy, an anti-imperialist perspective and solidarity with the Vietnamese (rather than an “anti-war” position). The movement’s spirit was vital and summed up by our belief that it was right to rebel; to us, harmony was a reactionary value. The state and its institutions, ranging from churches to universities and prisons, were out to crush that spirit. But, they failed — for a brief few years, at least — and each of those institutions experienced their own internal rebellions.

***

In 1968, I was in my final year of high school in Melbourne and was by that time politically aware and interested in communism. I was a bit of a wannabe communist. After school, still in my school uniform, I made my way to the big demonstration against the U.S. war in Vietnam on July 4 that year. The police rioted. They removed their identification badges and used batons, fists, and boots against us. It was scary. The demonstration included workers and students. The next day at school, one of the teachers claimed to have seen me on TV at the demo, and admonished me in front of the class. I felt embarrassed but also angry and determined to attend the next demo. The teacher’s admonition did not deter my classmates from electing me as class captain, and I was chuffed to see, on reading my old school magazine from 68, that I was described as “the rebel leader.”

Most of the school rebellion was about dress codes and hair length for boys, but there were also a couple of more political actions, such as when three of us decided to stand up and raise our clenched fists at morning assembly in solidarity with the two black American athletes, Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos, who had made the same gesture at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. They were supported by the third-place getter, an Australian named Peter Norman. On another occasion, I distributed a pamphlet around the school which, from memory, was called “American Atrocities in Vietnam” and had been banned under Victoria’s Obscene Publications Act. I was not part of any high school “underground” or organization but was influenced heavily by my father, Loreto, who had developed strong Left-wing views during his military service in World War II. He was Maltese. Born in Malta in 1918, he had volunteered in 1940 when it was clear that Mussolini’s Italia irredenta^[10] meant that fascism was part of a global threat.

My dad’s influence on my political development means that I can’t really agree with Arthur’s exclamation that “We told our parents to fuck off!” Of course, if by “parents” is meant the older generation, I can see the point. There was much in the culture that had been carried on by the older generation that we objected to, which is why the 68 rebellion was disproportionately a youth rebellion with the “oldies” in the revisionist communist parties trying to curb what they called the “excesses” (but really trying to curb the militancy and revolutionary perspectives).

But, for me, the rebellion was not against my parents because my father, a factory worker, was on the side of the rebels. He was in the Labor Party but identified strongly with communist union leaders such as Clarrie O’Shea and Ted Bull (both of whom were leaders in the CPA (ML), which identified with Maoism). He was skeptical about Labor opportunists, and attended some of the militant Vietnam solidarity demonstrations.

My mother was a sweet, gentle, woman who used to say that she wished she had been born later because she then would have had the advantages of “women’s lib.” She was born in Hackney, London’s East End, in 1916. She was not particularly political but, like most people who had had a poor and very hard life, she understood what Andy Blunden called “solidarity” — the importance of “helping others on their own terms.” She also understood how society was changing for the better, especially for women, and that the “protestors” were helping drive that process as were new technologies like washing machines and vacuum cleaners. For working-class women like my mother, technology was nothing to fear. It was definitely not something to wait for until “after the Revolution.”

***

Growing up in an industrial, migrant, working-class place like Brunswick, from the age of 3 (in 1954) to my early 30s, and with my kind of parents, made it easy for me to develop a socialistic outlook. There were a dozen ethnicities in my street but we all got on well, notwithstanding occasional nastiness. Paying the bills was more important than picking on one another for being different. We were united by two things: our class position and the English language. I grew up immersed in this low-income, working-class milieu.

Television was important in my awareness of world and national affairs. After my parents bought a television set in 1960, the world came into our loungeroom — including, the horror of apartheid in South Africa and the disgraceful treatment of Australia’s Aborigines. Like a lot of my generation, we were frightened when a showdown seemed imminent between the two superpowers in 1962. I still remember the grainy black-and-white imagery on television of the warships which we were told were heading toward one another in confrontation. To this day, I recall vividly the scene on television of the Democrat Police Chief of Alabama setting vicious Alsatian dogs onto black American protestors. It made me angry — and still does.

These images stood in stark contrast to the series like Father Knows Best (1954–60) and Leave It to Beaver (1957–63) that portrayed an unrealistic, idealized, version of American life in which everyone was happy and prosperous. These series rarely featured black Americans, other than in the roles of musicians or servants. But the contrast between the reality shown on news broadcasts and the idealized family series was not lost on me, even though I was young.

I was a big fan of science fiction. This was prompted by exciting “space” adventures in the real world such as the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth. Four years later, the Soviet Union again led the “space race,” and Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. It was so thrilling and set my young mind racing.

I read sci-fi books, usually collections of short stories, but movies on television and at the cinema showed just how far human beings might go thanks to our ingenuity and engineering skills. I was enthralled by movies that showed spaceships and exploration of other planets. These 1950s films seem a bit naïve today, when we have an actual spacecraft, Voyager 11, traveling beyond our solar system, now into the constellation of Pavo, and still sending the occasional “beep” more than 23 billion (Billion, not million) kilometers back to Earth.

I’m sure, on reflection, that this enthusiasm for space travel and sci-fi helped put me on the path of interest in the political philosophy that advocated for unleashing human potential. And this certainly informed the spirit of “1968.”

***

I’ll leave it there and hope my ramblings are of some use in understanding “1968.”

The period of decline from the early or mid-1970s is just as important in terms of lessons, but I’ll have to leave that for another time. |P

^[1] See the transcript in this issue. Video of the panel is available online at <https://www.youtube.com/live/8KD9AhyUYLU>.

^[2] Mao Tse-tung, “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing” (1937), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm>.

^[3] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851–52), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/>.

^[4] Karl Marx, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy,” in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/>.

^[5] Karl Marx, “Part I,” in “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/>.

^[6] The arguments were documented, and are available online at <https://themonthlyargument.wordpress.com/past-debates/>.

^[7] See <https://c21stleft.com/2021/03/31/fascism-and-the-left-how-do-left-wing-individuals-end-up-fascists/>.

^[8] After Oswald Mosley (1896–1980).

^[9] Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels (May 20, 1865), quoted in “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Co., Inc, 1969), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/introduction.htm>.

^[10] [Italian] Unredeemed Italy.

Fifty years ago – gaolings, resistance and a win

Posted on August 20, 2022 by c21styork

Barry York (republished from ‘Overland’ literary journal )

Fifty years ago, on 4 August 1972, three La Trobe University students—Fergus Robinson, Brian Pola and myself—were released from Pentridge Prison after serving, respectively, four months, three months and six weeks. Hardly any other political prisoners of that period in Australia had served such lengthy terms, with the exception of some of the draft resisters. This was an extraordinary and unprecedented case of political repression.

The ‘La Trobe Three’ had been imprisoned in a maximum-security prison without trial, without rights to bail or appeal, and without sentencing. Formally speaking, we were jailed for contempt of the Supreme Court of Victoria for violating an injunction restraining us from ‘entering the premises known as La Trobe University’. The injunction had been issued by the university governing body, the Council, because of the students’ leading roles in what academics refer to as ‘the La Trobe Troubles’. A fourth student, Rodney Taylor, was also singled out and named in the injunction. However, he was never captured by police.

The ‘Troubles’ on the campus were part of the broader student and youth rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with core issues the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and demands for greater ‘student power’ in university decision-making. Monash University had been the bête noir of the establishment due to its campus militancy and the capable leadership of Maoists like Albert Langer and Mike Hyde.

The immediate background to the La Trobe incarcerations dates to 19 April 1971, when a meeting of a thousand students—the largest ever held on campus—voted nearly unanimously in favour of a motion calling for the resignation of the Chancellor, Sir Archibald Glenn. Glenn was managing director of Imperial Chemicals Industries (ANZ) and sat on the board of its UK-based parent company. His presence as head of the University Council was intolerable to the great majority of students because ICI(ANZ) had been awarded a contract by the Department of Supply for Australian troops in Vietnam and the parent company was involved in the apartheid-based economy of South Africa.

The popular demand for Glenn’s resignation allowed the militant left-wing Labour Club (not to be confused with the Labor Party) and the Communist Club to connect the campus issue to the wider question of capitalism and whose class interests the universities served. The Communist Club leader, Dave Muller (1946–2021), had undertaken the initial research into Glenn and ICI, and this provided a firm basis for the campaign.

As with Monash, the communist leadership at La Trobe—which was also predominantly Maoist—posed a special challenge to the authorities. The leadership emerged through struggle within the Labour Club, while the revisionist Communist Party supporters split and either went with the Maoists or removed themselves from the practical struggle. Other factions went ‘every which way’, though basically supporting militant action.

There were other campus issues, too, such as an ‘exclusion clause’ introduced by the authorities to exclude anyone under suspension from a university from being admitted to La Trobe. This was clearly a political move designed to stop left-wing students who had been suspended from Monash being admitted to La Trobe.

The militancy at La Trobe went back further than 1971, most notably with the forced removal of Defence Department recruiters from the campus in June 1970 and later that year, in September, with the Vietnam solidarity marches from the campus along Waterdale Road in West Heidelberg. The first of these peaceful marches was savagely suppressed by police, as was the second march in defiance of the repression. Nineteen students were arrested, two at gunpoint. A third march attracted 800 people, including trade unionists, and marched defiantly along the street to the campus. At this time, the Maoist group was ascendant as leader of the campus left.

Robinson, Pola and myself were recognised as prominent among the leaders on the campus in 1971 when the campaign for Glenn’s resignation gathered momentum. As a matter of principle, no actions were initiated by the Maoist-led Labour Club without first convening a general meeting of students, either through the auspices of the Students Representative Council, or through unofficial general meetings. The latter were often larger than the former and, in July 1971, a meeting resolved to blockade members of the University Council until such time as the Chancellor resigned. A couple of hundred students blocked the doors of the Council room, where Council was in session, and police were called onto the campus that evening.

As a result of this action, eight students were suspended by the university disciplinary body—the farcical ‘Proctorial Board’. Five of them were also arrested by police. Occupations of the administration building, endorsed by general meetings, took place in protest against the repression, which in turn resulted in greater repression. On 30 September, the authorities called in the police to evict students who had occupied the Administration building. This was a first on an Australian campus. In October, twenty-four students were hauled before the Proctorial Board, of whom twenty-three were suspended and/or fined. (The late John Cummins was one of them).

Hundreds of students took part in occupations of the Admin building on 30 September and 1 October. When the police were called on 30 September, students escaped via the windows of the ground floor. In response, the Vice Chancellor arranged for heavy-gauge wire gratings to be rivetted over the windows. A student general meeting on 11 October voted to remove them and marched to the building, where a group attached ropes to the gratings and proceeded to tug on them until they broke from the rivets. This was done in broad daylight—a sign that intimidation would not work. It was later revealed that the authorities had collected evidence against the student leaders over this action, but no charges were ever laid.

The struggle and sacrifices proved worthwhile. In early December 1971, prior to the end of his term, Glenn announced his decision to resign as Chancellor, and the University rescinded its ‘exclusion clause’. By the end of 1971, the students had won significant victories. However, the campus struggle continued, bringing to mind Marx’s saying about people making history not as they wish but rather as circumstances dictate.

A characteristic of the La Trobe struggle in 1970 and 1971 had been the willingness to bypass official structures of student representation as part of building a revolutionary socialist movement. In early November 1971, the official representative student body—the SRC—resolved to pay the fines imposed by the Proctorial Board, subject to approval by a general meeting of students to be convened early the following year (which, as expected, supported the move). The University Council objected and threatened legal action against the SRC and against any suspended students who remained on the campus. The latter group included Brian Pola, who was the elected SRC President.

The slogan ‘Student control of student funds’ was popular but created a struggle that refocused the campus left onto official SRC politics rather than the previous revolutionary politics that challenged the role of the universities under capitalism. Had this shift not occurred over the issue of payment of the fines, the left would have raised the money from the rank-and-file student body instead. This would have been the ‘Maoist’ way of doing it—relying on the people—and it would have been effective.

With our victory over Glenn and the ‘exclusions clause’ achieved by the end of 1971, Fergus, Brian and I were among the few of the 1970-1971 militant activist generation to return to campus the following year when the continuing, unresolved, issue was ‘student control of student funds’.

Our consistent revolutionary perspective on politics and struggle, challenging the role of the universities under capitalism and supporting unity between students and workers, was as much of a threat to the authorities as the actions we supported. The use of Supreme Court injunctions to stop us entering the campus grounds was a clear attempt to stop us expressing our views at general meetings.

It is pertinent to note that in the three other cases of university authorities applying for injunctive relief against student radicals—at Sydney and Monash in 1970 and Queensland in 1971—the restraining orders were narrowly focused and specifically prohibited the named students from participating in disruptive activity. The exception was an ancillary injunction taken out by Queensland University on 30 July 1971 against an individual leader, Mitch Thompson, who was prohibited from entering the campus. This served as the model for the La Trobe injunctions, which sought to stop us from entering the university grounds—that is, to stop us expressing our views on campus. This left us no choice but to be defiant, as a matter of principle. And, of course, we were aware that the injunctions were designed to intimidate other leaders and developing leaders.

The indeterminate nature of the ‘sentence’ for contempt could only be resolved if and when the ‘La Trobe Three’ agreed to purge our contempt before the Supreme Court and promise not to enter the campus grounds if released. This we were not prepared to do. Rather, we sought to continue to exercise our right to participate in the political life of the campus, including helping to organise, initiate and address rallies and general meetings of students, and take part in protest actions on the campus.

It was very hard doing time without knowing when we would be released. We could not count down the days and we were in ‘A’ Division, which had a lot of long-term prisoners doing time for armed robbery or murder. The fact that we were placed with so many long-termers was an ominous sign. However, a campaign for our release was underway at the La Trobe campus, building strong support from other campuses and trade unions and, notably, within the legal profession.

I remember being told that Amnesty International was about to take up our case in London but we were released before that became necessary.

All our mass actions on the campus had been endorsed by general meetings of students. Therefore, after the capture of Fergus on 12 April and Brian on 1 May, the left leadership called for the holding of an official referendum on the campus to allow students to resolve the issue. The left called on the Vice Chancellor and Council to agree to abide by the referendum’s results. The main issue—the release of Fergus and Brian—carried the day in the referendum which was held from 10 to 12 May 1972. Of the 1667 students who voted, 1005 voted for the withdrawal of the injunctions.

I was captured and lodged at Pentridge in June, which added further pressure on the University authorities to abide by the referendum results and highlighted their refusal to do so. The Council was encouraged in its hard line by a ‘pro-violence minority’ among some senior academic staff and students aligned with the National Civic Council who consistently refused to support democratic means of resolving the conflict.

We never apologised to the Court nor did we purge our contempt before it. So, how were we released?

On the 20th and 22nd July, Vice Chancellor David Myers visited us in Pentridge with a view to persuading us to purge our contempt. We still weren’t prepared to do that, as it would mean agreeing to not enter the university premises, but we were certainly willing to discuss any offer he would make on behalf of the Council. He wanted us to sign a statement repudiating violence on the campus. We were not prepared to do this either. Although the far right ironically described us as a pro-violence minority, we knew that the real pro-violence minority were those who relied on police violence and intimidation, not to mention those who sent troops to prop up a fascist regime in South Vietnam and ‘bomb back to the Stone Age’ those who were fighting it.

One of our legal advisors, communist lawyer Ted Hill, also visited us and advised us to sign the statement only on condition that Myers also sign the repudiation of violence on behalf of the Council. In this way, the terms for the disbandment of the injunction and for our release were neutralized and we felt we could sign. So, on 31 July, we joined with the University Council in repudiating violence on the campus.

Our release on 4 August 1972 was a victory because the University authorities bowed to mass pressure and it was the Vice Chancellor who applied to the court for an end to the injunctions and for our freedom. We never apologised to the Court and we promptly returned to the campus where, still under suspension for specified periods, we continued to take an active part in campus politics.

My book, Student Revolt, published in 1989, provides greater detail and contextualisation about the La Trobe student movement from 1967 to 1973. It is available for free on-line: https://c21stleft.com/2015/09/05/student-revolt-la-trobe-university-1967-to-1973/

Book review: ‘Radicals’ – struggle between the lines pushed things forward

Posted on July 27, 2021 by c21styork

Here is my review of ‘Radicals’ by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley, just published in the Melbourne Labour History Society’s newsletter ‘Recorder’ (July 2021, No 301).

Celebrating Darce Cassidy

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Arthur

Notes for my contribution to memorial meeting on May 14, following Darce’s death on 2019-04-29

I’m not a historian and cannot do justice to the story of Darce Cassidy.

But I do know that he played a critically important part as a leader of the sixties rebellion in Australia and it would be well worthwhile for some historian to write up that story.

Most people who knew either Darce Cassidy or Jon Cassidy would know him as a progressive and radical who worked in the mainstream as an ABC journalist, staff organizer and manager and who was able to get on with all kinds of people helping others to organize themselves in a progressive direction that caused problems for the powers that be. He would be known by many for his contributions to Community and Multicultural radio and opposition to internet censorship and surveillance as director of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. He did all of that and more, and it was central to his life.

But I knew him as a revolutionary as well as a friend, and specifically as a revolutionary communist leader, and I know that was also central to his life and should not be forgotten so I will focus on that. That description may come as a surprise to many who got to know him after the sixties wave had subsided when there was no radical left to help organize and lead. He was able to adapt because he always followed the “mass line” of taking progressive political ideas from the masses, concentrating and developing them and taking them back to the masses.

In the late 1960s Darce played a significant leadership role in the largest and best known radical student and youth organizations in Australia – the Maoist led Monash University Labour Club and Worker Student Alliance. Like other open supporters of the Vietnamese armed struggle against US occupation and advocates of militant protest tactics in Australia he was regularly slandered. Bob Santamaria’s far right wing Newsweekly had a major campaign to oust him from his “subversive” influence at the ABC, claiming that he was a terrorist. More common were the slanders from the “Communist” CPA, the “Labor” ALP “left” and some Trotskyists who portrayed revolutionary rebels like Darce as sectarians.

In response to Santamaria’s campaign, the ABC duly obtained a report on comrade Cassidy from ASIO. This confirmed that actually he was a revolutionary, not a terrorist, and that his employment in charge of book reviews for the ABC was not a matter of immediate concern to ASIO in the current situation and while he was not in charge of news or current affairs. But Darce was no sectarian either and helped ABC news and current affairs staff to rebel in ways that right-wingers are still upset about.

For anyone interested in sources to find out more about Darce’s revolutionary activities, in preparing notes I was helped by two references easily found online by a google search for “Monash Labor Club”. They are listed at the end.

ASIO’s records have been released and would provide a lot more detail.

Darce was not a theoretician, nor a public spokesperson for revolutionary politics. But he was a leader, with a major role in strategy, tactics and organization. His revolutionary work as a journalist and organiser was central to the radicalization of the youth and student movement in the sixties because he taught others how to do radical journalism, how to get organised and how to maneuver against our enemies without getting isolated. He was particularly good at teaching people how to think before writing, so as to produce short punchy items with real impact, through careful attention to catchy headlines and humorous slogans that adapted tactics to strategy.

Darce arrived in Melbourne and enrolled at Monash University shortly before things got moving in 1967. He immediately helped launch our regular news sheet called “Print”. Unlike most of the sixties activists in Australia he had several years experience of radical politics at Sydney University before the movement took off and had edited a weekly newsheet there called “Wednesday Commentary”. He advocated a neutral name to focus attention on the content not proclamation. But he originally proposed the name “Gladys” as he thought “Gladys says” would catch on. Fortunately we were able to persuade him that “I saw it in Print” would also work.

The sixties Vietnam movement in the US grew more directly out of the civil rights movement than in Australia (especially with black conscripts as the most important force). But a lot of the sixties Australian indigenous rights movement was also inspired by the US example. An obvious direct import was the rural NSW Freedom Ride that Darce helped organize in March 1965 following on from solidarity protests in support of the fights against racism in the U.S. and South Africa. The Vietnam movement also had a natural continuity from solidarity with US as well as South African struggles. (My own earliest political activity was as secretary of “Youth Against Apartheid” around the same time.)

It is ironic that we were presented as “anti-American”. As with the Freedom ride, even more so for Vietnam, a lot of the inspiration for the sixties movement came from following the examples set by radical Americans.

We did not have the internet back in the sixties. But we did have typewriters, wax stencils and duplicating machines called “Gestetners”. One of Darce’s slogans was “All power grows out of the barrel of a Gestetner”. Darce was more than anyone responsible for launching an irreverant and uncensorable underground journalism tradition of “the sixties” that Australian university and later high school authorities could not cope with.

Another of Darce’s slogans was “If there is to be a revolution there must be a revolutionary party – Friday night at Jasmine Street”.

Jasmine street was the home of several Monash Labor Club activists including Darce from the summer break1966-7.

The revolutionary parties at Jasmine Street every Friday were pretty wild, some would say they were drunken orgies. But the revolutionary music organized by Darce was not just background noise. Radical songs are always a necessary part of any radical culture and tradition. Jasmine Street was also the off campus HQ where people developed their ideas on HOW to rebel in continuous political discussion. Later a similar role was played by “Shirley Grove” and then “The Bakery” which became the headquarters of a non-student organization, the “Revolutionary Socialists”. Darce was central to organizing all three HQs, fostering an atmosphere in which ideas could develop. Later he proposed disbanding the Rev Socs to form a more explicitly Maoist led youth organization, WSA, the “Worker Student Alliance”, in January 1970.

These irreverant takeoffs from Mao’s slogans “All power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “If there is to be a revolution, there must be a revolutionary party” were typical of the thoroughly irrevererant and politically incorrect sixties rebellion that Darce helped organize.

As Darce confirmed in an interview half a century later:

“By late 1966 early 1967 I grew to see ALP politics as futile and the Maoist stance offered a clear anti-Parliamentary line. Other than this fact it was the sheer rebelliousness of the Maoist ideas like ‘It is right to rebel’ that became attractive
to a lot us around that time.” (2005-09-03)

Soon after Darce’s arrival we had a major breakthrough in 1967. After some initial toughening up in response to attempts to censor “Print” from the University administration we were able to withstand a real “baptism by fire”. This came when we organized collections of aid for solidarity with the “National Liberation Front” who were fighting and defeating U.S. and Australian invaders in south Vietnam. The concentrated attacks from press, TV, government and University authorities as well as the peace movement “establishment” were a major turning point, not just for the student movement but for the wider anti-war movement. As intended the whole climate shifted left. The “moderates” were now able to distance themselves from us while also moving towards a position that the war could only be ended by defeat of the U.S. rather than by respectably influencing its government to be less aggressive. The left became a major force in the organized anti-war movement with Darce often representing us at private meetings where he helped out maneuver the old guard “peace movement” without them ever quite understanding how they got done over.

Darce’s detailed organizational proposal for moving from a weekly “Print” to a daily were written under the name Len Esdaile in the third issue of the internal bulletin of the Young Communist League, Sunday February 15 1969. Eventually the Monash radical student movement had many weeklies, including those from groups in most Faculties such as “Spanner and Sickle” in Engineering, as well as the daily “Print”. Many high schools also had their own regular newsheets based on the same rebellious and offensive “underground” style. These had to be distributed anonymously as the editors would be expelled from school. Being cheeky, rebellious and highly offensive to all right thinking people was easy. Learning to do it skillfully required lessons from a professional revolutionary journalist – Darce Cassidy, also known as “Tony Brooks”.

Darce’s commitment, like that of other sixties radicals, was not virtue signalling and hence was of interest to ASIO without them pretending that he was a eiither a terrorist or about to launch an armed struggle. Like the rest of us he was totally in favour of offending people to make them think (while rejecting the “being offended” that helps people avoid thinking). He was of course hostile to the censorious “political correctness” that now dominates the pseudo-left that imploded into the vacuum left by the subsiding radical wave half a century ago. It was the radical left, not the right that invented that term “politically incorrect”, and its Australian equivalent “ideologically unsound” to mock the pretensions of the pseudoleft.

Darce was a thorougly mainstream and thoroughly political incorrect revolutionary. That style of politics was fun. Darce will be remembered for it.

REFERENCES

1. Robins, Daniel (2005) Melbourne’s Maoists : the rise of the Monash University Labor Club, 1965-1967. Honours thesis, Victoria University.

http://vuir.vu.edu.au/30211/

2. From http://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/biogs/E000612b.htm links from page on “Monash Labor Club”

Bold thinking, revolutionary democracy and ‘the children of Karl Marx and Coca Cola’

Posted on October 20, 2017 by c21styork

Last month, La Trobe University organised a ‘Bold Thinking’ panel for its 50^th anniversary program at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

I was one of the four panellists. The others were Katie Holmes, professor of History at La Trobe, and my two old comrades, Fergus Robinson and Brian Pola. Fergus and Brian and I became known as ‘the La Trobe Three’ after we were gaoled for contempt of the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1972. Amnesty International became interested in our case as we were political prisoners.

La Trobe live-streamed the ‘Bold Thinking’ event, including question time, and it can be seen here. Anyone wanting greater background can check out my book ‘Student Revolt’ (1989) or this essay which appeared in ‘Vestes: Australian Universities Review’ in 1984: VESTES essay – Student dissent LTU 1967-72 (1984)

This morning, I viewed the film of the event for the first time. I thought each of us did well but had a lot more we could have said.

As for me, I was extremely nervous. The last time I had spoken before so many people in a public political forum was 1980 at the Lower Melbourne Town Hall when I was on a panel in support of a boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games.

Prior to the ‘Bold Thinking’ event, I jotted down a few key points. I was only able to make a few of them – after all, there were four of us sharing an hour – and I want to offer a few more thoughts (in no particular order) here.

* * * *

I had wanted to mention at the beginning of the evening that while the notion of ‘the La Trobe Three’ is valid because only three of us were gaoled, there were in fact four of us who were named in the Supreme Court injunctions. The fourth was Rodney Taylor, who was never captured and thus not gaoled.

Also, in late 1971, twenty-three left-wing students were fined by the University’s kangaroo court, or Proctorial Board, and twelve were excluded (expelled for specific periods). The authorities had accurately identified the core of the militant left, with one or two ‘innocents’ thrown in to make it look fairer. The point I had wanted to make was that of those 23 comrades, five are no longer with us. I want them to be remembered, and do so now: Rob Mathews, Ken Rushgrove, John Cummins, Jan Schapper and Maggie Grant.

A factual blooper on my part: I said that we escorted Defence Department recruiters from the campus in 1969 – it was actually 1970. (The first on-campus confrontation with the University’s governing body, the Council, had occurred in 1969, when a protest delegation entered a Council meeting without permission to demand student representation on the governing body).

Fergus made the point that the type of student rebellion of the late 1960s-early 1970s is “almost impossible to replicate today”. I broadly agree but feel that his reasoning – decentralised campus structures and overseas students – requires further consideration. To me, a glaring problem is the absence of communists on campuses. La Trobe – and Monash – had genuine left-wing leadership for at least a couple of years and we instigated and led the issues and set the pace. At La Trobe, this was the situation in 1970 and 1971. Today there are lots of ‘greens’ and post-modernists on campuses so…

Left-wing leadership was made possible through challenges we made to ‘revisionist’ or pseudo-left people with whom we were in open conflict. The CPA (Communist Party of Australia) was not just an opponent but an enemy. They sought to constrain our militancy and politically sought to divert our energies into supporting the Australian Labor Party. (At this time, after the ascendancy of Whitlam in 1967 as ALP Leader, the ALP’s position as the federal Opposition on Vietnam was no longer one of immediate withdrawal of all Australian troops but rather ‘holding operations’ in Vietnam. This pushed many of us further to the extra-parliamentary left, as there was no parliamentary party through which we could secure our goal in Vietnam).

The CPA was not in any sense a revolutionary organisation, and we were revolutionaries with an understanding of state power and the history of class struggle and the nature of the overthrow of one class by another. As with Marx and Engels in the C19th, some of our biggest ideological battles were with ostensible comrades, those seen as leftists or progressives. Within the left/rads/revs (whatever) is its opposite.

I believe there is a need for a similar overthrow of the faux left leadership today. Until that happens, the period of hibernation, or whatever it is, may continue for another 40 years.

The question of our relationship to the counter-culture came up and I wish I had been a bit more nuanced. It’s true that I wrote my book, ‘Student Revolt’, because I didn’t like the way the period was being portrayed/trivialised in popular culture as almost wholly about sex, drugs and rock music. But I should have made the point that, for all our hard-line politics, we were also part of a counter-culture in that we were working and thinking outside the system. We eschewed the ‘proper channels’ established by the La Trobe University Act to channel student discontent – the Student Representative Council – and I recall a leaflet describing the SRC as a ‘glorified high school prefect system’.

Personally, I had a good relationship with the hippy kind of people but I didn’t approve of the idea of ‘dropping out’ of society and living in share-houses or of the drug culture. Indeed, in 1971 or thereabouts, I compiled a pamphlet called ‘Goddam the pusher man’.

I did wear my hair long back then, wore a purple coloured top from London’s trendy Carnaby Street for a while and loved the more edgy music – especially The Animals, Nina Simone, Country Joe and the Fish, and J B Lenoir (one of the few overtly political blues men). And (gulp) I owned a pair of flairs.

My distaste for the idea of communal share-house living reflected my strong commitment to home ownership, something I retain to this day. I had this attitude because from the age of three to five, I was technically homeless (using the Australian Bureau of Statistics definition of homelessness).

My parents and I disembarked at Station Pier, Melbourne, in 1954 and after a very brief stint with my dad’s brother, Joe, who had worked on the wharves since the mid-1920s when he migrated from Malta, we became the ‘drifting migrants’ you see in the movies. My mum used to talk about how we had seven different accommodations – all boarding-houses in Coburg and Brunswick – within our first 21 months in Melbourne. That averages out as a move every three months. In each place, there was a single room for each family, with rooms running off long corridors. A notorious one in West Brunswick was run by a Lithuanian landlady. I was five but still vividly recall the police coming to evict an old drunk from his room. As they forced him out, the landlady ran behind them, screaming in her thick Baltic accent to the poor old bloke: “God help you! God help you!”

‘Housing for all!’ was a communist slogan back then. It should be revived today.

We also shared with the counter-culture a genuine interest in how society could be reorganised, how people could live differently to the alienating system based on wage slavery.

And we were all moved by the wonderful provocative slogans emanating from the 1968 Paris uprising when ten million workers went on strike and students took over the streets with them. I use one of the 1968 Paris slogans as part of the banner of C21st Left: “Sous les paves la plage” – Under the paving stones, the beach!” Awesome stuff and I hope I live long enough to see a revival of the soixante-huitard spirit.

“Society is a carnivorous flower!” Oui!

I had also wanted to mention and discuss Jean Luc Godard’s famous phrase (used in his 1960s film ‘Masculin-Feminin’): “The children of Karl Marx and Coca Cola”. It’s a rich comment, and an accurate one. We were the children of Karl Marx and Coca Cola in so many ways. I’ll flesh this out if I ever write a subjective memoir of those years.

Brian said he was still a communist. Fergus indicated he wasn’t. I described myself as a “revolutionary democrat” who supports all struggles against dictators and tyranny, especially in Syria. I said that I wouldn’t feel safe in North Korea or Cuba or any other nominally ‘communist’ country today. I wish I had expanded on what this means. The reason I wouldn’t be safe is because I’d seek out the dissenters and rebels against ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’.

Revolutionary democracy, to me, is entirely consistent with Marxism. But one can be a revolutionary democrat without being a Marxist. For instance, there are Islamists who are revolutionary democrats (and there are those who are very much the opposite). Under conditions of fascism, people who fight for basic bourgeois democracy can be revolutionary democrats regardless of how they self-identify politically.

For Marxists, the ultimate aim is a more democratic society, one in which democracy is extended to the social and economic realm through the ‘lifters’ overthrowing the rule of the 0.1% who are ‘leaners’ and establishing their own rule. In the C21st, no-one in their right mind will support this if it means one-party dictatorship or a continuation of the current Australian model of two-party dictatorship. They will want a genuine competitive multi-party electoral system, one in which the parliament and other representative bodies reflect accurately and proportionately the people’s will. There is no reason why this cannot be achieved in a system based on social ownership.

Which leads me to my regret that I didn’t once talk about ownership of the means of production. “Means of production”! Sometimes I feel like emulating Howard Beale, the character in Paddy Chayevsky’s great film script, ‘Network’ (1976), by going to a window in a tall building, opening it, and yelling to the universe: “I can’t take it anymore!!” but with the added words: “Why is no-one talking about the means of production?!!!!”

Revolutionary democracy, to me, implies the eventual social ownership of means of producing the stuff society needs, with a view to improving living standards and lifting everyone currently in poverty out of it globally, while also going well beyond catering for ‘social need’ through greatly expanding scientific and technological research and development in the interests of even greater progress – the pursuit of fun and fantasy. The early Suffragettes had it right when they talked about ‘Abundance for all!’ My early interest in communism, in the late 1960s, found that slogan enormously attractive. Old coms often talked like that. Back then.

Early influences. It’s always of interest to others to know how and why someone becomes a communist revolutionary. This is largely because 99.9% of people in the west don’t, and they find it intriguing and weird that anyone would.

The ‘Bold Thinking’ event provided opportunity for each of us to talk about this. Fergus and Brian and I had very different upbringings and socio-economic-family environments. I’m sure we each could have talked more about ourselves, and I’ll do so now partly because, for one thing, I regret not being able to explain the extent to which I was already political when I first went to La Trobe in 1969.

I had been involved in the campaign against capital punishment – the hanging of Ronald Ryan – in 1966 and 1967. It was easy as a 15 year old to cycle from my home in West Brunswick up to Coburg to attend protests outside Pentridge Gaol. This year is my 50^th ‘on the left’.

In my final years of high school, 1968, I attended the ‘riot’ outside the US Consulate in Commercial Road, St Kilda, Melbourne. The militancy helped ‘bring the war home’ and also jolted the CPA revisionists who had assumed they could keep leading and controlling the growing Vietnam solidarity movement. I was in my school uniform and my emotional response to the police riot, baton assaults and mass arrests left me both very frightened and excited by the fact that people were fighting back.

It may have been my first experience of the feeling that I was taking part in something much bigger than Australia. I had seen footage of the French and US student uprisings of that year – thanks to television. I felt for the first time that little ol’ me was part of a truly international movement of solidarity. (It was not, however, my first riot, as I had been at Festival Hall, West Melbourne, in 1965 when the Mongolian Stomper attacked Domenic DeNucci with the heavy brass ringside bell causing 7,000 Italian wrestling fans to engage in riotous behaviour that required the attendance of many police and several police divisional vans).

And speaking of my old friend Television, I should have thanked it for bringing the world into my lounge-room. News reports of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when I was 11, stay with me to this day, as does film of Bull Connor setting vicious attack dogs onto black protestors in Alabama. Connor was a Democrat of the ‘southern’ kind and Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety. There was also footage on the news of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. I wasn’t just disappointed or saddened by what was happening. I was angry – an anger intensified by the juxtaposition of programs like ‘Leave it to Beaver’, which promoted the idealised American family, against the real world characterised by so much oppression, suffering and resistance. Programs like ‘The Twilight Zone’ were among my favourites. In taking me into “a world of imagination”, Rod Serling really helped spark my imagination. Subversive stuff.

Another cultural influence of that time – another expression of the ‘Coca Cola’ in Godard’s formulation – was science-fiction literature (and movies). For a few years in my teenage years I read short stories in that genre and received at Christmas the year’s ‘Best of Sci Fi’ collections. Back then, there wasn’t so much dystopianism. Arthur C Clarke in particular saw the positive potential in rapid technological development. To this day, I believe in reaching for the stars, figuratively and literally. But we won’t get there via capitalism, where R&D is constrained by the pursuit of maximum profit and concentrated private ownership. I would have liked to have made that point on the night.

Still on personal influences, I told the audience how my parents were wage workers, my dad a factory worker and we were on the lower socio-economic side of life. I spent about 30 years growing up in Brunswick, which was all pretty much ‘lower socio-economic’ with many migrants from diverse places and many factories. You could be sure back then that wherever there were lots of migrants there would also be lots of factories. For more than ten years I lived next door to one. Its high red brick wall was the view a metre from my bedroom, blocking out the sun.

Perhaps coming from that background was the reason I do not share Fergus’ view that university life was fairly drab and that the left provided an avenue into stimulation from the boredom. To me, just going to the campus – two bus rides and eleven kilometres away in a strangely named suburb called Bundoora – was excitement in itself. My parents never owned a car and everything went into paying off our house. We never had a family holiday. I knew – and still know – West Brunswick like the back of my hand – every back alley, road and side street. There was a strong neighbourly ethos among some along my street but there was also insularity. For instance, West Brunswick ‘boys’ viewed East Brunswick, on ‘the other side’ of Sydney Road, with caution while we all regarded Coburg people as toffs and snobs. For me, going to La Trobe University in 1969 was like a whole new universe opening up. The politics was icing on that cake. I was meeting people of my own age cohort who lived on properties with beautiful gum trees in places I’d never normally visit, like Montmorency and Eltham. Not a factory wall in sight.

Brunswick suffered three main social problems back then: alcoholism, gambling and domestic violence. In my family home, there was no gambling and no alcoholism. Two out of three ain’t bad.

The act of going to university each day, all that way from Brunswick, was in itself liberating for me. An escape. I loved it.

There was a smattering of applause when Brian declared that ‘the New Left’ treated women very badly. I noticed that some of those applauding were not our age cohorts, so wondered how did they know?

I would gladly have swapped places with a woman, had one been able to replace me as a target in the Supreme Court injunctions, but none were in positions of leadership at that time to experience that degree of state repression. Was this because of the undoubtedly male dominated nature of the left’s leadership at La Trobe? Did the men hold them back, consciously? I don’t think so.

Was there a problem with male chauvinism? Yes.

When I enrolled at La Trobe I broadly sympathised with equality for women but I also brought with me the common assumptions about men and women of that time. I didn’t come from a ‘bohemian’ bayside background, where Simone de Beauvoir was discussed over fine wine in the evenings. Some of my personal attitudes and expectations were quite conservative in that regard. I was fairly backward in some ways but, as a slow learner, I’m a good learner. While achieving much progress for women, the women’s movement also challenged and changed many men. Including me.

Was there also egalitarianism within the left? Yes again. (I wish I had a dollar for every leaflet I typed – it’s a myth that women did all the typing. It is true, though, that nearly all the leaflets were written by men – which is certainly proof of male dominance).

Going by memory, I think the first regular newssheet published by a women’s lib group on the campus was called ‘Women Arise’ in 1970 (or perhaps 1969). Helen Reddy’s magnificent anthem, ‘I am woman’ was a year or two away but, to me, it sums up all that was and is great about the best politics of women’s liberation. No hint of victimhood, it is a song of defiance, determination and optimism.

I told the audience that I strongly supported the Women’s Liberation movement back then. I did, and still do. It was a very effective movement with clear, attainable, political objectives and it included many socialist women. I regard it as one of the great socio-cultural-political developments of the C20th. But it certainly fragmented – as part of the left’s rapid decline, I would argue – and some of the later varieties of feminism were distinctively not socialist and some were divisive and reactionary.

Any “ism” that uses the term “white men” as though it somehow wins an argument or proves a point, let alone as an insult, loses me as someone influenced by Marxism. These days, I’m favourably disposed to the libertarian feminists who, while not socialist, none the less display some of the qualities of the soixante-huitards. Conservative feminists don’t like them very much. I would have liked to make the point that, in my opinion, we need more Pussy Riots and fewer neo-Mary-Whitehouses.

An old comrade from the La Trobe days has made this comment: “The effect was certainly one of male dominance. A more contentious and important issue is that of intent. Did we write stuff out of a sense of ‘male entitlement’ or because we had things to say and stepped onto a stage that was as much our own making as not? Did we exclude women, that is, discourage their involvement? That is not my memory and the problem I have with the proposition that we did (it’s more an assumption than a proposition) is that it delivers a nice backhander to the women, a more pernicious form of sexism than anything I can remember us being guilty of”.

Smash Soviet social-imperialism! Fergus and Brian and I made it clear that we believed in international solidarity but it’s a pity none of us mentioned the fact that we supported the student and worker uprisings ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ as well as in the west. Again, I was a slow but good learner and came to regard the Czech and Polish rebellions as part and parcel of our own struggle. It made sense from a Marxist revolutionary democrat perspective to support the Polish Solidarity movement later and to rejoice in the fall of the Berlin Wall. I had no problem with the Maoist line that saw Soviet social-imperialism as an ascendant threat and US imperialism in decline following its defeat in Indo-China. Richard Nixon’s memoir (1978) shows how Mao and Zhou En Lai wanted more than just normalised diplomatic relations with the US in facing the Soviet threat.

Decline of the revolutionary left. I know that several hours would have been required to discuss and debate the above points. It’s understandable that people are interested mostly in the dynamic period of the late 1960s to early 1970s when there was so much passion, intensity, dedication, excitement, argument, optimism and resistance to repression. But I would have liked to have said something about the period of decline too, which I think was starting during 1972. The subsequent years in the 1970s were nothing like the period from 1968 to 1971, in activism or in spirit, and I’m still waiting for the spirit of ’68 to re-emerge in the C21st.

The period from 1972 to 1980 warrants the same level of investigation and discussion as the earlier period but this has not been undertaken. From my point of view, those years were characterised by increasing dogmatism. We stopped thinking anew, or dialectically. In some cases, ‘we’ turned into our opposites. I know this from personal experience, and to a large extent it happened to me.

One of the important lessons I learned from my activism back then is that it is very hard to think critically or dialectically. And it is even harder to think for oneself.

People usually want to know whether the gaolings, and involvement in left revolutionary politics, had an impact on our employment and careers. In my case, it had a very negative effect later in the 1970s when I was black-listed by the Director-General of the Victorian Education Department. I had completed my Diploma of Education and worked as an Emergency (or Relief) teacher in the Technical Schools Division of the Education Department. Back then, the principals of the schools could employ such casual teachers without needing the approval of the Department. To cut a long story short (I must write it up one day), I had been working at various schools on a casual basis, hoping to eventually be offered a ‘permanent’ teaching job, which would mean having a career and some security. I still have the references from principals of those schools and they range from good to very good in their assessments of me.

Finally, the principal at one of the schools told me that a full-time teacher was retiring and he would like to have me on the staff as an on-going teacher. I was thrilled, as I had been hoping for such an opportunity for many months. The principal took me into his office and rang the Staffing Office in my presence. He told the person on the phone that he had someone to replace the other teacher but when he mentioned my name the response made his face drop. His tone changed and at the end of the call he turned to me and said, “I’m very sorry, Barry, they told me you’re not to be employed”.

It’s hard for me to describe what a personal blow this was – in 1976 or 1977. It knocked me badly, emotionally and psychologically.

I was called to attend a meeting with someone from the Staffing Office, on a street corner in the CBD (I kid you not). I was told that the meeting was strictly ‘off the record’. The officer told me that “someone upstairs” had marked my file “Not to be employed” and that the reason was because I was “a known political activist”.

Of course, I went straight to the union with this news and, to their credit, the union leaders saw the issue in a principled way, as one of opposing the political black-listing of qualified teachers. I was able to keep working on a casual basis, as the Department regulations allowed principals in each school to decide who to take on as a Relief teacher. I had a lot of support and worked pretty much full-time as a Relief teacher, going from school to school as required. The fact that I was doing well in the classrooms, sometimes five days a week, completely undermined any arguments from the Department that I was not suitable for permanent employment.

It took about 18 months of protests, meetings, negotiations, and utter anguish on my part (I was almost certainly clinically depressed during this period) before the Director-General, Laurie Shears, surrendered and I was given an on-going teaching job. A highlight of the struggle was when the three separate teacher unions – The Victorian Teachers Union, the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association and the Technical Teachers Union of Victoria united and stopped work on my behalf. I was told by the TTUV president that it was the first time that the three teacher unions had taken united action.

Mao said that reactionaries lift a rock only to drop it on their own feet. I have experienced and witnessed that truth many times.

I hope this piece will prompt others from that period, or those with an interest in it, to send in their thoughts on that period of struggle… and beyond.

When the impossible becomes the inevitable: my memory of the struggle against apartheid

Posted on May 23, 2016 by c21styork

I retired from work, at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, last week. The following is my final blog post as an on-going Public Service employee.

Feel free to add a comment at the museum’s blog site.

On reflecting on the campaign of solidarity in Australia with the South African oppressed people, it reinforced my view that identifying with, and supporting, the oppressed and those struggling for freedom, is a core left-wing value. It was not just on the issue of South African apartheid that we did this, but on Vietnam too. The left supported the Vietnamese people against US imperialism, just as we supported the South African people against the apartheid regime. Other examples are our solidarity with the Czech and Polish rebels.

It is incomprehensible to me that people and groups that do not support the Syrian people in their struggle against the Assad regime can be in any sense left-wing, no matter how they self-identify and no matter what ‘left’ sounding slogans they shout.

Anyway, here is my final blog post at work.

* * * *

The museum’s Memories of the Struggle exhibition highlights the part played by Australians in solidarity with South Africans against the apartheid regime. It resonates with scores of thousands of us who actively took part in the struggle as grass-roots activists.

From the late 1960s and for most of the 1970s, I was one such activist in Melbourne. I lived and breathed the kind of left-wing politics that opposed apartheid and supported regime change and democratic aspiration there. If I wasn’t printing out and handing out leaflets about it, and sometimes writing them, I was attending working-bees where people designed and made placards and banners for street protests. And, there was hardly a demonstration on the issue in Melbourne that I didn’t attend. To me, it was part of a global revolutionary struggle. (The same applies to the Vietnam War, which loomed larger because of the policy of conscription for the war, and the greater violence against the Vietnamese).

Of course, not all of the Australian opponents of apartheid identified with the left and only a small minority were communists like me. It’s worth noting that while nearly everyone opposed the apartheid system in principle back then, there was strong opposition to Nelson Mandela, who was seen as a communist and a terrorist. He was certainly close to the South African Communist Party and his Spear Movement struck terror into the hearts of the fascists running the regime. To be opposed to apartheid in principle was fine, but to want to do something about it in practical solidarity was ‘going too far’.

Fast forward several decades and in 1994 Mandela is the elected and acclaimed President of a new era in South Africa, one free of apartheid and one in which all people have equal voice in elections. Despite serving 27 years in prison, he properly urges reconciliation rather than revenge. What a man! Governments whose leaders were not forthcoming with solidarity when it was needed now applaud him. The Australian governments of Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke are among the proud exceptions. Celebrities like Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor pose for photos with him. How things change.

That’s what happens when you have History on your side. When the reactionaries, who can seem so powerful, are revealed as the paper tigers that they essentially are. If proof is needed of the maxims that ‘the people make history’, and that ‘wherever there is repression there is resistance’, then South Africa under apartheid provides it. At times, it seemed a hopeless uphill battle. But don’t they all? Until they are won. And then what once seemed impossible suddenly seems inevitable.

When Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, I was so thrilled and overwhelmed that, after my regular fitness run up Mount Ainslie, which rises 800 metres above Canberra, I wanted to repeat the run immediately. I was on such a ‘high’ and carried along by the adrenalin of Mandela’s release and the excitement of South Africa’s prospects as a democracy. Thereafter, running up and down Mount Ainslie twice without stopping became my ‘Mandela Run’.

Their victory was our victory – and my victory too.

Fast forward again, and around 2010 I find myself pondering Mandela’s future. He is now in his early 90s and I feel an urge to write to him, to let him hear from an Australian activist, rather than a leader or celebrity.

I want to share some anecdotes with him – things I experienced directly – and I want to ask him for an autographed photo as a memento.

Sorry, but I can’t find a copy of my letter to him. But from memory, it told him of the following.

At my university in the early 1970s, we had a Chancellor who was on the board of Imperial Chemical Industries which, among other things, manufactured explosives and munitions in South Africa. A mass meeting of a thousand students demanded his resignation. Eventually we won and the Chancellor resigned before his term expired. But what a struggle. We occupied the Administration Building, blockaded the Council members, held mass meetings at least twice a week. And the authorities cracked down severely on us for our lawlessness. Or was it for our effectiveness? John Gorton as Prime Minister had declared that “We shall tolerate dissent so long as it is ineffective”. The student ring-leaders were identified, arrested, fined, suspended from university, lost our Education Department studentships and three of us – yours truly included – gaoled at Pentridge, without sentence or rights of appeal – for contempt of court. (It’s not easy being red).

I wanted Nelson Mandela to know that, in the west, our movement was not just about ‘sex and drugs and rock music’, as it has been condescendingly displayed in popular culture, but about real struggle, repression and resistance. Just as we brought the Vietnam War home in our protests, so too we related the oppression of the apartheid system to our own local targets whenever possible.

I wanted Mandela to know of the police violence deployed by State governments against anti-apartheid protestors. The petite university student, a young girl with whom I was friendly, being thrown face first into a pole by a burly policeman three times her size. The blood pouring from her smashed nose. The State Secretary of the Labor Party in Victoria having a baton thrust into his eye and nearly losing the eye. We knew we were in for a hiding whenever the police started removing their identification badges from their uniforms. Some of the worst police violence I have witnessed took place on protests against apartheid. They were clearly on orders to intimidate us, and batons and boots were their main weapon. But it didn’t work. We knew that the repression we experienced was minor compared to that of our brothers and sisters in South Africa.

I was arrested on one of the demonstrations and convicted of assaulting police. My only regret is that I am unable to explain on official forms that ask whether one has any criminal convictions that my crime was to try to stop a policeman pulling down an anti-apartheid banner held by the front line of a street march. I pushed him with force from behind. Technically: guilty. C’est la vie: c’est la lutte.

I wanted Mandela to know of the funny things too. Like the way in which one of my mates in Brunswick, who worked with my dad in a factory, would come to my place before a demo and we’d listen to Eric Burdon’s album, ‘Every one of us’. It featured an interview with an African-American ex-serviceman talking about racism. It inspired us in our passion, reinforced the sense that we were part of an international movement, and lifted our morale as ‘soldiers’ in a struggle.

And there was the time we tried to stop the Springbok rugby team – when Bob Hawke to his great credit as President of the ACTU intervened against the team’s visit. The police were brutal that day in 1971 but the thousands of assembled protestors at Olympic Park were determined to run onto the field and stop the game. The police cordon around the oval was holding out until it was broken when a group of police moved together to arrest people. I was standing with a comrade who saw the opportunity and said to me, “Quick, Barry! We can jump the fence onto the oval!” We ran forward, together, but at the last moment I lost my nerve. My poor comrade leapt onto the oval only to be grabbed by police. That comrade, incidentally, was Ian MacDonald, later to become a Minister in the State Government of New South Wales.

So I told all this, and more, to Nelson Mandela – ‘Comrade Mandela’ – in my letter.

After a month or so, I received a reply. It was from his secretary, who said that Mandela was now too frail to keep up with such correspondence and no longer sent out autographed photos.

However, the letter had been read to him in full.

And he had liked it.

To me, that was all that mattered.

STUDENT REVOLT – La Trobe University 1967 to 1973

Posted on September 5, 2015 by c21styork

I’m pleased to make my book, Student Revolt: La Trobe University 1967-73 available on-line as a pdf. The book was published in 1989, with comrades helping finance it. It was based on my Master of Arts thesis, completed at the University of Sydney in 1984. The book was published in 1989, when La Trobe University was commemorating the 25th anniversary of the passage of the La Trobe University Act. The University declined my offer to contribute a chapter to their official history of the University and, as I expected, the official history trivialised and down-played what bourgeois academics and administrators still refer to as “the troubles” on the campus. It was actually a full-fledged student rebellion, questioning the nature and purpose of the universities under capitalism, and part of a global movement of young people questioning the inherited wisdom that held back progress by keeping the system in place.

I wish that rebellious questioning spirit would return to the campuses, which strike me as too bogged down by group-think and uncritical thinking in the Arts faculties. Yes, a generalisation but one borne out by what I read and experience – and confirmed by efforts to shut down research that does not fit the dominant paradigm and to censor ideas deemed offensive. I continue to embrace the motto “It is right to rebel!” – offensive though it may be to the professors, popes and princes.

Here it is: STUDENT REVOLT By Barry York

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